Making Sense with Sam Harris - #65 — We're All Cucks Now

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with David Frum about the presidency of Donald 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.

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 one. Today I will be speaking with David Frum. David is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. He was a speechwriter for George Bush and has been well known in Republican political circles for many years.

He's written many books and he is one of Trump's most notable Republican critics. I wanted to get David on the podcast because he's obviously much more knowledgeable about government in general and the Republican Party in particular than I am, and I wanted him to walk us through this moment in history and just talk about what we might expect to happen in the near term here, and how maybe something good might come of all this. We don't say much that will be viewed as charitable toward Trump, but if you listen to the podcast, you'll hear that we really do our best to be even-handed. That doesn't paint a rosy picture, you'll see, but David's conservative bona fides are beyond dispute. And that makes his opinions about Trump and the people around him and the Republicans' support for him all the more incisive. So without further preamble, I bring you David Frum.

I am here with David Frum. David, thank you for coming on the podcast. What a pleasure to be here. So listen, we've never met. It's great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for quite some time, but my appreciation for you has just gone up by a factor of 10 in recent months, seeing your opposition to Trump and just imagining what your experience is like holding the line there. So I want to get into that. I want to talk about Trump, obviously, and the state of our country and the state of the media. But the challenge for us, given that we're going to agree so much about the problem here and given how much we each hate Trump. The challenge is really for us to say something that could conceivably persuade

someone who doesn't already agree with us. I don't want us to just be indulging confirmation bias here or just rattling around our own echo chamber. I'd like us to be on our guard against exaggerating anything. And I really want us to say things about Trump and about the current situation that are as fully defended as possible. So with that in mind, let's just start with, can you summarize your political background and background as a writer so people who are less familiar with you can be up to speed? Sure. And those are great cautions. And thank you for the generous welcome. It's really wonderful of you to say that. I really appreciate it.

And maybe to answer your question about not getting bottlenecked, maybe after I give that introduction, maybe the place to start is like, I'm going to present some things where I think Donald Trump is saying some things that are worth hearing, some things that are true and where he's, where he's maybe if he's not right, he's onto something important. But here's my background i was born and grew up in canada in toronto um uh my mother was a quite well-known canadian journalist in fact a very well-known canadian journalist a host of a radio show called as it happens in the 1970s and she went on to host a program called the journal which was um the the cbc's main canadian broadcasting corporation's main late-night face-to-face

television talk show in the 1980s. She died in 1992, aged 54. An extraordinary career and much missed, and a huge influence on me. I graduated from college in 1982, and I was very caught up in the politics of that time. The class of 1982 was, these are people who'd grown up during the chaos of the 1970s, caught up in the Reagan moment. And I think to this day, we are probably the most Republican-oriented cohort of people who are not absolutely old. And so that was a huge influence on me. I worked for many conservative magazines over the years, National Review. I was on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I worked for conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute. And to catch the story, I'll skip over most of the earlier parts, but to catch

the story up into the more recent times, in 2001, I joined the staff of the George W. Bush White House. I worked as a speechwriter there for two years. After that, I departed and wrote some books. I wrote a history of the 1970s called How We Got Here. That was published just before I went into government. I wrote a memoir of my Bush time. I've written about eight books altogether, including I did a lot of work on the need to understand the consequences of the failure of economic expansion to pay off for middle-income people. I wrote a book about that that was published in 2007. And I started a website

on that subject called From Forum that flourished from 2009 to 2012. I think I obviously overdid it because I got sacked by AEI in 2010 for going a little too far. I was kind of disgruntled about that at the time. But in retrospect, I think if you drive through enough red lights, you can't be angry if the state trooper writes you a ticket. And I have arrived at the Atlantic where I'm senior editor. I've been working here since 2014. And I've written a number of articles on all of these various subjects and continue to write on the Atlantic website almost every day. You've done some amazing journalism there. With respect to this current moment, there's one article that has got to be among the most viral in recent history from the Atlantic.

The title is How to Build an Autocracy. So many people have been talking about that. I actually want to ask you about the good case to be made for Trump, if there is one, but let's hold off on that for a second. There's one sort of scene-setting question that I'd like to ask you here, kind of a personal one, what your experience has been taking the stand that you have, because you're among the few really prominent conservatives who came out against Trump early and stayed against him. I put Bill Kristol and David Brooks, and I guess Brett Stevens of the Wall Street Journal in that category as well. I've heard from other conservatives who've taken similar positions

that their experience has just been a nightmare. I'm wondering, have you had a rough go of it at all, or have you just come out of this unscathed? First, I can't complain. Compared to what anybody has to put up with in a genuinely unfree country, it's nothing. Second, I would say, do you remember that saying, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog? I have two dogs, so I have good friends.

But more seriously, actually, I think I've gotten off quite lightly compared to some other people. And that was maybe due to the experience I mentioned in the setup bit, where I've been through this before. I went through this experience in a much more traumatic way between 2009 and 2010. And at that point, I was concerned that the then new Tea Party movement was way too radical, way too hot. And I urged a more restrained form of opposition to President Obama. The article that got me fired from AEI, actually, was one I'd been writing through 2009 and 2010 to those conservatives who imagined that by stopping the health care law, they would destroy the Obama administration. Please remember,

the Democrats have also seen this movie. They know how it ends if they don't hold together. They will hold together. They will pass this law. And so the smart thing to do is to go. It's full of things that you don't like, but it's also got things in it that you should like. So this is a time to do business, to negotiate, because this law will pass. And if it passes over your opposition, you will be spending the next quarter centrally trying to fix things that you could fix for the asking today. On the day the law passed at the end of March, it overcame the last procedural hurdle after which was a clear shot toward the president's signature.

And that was the end of March 2010. I wrote a blog post on my site called Waterloo that said people like Jim DeMint had promised that by breaking this law, they would deliver a Waterloo of defeat to President Obama. This is the Waterloo, indeed, of the radical Republican opposition. This law will never be repealed. I still hold to that prediction. Yes, Republicans will do well in 2010, but legislative majorities come and go. This law is forever. And the radicals led us to disaster. And after that, I went through the experience that many of my anti-Trump conservative friends are having now of true social isolation, true accusations of betrayal, saying, you know, the only reason you say this thing is because of those legendary

Georgetown cocktail parties and anybody that radical critics always presumed people would pay any price to attend. They're not so great. And I went through that experience. In fact, for me now, on a personal level, I find I've been operating this little lemonade stand by the side of the road, and I'm now seeing a lot of people stopping by to buy lemonade. So it's actually been a kind of congenial experience. And I've had this kind of grim amusement, not surprise, of seeing that a lot of the people told me in 2010 that by saying we should try to come up with a market-centered approach to universal health care coverage that I was a sellout without principles, they are now working for Donald Trump or apologizing for him. And a case where there is no principled case for doing this. And that has been a kind of grim amusement to watch that.

Well, what was your experience watching the actual election results come in? I was totally surprised. Totally surprised. I was in Canada. I was on the set of the CBC News. They had a panel covering the election results. And I was on I was in Canada. I was on the set of the CBC News. They had a panel covering the election results. And I have I was stunned. They were not what I'd expected. I'm quite sure, for example, that Trump could not break through in Michigan because the high levels of minority vote in that state. But he did. So I was blindsided. I was up to three o'clock in the morning that night. night um you know it was it was an overpowering thing i was actually um coming out of a tv studio at three in the morning with the streets deserted um in toronto foreign city um and walked back to the hotel i was staying at it was really cold but i walked anyway and you just felt like there had

been this and a chapter in one's life and human history had just turned in a way that I knew then was not going to be good. Nothing good was waiting for us. We're going to get into the dark side in a moment, but to start and to be as generous as possible without being delusional, what is the smartest case you have heard in defense of Trump? If you had to give the most respectable case for having supported him until this point and for continuing to support him even now, what is that case? that the rest of the political process had tended to ignore. The first of those things is the crisis in what is happening in American rural life. You know, Donald Trump uses the phrase inner city a lot when he wants to convey trouble and drugs and crime and despair. But actually, you know, the American center cities are having an amazing revival almost

everywhere, even in some pretty hard pressed places like the Clevelands and the Philadelphians. The center cities are doing fine. Where you see real trouble is in the small towns and rural areas, drug abuse and family breakdown and levels of imprisonment, signs of social dysfunction that you would associate with the beginnings of the crisis in black America in the 1970s. And Donald Trump went to those places and channeled the unhappiness of those people who, you know, a lot of the rest of the political process of, you know, they should just move. They should just move to Brooklyn and serve coffee. He understood them and intuited what they were about. And that is really important.

They have not been heard and they needed to be heard. The drug crisis in America is a rural phenomenon as much or more as an urban phenomenon. He got right that we have had a series of beliefs about trade that grew up in the days when we're building a trade system that included fellow democracies. And then the Pacific Rim countries that maybe they weren't always democratic, but at least they were

small. Places like Taiwan and Singapore, they weren't at the time we brought them into the world trade system, not democratic, but they were not also so big as to make a difference to anybody else. And then we applied all of those ideas to China's arrival into the world economy. implied all of those ideas to China's arrival into the world economy. And it has not worked in the same way. We have had chronic and massive trade imbalances with China. And those have caused real, harsh, ongoing dislocation for a lot of Americans who do, who work in traded sectors.

And while we talk a lot about, well, the winners will compensate the losers and we can retrain people, we don't do anything about that in proportion to the severity of the shock. Donald Trump was talking about something important when he talked about the trade arrangements that worked in the past have stopped working for a lot of Americans since the year 2000. And the third thing I think he's made, he perceived something true and made a real contribution was on the immigration issue. Immigration is described by economists as the only policy that creates no, that has no costs, only benefits. Well, that's not true. It has large costs.

They're invisible to those of us who talk about it because we don't pay them. But the costs of immigration, both economic and cultural, are heavy. They fall on the bottom 30 percent or 40% of American society. And even discussing those costs has been so beyond the pale in the media mainstream and the political mainstream that this issue just was waiting there for somebody to talk to it, and Donald Trump did. Right. There's another case that people tend to make. I grant all of that. I think all of that is interesting, but none of that suggests that Trump himself would be the right person to implement any changes in any of those three areas. One argument I keep encountering from

reasonably smart people or ostensibly smart people. In defense of Trump, the man, really, and all of his erratic unprofessionalism, as was totally on display in his last press conference, people seem to think that there's something about him being a little nuts or seeming a little nuts, which in just a purely game-theoretic way could turn out well for us, both domestically and as a matter of foreign policy. Domestically, we have just this ossified political system with vested interests and bureaucracy and deep state, and he is like a wrecking ball that is just swinging through that

and clearing out the mess that it would take someone like Trump, perhaps someone as unhinged as Trump, someone as narcissistic as Trump, to do that dirty work. And as a matter of foreign policy, it could be advantageous, again, just along game theoretic lines, to have a bull in a china shop, right, who will break the right stuff and who will keep our adversaries on their toes because now they're dealing with a genuinely erratic, not always rational person. And so we could expect our adversaries, like North Korea or Iran or even China and Russia to be somehow more compliant. Does any of that make sense to you?

No, I'm sorry to say. I'm sorry to say. I know it's not your own view. First, when you connect, when you speak about Trump, the man, I'm quite sympathetic. I think I have something to learn from his voters on trade. And I'm quite sympathetic to his message on immigration. And I've been worrying about the problems of rural life and what's happening to the american working class that's been a major theme of my writing since 2000. but this is a little bit like the story of the legendary plotkin diet uh the plotkin diamond is one of the most beautiful

diamonds on earth uh very romantic it's got a long story history the plotkin diamond unfortunately comes attended as famous diamonds often do, by a terrible curse. And the terrible curse is Mr. Plotkin. And that is true here. For Donald Trump, the man, there is no defense.

And all the things, that case you make, I mean, it's sort of ingenious and you can well see that somebody would have made it during the campaign. But Donald Trump,

on the day we speak, has been president for close to a month. And we have seen that it's just not true, actually, that he's not on a domestically. He's not cutting through the bureaucracy. On the contrary, because he is so massively disorganized and incompetent that on something like staffing his government, he is lagging far behind. He is not nominated of the 700 or so Senate confirmed positions, he's nominated only about 90 of those. That has, if you're a Republican-leaning person who wants to get, say, a tax cut through Congress,

that has really ominous potential. Because if people, if the Senate is not confirming people in January and February, that means it will be confirming them in April and May, by which time you should be passing major bills. The Senate's time is a very finite resource. And if the schedule gets clogged later because the president was too disorganized to get his appointments done early, then you're going to discover major parts of your legislative agenda fall apart. Abroad, it's even worse. The president of the United States has the power to end organized human life on this planet. There are almost

zero checks on his power to do that. It is really important that the United States, as a nuclear superpower, as the dominant power on Earth, behave in a way that is predictable. In fact, an unpredictable United States empowers adversaries. It does not deter them. And what is especially ominous here, you listed potential adversaries, North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia. Well, one of those adversaries, Russia, has just graduated from the rank of adversary to something else that is really sinister. And that goes back again to the unpredictability of this government. I don't know what Russia is now.

Is it quasi-ally? Is it a patron? But it's got a power inside the US government that is unjustified and undisclosed and deeply ominous. And that too comes from Trump's erratic nature. So no, I think there is no, for him, I think the verdict is, there's a dispute whether Warren Harding ever actually said these words, but words attributed to him on his deathbed, looking back on his presidency, I'm unfit for this place and never should have come here. That is going to be Donald Trump's epitaph, although he would lack the self-knowledge ever to pronounce that himself. Yeah, well, needless to say, I am deeply sympathetic with that summary of him. I've never seen, even for a moment, a real method to the guy's madness.

People have been interpreting his boastfulness and his speaking style as a kind of stagecraft, as a kind of master-level communication to the masses and a brilliant playing of the media. I have just been seeing the ejaculations of a disordered personality. I've seen someone who's so malignantly selfish and so uninformed, though occasionally he can string a few sentences together. At bottom, he is deeply inarticulate. I mean, he has a kind of confabulatory mind where he will get tripped up by his own word choices and take garden paths through his own mind that he was clearly not intending, right? He was not intending to speak of something, but the word just came out and then he's off and running on that topic. And this goes to questions of policy,

goes to questions of what our country will do next. It's terrifying to behold, but you have people who are enamored of an interpretation of this, which is not only exculpatory, but just praises the man to the skies as a kind of next level genius communicator. Well, the thought that you're in the car with a hopelessly drunk driver at the wheel is so upsetting that you want to believe that the driver must have some secret plan. But I do think there is some method to the madness. I don't think Donald Trump is a strategic visionary. He never has a plan. But what he is very good at in his business career, he makes impulsive decisions that are usually bad decisions. All of his shrewdness and canningness is applied after

the fact. What he's very good at is having made a bad decision, shifting the cost of that decision onto other people, finding people to blame, finding people to cheat. He's very good at that. And he is a master communicator of a particular kind. He is so deeply aggrieved. He is so irresponsible that he's able to speak in ways that strike a chord with other people who feel those same levels of grievances. I am not in any way making a Hitler analogy here. I want to, I'm going to say, I may have occasion to say that more than once. The analogy I often use is that people, one of the reasons to study history is so that you're not always making Hitler analogies and you understand that there are a lot of ways that things can be bad.

You can be on a bad train, but it has many stops before you arrive at Hitler Station. But one of the contemporary observers of Hitler's rise to power, an American journalist named Dorothy Thompson, wrote an essay in the early 1930s about who was susceptible in Germany to Hitler and who was not. And one of the things she noted was that happy people never became Nazis. And I think there is something, but there's something, Donald Trump, he's so full of bitterness and rage. And you look at the people in his inner circle, there's not a person in his inner circle, except for his daughter and son-in-law, and they have to be there. But there's not a person who's come into his inner circle who has a fully functioning personal life. They're all people who are full of rage.

General Flynn enraged at Obama for firing him from the Defense Intelligence Agency for incompetence. Steve Bannon, a man who obviously has tremendous rage and addiction issues, three marriages, three divorces. The others as well. And there are millions of people in America who say, you know what, I am just delighted to see Donald Trump be rude to the snobs. I don't care what he's going to do to me. It'll be worth it. Right. Well, let's take a moment to talk about the Republicans for a second, because obviously,

they are shouldering a lot of the responsibility for what happens now. I'm by no means the first person to make this point, but I think it's very interesting and uncanny to consider what the world would be like if this situation were reversed. I mean, imagine if Clinton had won the presidency without winning the popular vote and with evidence of assistance from Russia, right? The RNC had been hacked and Clinton had delighted in this during the campaign, had even called for more hacking. And then inexplicably, she had only positive things to say about Vladimir Putin, a thug who jails and even kills his political opponents. jails, and even kills his political opponents. Let's say she's vastly wealthy, even more than she is, and yet known to have financial ties to Russia. She's refused to release her tax returns, even though she promised to release them once

her audit was over. But now as president, she's refusing. She's appointed multiple people to her administration who have unusually deep connections to Russia, right? And then we learned that some of these people were in dialogue with Russian intelligence during the campaign and that Russia was attempting to influence the election with a continuous stream of hacked leaks and state propaganda. So you have this just reverse picture with Clinton. Imagine how the Republicans, the party of Reagan, the party that won the Cold War, would have responded to this.

Is it safe to say that we would be in a completely different situation with the Republicans just going berserk? Well, that's clearly right. I have occasion to point out, Alger Hiss just had a lousy job in the Department of Air Force. That seemed like a big deal. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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