#428 — Political Extremism

Sam Harris speaks with Jonah Goldberg about Trump 2.0 and wealth inequality. They discuss the horseshoe theory, illiberalism on the Right and the Left, the fallout of the Trump-Epstein controversy, cracks in Trump's cult following, the difference between MAGA activists and average republican voters, why the Democrats still haven't course-corrected, problems with the "abundance agenda," socialism and economic populism, the pitfalls of the far-left's approach to solving wealth inequality, Israel's standing on the world stage, 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.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me back.

• 0:41Sam Harris?

  Yeah, it's great to see you again. So I'm sure there's a lot to talk about. Let's remind people, first of all, where they can find most of your stuff to read online. And how do you describe what you do and where you are these days?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm the editor in chief of The Dispatch, which Steve Hayes and I launched about six years ago because we wanted to sort of model behavior that wasn't too much on display in American journalism, particularly in right of center journalism. And so we are unapologetically right of center. We have some left of center writers as well, but we are kind of, we pride ourselves on being fact driven and we're sort of violently nonpartisan. So we're perfectly happy to talk about how the Republican Party is a shit show. And so The Dispatch is the best place to find me. I'm an LA Times columnist, have been for almost two decades, and I've got a podcast called The Remnant. So there you go.

• 1:30Sam Harris?

  Nice, nice. Well, let's start with Trump 2.0. How's it going? How is the first, what is this, seven months, almost eight months been in your view? What has surprised you? What is better than you thought, worse than you thought?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a good question. I am, I have to admit, I was wrong about some things. I, like a lot of people, thought that we would see more continuity with the first term. For good and for ill than we have. I had this theory, I may even floated it on here, that the kind of mass deportation he was promising is too big of a lift, logistically and politically, for him to pull off. I don't think he's where, he still hasn't gotten to where he sort of promised to go, but he's gotten closer to it than I thought he would. I have to say, I've been surprised at his remarkably quick success in shutting down the border. I think if he were smart politically, he would talk about that a lot more and stop doing a lot of the other stuff that he does.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  I've been surprised by the really sort of complete feckless confusion of Democrats in all sorts of ways and how to counter him. Yeah. I also, you know, but the thing that I was wrong about was more that I, I thought that in his first term, the condo salesman part of his presidency was much more pronounced insofar as he liked the headline, he liked to promote the headline, he liked to claim total victory. You would tell people he actually built the wall. He claimed that he completely tore up NAFTA, when in reality, he basically just added a couple, you know, new provisions to an updated NAFTA and kept it. But he got to claim that he did something huge, right? And this time around, I've been shocked to the degree to which there's more substance

• 3:14Speaker 01

  for good or for ill to a lot of his stuff. I never thought Doge would work, and it didn't, but it did a lot of damage. There was a lot of performative vandalism to it. Yeah. And I, I guess the thing I'm sort of most shocked by, it's hard, I should have made a list, but I guess the thing I'm most shocked by is the cavalier way a lot of people just sort of price in the corruption. And I don't mean, I don't necessarily just mean like the crypto stuff and the Bitcoin stuff and taking a plane from the Qataris and all of those sort of obvious things. You know, corruption has a more, has a richer, more redolent meaning than the sort of just bribe-taking kind of connotation to it. The corruption of sort of the way the system is supposed to work, the, you know,

• 3:56Speaker 01

  one of the things that's good about hypocrisy that people don't really appreciate is that even lip service to an ideal that you fall short of maintains this idea that the ideal should be an ideal, right? Like Wayne Booth, the literary critic, says that rhetoric is the art of probing what men believe men ought to believe. And so the fact that Trump has been so successful in just dispensing with the pretense of doing the right thing some of the time. And people cut them slack for it. You know, this idea that you're going to fill the government with loyalists where you make them take loyalty tests. And everyone says, well, that's just Trump. That's what people voted for. The idea that you're going to put some of these, some truly unqualified people in power solely because they're loyal?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  That's the kind of thing that, look, loyalty tests are a thing in politics and have been for thousands of years and they're never going away. But the pretense that you're doing things for other reasons is usually cover for it. And here, there's a lot of crap he's doing that, that they're just, they're just owning it. And that's been pretty shocking to me.

• 5:00Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that point about hypocrisy is, is a deep one. I think it was, I think there's this La Roche-Ficole maxim that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue. And it's, and that does have the same, is making the same point that you're only truly capable of hypocrisy if you're to some degree granting the, the importance of certain norms tacitly. So it's by reference to those norms that you can be convicted of hypocrisy. But there's just no pretense of normativity at all with these guys. You know, the one thing, I mean, Trump lies about everything under the sun. He's a massive imposter and has been for, in so many respects, you know, he pretended to be rich when he wasn't rich, et cetera. But he's never pretended to be a good person, right?

• 5:44Sam Harris?

  He's not a hypocrite in that sense. And I think that's some of, some key to his, his charm for at least half of America.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm kind of curious what you think about this because I, I often try to explain this point to people and they look at me the way my basset hound used to look at me when I tried to feed it a grape with just sort of head tilting, total incomprehension. I see Trump in many ways as almost a culmination of post-modernism, right? And we can stay on the hypocrisy thing for just a second. You know, as, as a friend of mine once said, when Hugh Hefner moved out of the Playboy Mansion to raise little kids, no one criticized him for failing to live down to his principles, right? Like the, in a healthy society, the hypocrisy thing about upholding the ideals is important because it still keeps the standard alive.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And the cult of authenticity, which is more from romanticism than post-modernism, but they overlap, says, no, the true, the highest version of, of truth, the highest version of legitimacy comes from within, that you just have to be true to yourself. And that's why I think our culture for the last 50 years has been so obsessed with notions of hypocrisy. But I always used to say, you know, if a glutton says everyone should overeat, that he's being true to himself, but he's giving terrible advice. It's better to say, don't do what I do, right? The essence of good parenting is to say, you know, don't make, you know, is not to sort of teach your kids to make the same mistakes you made, but to say, I learned from some things and we're going to set some standards and do as I say, not

• 7:14Speaker 01

  as I did. And Trump, I think, comes partly from Norman Vincent Peale and the power of positive thinking upbringing that he had, and partly from his just, you know, malignant narcissism. He has this approach to the universe, which is to say that his feelings are determinative of reality. We just saw this last week with the firing of the BLS commen- commissioner. It's critical Trump theory, right? If any external truth or standard undermines his desires, his will to power, his preferences, it must not only be corrupt or rigged, as he would put it, but it must be specifically rigged against him, that it's bigoted against Trump, right? When Barr told him, we looked into these allegations that the election

• 7:59Speaker 01

  was stolen, and there's no evidence to it. Trump's response was, wasn't go look again, or show me the facts. It was, you must hate Trump. Because he doesn't speak the vernacular of, you know, Foucault reading campus radicals or anything like that. And because he, he's so naked in his appetites and his agenda, people don't see it that in many ways, it's a kind of horseshoe theory thing where he is, he's living down to this cult of authenticity thing, and it gets him off the hook. People will say, that's just Trump being Trump, as if an explanation is the same thing as an excuse.

• 8:38Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, there's this phrase that is gaining some currency in, among the commentary at, which is the woke right, you know, or the postmodern right. And the claim seems to be that the right has learned, if not explicitly by osmosis, from the success of wokeness on the far left, that you can essentially take all of your political assertions off the gold standard of reality testing and truth claims and intellectual honesty, and it's just all a matter of just the memetics of what will win. I mean, what narrative can you force into people's brains on social media? Who can you smear successfully?

• 9:19Sam Harris?

  And yeah, then there's just whatever sticks, sticks. And it's just a set of power relations, right? You're just, you're worried about who has power, who's going to benefit from anything being established as true, as opposed to whether or not it is true. And yeah, it does vindicate at least this part of horseshoe theory. I mean, I guess there's antisemitism also vindicates it. If you go far enough left or right, you meet antisemites of a different flavor.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 9:48Sam Harris?

  But the resemblance of the, of the political extremes to one another is in the lack of principles and the conspiracy thinking and the willingness to really break all of the norms that allow for sane, rational compromise. Yeah, it seems to be there and it just is self-evident.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  I used to be a big critic of horseshoe theory, and I'm still willing to defend my old criticisms, but I've had to say, times have changed and I've changed my mind about it. Insofar as, I used to defend the American right and conservatism, and I still defend the conservatism that I believe in on these grounds. It's just that my conservatism isn't very popular these days. But, you know, American conservatism is liberal in the classical liberal sense. It is the, the heart of the American conservative movement in my lifetime was defending, you know, the founding fathers and the, the constitution, free market capitalism, all of these things that stem out of 18th and 19th century classical liberalism. And a big chunk of the American center-left is classically liberal too. I mean, they have

• 10:51Speaker 01

  too much rawls in it for me, but that's a different conversation. And what kind of just dawned on me is like, I never, I always thought that the right would not let go of those commitments. And it turns out that the reason why horseshoe theory works is the second you stop being liberal, right, in the classical liberal sense, you know, individual rights, the sovereignty of facts, the liberal of liberal arts, right? That's the kind of liberal I'm talking about. This idea that rules and rights are sovereign, that the individual is key, that conscience rights are important, that we don't judge people as members of groups, but on their own actions and based on their own arguments and facts and all that.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  The second you abandon that, whether you do it for a culturally loaded left wing-ism or a culturally loaded right wing-ism, the salient point is it's illiberal.

• 11:45Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  And illiberalisms, it's sort of like in particle physics, you know, you got different, they start giving these different things, different tiny little flavors to explain the differences of them. But at the end of the day, like illiberalism is a liberalism. And the differences between them boil down to flavors and aesthetics. And also which constituencies you want to reward, right? Which powers, which groups you want to elevate and which you want to denigrate. But in terms of like, respect for rights and facts and logic and reason and conscience and all of that kind of stuff, the different forms of a liberalism are all remarkably similar.

• 12:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're, they're both tribal, right? You're, you're fighting for your tribe and there's no pretense of the universality of your commitments. You know, so I mean, to be actually ethical, to be saying something is good or something is evil, really you have, it can't just be, it's that way because you are you, part of your group, or you have your skin color. I mean, you have to be making a claim that's generalizable to people regardless of identity. But once you give up that criterion and you just think identity is everything, then yeah, there's no reason to respect expertise. I mean, obviously, you know, expertise is a sham, that's just another power relation. Institutions don't have to be preserved. We don't, you know, as you go far enough left and far enough right now,

• 13:09Sam Harris?

  you meet people who don't seem to think there's much of anything worth preserving in our society, right? So it's definitely not conservative. The further right you go.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  You meet the tear it all, tear it all down brigade, you know, just as surely as you meet them on the left. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the arguments, I think, I apologize if we talked about this last time I was on here, but one of the arguments that drives me crazy is this claim, which you get from a lot of people on what they call the common good constitutionalism. It's one of these post-liberal, right-wing intellectual niches. And the argument that they like to make, which has its, its analogues in the arguments that the Trump administration makes all the time, is that the Constitution, and by extension, the rule of law, but the Constitution is a morally neutral document.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And I find this really grotesque because, first of all, where the Constitution is neutral, that neutrality itself is profoundly moral, right? This idea that you, you know, the reason why justice is blind is that you're not supposed to pick favorites by the color of the skin of people walking to the courtroom, right? But at the same time, you know, the idea that you have the right to confront your accuser, right? That was one of the most hard-won moral victories for humanity, right? The idea that you should be secure in your papers and your properties and you have a right to privacy and all these kinds of things, that is not morally neutral. And it's very easy to see how it's not morally neutral if you feel like it, when it's violated.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  You know, if you, if you start thinking about the Fifth Amendment or the First Amendment, the right to speak your conscience without punishment, right? The right to worship as you please, to associate as you please. We take these things for granted, which is a shame, but taking them for granted is not the same thing as thinking that they're morally neutral. No, no. The, this is what makes Western democracies morally superior to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the right or the left, right? The fact that we recognize these things, but this tribal thing that you get on the post-liberal right says, no, no, no, because they don't reward the things that we like. And they allow for the freedom of people we disagree with.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  That's a suicide pact and we got to get rid of it. And I, I think it's, that's what suicidal is, that kind of thinking.

• 15:34Sam Harris?

  So what do you make of Trump's apparent failure to put the Epstein mess behind him in a way that is as efficient as his dispatch of most of the scandals he's had to deal with?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm, I'm glad we've moved on from the, the philosophical stuff for a little bit. So I think the Epstein thing is kind of fascinating. All right, we'll just do this as political punditry just for a second. Part of what we're seeing here is it dawning on the various hotbeds of MAGA, social media, podcast bros, whoever, right? Steve Bannon. It's dawning on them that Trump's not going to be around forever. And the Epstein story is just too good. Right? It's got, I mean, it is, as my friend David French says, it's something like, he calls it the thinking man's QAnon. Right?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  And it just checks so many boxes and scratches so many erogenous zones. It's got this, this perfidious Jewish guy at the head of it, right? And he's in the shadowy globalist world of banking and all of this kind of thing. And it's got pedophilia and, and sexual depravity, which, you know, is always a big theme of the QAnon crowd. And to let go of it means that you can't use it down the road, say in the Republican primaries or in the post-Trump era. And so part of it, I think, is like, a bunch of people are realizing this topic is just too damn monetizable to let go of. That's part of it.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  There's also the fact that it's just too damn juicy, right? And people like Dan Bongino and Cash Patel, they have invested so much of their identity in these stories that they're presented with, and for listeners, I assume they know, head of the FBI and the number two guy at the FBI, that for them to say, oh, we were just, there was nothing there, puts them in this incredible bind, which I find utterly justified. Delicious because either the only choices are we were lying to you all along or we were full of crap all along. Right? Uh, maybe that it could be one or both of those. I argue, I think they're both, but, but we were, we were gaslighting you all along.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  And, and now we're telling you the truth, or we were telling you the truth before, and now we're lying to stay in power. And that rubs up against this whole sort of anti-deep state, anti-establishment thing. It creates excruciating problems for them. And the fact that Trump has had such a hard time putting it to bed. I mean, it's kind of gone to bed now. It's taking a nap. I don't think it's, it's gone. Shows how fraught creating a mass movement based on a cult of personality is. Because you've got this massive coalition that is only unified basically around one thing. It's Donald Trump. And that's not an ideological coalition. That's not a political coalition. That's not even a coalition of interests properly understood.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  It is purely a grift about a cult of personality. And the fact that you can see that he can't hold it all together on it when it comes to an issue like this is fascinating. Now, as for why he wants it to go away, I'll just be clear. I don't think there's any, I don't think we're ever going to get evidence that he, he was on the blackmail list. I don't think there was a blackmail list. I don't think there's going to be any evidence that he was sleeping with underage girls. And the reason I think that is not because I have a high view of Donald Trump's character. It's because if that stuff existed, there is no way the Biden administration or New York District Attorney's Office,

• 19:20Speaker 01

  or the Justice Department generally, wouldn't have weaponized it. When they were putting Donald Trump on trial for the stupid bank, you know, uh, business records thing. Right. Um, and that kind of stuff, if they had this and opted not to use it, that would be utterly bizarre. The idea that it wouldn't leak is utterly bizarre. At the same time, do I think there's embarrassing stuff in there for Trump? Absolutely. And I think that's probably enough. And he deserves all the grief he gets for it because he's covering up something that he's told his people for years. Any government coverups of something is proof of some conspiracy. And now he's covering up something that he said he was going to release. So it would sort of take a heart of stone not to laugh at all of it.

• 20:02Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. No, my schadenfreude circuits have been humming along for at least a month now. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, the only time I can remember Trump getting sideways with his cult in this sort of way that was briefly surprising, and then he'd never touched that again, I think, was when he, in front of some crowd, it might have been CPAC, I don't know where he was, but he took credit for the vaccines.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:27Sam Harris?

  And he got booed.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:28Sam Harris?

  Right? And that, that was just this first moment, really. I mean, I think not to be repeated until the Epstein mess, where it was just clear that, okay, his cult is all about him, except there are a few things they really do care about. And if he seems to see those things differently, that's a potential problem for him, right? So they really were against the vaccine, more or less to a man at that point. And so for him to take credit for it as though it were a good thing, that was just too much cognitive dissonance. They just, they erupted in boos. And here, it seems like, yeah, they, they know he lies about everything, or they pretend not to know that he lies about everything. But here's a case where he seems to be lying about something they actually care about.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:14Sam Harris?

  And that might have been the first occasion where that was the case.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  So I agree with you entirely on the analog that I think that is the last time. I think it's worth pointing out that this sort of adds another layer of schadenfreud-tastic deliciousness to all of this, which is that Donald Trump's bubble, like when he was, I think you're right, it was CPAC, but if it wasn't CPAC, it was TPUSA or one of those kinds of groups. His primary feedback mechanism are the extremely online ultra-maga types, right? The people who, um, that's his pool of narcissists are those people. And, and they steer him the wrong way all the time. And sometimes to his credit, I gotta say, he doesn't listen to him.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  But like, he imbue, he sees that crap, those kinds of crowds as avatars for the rank and file Republican voter. And the rank and file Republican voter, there's not a lot of polling evidence that they care much about the Epstein stuff, that they're focusing on the Epstein stuff. This is an obsession among the groups that he's obsessed with, rather than sort of the median voter. And, you know, the Democrats are trying to change that and turn it into a bigger thing. And I do not blame them in the slightest as a matter of just raw politics. But Trump would be in better shape if, you know, he stopped caring what Laura Loomer and these other gargoyles thought about stuff because they actually,

• 22:42Speaker 01

  off of social media platforms, they actually don't seem to move the needle very much on, on public opinion. But he cares about them. Don Jr. cares about them. The people in his orbit care about them. And I think some of it is a function, I remember back when he was running for the first time in 2016, people, he would constantly talk about how online polls are very scientific. And the reason he thought they were scientific is that he did well in online polls. And because he invests in the shadows on the Plato's cave, he, he overreads their importance in all sorts of ways. It's why he puts Fox News hosts throughout his administration.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  He lives in this very meta sort of online, on TV universe. And he doesn't actually have good instincts for reading the normies all that well. And that's one of the reasons why this thing has gotten him into trouble. Cause he cares so much about their feedback that he's the one who keeps bringing it up. Is there anyone in that orbit?

• 23:45Sam Harris?

  Who's fundamentally broken with him over this? I mean, I haven't followed this that closely, but people like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, or I mean, they were quite disgruntled in the beginning around how, I mean, I think they deflected a lot of their blame onto Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino. But has anyone just actually broken with Trump and MAGA over this? Like, this is clearly that they've just become the swamp and, you know, the new rulers are as bad as the old rulers?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Not that I can think of off the top of my head. I mean, I remember, I mean, Charlie Kirk said shortly, when this thing first started to blow up, that he would never let go of this story. It's the most important story of the 20th century. And then like 72 hours later, after he got a call from the White House, he's like, yeah, I'm not going to be talking about this anymore. I think I try not to follow Tucker too closely, but I don't think Tucker's let go of it. But I don't think, I don't think the incentives are quite there to say, I'm done with Trump. I mean, there's this dynamic that has been very common. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it a thousand times, right? There's this, it's sort of a cliche in among about Jews and in Tsarist Russia, where they would always say, if only the czar

• 24:54Speaker 01

  knew, right? And there's this desire to say, oh, whenever Trump gets himself into trouble, his advisors should stop telling him this, as if he hasn't made these decisions himself, right? That falsifying Trump gets you in a lot of trouble. Saying that the people around him are in error is usually the safe harbor.

• 25:17Sam Harris?

  What do you think about the state of the Democratic Party at this point? I mean, as you say, they're trying to ride this political controversy to some better spot on the map. But until this moment, until the Epstein story began to cause Trump this amount of anguish, I mean, they seemed completely feckless and I mean it's hard to even know what they were attempting to do. It seemed like they were it was just nothing but apathy and bewilderment that had subsumed the party. I mean, I it's like they were, you know, apart from the the rallies that Bernie Sanders and AOC were holding that got some traction, which seemed to be pulling the party in absolutely the wrong direction for for future political success.

• 26:02Sam Harris?

  It's it was hard to know what anyone was attempting to do to push back against Trump in his second term. How do you view the Democratic Party at this point? And what do you think the prospects are going forward?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  So Ezra Klein had this piece, which I don't think was, I'm not trying to insult Ezra. It was less that it was so insightful than it was so indicative of a mood shortly after the election where he was lamenting the fact that, given how close the presidential election was in 2024, the vibe shift is weakening.

• 26:36Sam 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.