#444 — America's Zombie Democracy

Sam Harris speaks with George Packer about American democracy and authoritarianism. They discuss Packer's article "America's Zombie Democracy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/america-authoritarian-regime-ai-suicide/684350/," the erosion of democratic institutions, the Justice Department's independence, Congressional dysfunction, the weaponization of the military, Trump's unprecedented corruption, the public's failure to recognize democratic collapse, shamelessness as political superpower, the role of hypocrisy, potential threats to the 2026 midterm elections, hyperpartisanship and the loss of shared reality, the mainstreaming of white nationalism on the right, the damage done by wokeness and identity politics on the left, the Epstein files as a potential breaking point for MAGA, the post-Trump Republican landscape, wealth inequality and economic pain as catalysts for change, the role of status in American politics, social media's toxic effects on discourse, 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 http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  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. 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.

• 0:35Sam Harris?

  I'm here with George Packer. George, thanks for joining me.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Sam.

• 0:40Sam Harris?

  Great to see you. I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm an avid reader of everything you write in The Atlantic. I'm also now a reader of your latest novel, which is titled The Emergency, which I haven't yet finished. I actually wasn't planning to talk about it, but I can just say that it's extraordinarily good and alarming. You've done something very Orwellian, and it's just a very unnerving fable you have written here that I'm deep into, and it really grabbed me from the first page. So I just, I encourage people to read it, whether we talk about it or not. You're a very talented writer, both in fiction and nonfiction, so congratulations.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam.

• 1:19Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, it's actually beautifully published. FSG still produces a nice book. I love the cover.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  And even the texture of it, yeah, it's special.

• 1:27Sam Harris?

  Yeah, it's got a very good hand feel, which in these dark digital times, I have, I take more and more pleasure in now. There was a time where I was reading at least half of what I was reading on Kindle and/or an iPad, but that's behind me now. I still listen to audio, but now I really love to get back to physical books and hardcovers especially.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'm with you on that. When I, when I find myself reading too much on the screen, on my phone, I just feel alienated from the words and the world. And when I reach on my shelf for a physical book, there's something solid and reassuring about it, and we must never let them disappear from the world.

• 2:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know if you have, if you're so- Wayward that you've had this experience, but I find that with audio or digital books, because you really never see the cover again, it's possible for me to to read a book and even enjoy it and to forget the author's name, right? Because I'm literally never confronted by it again for the whole experience of of interacting with the book. That, you know, as a as a writer of books, that makes me fairly nauseous.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  It's unnerving. Yeah. Someone wrote it in that the book is the expression of their individuality, their humanity. So we got to keep their name in mind if it's a decent book. Yeah.

• 2:49Sam Harris?

  Okay. Well, so I want to I mostly want to focus on the article you wrote that was titled America's Zombie Democracy, which came out, I guess, the end of September, wherein you you really just come right out and say that you think we're living in an authoritarian state. And I mean, you argue that the the our expectations about what it would mean to slide into authoritarianism are are kind of faulty based on some 20th century examples. And then in the 21st century, the erosion of democratic norms has a has a different character than, you know, goose stepping troops in the in the streets, or, you know, people getting, you know, put up against the wall and shot, etc. So I guess to start,

• 3:31Sam Harris?

  what in your view are the clearest indicators that we have slid into something like authoritarianism in the US at this point?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Well, one of them came the day the piece was published or the day after, which was the Justice Department filing charges against James Comey and filing them in the most nakedly political way possible after a series of prosecutors had had refused and a grand jury had originally refused to as well. And finally, President Trump found the prosecutor who would do his bidding. And she, in a kind of shambolic way, assembled a case very quickly and got a grand jury to go along with it. And since then, other enemies of the president, political enemies, have also been indicted. And that The rule of law is such a powerful tool and the pressure of the state weighing down on

• 4:25Speaker 01

  an individual is so crushing that it almost doesn't matter. Of course, it matters, but they will suffer irrevocably whether or not they're convicted because of the amount of time and money and energy and just sheer anxiety and stress that is involved in having the federal government coming after you. So if the president can do that, can use the Justice Department as his personal police force, prosecution force to go after people he regards as his political enemies, that's a huge check against unaccountable power that's been taken down. And there are a whole bunch of others, but that one was so glaring that when it happened right away after the article came out, it was as if the White House was saying, we don't care. Yeah, this is what we're doing. Make us stop.

• 5:09Sam Harris?

  Of course, the MAGA retort to that would be no figure has been more victimized by purely political prosecution than President Trump himself. And that happened under Joe Biden's watch. So by the, you know, the same measure, they would say, okay, well then authoritarianism arrived during the Biden administration.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Right. And that would make some, a little bit of sense when it came to the one conviction that for 34 felonies that befell Trump under the Manhattan DA, that was the weakest case against him. And it was the only one that was successful. The others never happened. They fell apart along the way for mainly political reasons. And if you think about how long it took Merrick Garland to name a special prosecutor who then had to begin assembling a case on about January 6th, which was a pretty strong case against the president, the former president. And the fact that it never came to fruition before Trump was reelected, that tells you the

• 6:12Speaker 01

  rule of law and procedures and norms were in place, or else they would have nailed him long before he was reelected. They would have made sure that Trump was in at least convicted, if not in prison for attempting to overturn a democratic election before he became president again. Now it's all history. Because he's back in power. So I would say there's always some gray area where you can point and say you did it first, but look at the details of that gray area and you see it's not Biden ordering it to be done. It's not Biden going through a series of prosecutors until he can find one who will do it. It's not a complete rookie prosecutor filing the charges. So it falls apart upon its on close inspection, I think.

• 6:55Sam Harris?

  So in the title of your piece, you have this phrase, you know, zombie democracy, which is referring to the institutions that are persisting in some kind of zombie afterlife. Which institutions are you most worried about at this point? And which are the the most crucial in their failure to check Trump and MAGA's authoritarianism?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Let's name two or three. The rule of law, the Justice Department, the justice system is the first. After Watergate, presidents, without having it written down as a law, respected, at least to varying degrees, the independence of the Justice Department, the the need to insulate the credible power prosecution from the White House, from politics. That has completely disintegrated. There is no distinction any longer between what Trump wants and what his attorney general is willing to do. Second, Congress. Congress has stopped functioning as Congress, and that happened before the shutdown ever came along. They no

• 8:01Speaker 01

  longer assert their right to tax and spend. Trump can tax with tariffs. Trump can spend or not spend if it's been appropriated and he decides he doesn't like it. Trump can eliminate programs that Congress legislated, beginning with USAID. So because of the nature of our partisan's politics, and this has been happening for a long time. Again, you could say the Democratic Party became more and more tool of Democratic presidents and the Democratic Congress was more willing to cede Article One power to the president.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  If it was a Democratic president. Yes, we've been watching presidents gain more and more power over the last decades. But again, this is a complete qualitative break as the Republican Congress simply cedes its constitutional authorities to the White House without a peep, without a peep. We're finally seeing a little bit of a break, a little daylight over the Epstein files. Seems to be the very first matter in which Republicans in Congress are not lining up in a single file behind Trump. And the third would be the Defense Department, now called the War Department, not legally, which Trump makes no hesitation, no secret of using as a partisan tool,

• 9:25Speaker 01

  or at least trying to, having his, you know, Pete Hegseth firing senior military leaders on the basis of political dislike, or even racial or gender dislike. Trump gives speeches to troops that are nakedly partisan, in which he insults Biden. He talks about using the military to go into the cities, the blue cities, as a training ground. This is maybe the most dangerous one, and I think the military is probably the, still the most inherently independent institution in the government, more than Congress, certainly more than apparently the Justice Department, because there is such a deep code of non-partisanship, of independence, of not being political.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And because it's so dangerous if the military does become a tool, a political tool of the president. But Trump would love for it to be that, and he's behaving as if he sees it that way.

• 10:21Sam Harris?

  Yeah, on the list of qualitative differences, the one that shocks me the most, or the absence of widespread shock in response to it shocks me the most, which is this, the level of corruption that is so obvious with Trump and his enablers. I mean, I still remember a time when Hillary Clinton was castigated for her speaking fees when she was out of office, right? People just thought it was just totally unseemly that a Former Secretary of State would dine out on her time in office to the tune of $200,000 or so to speak to hedge funds and, you know, Wall Street firms and other deep-pocketed

• 11:03Sam Harris?

  hosts. And yet now we have Trump and his family literally raking in billions of dollars and creating mechanisms by which foreign agents and criminals can pay them directly, you know, in a meme coin and even holding dinner for the people who have done that most lavishly to reward them with attention and even using US trade policy and even foreign policy to extort tribute from other countries. And yet somehow this isn't perceived to be the five alarm fire that it is. I mean, somebody's worried about it. I'm worried about it. I know you're worried about it, but I, and I think it's doing obvious damage to our reputation as a country. But just stepping back from the autopsy we've begun

• 11:48Sam Harris?

  to perform here, I mean, how do you account for the fact that at least half of American society doesn't think that anything truly out of the ordinary is happening? How do you account for that perception? And I mean, leaving, leaving aside the people who simply don't follow the news or don't follow politics at all, or people who are, you know, so red pilled or so deep in the MAGA cult that they just, you know, that up is down and down is up and they simply don't care about the kinds of things we would list here as being crucial to the survival of our democracy. But like, you know, I know ordinary people who read

• 12:28Sam Harris?

  the Wall Street Journal and who are not MAGA, who don't share our concern about the fate of American democracy. Yeah. I would imagine you know a few of those people yourself, too. How do you explain that state of mind?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  That's a profound question that I've been asking myself all year and sort of waiting for the worm to turn and for suddenly there to be a kind of collective shock and awakening. And it doesn't happen. Perhaps it's because they wake up in the morning, the Wall Street Journal is still there. It's not been censored by the government. No one is knocking down their door in order to bring them in and question them about their political loyalties. They can take the commuter train or drive to work and listen to whatever they want, hundreds and hundreds of radio stations, podcasts, books, and then they get to work

• 13:22Speaker 01

  and people are doing the same thing they've always done. There's this sort of eerie normality to life, which I wrote about a bit in that piece. My life is also, even though I'm a journalist, and this is what consumes me, when I look at the world around me, I just see the same world. You have to leap a bit into your imagination or into your ability to understand what's happening, maybe more abstractly. The Qatari jet made it very concrete, but meme coins and deals with UAE over AI chips that lead to all kinds of

• 14:00Speaker 01

  money flowing into the Trump family bank. These are pretty large abstract scandals. There is no.

• 14:09Sam Harris?

  And yet, some of these same people would have reacted to the Hillary Clinton speaking fees or the Obamas getting a very rich Netflix deal, or, I mean, they were, their sense of indiscretion was finely calibrated enough to react to those sorts of venial sins.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:32Sam Harris?

  And yet, when you have this black hole of corruption appear in the middle of our politics, sucking everything into it, they seem either not to care, or they just think that basically everything is on par with everything else. There's no sense of magnitude. There's no scale that they're holding up to judge how colossal these changes are. It's analogous to saying, well, if you refer to Trump's, you know, 30,000 and counting documented lies, the response is, well, all politicians lie, right?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:07Sam Harris?

  As though Trump were not lying on a scale we have never seen before.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Right. And your first example about Trump being prosecuted during the Biden years is that's a grayer area, but it's another example of, well, who started it? There's always a way to say they do it too, or they did it first and to sort of intellectually disarm and not bother with, let's look at this and really weigh it against what's happened before. There's always been political corruption. There's never been corruption like this. And in a way, I don't know, Sam, maybe that it's the latency of it, the openness is a bit of a shield for Trump. It's as if, well, of course he's corrupt. He's Trump and he's not making any bones about it. He's doing it in daylight. He's not trying to hide anything.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  So that makes it seem perhaps for some people as if it's more acceptable than hypocrisy, which, which has a smell that people don't like.

• 16:05Sam Harris?

  I think you've put the, put your finger on, on at least one variable here, which is that hypocrisy is the thing that people find most infuriating. And because Trump doesn't acknowledge the existence of any of these norms, the one thing you can't convict him of is hypocrisy. He really is not a hypocrite. He's just corrupt. He won't even acknowledge that corruption is a thing, right? Or self-dealing is a thing. It's, it's, of course I'm self-dealing. This is, you know, I would be stupid not to be self-dealing.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Right. And we all hate hypocrisy and it, it seems slimy and, you know, something sneaky about it. But when you're then confronted with blatant immorality and corruption, the virtue of hypocrisy begins to become clear. It is actually a sign that there are certain standards that have to be at least pretended to be kept. And if you don't, there's some shame involved, whereas there's no shame. And shamelessness with Trump is a great superpower. I'm beginning to think shamelessness might be the superpower of the most powerful and successful people in the world today. They all seem capable of doing anything, coming

• 17:17Speaker 01

  back from any embarrassment or scandal without being crippled by it. You could say, you know, Elon Musk can be revealed to have cheated on every woman he's ever been with and had children across the landscape, et cetera. And it still doesn't matter because he's shameless and Trump is shameless. And so what is there more to say? Yeah, you're corrupt. I don't, I don't deny it.

• 17:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. It is a kind of superpower to feel that you never have to look back at the harms you cause, much less apologize for them. And I've noticed this whenever I've witnessed the aftermath of a public apology, how it so often leads to a kind of redoubling of the outrage over the thing apologized for. It rarely translates into just kind of relief. And I don't, I don't find this with personal apologies, but I just noticed that when challenged with the having to manage their reputation in public, when public figures apologize for something, it almost invokes more outrage. So you, they become a kind

• 18:25Sam Harris?

  of wounded prey animal, and the public just wants to see more blood at that point.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  That is the nature, I think, of social media for sure, and of media generally. If you apologize, if the baying hounds finally force you into some public confession, it's going to look more like a cultural revolution confession, where that just becomes the trigger for them to then descend on you and tear you to pieces, rather than a ceremony of confession, atonement, redemption, forgiveness, which is what we would have in a, in a more humane world. It just, in politics and in public life, it's a confession of weakness.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And it seems as if the only real sin is weakness and shame and self-reproach. And so many politicians who apologized didn't live to, to fight again. And the politicians who pretended it never happened or just ignored it, just hung on. We didn't like them, but they, they kept their power.

• 19:29Sam Harris?

  Yeah, just, you just recall to mind Al Franken's exit from political life. What a quaint time that was.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  He actually tried to say, I did something wrong, and I'm sorry. I want to apologize to each of them individually. What a, what a fool. Why, why not just say, uh, yeah, so what? Make me resign.

• 19:51Sam Harris?

  Okay, so, looking forward, what bright lines do you see that if crossed, they would, those indiscretions would suffice to wake people up? Or would just be whether the sleeping herd woke up, they would be especially worrying, from your point of view, that we had crossed further into, you know, beyond the range of any democratic norms and physics?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I'm looking at next year's election and trying to think through all the ways in which...

• 20:24Sam Harris?

  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 Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.