#460 — When the Center Cannot Hold

Sam Harris speaks with Jonah Goldberg about the state of American conservatism and the Trump presidency. They discuss the politicization of federal institutions, the erosion of legal norms, the schism between Never Trump conservatives and the nationalist right, infighting over figures like Nick Fuentes, J. D. Vance's political future, a theory of mind for Tucker Carlson, the prospects for regime change in Iran, 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.

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me again.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hey, it's great to be back.

• 0:40Sam Harris?

  It's great to see you. So I think it's been about six months since you were on the podcast and a few things have happened. I think I looked at it was somewhere around August of last year. I have a list of things that I think we could profitably discuss, but what's most concerning you these days? Where's your head been on our political landscape?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  If we're talking politically, right? I mean, there's all sorts of, you know, the AI thing is interesting in all sorts of ways. We could talk about that all. But if you're just talking about like get Goldberg on to do report from inside the Beltway, what's going on with politics? I think the continued erosion of and politicization of our institutions in distressing ways is probably the main thing I'm concerned about. I mean, we're talking on, you know, February 19th or whatever, like by the time that people listen to this, we could be invading Iran. So that could make anything I say kind of outdated. But just a potpourri, you know, like just a couple of days ago or yesterday, Kevin Hassett,

• 1:41Speaker 01

  chief economic advisor of the president, you know, he said that some staff economist who did a paper verifying what economists have been saying for 30 years, 50 years, 70 years about tariffs, that Americans pay them and that foreigners don't. Kevin Hassett, who I knew personally, and I know he agreed with that when I knew him, now says that those staffers should be penalized for releasing such a finding. And you, or you look at the chicanery that's going on. With Stephen Colbert and the FCC, Trump is running what political scientists sometimes call a personalist regime where the distinction between his personal aims and desires and the demands of state are completely blurred. And I don't think that's going to last forever.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  You know, the guy's, you know, 80 or whatever. And I don't think Vance can pull off that act or anything like that. But the problem is, is that it's like with trust, once you violate these kinds of norms and these institutional rules, what you know, the sort of Hayekian hidden law stuff, you can't recreate it overnight. We have an, what should have been a headline story all across the country is a number of federal judges have basically have, have abolished or rescinded what they call, I think it's the presumption of regularity, which is basically a fancy term for saying that when lawyers for the government come to court, judges are going to assume-

• 3:04Sam Harris?

  Are they gonna lie?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, assuming they're not lying, right? That's it. The gist, that the facts they're presenting are true to the best of their knowledge. And the bunch of judges, including conservative judges, saying, we can't give you that benefit of the doubt anymore because you guys are lying. And I'm a both sides guy. Like, I think these kinds of norm violations invite future norm violations. And so that stuff really worries me. And what Trump does with the midterm elections or tries to do, or imply, could just really mess things up too. So that's, that's sort of where I'm at. If you're like, if you're looking for reasons to, for things I'm worrying about.

• 3:39Sam Harris?

  Well, I want to talk about a few things you mentioned there, the midterms and even a possible invasion or otherwise attack on Iran. But this point you're raising now, just how, the degree which our institutions have been vitiated by Trump loyalists and, and people who we know more or less to a man and woman now, are not disposed to follow the norms that we really have every right to expect our institutions would, would enshrine. This raises the question, which several people have asked of late, which is, in a perfect world, we'll say we get a completely sane president in 2028. How do we reboot the system? Because it seems that, that any-

• 4:20Sam Harris?

  Wholesale change in staffing is going to be perceived, at least by a a large minority on the right, as just yet more, you know, purely partisan tribalism. I mean, just it can be viewed in the most cynical way as exactly analogous to what Trump did when he came into office and staffed it all with his loyalists in the first place. How do we, with the best of intentions, perform a reset back to something like normal that gets perceived for what it is, rather than just this pendulum swing into the antithetical style or antithetical pole of hyper-partisanship?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  It's very hard, right? It is just very, very hard to see how you do that. Look, I'm not, I'm still a sort of, I'm a right of center guy. I've been conservative. I was at National Review for 20 years. I've lost all of my rooting interest in the Republican Party, but I haven't gained a lot of rooting interest in the Democratic Party, except as a way to sort of right the ship of the American political system. And I've come to the conclusion that the only way you can have a sane Republican Party or a sane Democratic Party is if both parties are sane. You can't just have one sane party because in, part of this has to do with, for structural reasons, having to do with primaries, part of it has to do with social media and the balkanizing of the landscape.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  But the simple fact is, is that we live in a climate now where if one party is crazy, it gives permission to the other party to be crazy as well. And that's a vicious cycle. And so

• 5:52Sam Harris?

  Do you think the virtuous cycle is just as strong that they, once you have a, some sanity, come over one party, it's going to drag the other party back to the normal?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  I do think it encourages it, but the way you need to do that, right? The only way I know of how to do that is to get back to the system that you and I kind of grew up under, right? You remember, I've probably talked about this last time I was here, is like, you know, when we were growing up, Republicans ran a little bit to the right in the primaries to get a little bit of the base, right? And then they ran back to the center once they got the nomination and focused on the median voter, the swing voter, the independent, whatever. Same thing with the Democrats, they ran a little bit to the left of the base in the primaries. And then once they got the nomination, They're into the center. The problem is, is that structurally, the threat to incumbency or reelection in our system now is in the primaries. It is not in general elections. Something like 80% of districts and states, if you get the nomination in a very blue state, you're going to win.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And if you get the nomination in a very red state, you're going to win. And so this has created a sociology within both parties where they think they are there to represent the base of their own party, rather than try to be a majority party.

• 7:01Sam Harris?

  Is this truly a symmetrical problem on both sides? Are the rules the same for Democrats and Republicans such that there's no difference here?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Well, I want to be really clear. I think the problems with the Republican Party are much worse for the country than the problems with the Democratic Party.

• 7:14Sam Harris?

  Just as a fact now, or just actually systemically in any decade?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, so to answer the first part of your question, yeah, they're basically symmetrical. The prime, you know, both parties, the two big mistakes we made as a country politically was one, moving to primaries in the first place. I don't want to get, I can get in the weeds on it, but basically we're the only advanced industrialized democracy in the world whose parties have given up the ability to pick their own candidates. Instead, we farm it out to the angriest people on the left and the right, who, you know, if you're running in a very blue district and you say, if you send me to Washington, the first thing I'm going to do is work with anybody, including people across the aisle, to do what is best for my district and my state, you will not win a primary. If you say in Texas, I'm going to go, I don't care what party you are, I want to do what's best for Texas, you will not win.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  If you say, if you send me to Washington, I will tear off the, I will tear the skull off of our enemies and use their heads as a victory goblet, you will get the nomination, right? So the incentive structures internally, which are backed up by Fox News and MS Now and all of that, is to pander to a non-representative voter. And the other mistake we made was having to do with campaign finance stuff, which basically, you know, Bernie Sanders in that crowd thought we were going to have mass participatory democracy with lots of small donors. And it turns out what we had was mass participatory populism with very small donors. Fundraisers in the Democratic and Republican part in the House for a long time were AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

• 8:46Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  They didn't do any legislating, but they were really good at like getting people to give them 10 bucks. Give them 15 bucks a month on their credit cards. That incentive structure has messed things up. And then you add in the narcissistic psychosis of Donald Trump, who, you know, literally thinks he's a war president and the enemy is really the other party. Or the people who don't like him and that messes all sorts up. But so take the Colbert FCC stuff. I think the FCC, I think the equal time rule should have been abolished a long time ago. I kind of thought it kind of had been for all intents and purposes. Stupid law written in 1936, when we basically only had radio and now you're going to apply it to broadcast television when broadcast television is dying. This podcast probably has more viewers than Stephen Colbert on a given night.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  You know, the idea that somehow you're free to say whatever you want, but Colbert can be policed by the state. I think it's all stupid. But if you're going to establish the principle that for partisan purposes, you're going to punish networks that voice criticism of the president. And you don't think that in the next democratic administration, and I think there will be one, there's not going to be enormous pressure, even on a sane democratic president, to go hammering tongues at right wing talk radio, which is wildly disproportionately partisan to the right. That's what I'm talking about, about trying to find a balance again, about, you know, rather than this tit for tat culture. But as long as both parties think they are only answerable to their most committed base. And the most committed base really doesn't like their own party. They just hate the other party more.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  It's very difficult to figure out how you have a president approach politics as if they're president of the entire country. And the structural reforms I'm thinking of would require getting our system back to the place where we have competitive elections in a lot of places. And the deciding voters are the swing voters, independent, the median voter, rather than the fringe voter.

• 10:34Sam Harris?

  What do you think about the prospect of a democratic presidential candidate running on the platform? That the first thing he or she would do in office is reset and diminish the powers of the executive. I mean, seemingly work against his or her. Her own interest, not to fall into this tit for tat pattern of now using all the full scope of the Trumpian powers of the presidency to do the antithetical thing, but to actually recognize how the shape of the executive branch has been distorted and to figure out how to pull it back and minimize this overreach. I mean, one of this could be, as these words come out of my mouth, it's it may, it sounds fairly quixotic, but one, do you think that would be something that could be run on?

• 11:17Sam Harris?

  And do you think it could be accomplished if somebody actually had the intention to do it?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So I have a sort of a disheartening answer and an upbeat answer. The disheartening answer is, I think it's very hard to get to the Democratic primaries with that message. So you would have to, in fact, downplay that message to a certain extent to get the not in the process of getting the nomination. But once you had the nomination, I actually think you could, that would be a fairly winning message. You know, that's, that was Joe Biden's message was a return to normalcy after the Trump years. And the problem is he didn't deliver on it because he made a deal with the hardcore base of his party and didn't try to govern as a majority party president.

• 11:56Sam Harris?

  I think his first executive order had to do with the trans issue, if I'm not mistaken.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Right. So. And, and the first legislation, I think, that came out of the House, Democratic controlled House, was to nationalize elections, which everybody's freaking out about right now, right? And so, look, I think I've talked to Rahm Emanuel about all this stuff. I'm not a massive Rahm Emanuel fan. I have my disagreements with the guy. But the thing I like about Rahm Emanuel is that he is actually willing to have a real argument with the left wing base of his own party. And I think that sentiment is how, is the, is how you get towards, towards sanity. And, you know, there's, there's rumors that like if Rahm got the, was elected, he would have like, you know, Chris Christie as his attorney general, try to do a unity government kind of thing.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people would, would appreciate, particularly given how I think the Trump presidency gonna end, not just a return to normalcy, but a return to decency kind of thing. And that was a winning message for George W. Bush at the end of the Clinton era. And I have to imagine it'll be, it could be an even more winning. Message at the end of the Trump era, but it takes the right kind of Democrat to carry it.

• 13:05Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So what are your expectations around the midterms, both with respect to, I guess, a result, if a clear result is achieved, but the chicanery that many people are worried about coming from the Trump administration?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's just say, without Trump, like, doing legitimately crooked things, right? Sending in National Guard or ICE agents and let's just assume he sits out of it for the most part. Inconceivable to, not inconceivable, but really unlikely that Democrats don't take back the House by a significant margin. I know there aren't that many competitive seats left and all of that for the reasons that we sort of alluded to before, but at the same time, you know, the historic average for midterm election and a presidency, you know, is something like 26 seats, give or take. I mean, it's a little sui generis because Trump, this is kind of his second term and it's kind of his second first term. So, but in a first term, it's like 26 seats.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  And it's not entirely clear that the Republicans are going to hold on to the House majority by Election Day. All you need is one dude to slip on a bar of soap or eat some bad clams and the Democrats are going to be a majority. They're down to a one-seat majority in the, in the House. The bigger question is the Senate. That is still a heavy lift, but if you actually have a real wave, which there are reasons to think that there is going to be a Democratic wave, it does put it in play. Republicans are definitely worried about putting the Senate in play. And so I think it's going to be a good Democratic night. The question is, how good is, depends on your expectations, but I, it's just very hard for me to imagine that Democrats don't take back the House and at least tighten the margin in the Senate.

• 14:45Sam Harris?

  If they got all of Congress, what would that spell for the rest of Trump's term? I mean, is that just synonymous with impeachment proceedings and endless investigations? And just proper gridlock? I mean, I know most of what he's done, in any case, hasn't even involved Congress, so perhaps he could just keep forging ahead, but you would imagine Congress would no longer be sitting on its hands, watching him do that.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. The absolute concession that Democrats could screw this up. The simple fact is that it is an outrage that Congress no longer does its job. That Congress is run along partisan lines rather than along institutional lines. And I do chapter and verse of how we got here, but the simple fact is the GOP controlled Congress, at least in its orientation, I'm not talking about their eternal souls, is just shot through with what social scientists call cowards. It's embarrassing, it's terrible. And so.

• 15:41Sam Harris?

  And is the full explanation of that cowardice simply that the Republican Party has turned into a proper cult of personality such that the Republicans in Congress can't afford to take their responsibilities to provide any kind of checks and balances seriously? They don't, they don't care about the independence of their institution anymore because each of them perceives their political future to be totally dependent on whether Trump endorses them or not?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like the end of that sentence is not necessarily support for the cult, the beginning of it. And so far as for some people, it's definitely a cult of personality. It's that they love his musk, they think he's a genius, they think he's like a world historical figure. They look at him the way Champ Kind looks at Ron Burgundy in the Anchornet movies, right? So there's some of those people, and then there are other people who really don't like him.

• 16:28Sam Harris?

  But the base.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Fewer than there were.

• 16:30Sam Harris?

  They're afraid of the base.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  But they're afraid of his base, right? Trump's superpower is still that he can kill you in the primaries. And so one thing to look for is we approach a lot of these primary deadlines in the next weeks or month is how many Republicans, once they have avoided a primary challenge, start heading for the hills and, and running on their own rather than running on a sort of Trumpy ticket. So some of that might happen. But I mean, there are a lot of reasons for the institutional gelding of, of Congress. My only reason for getting into all that, and I'm happy to get into it more, is that it will be in the partisan interest of Democrats to actually do the job more. The job of Congress is to do oversight, right? I mean, in terms of a president, the job of Congress is to protect its prerogatives.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Now, I would like it if they were doing it for more institutional or constitutional reasons than partisan reasons, but I'll take the partisan. And, and so I think you're. Going to see a lot of replays of like that Pam Bondi hearing. Where everyone go, you know, cabinet secretaries go and they perform for Trump or they perform for Trump's base. Rather than actually showing respect and deference and providing information. I'm fine, you know, that's better than nothing. I want, I want a lot of oversight. I want Congress to sort of carve back its prerogatives. Congress is the supreme branch. The, the whole concept of co-equal branches is Nixonian propaganda. Not sustained by any of the founding fathers, but I also think it's very possible Democrats wildly overreach with impeachment stuff.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Which is not to say, I, I think he's done a half dozen things that are legitimately impeachable or worthy of impeachment. But if you don't have your ducks in a row, if you seem like you're just doing it to get on cable news or, you know, small donations and not doing it seriously and doing the proper legwork on investigations. It could backfire on Democrats and I could also see Trump using all of that stuff as a pretext to just simply truly defy Congress in ways that we've never seen a president do before. And you could see, you can see a much worse erosion of things. I just, I just don't know how it would play out, but like, it would be, I think it'd still be better for the republic if Democrats at least took back one of the branches.

• 18:38Sam Harris?

  So what do you make of all the infighting we've seen of late on the right? I think the epicenter of it was the Turning Point America Fest conference where you had, I mean, this gives them, which I've spoken about on the podcast before, it seems to be between Republicans who think Nazis are probably still bad, all things considered. And those who think that, no, we actually kind of need the Nazis. We'll, we'll take every last one of them. So you have people who want to disavow someone like Nick Fuentes and they, obviously Ben Shapiro is prominent on that list. But he's disconcertingly alone or nearly alone or surrounded only by other Jews in the Republican Party.

• 19:19Sam Harris?

  And then you have some very prominent people like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and even, you know, J D Vance to some considerable degree. I mean, J D, the only daylight Vance seemed to want to put between. Himself in Fuentes was, you know, of the don't talk about my wife variety. But it's fairly alarming. I get it. You're much closer to these characters than I am. I don't know any of these people personally, really, except for Ben a little. What do you make of this schism? And how do you think it's going to resolve itself?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So I think you described this schism pretty well. The way I've been saying it is, you know, like, you know how like, there's this safe harbor for conservatives where they're, they're not pro-Trump, they're just anti-anti-Trump, which is a throwback to being anti-anti-communist. It's like, a lot of liberals were like, eh, I don't like the Soviet Union, but I really hate the McCarthyites. So like, I don't like the anti-communist people. There are a lot of people on the right who have fallen back into being anti-anti-Trump because they don't like the resistance types. I see Vance as basically the titular leader of the anti-anti-Nazi crowd. It's not so much that he's a Nazi. I don't think he is. He just thinks part of his political interest is covered by defending people who are either Nazis or Nazi-adjacent, or want to have a big tent that allows Nazis in it.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Or neo-Nazis or bigots, whatever, we could get down on the list.

• 20:36Sam Harris?

  Christian nationalists, white supremacists, I mean, there's a different, there's a Venn diagram here of different.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. There are many rooms in the mansion of bat guano crazy bigoted right-winger-y. And I get a little tired of people who want to have a big tent that allows all of them in the movement, but then take offense when I associate them with one of the other people in that they want in the tent. It's like, if you, if you want neo-Nazis in the tent, it is a reasonable conclusion looking from outside.

• 21:08Sam Harris?

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