Making Sense - Sam Harris - #439 — How to Lose a Democracy

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing

00:00:11.980 this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part

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00:00:26.400 made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing

00:00:30.400 here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Damon Linker. Damon, thanks for joining me.

00:00:39.840 Thanks for having me, Sam. It's great to be here.

00:00:42.220 So many people will be familiar with your writing, but remind people of what you've been up to

00:00:48.940 these many years as a writer and a political commentator and where they can find your stuff

00:00:54.080 currently. Well, like it seems like everyone these days, I have a sub stack titled Notes from

00:01:00.660 the Middle Ground. And then I also teach political science at the University of Pennsylvania as a

00:01:08.120 senior lecturer there. And I mainly teach courses in political theory and the political right.

00:01:15.840 Well, we're going to get into the political right and the theory or lack of theory that may apply to

00:01:21.520 the current moment. And how would you describe your politics at this point?

00:01:26.740 You know, for the last decade or so, I've described myself as being a liberal on the center left.

00:01:33.920 I used to be a conservative about 20 to 25 years ago. I was an editor at First Things magazine,

00:01:42.040 which Andrew Sullivan once called the intellectual nerve center of the religious right. And so I spent some

00:01:48.500 time in the midst of that during the Bush administration and became frustrated with

00:01:53.660 some of the Bush policies, the Iraq war, opposition to same-sex marriage. And so broke from that,

00:02:00.720 wrote a book about it called The Theocons. And since then, I've been on the broad center left with the

00:02:07.360 emphasis mainly on center. I'm really not that far to the left, but I do incline that way,

00:02:12.920 mostly out of aversion to what the right has become. Although that's kind of amusing because

00:02:18.580 that break, as I just said, was initiated under Bush. And now I look back at the Bush administration

00:02:24.820 and it seems like the good old days. Oh, yeah. Yeah. As do I. I don't think we've ever crossed

00:02:31.620 paths, but I seem to remember you having some critical things to say about the new atheists.

00:02:35.480 I don't know if those same criticisms still apply and perhaps we'll get to some areas of

00:02:40.400 disagreement. But when I look at your writing now, certainly on the topic of politics,

00:02:44.800 you know, you and I are more or less in lockstep in how we view the current moment.

00:02:49.340 That sounds about right. I would expect that. Everything I've heard of you and your podcast

00:02:54.420 and other media appearances, I think were pretty simpatico. Yeah. I mean, I was critical of some of

00:03:03.140 the new atheist writings at the time. That whole wave seems to have kind of dissipated and moved on

00:03:10.380 we're talking about other things now. So it almost feels like ancient history. My second book called

00:03:17.840 The Religious Test does have an essay in it that's critical of the new atheists. And you are in there

00:03:24.200 along with your colleagues, the late Christopher Hitchens and, you know, the others, the four horsemen

00:03:32.100 of the apocalypse or... Well, maybe we'll get there. You know, both of us talk about our worries at this

00:03:40.680 point, perhaps ad nauseum. I wouldn't like it ever to be accurately said of me that I'm an alarmist

00:03:47.560 around the changes that seem to be happening in our democracy. And I wouldn't want it said of you

00:03:53.260 either in this context. So I would like us to, as a posture, to be as circumspect and sober as we can

00:04:02.620 be. But I also don't want us to shy away from honestly analyzing what we think is happening here.

00:04:10.420 So with that as a, you know, my effort to lead the witness, what can you say about the current state of

00:04:16.560 American democracy from your point of view? Well, it's, I certainly agree with the way you've,

00:04:22.720 you framed that. That's sort of my brand at my substack is to be sober and clear-eyed, honest

00:04:32.520 about how things are going. And also not to, I don't really believe in pep talks, in trying to

00:04:41.780 portray things as better than they are in order to buck up my own side. I think it's much better

00:04:47.680 for liberals to stare resolutely at those who wish to do us harm and assess what it is they hate about

00:04:58.340 us and what they want to do to us and in place of us if they firmly depose us. And only in doing that

00:05:08.360 can we formulate a kind of coherent and reasonable response? The way it looks to me now, I have gone

00:05:16.520 back and forth over the last, say, half decade to full decade, basically since Trump first, you know,

00:05:24.680 descended the escalator and began his first campaign. I've gone back and forth between fearing what a lot

00:05:31.260 of people on the center-left fear, which is a kind of dictatorship under this man who appears to have

00:05:38.360 what I call a tyrannical soul, if you will. Someone who longs to be a strong man and vanquishes enemies

00:05:48.300 and punish those who do him any wrong, which he defines very broadly. So sometimes I worry about that,

00:05:57.140 but at other times I worry about an alternative bad case scenario that intertwines with it in a kind

00:06:04.480 of ominous way, and that is the United States spiraling into civil unrest. I'm hesitant to use

00:06:12.220 the word civil war or the phrase civil war, which we hear so much of these days unless we define

00:06:18.140 precisely what we mean. I do not anticipate a new Antietam and Gettysburg and armies lining up against

00:06:26.760 each other on battlefields and firing guns at each other, but other examples throughout history like

00:06:33.660 the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the years of lead in Italy, a kind of spiraling of tit-for-tat violence

00:06:42.080 by radicals on both the far left and the far right, which, if left to their own devices, could devolve

00:06:50.480 into a kind of ongoing chaos in which the economy can't really function well and day-to-day violence

00:07:01.400 in our lives with bombings and shootings becoming so great that kind of public spaces become kind of

00:07:09.020 emptied out as people try to just stay in their homes to avoid that violence. That's bad enough,

00:07:16.540 but the way in which these two options intersect with each other is, I think, what alarms me most

00:07:23.540 about the present moment, with the present being defined as the fall of 2025, because it does evolve

00:07:30.340 over time, is the way that Trump and his most malign allies in the administration, foremost among them

00:07:40.020 being Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the President,

00:07:47.080 that they seem very eager to be given a pretext to clamp down on political dissent in a more radical way,

00:07:58.120 and they are using any sign of violence by anyone who can be described as on the left as that pretext.

00:08:09.180 And, of course, the Charlie Kirk assassination was the biggest of these opportunities for them.

00:08:17.220 They haven't thankfully moved, say, to invoke the Insurrection Act, which we can maybe talk a little

00:08:23.160 bit more about later in response to that assassination, but you now have Trump in the last couple of days

00:08:30.120 actually invoking that act in his own name as something he's contemplating. He and Miller desperately

00:08:38.380 want Portland to be burning to the ground so that they can use that as a pretext. They want Chicago

00:08:47.060 to spiral with attacks on ICE officers by people on the street, which then the military can be sent in

00:08:57.900 to defend the ICE officers, and then, you know, the administration would then hope that the left

00:09:04.620 attacks the soldiers and that this would, you know, intensify support for, again, a more militaristic

00:09:13.760 power grab. It's really scary stuff. And so what do I fear most is exactly what I've just been

00:09:19.460 describing, the both of them interacting with each other. Okay, so I want you to prop up that dystopian

00:09:26.880 vision as fully as you can. I want you to walk me through what would happen between now and then to

00:09:32.720 make those increments seem plausible. But what would you say to someone who thinks that the last few

00:09:39.360 minutes of your utterances was just a lurch into the very alarmism I disavowed, right? I mean, what

00:09:48.100 would you say to someone right of center who thinks that nothing really out of the ordinary is happening

00:09:55.200 except for the fact that we finally have an administration who is willing to take the crime

00:10:00.620 problem in these democratically mismanaged cities seriously, right? So all Trump wants to do

00:10:06.820 is, first of all, he's implementing the very immigration policy that he ran on. And in truth,

00:10:12.380 he, I don't know where the numbers stand now, but last I heard, he hadn't deported many more or even

00:10:18.140 as many people as Obama had in his, one of his terms. You can correct me if I'm wrong there. But I

00:10:24.020 mean, it's like the number of deportations have not been astronomical. There's just been a lot of noise

00:10:29.700 around them. And the number, you know, the numbers aside, he promised to do this and now he's doing

00:10:36.040 it and half of America clearly wants him to do it. And everything else, bringing in the National Guard or

00:10:42.820 even the 82nd Airborne into a place like Chicago is just a response to an ambient level of violence

00:10:49.660 there that every American should find intolerable. And he's not doing anything tyrannical. He's just

00:10:57.100 restoring order, the order that most people in their heart of hearts would really want. And

00:11:03.420 basically everything you just said is some species of left-wing paranoia.

00:11:10.260 Well, yeah, that's a great way to set it up. And it, because it, you know, it shows that the challenge

00:11:15.380 of trying to hew to the center, because there's a lot of truth in what you just said as a kind of

00:11:21.400 hypothetical rebuttal to what I said. So, for example, I think it is true that Biden very badly

00:11:30.360 mismanaged immigration. It's not even clear exactly why, if this was coming from the president himself

00:11:37.880 or senior advisors who simply took over for him when he was, you know, relatively incapacitated and

00:11:46.860 not attending to that, maybe distracted by Ukraine and other things going on in the world. And so he

00:11:52.660 handed it off to advisors and let them handle it. Whatever the cause, it was not handled well.

00:11:59.320 There was a kind of reflexive sense, I think, among a lot of Democrats that Trump had been

00:12:06.620 already pretty tyrannical about immigration because of the child separation policy and the Muslim ban and

00:12:15.720 so forth in the first administration. And that therefore, once Democrats were back in charge,

00:12:20.980 it was important to reverse course, to stop relying on COVID era restrictions, about letting people come

00:12:28.720 in the country and wait out their hearing on this side of the border, when in reality, many of them

00:12:35.700 can simply sort of disappear into the woodwork of our enormous country and so forth. So if that's what

00:12:42.260 you're saying that all Trump is trying to do is kind of reinstitute the rule of law after a period where

00:12:50.540 it was insufficiently defended, there is some truth to that. And there is some truth to the fact that he

00:12:56.480 won the election and a lot of people who voted for him felt strongly about that issue. Where I would

00:13:01.980 push back is in saying what is so alarming about the way Trump is handling immigration is the way it's

00:13:10.820 being imposed. As you note, it's true. If you look back at the number of people who were deported

00:13:17.480 or sent back at the border under Presidents Clinton, under President Bush, under President Obama,

00:13:26.060 and then compare that to either the first Trump administration or now, it appears that Trump

00:13:33.220 isn't doing all that much. There were something like 10 million people returned or, again, either at the

00:13:39.640 border or within internal deportations under those other Presidents. A little bit less under Obama,

00:13:46.680 but still way more than Trump. But those Presidents did not send in ICE officers with their faces masked,

00:13:56.800 with no badges visible, to raid employers, detain people without proper charges. Quite often,

00:14:04.840 people who, in fact, are not here illegally but are legal immigrants with green cards or even full

00:14:11.500 American citizens. And it's this sort of haphazard, kind of over-the-top displays of aggression and

00:14:23.660 violence and seeming lawlessness by officers of the federal government that has people extremely alarmed.

00:14:32.120 Again, almost as if what Trump wants to do is have a kind of camera-ready show of force for his most

00:14:39.940 right-wing supporters and kind of winkingly to those supporters, hoping that that provokes a reaction

00:14:50.180 from the left that will then justify it retrospectively and justify him doing even more

00:14:57.600 in that direction. And that is bad. Now, on the broader question of crime, I also am in the middle.

00:15:05.520 I am all in favor of prosecuting crimes, keeping our cities safe or making them safe if they aren't.

00:15:13.980 I've written critical things about the way a lot of democratically-led so-called blue cities handle

00:15:19.900 homelessness and crime in various ways. That isn't something that I want to defend. And I think

00:15:26.840 Democrats often have walked themselves into political weakness by responding the way they do to these

00:15:34.800 issues. The problem, once again, is that within my lifetime, at a time when, say, I lived in New York

00:15:41.180 in the early 1990s, New York City had over 2,000 murders per year. It's now something on the order

00:15:49.980 of 10 to 20 percent of that. Other cities, even those like my own Philadelphia that have higher rates

00:15:57.760 of violence, it is still lower than it used to be. And then again, with Portland, did Portland have

00:16:06.160 a big problem around four to five years ago through 2020 with Antifa and protesters clashes with the

00:16:14.420 police, areas of the city that were kind of occupied by left-wing vandals. Yeah, but that was four to

00:16:21.460 five years ago. That is a very minimal problem now. And there's no real precipitating cause that would

00:16:30.580 justify treating this as some kind of national emergency in the present moment. And it is,

00:16:37.680 it is, to my mind, a kind of, a kind of tell that the administration is attempting to do that

00:16:45.140 in a way that involves, I think, little more evidence than often telling a story. If you look at

00:16:51.100 Stephen Miller's posts or tweets on what used to be called Twitter and now X, you will see that he's just

00:16:58.820 telling a story in which we live in a country in which there is an organized wave of left-wing

00:17:04.880 terrorism going on. And that is just simply delusional. That is not true. Our country did

00:17:11.400 have a problem of organized left-wing terrorism in the early 70s when in a period in between 1971 and

00:17:19.800 1973, there was something like 500 terrorist bombings. Yeah. They didn't kill that many people,

00:17:27.260 but they blew up banks, post offices, other public areas, often at night. That there's,

00:17:33.320 there's really nothing remotely like that going on now. And simply saying that it is doesn't make it

00:17:40.760 true. So I would just urge the Trump administration and supporters, as well as those on the left who are

00:17:48.860 spoiling for a fight with ICE and so forth, to just kind of rein it in a little bit and, uh, you know,

00:17:56.360 recommit to looking at the reality-based community and treating reality as a thing that everyone should

00:18:05.240 be able to, uh, agree on certain basic facts about. And I'm disheartened by how little sign there is

00:18:13.840 that, uh, especially the right wants to do that. The left has its problems and does some of that,

00:18:19.320 but it is also the case that even with all of the ICE provocations, the raids, the masking,

00:18:25.380 the lack of badges, you know, grabbing people off the street and manhandling them, throwing them

00:18:30.920 into unmarked cars and driving off with them, with all of that, we really haven't seen widespread

00:18:37.660 left-wing violence riots and so forth. Like we did, for instance, in the summer of 2020, with I think

00:18:46.460 far less provocation, you know, I mean, in the sense, of course, I think the George Floyd killing was

00:18:53.260 terrible and worth some protests, but, uh, you know, this is a systematic act of the federal government

00:19:00.020 with the president leading the way with very incendiary rhetoric. So given that fact, I think

00:19:07.220 actually the left has been remarkably restrained, not in the sense that I'm saying like they should

00:19:13.820 be doing more and more violent things, but simply I might've expected them to be more violent given

00:19:20.720 the recent history of how the left has occasionally behaved in the face of other provocations.

00:19:27.380 Yeah. Well, I mean, the rhetoric has certainly been appalling. I mean, everything out of Stephen

00:19:32.600 Miller's mouth suggests that he's, he's vying for some kind of banality of evil award. I mean,

00:19:38.160 it's just, he's just so clearly an awful human being in addition to everything else that is

00:19:42.920 wrong with his politics. And I do think that the lack of civility and the indulgence of conspiracy

00:19:49.420 thinking, all of this is just frankly dangerous, right? It's not just words. It really is raising

00:19:54.420 the temperature, uh, in ways that, that are dangerous and it's making certain terrible

00:20:00.880 outcomes far more likely as well as just attesting to the callousness and delusion of the people in

00:20:07.060 power, right? So it's all terrible. And yet many people will say, well, these are just words,

00:20:11.420 right? You should be taking him seriously, not literally. And so it goes for every one of his

00:20:15.560 courtiers and concubines and, uh, enablers. What Trump has done to our politics has scared a lot of

00:20:22.240 people left of center, but it really, it's not on a continuum with now, now, again, I'm, I'm just

00:20:28.660 bending over backwards to be charitable to people who disagree with us. It's not on any kind of

00:20:33.520 continuum with what we mean by authoritarianism, much less fascism. This is a reality TV show,

00:20:40.460 right? This is all, um, theater on some level, not much as really as at stake. They're, they're creating

00:20:48.520 a vibe. And yes, it's understandable that people left of center are alarmed, but these are not the

00:20:55.820 sorts of people who are ever going to put people up against the wall and shoot them. Like the,

00:21:02.200 what everything that is being, that, you know, alarmists like, and again, I'm being ventriloquized

00:21:08.320 here, alarmists like Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum and all these people as scholars of,

00:21:14.100 of totalitarianism and the unraveling of democracy, all these people are hysterics and they're drawing

00:21:20.640 bad analogies to other cases. What we have here is somebody who's, um, just has a very different

00:21:27.580 style, right? And so, and the masking of, of ICE that even has its own exculpatory explanation.

00:21:34.080 These guys are being doxed online and this is, so this is a new moment where social media is

00:21:39.040 posing a real risk to law enforcement. So they have to be masked. And, um, yeah, if they're a

00:21:45.040 little rough around the edges, well, you know, these people are here illegally, you know, if you

00:21:49.620 don't want the laws in force, you shouldn't have these laws in the first place, right? Everyone's

00:21:53.940 guilty of a crime who's here illegally. It doesn't, it doesn't matter how long they've been here. It

00:21:57.420 doesn't matter how profitably they've been working in necessary industries. Again, we have laws on the

00:22:03.220 books and now we're enforcing them. So what, what is clearly wrong with that level of, of insouciance

00:22:09.760 around the current situation? Well, I would say that liberal democracy as a form of government,

00:22:17.180 it's a form of government where... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 14, 2025

#439 — How to Lose a Democracy

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