Making Sense with Sam Harris - #51 — The Most Powerful Clown

Episode Date: November 10, 2016

Sam Harris talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election and the prospects of a President Trump. 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.

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Well, it has come to pass, President Trump, a man who many of us treated as a buffoon and only took seriously as a threat at the 11th hour, will be the 45th President of the United States, with a Republican Congress behind him, and with at least one vacancy, probably more, on the Supreme Court to fill. So, what went wrong, and how bad is this?

Well, I think there are two parts to this story. The first is unambiguously depressing. And this is the part that has been seized on by most liberals. But it's only half the story. And it is this. Trump has ascended to power despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it, and by exposing in himself and in the electorate the worst that America has to offer. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, a contempt for the most vulnerable among us,

A contempt for the most vulnerable among us. Intimations of fascism. A positive love of bullying. Total disdain for our democratic institutions. A willingness to make threats of political violence just for the fun of it. A contempt for science. And a love of conspiracy theories. I mean, I could run through it all again.

The crazy things he's said and the toxic alliances he's made. The irony is, if he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse. He would have been more recognizably dangerous. There were so many awful moments that the media couldn't focus on them for long enough or weigh their significance. And the big things were as big as they get, right? Climate change is a hoax. Why can't we use our nuclear weapons? Maybe nuclear proliferation is a good thing. Let the Saudis and the Japanese and the South Koreans build their own nukes. Who's to say we should support our NATO alliances? What have they done for us?

Putin is a great leader. Maybe we should just default on our debt, cut a better deal. Any one of those things should have ended it. But of course, the little things were just as weird and should have been just as disqualifying. I mean, we have just elected a president who has bragged about invading the dressing rooms of beauty pageant contestants so that he could see them naked,

when they were effectively his employees. I mean, he owned the pageant. And then he even bullied some of these young women publicly, some on social media in the wee hours of the morning, while campaigning for the presidency. And then he denied doing any of these things when no denial was even possible. We had all seen his tweets. And in response to the astonishment of the media, he looked the American people in the eye and said,

no one respects women more than I do. No one. and said, no one respects women more than I do. No one. And half the country accepted that as, what, the truth? As good theater? As sketch comedy? I mean, there are really no words to describe how far from normal we have drifted here. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, described the situation the night of the election

in a piece entitled An American Tragedy. Now, I'll read a little of that so you get a sense of what the liberal elites were thinking at 3 a.m. Quote, The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American Republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump's shocking victory, his ascension to the presidency,

is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American president, a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit, And then he goes on. In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the, quote, innate wisdom and essential decency of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner, but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the FBI,

the malign influence of Russian intelligence, the free pass, the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies, provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There's no reason to believe this palaver. There's no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates,

Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and yes, Paul Ryan, are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law. He was elected in the main on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future. It cannot be. We cannot allow it to be so.

But this is surely the way fascism can begin." I think most of that's true, unfortunately, but it's not the whole truth. And the parts that are true are probably not worth dwelling on at this point. I'm not sure how useful it will be to stay in the well of blame and despair and to resist quote normalizing this situation but it is true that the normalizing seems like an act of prayer I mean just just consider Trump's victory speech which was alarming for how untrumpian it was. I mean, it read like it was written by Van Jones on Ambien. It was the most anodyne bit of fence-mending. But you could feel the desperation in the media

to read into his surprisingly gracious notes the normalcy that Remnick is talking about here. I mean, maybe we were all just wrong about him, right? Maybe he's a nice guy after all. What are the chances of that? Is it possible that an ethical person merely pretended to be a total asshole for 18 months? It seems somehow far-fetched. But what are we to make of the fact that Trump had nothing but nice things

to say about Clinton? What happened to lock her up? Does anyone care that the Trump who spoke on the night of the election was totally unrecognizable? Who did his supporters think they had elected? Were his supporters surprised to see him merely praise Hillary? Is it all theater? Who is this guy? Will he attempt to do anything he promised to do? Does anyone know? Does Ivanka have any idea what her dad will do as president?

what her dad will do as president. Now, I've gotten a fair amount of grief from people at this point for having been wrong about the election. I'm not sure what they mean. I admit I did jinx it by posting a suitably repellent picture of Trump on Twitter early in the day and saying, bye-bye, Donald. Now, of course, that wasn't a prediction. I was simply saying how nice it would be to never think about him again. Of course, when I sent that tweet, the polls were giving him around a 20% chance of winning.

Now, whether the polls were wrong or not is anyone's guess at this point. A 20% chance of winning is not nothing, right? Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often a 20% chance comes up. It comes up quite frequently, sometimes on the very first roll. So I jinxed the election. Sorry about that. But surely it can't have been a failure of judgment to have trusted the most reputable polls. Basically everyone was doing that. What else was there to trust? Just the torrents of hatred I saw on social media? about what happened with the polls will be interesting in the weeks and months ahead. And the truth is, I always had a bad feeling about the election, and that's why I talked about it so much on this podcast. I could tell that Hillary's flaws as a candidate were causing people to ignore Trump's flaws as a human being. Well, we're about to find out how high a price we and the rest of the world will pay for that.

Speaking personally, I can say I feel that I left more or less everything on the field. I know I alienated many of you in how fully I disparaged Trump. And I kept doing it even at the risk of boring those of you who actually agreed with me because I thought it was so important. So I don't honestly see how I could have done any more. And at this moment, that's actually a good

feeling. I was preparing myself for this moment. And I certainly know many scientists and business people. 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, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the

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