Making Sense with Sam Harris - #54 — Trumping The World

Episode Date: December 1, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with journalist James Kirchick about the coming Trump presidency, liberalism vs illiberalism, fake news, Russia, Syria, Iran, and the future of American power. 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. 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 Today I'll be speaking with Jamie Kerchick. Jamie is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington. He's reported from all over the world, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, various countries in Europe. He writes mainly now for the Daily Beast, and he's also a columnist for Tablet. And his first book, coming out from Yale University Press, I believe next March 2017, is entitled The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. His writing has appeared everywhere, the Washington Post, the Wall

Street Journal, the New York Times. And he spent a lot of time thinking about the election and its implications for U.S. foreign policy, the kinds of trends and concerns that brought us here, and the trends and concerns that will likely endure. I wanted to talk to him, and I'm very glad I got him on the podcast. And we dive back into politics here, talking about the election and the coming Trump presidency, mostly with a focus on the implications for foreign policy. So if you are concerned about the world and what happens to it on our watch, well, then you might find something useful here. And now I give you Jamie Kerchick. I'm here with Jamie Kerchick. Jamie, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Sam. Tell our listeners how you describe yourself at this moment and what you mostly focus on. So I'm a journalist based in Washington. I focus mostly, I'd say, on foreign affairs, Europe, where I used to live, working for Radio Free Europe for a couple of years. But I write about increasingly domestic American politics. I was sort of pulled into it by this election. I write for the Daily Beast primarily, but also for Tablet, which is a Jewish-themed website, and lots of other publications. I've been noticing you. I forget how I first noticed you. I think it might have been on Twitter, which is somewhat ironic because the influence of social media on our thinking at this moment is so depressing. And I think we'll

probably talk about it, but I think I discovered you that way. And I've actually discovered a few podcast guests that way. So it's useful for something. And I've noticed that you and I are worried about many of the same things. and obviously we share these worries with many people, so there's a lot to get into. Because we're finding illiberals on both the left and the right. And people are falling into identity politics and conspiracy thinking. And they're producing fake news stories and standing in opposition to free speech. These trends are just, I mean, they're antithetical to getting a grasp on reality and reasoning honestly about it. And yet this problem does cut across political lines. We might argue that any one of these things might be worse on the left or the right at this moment,

but it's definitely, it's hard to align politically in a way that is easily summarized on many points of real significance. And all of this seems to have crystallized with the election. But there are so many topics here, which I've heard you speak about and I've seen you write about, which are related. So just there's kind of a through line here where you can talk about the failures of the Obama administration at the level of foreign policy. So, you know, the red line in Syria, for instance, and subsequent Russian involvement there, and then the migrant crisis to Europe, which is leading to the possible dissolution of the EU and the rise of nativism everywhere. And this is giving us this spirit of anti-globalism and a fundamental distrust of the media and even a disdain for the very concept of a fact, right?

So, and again, this all seems to have been brought to a kind of a crystalline focus with Donald Trump. So, just, you know, I've kind of put out the terrain there. Tell me how the things look for you at this moment. There's a lot to unpack there, but I think you're right. And I agree that we're in new political terrain where someone like myself, who really, I consider myself center-right. I work for a conservative think tank. I usually vote Republican. But I found myself so viscerally opposed to Trump, almost even more radically you know, radically anti-Trump than a lot of my left-wing friends. And having lived in Europe, you see this sort of political realignment of the extremes coming together on the far left and far right. So, you know, there's this Syriza

government in Greece, which is sort of neo-communist. And, you know, they've been praised by Hungarian fascists that I've interviewed, um, because they're all sort of anti-liberal, illiberal, um, in the classic sense of the word. Um, and during the campaign, I wrote an article for the Daily Beast that got a lot of angry responses where I really called out some of the lefties for Trump. You know, and one of whom I just said out loud was our very good mutual friend, Glenn Greenwald, whose whose real, you know, whose entire approach to the election was basically could be summed up as, well, Hillary Clinton is a lying neocon, neoliberal corporate warmonger shill. And how dare you accuse me of passively,

aggressively supporting Donald Trump? And there were many people I found on the left who, you know, they would never come out explicitly and say it because obviously, you know, you wouldn't want to ally yourself with this guy who's such a bore and playing all these kind of racist dog whistles. But I think Trump actually had a lot in common with sort of the far left, certainly in terms of his worldview and his view of American power, and his belief that America should just kind of mind its own business and, you know, stay at home. The kind of anti-imperialist left, if you will. But yeah, we're in a really dark time. And you also brought up this issue of how much of what we're going through now is it a response to Obama. And I

do think that there's an element of this. And we can talk more about sort of the alt-right. And there seems to be a lot of self-flagellation now from liberals, in which they're sort of accusing themselves of not being, you know, in touch with middle America, and the media was, you know, sort of navel gazing, and we talk in this bubble, you know, SNL had a skit about the bubble last week. And I, you know, I've written a lot about political correctness and free speech, and I am the first person to criticize the left for this. Yet as strongly as I loathe the kind of social justice warrior left, and when President Obama refuses to say Islamic terrorism, none of these things in my mind justify a vote for Donald Trump.

And I feel like a lot of people who might not be as nuanced as, you know, Sam Harris and Jamie Kerchick, they basically threw up their arms and they said, you know what, I can't stand this anymore. I'm being told that there's 69 different genders. The president won't talk about Islamic extremism. I'm just going to vote for this Trump guy because he tells it like it is. And I get that. I just think it was the wrong choice. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. It's interesting because I'm finding, as you probably know on my podcast, also on my blog, I've been maybe not as vociferous as you. You may set the standard there, but I've been probably as vociferous as anyone else I could name in my repudiation of Trump, and really gone on ad nauseum. And it's interesting, I noticed that

post-election, there's this kind of the wind has gone out of my sails to a significant degree, because I basically said everything I had to say. And now he's elected. And there's a sense I have that the moment to do anything has really passed. And, you know, this is politically, this may in fact not be true, but it's not just me. I feel like many people are sort of moving on to just accepting that we're going to have four very interesting and perhaps very depressing years of political incompetence. and perhaps very depressing years of political incompetence. And I think the worst things about Trump, I mean, the things I fear most about him are not what liberals and what the mainstream media is tending to focus on. I mean, obviously, we can debate whether, you know, the dog whistles were in fact dog whistles. I think we both bemoan the eruption of misogyny and anti-Semitism and racism we've seen that has been a response to Trump and part of his support. But I think it is at least reasonable to expect that that is a tiny fraction of the people who support him.

people who support him. And the scariest thing is just we now have elected somebody who is, as I've said before, just clearly a con man and a pathologically selfish and petty and just unenlightened person. And we are now giving him more responsibility than any person has had in human history. And so it's incompetence and dogmatism and this kind of the petty tyranny of a psychologically not entirely healthy person that I worry about more than the prospect that he is a deeply racist or otherwise ideological person. And so maybe, maybe react to that. And also just the concept of how normalizing this is a, is almost irresistible, even for critics of Trump, because it's just that you just can't, what are we just going to complain endlessly for four years now? Is that our new job? endlessly for four years now? Is that our new job? Yeah, I mean, like you, I feel sort of exasperated, exhausted. I think from about February or March until, you know, two weeks ago when the

election was held, I really didn't write about anything other than Trump. And I have to understand, I usually don't write that much about domestic politics. I'm usually writing about foreign policy. I just got so sort of obsessed with doing what I could to kind of, you know, warn people and convince them not to support this man. And now there's sort of a feeling like, wow, like it didn't even have an effect. And what does it say about our country that however many tens of millions of people would fall for, as you said, an obvious con. And I actually want to ask you later, I mean, to me, almost one article I wrote about Trump was that he most reminded me of L. Ron Hubbard. And he seemed he almost seems like a cult leader, and that his his pull over his supporters is very similar. I mean, when he got up and said,

you know, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still support me, he's right. And that's not the kind of language of a democratic political leader. It's the language of a dictator or sort of, you know, David Koresh or Jim Jones. And as someone who studies faith and religion, I'd be curious to know your views on that. But just one last thing. I mean, I agree that I'm much less worried about the implications and the consequences domestically. I think a lot of people on the left are getting a little hysterical about America turning into Nazi Germany overnight. What I'm much more concerned about, and this stems from my experience having lived and worked in Central and Eastern Europe,

is really the effect that he will have on the world, and particularly that part of the world. I think the biggest story of this election that still has not been fully explained is Russia and their involvement in this election. I mean, the tactics that they used in hacking the DNC and John Podesta and then using WikiLeaks as a front. These are the sorts of tactics that, you know, I witnessed as a reporter in Kyrgyzstan, OK, which is like a Soviet backwater. It's the kind of stuff that the Russians would do in, you know, like the third world countries that they once ruled. To see them actually use these kinds of tactics in the world's, you know, greatest democracy, so-called, and to basically get away with it is really appalling. And I still don't think that we fully wrapped our heads around this. I think part of the reason

might be because a lot of the journalists on the left who sort of, you know, wrote about this story were kind of like, you know, Johnny come lately cold warriors. It's like, oh, wow. All of a sudden, like, you know, Josh Marshall cares about Russia all of a sudden. It's like it would have been nice if you were there, you know, for the past eight years during the reset, you know, President Obama's disastrous policy towards Russia. Or, you know, when you were laughing at Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was our greatest, you know, global security threat, which I think is evidently true now. So this this whole angle, the Russian angle, their involvement in our election, also their involvement in all of this kind of fake news that you're hearing a lot about. Yeah. And sort of just kind of. I mean, what there's there's a friend of mine, Peter Pomerantsev, who wrote an excellent book about Russia. It's called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And it's about his years living as a TV producer in sort of Putin's Russia. And it's a brilliant book about sort of the surreal

postmodernist Russian world where there's, you know, fake political parties and it's called managed democracy. And as the title suggests, nothing is true and everything is possible. And I never thought that his book, which just came out a couple of years ago, would so accurately describe the kind of postmodern world that we're entering now in the United States, where basically a candidate can get up, lie through his teeth, left and right. And people just don't, you know, you and me get really angry and we fume and scream and the media goes crazy. But a lot of people don't care. immigration or Islamism. All of these topics have room for diversity of opinion. I mean, not every relevant topic does. I think if you're dismissing climate science at the moment, you probably don't deserve a seat at the table for debate. But we could disagree about how bad it is or what we should do about it or what the likely implications are. But this kind of post-fact

moment where people no longer care what the truth is, and there's a kind of nihilistic delight in just setting the universe of information on fire, right? I mean, this fake news orgy is just unbelievable. So I think you have seen both of these articles or you know about both of these stories. A couple of days ago, there was an article in The Washington Post about these two guys in California who have made up Liberty Writers News is their website. readers, and they're making probably some hundreds of thousands of dollars a month just creating fake news stories, which have been lapped up by Trump supporters. And they were part of this Facebook scandal that may, in fact, have influenced the election, just where Facebook became an organ of disinformation publishing these stories. And as you say, there's this now cottage industry sponsored, or at least

inspired by Russia, right? And in some Eastern European countries, just creating fake news websites that have significant currency in the US. Again, this happens on the left and the right, but now I'm talking about right wing versions of it. But this other story, which was just completely insane, which I just heard about yesterday, which I think is going by the name of Pizzagate. Oh, yes. The story about this pizza parlor in D.C. that was alleged to be running a child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, right? And this is, I mean, apparently believed by people, right? So the owners of this restaurant are getting death threats by the hundreds and,

you know, their lives are completely upended. They've got photos of their kids online being circulated on crazy websites. It's pure insanity and should be recognizably insane to anyone who cares about what's happening in the world, but apparently it's not. And so, I mean, this breakdown of valid forms of information and is a kind of moral equivalence where any error found in the New York Times is considered to be on par with a fake news website that is just manufacturing propaganda out of whole cloth, it's terrifying. Let's focus on that piece a little bit and on Russia's putative involvement here. Because whenever I have circulated stories about Russia hacking the election,

I have gotten back by the dozens and more claims from Trump supporters that all of that's made up, that there is there's no evidence that Russia has been involved in anything. Have you have you seen that? And what do you have? What's your. I mean, there's this there's this sort of, you know, you're being a McCarthyite. They they love to throw that word around. I mean, look, there's two issues here. There's the I'm not alleging hacking of the ballots or the, you know, election system. In fact, it was Donald Trump who it was Donald Trump who was the one who was going on and on about the rigged election system. I'm not alleging that. What we do know is that Russian hackers basically committed cyber Watergate at the DNC and then they released and then they used, you wikileaks which is their front and you know

that that's a whole i can explain that to people but that's pretty much accepted that wikileaks is a russian intelligence front let me just focus on that claim for a second now do you think that wikileaks has always been or it's just simply been co-opted recently i think they've been yeah i think they've been co-opted i think it's's the same as Edward Snowden. I think, you know, people have ideas. Julian Assange really does. He I would say he's he's a radical transparency activist, although it's very selective. Of course, you don't see him publishing documents from Russia or China. is, he's just your typical sort of far left anti-American Australian, of which there's a long pedigree. And, you know, the Russians were very smart and they were able to basically co-opt him. He had a show on RT, which is the Russian propaganda channel. And so they're basically being used now as a front for Russian intelligence. They have been for quite a while. And so what did they do? They released these emails right on the eve of the Democratic National Convention that were designed to anger the Bernie supporters, the Bernie Sanders supporters, to keep the Bernie supporters home on election day. So we know they did that.

We know they hacked the Podesta emails. These are not, you know, made up. These are these are these this this is true. As with regard to the fake news, this is a real to take advantage of our freedoms, which is freedom of speech, and basically sneak inside and take advantage of it and corrupt it. And, you know, we can't, you know, censor these things. We can't, you know, arrest people for writing fake news stories. What we need is just some sort of, I mean, media literacy among our population. I mean, we need people to be, people need to understand that, you know, when they read

something that's in the New York Times or the Washington Post, there's a much better chance it'll be true than if it comes from libertywritersnews.com. And it's just astounding to me that we have a society where there are so many people who don't accept the distinction. Yeah, well, unfortunately, every case of error or bias on the part of a institution like the New York Times does so much damage to their credibility. And obviously, there are people who are poised never to accept anything they say ever again. So those people may be irreclaimable. But still, it's just to notice,

because we have people on the op-ed page of the New York Times, someone like Nick Kristof, who will reliably make the most charitable thing is to say an error of judgment about something relevant to Islamism, say, you know, or, you know, he won't recognize that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is or should be considered a feminist hero. He will basically castigate her as a big know, the Southern Poverty Law Center just did this. They put together a list of, quote, anti-Muslim extremists, and Ayan and Majid Nawaz are both on it. The irony here is really painful because if ever we needed a clean and truly wise institution to combat right-wing extremism and racism in the U.S., right? We needed it now, post-election. But as far as I'm concerned, the Southern Poverty Law Center is irredeemable on the basis of the magnitude of this error and the fact that they have just

doubled down on it and defended it. Yeah, I see them being quoted a lot over the past couple weeks on sort of the spike in hate crimes after Trump's election. And it really angers me for precisely the reason you say, because they totally have a political agenda. They slandered Majid and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are heroes of liberalism, frankly. And so, yeah, they've totally lost credibility. And I think it's a shame when when institutions that should you know play that role that constructive sort of arbiter role get tainted in that way yeah by their own doing by their own doing it's completely self-inflicted but the problem is that you know it does come down on some basic level to intellectual honesty and a commitment to correcting errors. I mean, if you made a mistake, right, well, then as long as your overriding goal is to correct your mistake

as soon as it comes to light, right, and not be wrong any longer than you need to be, then basically everyone can forgive that. I mean, that's what every institution needs. That's what we need personally, and that's what a non-profit like the Southern Poverty Law Center needs. And it would have been totally possible, I guess it's still possible, for them to correct this error. And it's possible for someone like Nick Kristof to realize, oh, you know, I kind of lost the plot here. I've been defending Islamists in many respects and castigating a truly courageous and victimized person. It would be possible to correct this error and issue the appropriate mea culpa, and the institution would be intact. But either there's just people have too much going on and they just can't take the time to figure out how they got things wrong, or there's this

all-too-human tendency to double down in the face of criticism. And it's really damaging, and it allows people to now, going forward, no longer distinguish between real journalistic enterprises that are trying to get the facts straight most of the time. And these confections of just teenage insanity, where literally you've got like 18 year olds with their laptops, defining the worldview of millions of people. Yeah. And what I worry about is that Trump is so awful. He's so manifestly awful that I feel that a lot of our sort of mediating institutions are just going to kind of uh become less responsible they're going to feel that they can kind of get away with more perhaps they won't

cover him um they might they might cover him in a more shrill hyperbolic manner because he's so he's so bad and they'll they'll think that they can just get away with with things there might be some you know um curtailments of facts here and there. And I worry that sort of the average decent, you know, liberal center is just getting lost in what's becoming almost a kind of Weimarization of American political discourse, where, you know, on the right, you have this sort of ethno-populist authoritarianism. And on the left, you know, it just seems that the Democrats, the lesson that they're taking from this election is, oh, well, we need to be even more left-wing,

and we need to protest in the streets, and we need to make Keith Ellison the head of the DNC. And that's, you know, and that's going to be our ticket forward. And it's like, well, where are the people in the middle supposed to go? Unfortunately, being in the middle, I can tell you personally what the inclination is. It's to more or less change the subject and focus on other things. So I just noticed how, again, this is kind of a psychological experiment being run hour by hour

whenever I open Twitter. When I see someone like David Frum or somebody take another hard whack at Trump, he'll send out an article revealing how Trump is showing that he's just going to wring out every dollar from the family business in response to this opportunity. And you've got Ivanka's jewelry company advertising the $11,000 bracelet she was wearing in the 60 Minutes interview. And so these things get tweeted. And prior to the election, I would have circulated that stuff too, because anything I can do to put my shoulder to the wheel and stop this guy, right? But now it just seems like I know what the consequences are. Some significant percentage of the people following me are Trump supporters, and I'm going to get just pure pain from them.

of the people following me are Trump supporters, and I'm going to get just pure pain from them. And I will look boring and repetitive to some, and just totally ineffectual, and in fact be ineffectual to some significant percentage of the rest of the people following me. So it's sort of the avoidance of boredom and this hunger to be once again free to pay attention to legitimately interesting things. Among many other things, Trump is one of the most boring people on earth. Perversely, I mean, now we're through the looking glass and it's hugely consequential, if not interesting, that he now has the power or is about to have the power he will have. interesting that he now has the power or is about to have the power he will have. But talk about someone who encapsulates basically the, he's like an intellectual vacuum, right? I mean, there's just nothing there that you would want to spend any time on. I feel myself kind of wanting

to move on to other things and more or less just wanting to hope that he's not as ignorant or as bad as he advertised himself to be. And I was just wondering if you can comment on that, that mood that is growing in me, which it feels frankly, kind of, it worries me. So. Yeah. I mean, I guess the, the danger is that we become apathetic, right? That we just sort of, you know, we've lost and we just sort of tend to our gardens and he goes on and does, you know, awful things and there's just less people to fight him because we've become so demoralized. On the other hand, I think, like you said, I think now that he's going to be in office, we need to perhaps preserve our gunpowder for the real serious fights. So perhaps the Ivanka jewelry marketing scandal, maybe that's not really what we need to get all worked up about. I mean, similarly, there are a lot of people talking about over the weekend how

Trump, you know, was tweeting these attacks on the Hamilton cast for lecturing Mike Pence, and how that coincided with the $25 million settlement that he just made in the Trump University case, and how that was sort of expertly timed to distract us. You know, he could distract us with this silly scandal about Hamilton, while the real story is the fact that he just settled a fraud case for $25 million. So I think we need to be, you know, vigilant in terms of where our outrage goes. And in terms of Trump himself and how he performs, look, no one would be happier if he becomes Harry Truman and just, you know, becomes this great president and surprises everyone. I really don't think that's

going to happen. But if it does happen, then I'll be the first person to admit it. If that does happen, though, what I think will have been lost is this sense of sort of honesty and decency in politics. I mean, maybe it's been gone already, but I just, I feel like if Donald Trump governs as some sort of like Rockefeller Republican moderate, then like, what was the entire point of that election when he got up there screaming and yelling about locking Hillary in prison and the whole litany of things? Like, then we've truly entered this postmodern era, right? Where you can just get up and shout ridiculous things and just no one takes anyone seriously anymore.

Right. Yeah, that's something I commented on a couple of podcasts back, I think, after his acceptance speech, which I found alarming just in how benign it was and how antithetical it was to how he had campaigned. it was and how antithetical it was to how he had campaigned. And I was just trying to take the position of a person who had voted for him, you know, chanting, lock her up, lock her up as the happy mantra of the campaign. What did it mean to that person to see Trump say nothing but good things about Hillary? And now we learn. Today he said, yeah, today he said he's not going to pursue her. So now we learn, you know, like, so like, who's the cuck now, right? I mean, now we learn he's not going to do any of that, right? Now, what else is he not going to do?

So is there anyone who supported him rapidly who cares about this mismatch between who he said he was and what he said he was committed to and what, in fact, appears to be true of his looming presidency. It's just this lack of concern about what's real and just this indulgence of the theater of getting people's attention, right? It's just like, it doesn't matter. As long as I'm up here on stage making noise, I don't even have to speak in complete sentences. And yes, I could shoot someone in Times Square and you're all going to stay with me because you love this shit. And it's just, this is not something that for all her flaws and for all her deceitfulness and all her guardedness with the media, this is not something that Hillary Clinton was remotely doing. It is bizarre. I mean, it would be amazing for him to move forward and be essentially the Democrat

that everyone thinks is hiding in there, at least on most issues, and pursue a massive infrastructure project that he manages to get through because the Republicans are now in his thrall, and then basically do, you know, eight out of 10 good things. That would be amazing. Although, again, I share your skepticism about whether it's possible. Yeah. And it seems that there's like two kinds of Trump supporters. They're the ones who like fully believe and want him to carry out every kind of cockamamie promise he made. And then there are the more cynical ones, the operators, the ones in Washington, D.C., the Newt Gingrichs, the Kellyanne Conways. And these are the people, I think, who always knew that he was a bullshit artist, frankly,

but that he obviously clearly had some amazing ability to connect with people and they were willing to kind of ride the tiger. I'm not sure which is worse, you know, if you actually believe that he's going to deport 11 million people and, you know, all this nonsense, or if you, you know, you cynically attach yourself to this because you want power. I mean, they're not, neither of them are very good. What I worry about is, you know, are these kind of radicalized people, if they don't get what they want in a Trump, you know, how are they going to respond? What's their what's their next move going to be? Do they become more radical agree with him that, oh, you know, Trump's whole shtick was moving the Overton window, you know, so we could get more money out of our NATO allies was, you know, the whole purpose of threatening to leave NATO was to get them to pay up. And we knew that all along. I'm not, I'm not sure. You might define Overton window

for some listeners. I think it's a little esoteric bit of internet knowledge. Yeah, I guess I'm not sure where it kind of, maybe it was Glenn Becker. I'm not sure exactly where it comes from. But it's basically this notion that in politics or in negotiating, you initially come out with an extreme position to sort of move the conversation more in your direction. And it's also this notion of the window that bounds what is acceptable to talk about. Right. Right. So it's like now it's acceptable to talk about deporting 11 million people, say, or a registry for Muslims or something. I mean, we're now actually debating this. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit more about

the Trump presidency before we talk about the whole world. Are any of these appointments that he's made thus far as scary to you as they seem to be to people on the far left? I mean, Bannon is bad, but I think Steve Bannon is the former kind of overlord of Breitbart. 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 and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.