#460 — When the Center Cannot Hold

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0:36I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me again. Hey, it's great to be back. 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? 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 and all.

1:08But if you're just talking about like, get Goldberg on to do report from inside the Beltway, what's going on with politics stuff. I think the continued erosion of the 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 So that could make anything I say kind of outdated, but just a potpourri, you know, like just a couple of days ago or yesterday, Kevin Hassett, chief economic advisor of the president, you know, he said, um, 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 the foreigners don't.

1:56Kevin 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. 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.

2:32But the problem is, is that it's like with trust. Once you violate these kinds of norms and these institutional rules, you know, the sort of Hayekian hidden law stuff, you can't recreate it overnight. We have what should have been a headline story all across the country is a number of federal judges have basically, have abolished or rescinded what they call, I think it's the presumption of regularity, which is basically a fancy term for saying that when lawyers for the government come to court,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 - Are they going to lie? Right. They're assuming they're not lying, right?

3:08That's it. That's 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 you're looking for reasons to for things I'm worried about.

3:39I 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 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 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 any wholesale change in staffing is going to be perceived, at least by a large minority on the right, as just yet more purely partisan tribalism.

4:32I 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? 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.

5:09I'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 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. 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.

5:49And that's a vicious cycle. And so did 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? I do think it encourages it. But the way you need to do that. Right. The only way I know how to do that is to get back to the system that you and I kind of grew up under. Right. I remember, you remember, I probably talked about this last time I was here. It's like, you know, when we were going 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.

6:25Same 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 ran to the center. The problem is, is that structurally the threat to incumbency or election 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. 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.

7:01Is this truly a symmetrical problem on both sides? Are the rules the same for Democrats and Republicans such that there's no difference here? 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. Just as a fact now or just actually systemically in any decade? 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.

7:40Instead, 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. 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.

8:12You 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 and 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. The biggest fundraisers in the Democratic and Republican part in the House for a long time were AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

8:46They didn't do any legislating, but they were really good at 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 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 of stuff. 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.

9:26This podcast probably has more viewers than Stephen Colbert on a given night. 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 hammer and tongs at right-wing talk radio, which is wildly disproportionately partisan to the right.

9:57That's what I'm talking about, about trying to find a balance again, 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, 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 voters, the median voter rather than the fringe voter.

10:34What 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 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 sounds fairly quixotic, but one, do you think that would be something that could be run on?

11:17And do you think it could be accomplished if somebody actually had the intention to do it? 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 through the Democratic primaries with that message. So you would have to, in fact, downplay that message to a certain extent to get the nomination in the process of getting the nomination. But once you had the nomination, I actually think that would be a fairly winning message. You know, that was Joe Biden's message. It 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.

11:56I think his first executive order had to do with the trans issue, if I'm not mistaken. Right. So, 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. 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's actually willing to have a real argument with the left wing base of his own party. And I think that sentiment is how is that is how you get towards towards sanity.

12:31And, you know, there's rumors that, like, if Rahm was elected, he would have, like, you know, Chris Christie as his attorney general try to do a unity government kind of thing. I think a lot of people would appreciate, particularly given how I think the Trump presidency going to 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 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. 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?

13:19Yeah. So let's just say without Trump doing legitimately crooked things, right? Sending in National Guard or ICE agents. Let's just assume he sits out of it for the most part. Inconceivable to me, not inconceivable, but really unlikely that Democrats don't take back the House by a significant margin. And I know there aren't that many competitive seats left and all of that for the reasons we sort of alluded to before. But at the same time, you know, the historic average for a midterm election in 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 a second term and it's kind of his second first term.

13:59So but in a first term, it's like 26 seats. 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 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.

14:35The question is how good is depends on your expectations. But 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. 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.

15:09Yeah. So with 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 can 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 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?

15:58They 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? Yeah. So like the end of that sentence is not necessarily support for 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 Anchor Nan movies, right? So there's some of those people. And then there are other people who really don't like him.

16:28But the base. Fewer than there were. They're afraid of the base. 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 as 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 running on their own rather than running on a sort of Trumpy ticket. So some of that might happen. But there are a lot of reasons for the institutional gelding 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.

17:06The job of Congress is to do oversight, right? I mean, in terms of a president, the job of Congress is to protect its prerogatives. 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 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 a lot of oversight.

17:41I want Congress to sort of carve back its prerogatives. Congress is the supreme branch. 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, which is not to say 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.

18:18And 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 could 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 would still be better for the Republic if Democrats at least took back one of the branches. 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 the schism, which I've spoken about on the podcast before.

18:52It 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 take every last one of them. So you have people who want to disavow someone like Nick Fuentes, and 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. 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, the only daylight Vans seemed to want to put between himself and Fuentes was, you know, of the don't talk about my wife variety.

19:34But it's fairly alarming. Again, 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? So I think you described the 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, I don't like the Soviet Union, but I really hate the McCarthyites.

20:06So 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 or neo-Nazis or bigots, whatever we can get down a little. Christian nationalist, white supremacist. I mean, there's a Venn diagram here of different.

20:41There are many rooms in the mansion of bat guano, crazy, bigoted right wingery. 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 they want in the tent. It's like, if you want neo-Nazis in the tent, it is a reasonable conclusion looking from outside the tent. 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.

21:23And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.