Making Sense with Sam Harris - #396 — The Way Forward

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Matthew Yglesias about the future of Democratic politics. They discuss where the Democrats went wrong, the failure of identity politics, the Left’s reaction to the Daniel Penny case, what a second Trump term might look like, immigration and the border, gender and racial disparities in crime, wealth inequality, Matthew’s “nine principles for a common sense Democrat comeback,” and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Matthew Iglesias. Matt, thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me. So, how would you describe your journalistic and political background before we jump into the deep end of the pool of democratic politics? Sure. You know, I started writing a blog sort of in my spare time when I was a college student around 2001, 2002. Graduated, worked for a kind of a small progressive magazine here in D.C. called The American Prospect for a number of years. I've been doing different things, but mostly, you know, kind of digital journalism from Washington, D.C., writing about politics. I was working at Vox.com. I left there a little bit more than four years ago, go off on my own, start a sub stack. Like a lot of people, I think I felt a little pushed out of the currents in progressive politics that had been churning in the late teens, circa 2020.

Been doing my own thing since then. You know, consider myself liberal, leftist center, Democrat. I voted for Kamala Harris. But, you know, with myself liberal, left of center, a Democrat. I voted for Kamala Harris. But, you know, with the kind of increasing unease about where things had gone and sad that Donald Trump won the election. But I also hope this can be an opportunity to kind of set things right, do some course corrections in left of center politics. Yeah, yeah. So you and I are in a similar spot politically. Perhaps there's some daylight between us, which we can explore. But how would you say the Democrats have lost their way?

If you had to summarize the destroyed fortunes of the Democrats politically in this last cycle, what would you give as the primary reasons? I mean, there's, you know, you lose your way in many ways simultaneously. But, you know, I mean, I think primarily Democrats have gotten sort of out of touch with kind of mainstream cultural and moral values that people have. You know, I have some of my own criticisms. There are ways in which I myself am a little out of touch with mainstream cultural moral values. But, you know, you really saw a party that has gotten so invested in certain kinds of identity politics and, you know, slightly loopy ideas about people and democracy in ways that I think don't really work and have lost or sort of buried the core of what it is that people like about the idea of a political party that cares about, you know, protecting

vulnerable people and making sure that we're all taken care of, has gone into this kind of hyper-focus on the idea of a kind of, you know, escalator of privilege and oppression in a way that has, you know, distorted the kind of basic epistemological soundness of how progressives think and talk. So, yeah. So let's talk about identity politics, because have you migrated at all in your view of this issue? Because I, you know, you and I have never spoken before, but I dimly remember you making some fairly woke noises when I had my falling out with your colleague Ezra Klein back in, I think it was 2018. Are you in the same spot you were in there, or am I misrecalling what actually happened there? No, I mean, I think you're correct.

I mean, I have shifted my view quite a bit about what the balance of risks are in our society. You know, I think that when that went down in 2018, it seemed to me that, you know, all this stuff about political correctness, et cetera, was being really kind of badly overblown. And I think that was wrong. You know, that what we really saw over the next few years is that there was a real challenge among Democrats in kind of articulating, you know, basic approaches to crime problems, police brutality, other things that came up over the past, you know, over the next several years. And, you know, I was on the wrong side of that. And I think more and more people have been catching up to the fact that, you know, we let things get too far.

Yeah. So actually, it's in the news now. I mean, I think it's probably still in the news. I just happened to read a Nation article on this topic that I found especially galling. There's this story of the Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely incident on the subway car in New York. Penny, as many people remember, was acquitted of murder charges and even manslaughter charges, and he was found not guilty of whatever Alvin Bragg threw at him. left-wing politics and media in ways that seem morally deranged and don't suggest that the Democratic Party is going to learn the lessons or is guaranteed to learn the lessons that I think you and I agree that it should learn, right? So this Nation article kind of lined up the case of Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. I don't know if you read this article, but it made them seem essentially as equivalent cases of vigilante justice or pseudo-justice that were both monstrous acts of violence that are being celebrated by, in one case, the far left, in one case, the far right.

And if anything, according to this author of the Nation article, the Penny case where you had somebody to my eye actually just simply trying to defend innocent bystanders from the rampages of a violent lunatic, you had what was optically judged to be the worst or least sympathetic case, which is to say that the writer of this article thought that his readers at The Nation would find Luigi Mangione, the person who murdered a more or less randomly selected health care CEO, would seem more sympathetic than Daniel Penny, who, you know, by the lights of this author, had effectively lynched a homeless black man on a subway car.

effectively lynched a homeless black man on a subway car. How do you view that case? And are you as baffled by some of the left-leaning intuitions you've heard about it as I am? Yeah, I mean, the Petty case is interesting because I think this is a little bit of a lagging indicator, you know, of the politics from a previous time when the indictment originally came down. I, you know, never looked into this in extreme detail. He was acquitted. It seemed like it was not that close of a call among the jury in a very liberal city. I think you've got to believe that, you know, there was no case, right? There's no strong case against him.

And that if anything, you know, the racial politics on this probably went in the opposite direction of the one that I've seen some leftist people suggesting. You know, I think an African American Marine who stepped up to defend other people on a subway would have been given the benefit of the doubt by left-wing people. But instead, a white seen as conservative one was viewed with incredible suspicion. So, you know, I think the coverage of that case that I've seen since the verdict in some of the further left sources, some of the Twitter feeds of left-wing politicians has been pretty thoughtless and pretty bad. At the same time, if you compare the reaction to what it

would have been four or five years ago, it's much more muted. You know, The Nation has always been a far left publication. When I was, you know, very enthusiastically voting for Barack Obama in 2008, 2012, they were saying, oh, he's like, he's way too moderate. You know, we're much more left wing than that. So, you know, I don't think it's surprising to see ideas in The Nation that I think are too far left, I don't think it's surprising to see ideas in the nation that I think are too far left. I don't think it's so surprising that a handful of politicians in New York City are fired up about this. When Penny was first arrested, you know, there were big protests in New York demanding that this happen. When he was acquitted, much more muted response.

I mean, I think that the country has moved to the right in a number of ways. Donald Trump winning the election, sort of most notable of them, but that we are seeing a, not an evaporation of kind of out of control left wing or woke ideas, but a recession of them back more to, you know, the kind of normal level that it's historically been at. But I did think that this case was a good example of, you know, the kind of normal level that it's historically been at. But I did think that this case was a good example of, you know, racial politics on the left getting a little bit out of control. You know, you can't expect people to ride on mass transit if there's going to be mentally disturbed people acting out and threatening people. I think that's sort of

common sense. It's something that transit officials around the country have started to recognize. And it's good if bystanders come in and intervene and try to help people. It's, of course, tragic if when they do that, somebody ends up being seriously hurt or even killed in this case. But that just goes to show, you know, that we need to think more seriously about how we treat people with severe mental illness. The man who unfortunately died in this case, as I understand it, had been arrested many, many times, had been offered all different kinds of mental health support and treatment. But, you know, we've really moved away from being able to coercively treat people who are a danger to themselves and to others. And that's a real problem, I think, in our society. You can't just treat, you know, the public space as a kind of, you know, open venue for disorder

and chaos. I have a heuristic in my mind that I would want the Democrats to absorb. I'm wondering if this goes too far for you, but it seems to me that any reference to race most of the time, virtually all of the time, is politically and even ethically suspect at this point, right? I think we should be very, very slow to talk about, think about, reference, point to, be motivated by the concept of race in our politics and really in our ethics. I mean, there are certain cases where I think you could defend it and perhaps those could readily spring to mind. But generally speaking, you know, 99% of the time, it seems to me to be the wrong direction to move. And politically, I think this is now obvious, but I think I could

make the ethical case for that. Does that seem like it's overreaching to you? Well, I mean, it depends what we're talking about, right? I mean, I read a book recently about prison gangs. And obviously, I think if you want to understand how prisons function, the fact that many of them are sort of de facto controlled by these racially segregated gangs is very salient. It's very relevant. You can't speak intelligently about that without talking about race. At the same time, I mean, I really do think that what we want to do as humanists, as liberals in the sort of broad philosophical sense is reduce the salience of race in our society, right? It's not injected into contexts where it's ambiguous or, you know, debatably

relevant. And I think that a trend really emerged around five to 10 years ago of doing the opposite, right? Of sort of taking situations and finding opportunities to inject a racial discourse into them. And there was a view that that was going to help us make some kind of progress as a society. And I think that's really wrong. I mean, it's wrong. It's wrong as an electoral politics question, but it's wrong as a question of human psychology and interaction, right? We don't want to be encouraging people to think in terms of racial and ethnic categories. That's sort of contrary to the American value ethic historically. Obviously, we have had a lot of people in American history who do encourage people to think in terms

of racial categories. But classically, what you would say is, well, those people are racists, right? They're doing something bad by saying we need to be thinking about race all the time. We need to be thinking about racial categorizations all the time. And we should be moving away from that. You know, one of my grandparents is from Cuba. And so, you know, a question arises in the scheme of, you know, American ethnicity. Does that mean I'm in some sense, am I a Hispanic person, quote unquote? And, you know, I think in most real world senses, it's like, no, you know, I have light skin.

I only speak English. I was raised in a Jewish household. Don't you know, Matt, you're Latinx. Right, exactly. At the same time, you know, it's a true fact about my family, my ancestry, etc. But, you know, there's no fact of the matter about these kind of schemes and categorizations where people, we have family members who are from different places, we have ancestries. But it's not healthy to encourage this kind of, you know, obsessive thinking about race and ethnicity. Yeah, well, the painful irony for me, and this is something that I've whinged about, I think, for several years at this point, is that the Democrats, you know, up until yesterday, thought about race, spoke about race every bit as much as white supremacists on the

right. I mean, you have to go all the way to the neo-Nazis to find people on the right who are as vocal about the salience of race and racial difference. And that just seems patently crazy to me. I mean, what's wrong with identity politics, in my view, there are many ways you could come at this. But to come back to the Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case and perhaps make it generic. I mean, if you describe a situation on a subway car where there was a violently deranged and threatening person who came on the car and terrified everyone, including women and children, on the car and terrified everyone, including women and children. And a man at some risk to himself and at some obvious risk of future prosecution stood up to try to pacify this person and attempted to use the minimal amount of force, but because of his lack of perfect skill, wound up severely injuring or even killing the aggressor. If you describe that situation

generically to people, left of center, as you move further left, then you don't actually have to move that far left. I mean, really just a step left of center. I think you meet people reliably who don't know how they feel about that situation, no matter how exhaustively you describe it and describe the motives of people involved and the testimony of bystanders, et cetera, they don't know how they feel about it until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved, right? And if you swap the skin colors on the various participants, they feel differently, reliably differently.

If you tell them that the victims are Jewish, they feel one way. If you tell them that they're black, they feel another way. All of these markers of identity are incredibly salient for them morally. And that, to my eye, is the very definition of not actually thinking these things through in moral or ethical terms. It is a layer of political delirium that is riding atop of our otherwise serviceable moral toolkit and visibly, palpably damaging it. So what I think we need in the Democratic Party to reboot, and we're going to come to your list of, I think, nine principles that you wrote about on your blog, Slow Boring, which seem to have been quite influential. But I think that one place to reboot from is just a call for basic moral sanity and honesty, right? And if changing skin color in a situation changes your intuitions as reliably as

it does for a white supremacist, the onus is on you to make moral sense of that. I think that's right. I mean, I think that what happens in the identity politics space on the left is people have taken a, you know, I would say a widespread moral failing, right, which is to judge cases in part based on the identity of the people involved and your kind of group affiliations and turn it into a kind of a virtue. And I don't know, you know, I think there's probably a lot of people whose snap judgments of a situation might be influenced by information about the

ethnicity of the people involved. But what's become very unusual on the left in America is for people to say that that's good, right? To say that that's true and correct. And in a more abstract policy sense, I think there's live, but in a lot of other cities is, you know, there's been a move in cities to have cameras, you know, to catch cars who are speeding, right? And then in D.C., in Chicago, and a number of other cities, once these were installed, it's come out, well, you know, they're catching more people speeding in Black neighborhoods. And so that's bad, right? Somehow the cameras are discriminating or something. And you think that through and it's like, well, by definition, right, we've put cameras in place precisely because cameras aren't subject to these kinds of biases. If people are speeding more in African-American neighborhoods, that could be a disproportionate benefit to the pedestrians

living in those neighborhoods, right? I mean, if people are driving unsafely by your house, by your kid's school, that's really bad, right? I mean, if people are driving unsafely by your house, by your kid's school, that's really bad, right? You have learned something about the world from that. And it also, it just, it doesn't matter, right? I mean, there's, you know, cities should set speed limits appropriately. It shouldn't be too low.

The fine shouldn't be too high, whatever it is. But if you have reasonable traffic rules, then you should try to enforce them and get people to drive safely. And this kind of endless inquiry about the identities of people involved or trying to draw inferences or trying to draw obvious conclusions about what's right and what's wrong look at the kind of the great reference points that even progressive minded people look to say, you know, who are our moral leaders in the past? Who are our political heroes? That's not how they talked. It's not how they acted.

You know, these are ideas and habits of thought that have arisen relatively recently, I think, out of a kind of slightly odd academic milieu that I don't totally understand. It's not, you know, I was a philosophy major when I was in college and, you know, read political, moral theorists, et cetera. None of the people I was assigned said that you should proceed on that kind of basis. You didn't get to that chapter in Rawls where it said... Right. Right. I mean, you know, it's not Rawls, it's not Mill. It's not part of the liberal tradition. It's not part of the Marxist tradition, even. I don't know 100% what it is, but it's become very, very dominant and especially became ultra-dominant about five years ago. And, you know, it's something, I mean, this is part of what I wrote in my piece, but I mean, it's something that Democrats really desperately need to move away from back to, you know, an ideal of treating people as individuals and judging them based on what they do.

You know, we can talk about the history of America, right, in which obviously racial categorizations were a very important part of American history for a long time. That's like a real fact. We don't need to lie to people about that. But it's not something that we should encourage on a forward-looking basis. Well, why isn't wealth inequality as a focus an appropriate surrogate for rectifying the disparities as people that have obviously historical and historical explanation that people are still worried about. I mean, if it is in fact true, and last I looked at it, it seemed to be true, although these data are a few years old, that on average, African-American families have one eighth the amount of familial wealth as white families. And that's a disparity

which might have several reasons, but the most glaring certainly is the history of racism and racial discrimination and racist policies in America. That has a legacy effect that would seem undeniable. But whatever the reasons, it is the current reality. And if you just focused on class, if you focused on disparities in wealth and all of the opportunities that correlate with wealth, educational opportunities, et cetera, health outcomes, if you focus on those things in a way that was race-blind, you would obviously disproportionately advantage or appropriately and proportionately advantage, depending on how you thought about it, people of color, without ever stepping onto this terrain of politically invidious and morally suspect distinctions, which of the sort that we saw during COVID, where you have the Biden administration saying that

we're going to privilege black and brown people for the vaccine because that's obviously the good thing to do, or we're going to give, you know, aid to black, you know, businesses run by black and brown Americans before white Americans, because that's obviously a step in the direction of equity. I mean, that, you know, it's understandable that the good intentions at the bottom of all that are recognizable, but it is understandable that that is just akin to just obvious political evil when viewed from the perspective of a desperately poor white American who should be just as much within the circle of our social concern as any other poor person. Yeah, I mean, you know, something I like to tell people, remind people of is when Barack Obama was president, you know, early in his term, he was trying to do a big health care bill that, you know, among other things, it expanded Medicaid, it gave extra money to low-income people to help take care of their health needs.

low-income people to help take care of their health needs. And Rush Limbaugh, you know, conservative radio host, very influential guy while he was alive, he used to say, oh, this Obamacare, this is really a reparations program, right? Because that was, he was trying to sink an effort to help poor people by making it out to be just an effort to help Black people, right? He was trying to mobilize, you know, racial division to defeat an egalitarian economic program. That's a very classic trope in American politics. And if you go back, Martin Luther King's book, Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community, he talks about how, you know, the only way we are going to develop what he wanted for Black people, you know, living in slums, living in ghetto neighborhoods, was to build an alliance with lower income white people who had similar needs. And in the freedom budget that he and Bayard Rustin and Philip Randolph put together, you know, they say we're going to have quality education when we have good schools for everyone.

We're going to have good jobs for everyone, right? That's sort of how you try to create a politically tractable vision is you decrease these kinds of racial divisions. And, you know, it's obviously, it's politically toxic. I remember in the summer of 2020, I was in rural Maine, you know, and there's a kind of affluent town by the coast and they had all the Black Lives Matter, you know, and there's a kind of affluent town by the coast and they had all the Black Lives Matter, you know, banners up there. And then there's a poorer town inland, you know, people living in trailers, things like that, all white in both cases, very white state. You know, and obviously, you know, if you're living in a trailer in Penobscot, Maine, and the lumber industry that your family used to work in

has gone away, things like that. I mean, you don't want to be lectured by other people about how privileged you are in life. And I think that's just completely obvious. It also does a disservice actually to, William Julius Wilson talked about the truly disadvantaged, by which he meant, you know, poor Black people living in, you know, high poverty neighborhoods, right, really cut off from economic opportunity and kind of functional social institutions. You do no favors to people in that kind of situation to kind of hyper-focus on, you know, microaggressions or kind of pure representational politics among the elite. Because, you know,

the only people able to take advantage of those kind of opportunities are actually people who have achieved a fair amount of prosperity, right? So if you want to help people who are really suffering, which I think you should, you know, you need to focus on kind of objective indicators of deprivation, whether that's income, wealth, health status, other need to focus on kind of objective indicators of deprivation, whether that's income, wealth, health status, other kinds of things like that. That's common sense politics. That's the way it was done by almost everybody up until, you know, the 20-teens. And it's been a dead end. And I think that should be the message of the extent to which all kinds of people swung toward Trump this time around. Again, I want to jump into your nine principles, and this will take us over some of

the ground we've already covered, perhaps, but in greater detail. But before we jump into your nine principles, I'm wondering, what do you think Biden's legacy will be at this point? You know, I mean, I think it's going to be quite meager. His whole pitch was that he was going to sort of save the country from Trump to go out the way that he did to be succeeded literally by Trump, you know, means there essentially is no legacy, except that we don't know what's going to become of Trump, right? I mean, if he turns out to be as threatening to American institutions as I'm certainly concerned he might be, that could leave Biden with a very bleak legacy. If four years of Trump goes okay in America,

then he'll be a kind of a funny trivia answer, right? Like Benjamin Harrison, who served between two Grover Cleveland terms. And that's because, you know, who even remembers Grover Cleveland, right? So Biden may just not amount to anything when he, I think, actually had a lot of promise, you know, in 2020. He had some appealing ideas, I think. And I think that the vision of kind of a figure from an older generation who was going to try to bring Democrats back to stability is why he won the primary, you know, in a very kind of tumultuous time. He was seen by rank and file Democrats as a steady pair of hands who was going to, you know, both beat Trump, but also bring the party back to a set of values that, frankly,

Biden had been associated with for most of his career. And then that's not how he governed. And I'm, you know, I'm quite taken aback by it and have been consistently for the past several years. And what do you actually expect of a second Trump term at this point? I mean, it's very hard to say, you know, I mean, everything that you get from Trump is very contrary signals all the time. You know, he campaigns the whole time. He says, we're going to have tariffs on

everybody. And then his allies in the business community say, no, don't worry, he's not really going to do that. There was a Wall Street Journal article this morning which said, nope, like he's really, he is going to do that. There was this kind of, I think, slightly unnerving story about ABC settling a defamation case with Trump that I think, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but most people who are informed about these things say they think ABC could have won that case if they'd taken it to court, almost certainly would have won. But, you know, they wanted to settle it because the Walt Disney Company didn't want to make Trump angry, didn't want to make him upset. You know, he's going to put in an FBI director who says he's going to like purge the institution and find Trump's enemies. So, I mean,

who knows? You know, if there's anything that I know from 20-something years of covering politics, it's that it is very hard to predict the future. I hope it goes okay. You know, not all of his ideas are terrible. I think people had some valid reasons to want to vote for him. I think it's unfortunate that Republicans threw up somebody with really a kind of a low character. You know, nobody has ever said to me about Donald Trump, well, if you only, like, if you really knew him, you know, if you saw what he was like behind closed doors, he's so much more thoughtful. He's so much kinder than he comes across as.

And you hear that every other president, you know, maybe it's BS, but like people who worked for George W. Bush, people who worked for Biden, people who worked, you know, people who lost Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, their closest aides will say, you know, this person is so great. I talk to people who worked for Trump in his first term and they'll say, you know, no, like this guy's totally nuts. It's, it's exactly what it seems like. And that, you know, that worries me. Do you think Trumpism and the more generically this trend of right-wing populism in America ends or gets severely mitigated in the absence of Trump? I mean, is Trump a singular figure that has potentiated this cult of personality that has subsumed the Republican Party? Do we swing back to a more

normal Republican Party after Trump or not necessarily? You know, there's an element of personalistic politics to Trump that's very unusual and that I think is going to be hard for anybody else to replicate. There's also an idea, though, of a kind of a crude nationalism to Trump that I think has kind of deep roots and that you see in a lot of different countries and a lot of different contexts that I don't like. You know, I don't think it's morally admirable to be saying things like we should have taken the oil, that kind of thing. I don't think that, you know, there's very legitimate criticisms of how immigration policy was handled under Joe Biden. I also don't think that trying to promote, you know, indifference to people because they were born in another country is like a good thing. This is a form of identity politics that I think, you know, can be quite problematic, but that also is kind of deep in

the structure of democratic politics and isn't going to be vanishing. I did think, I thought that if Trump had lost, you know, that the spell would kind of break on this. That Republicans would say, you know what, like, this guy had some good points, but fundamentally he's a loser. He's dragging us down by being so weird. We have a lot of other people in our party who can talk about border security without being so nutty and without having these kind of authoritarian aspects. Since he won, you know, winners tend to prosper. People are going to try to copy him whether they can or can't. What do you make of the failure on the part of Democrats and the Biden administration to deal with the immigration problem at the border,

which was so obviously politically disastrous. I mean, even if you had no other concern about it, the optics of it were so terrible. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone

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