Making Sense - Sam Harris - #456 — American Fascism

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

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00:00:26.260 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.240 doing here, please consider becoming one. Hi, I'm here with Jonathan Rauch. Thanks for

00:00:37.160 joining me again. Happy to be here. So let's jump right into it. You have recently written

00:00:41.920 yet another important article for The Atlantic where you can often be found. The title of this

00:00:49.240 one is, Yes, It's Fascism. So that got my attention. I'm sure it got other people's attention. Like you,

00:00:54.620 I've resisted using this term because there were obvious historical associations that didn't quite

00:01:02.380 and don't quite map onto our current circumstance under Trump 2.0. But the resistance has seemed

00:01:08.960 more and more pedantic as the months have rolled by and the overreach and indecency of this

00:01:17.260 administration has become more and more obvious and unignorable and odious. Well, let's just start

00:01:23.900 with your misgivings about it, which you expressed to some degree in the article, and yet you've

00:01:28.640 overcome them. How did you decide to finally pull the trigger on this terminology? And what are your

00:01:34.800 concerns about doing so? Well, it was painful. I'll tell you that. This was the article I had hoped

00:01:40.340 never to write. A year ago in The Atlantic, I wrote an article saying that Trump was not a fascist.

00:01:47.080 He's a patrimonialist. And that's a style of government that you find not only in states,

00:01:53.120 but in the mafia, criminal organizations, cults, political machines, where the state is in effect

00:02:00.220 the personal property and family business of the leader. And in that situation, the head of state

00:02:08.460 will go rampage through the bureaucracy, cutting through rules and replacing people with personal

00:02:14.540 loyalists. And then things get very corrupt and they get very incompetent. And that's clearly what

00:02:20.660 we were seeing. And that, I think, uncontroversially applied to Trump. But patrimonialism, it's not

00:02:26.960 ideological. It's not especially aggressive. It's not interested in the use of force or taking over

00:02:32.260 other countries, for example. And it could have just been about Trump and enrichment. And I thought

00:02:38.360 initially, that's probably where things were headed. But over the course of the last year,

00:02:44.620 and specifically over the course of the past few weeks and couple of months, we saw the emergence

00:02:50.180 of so many properties that are associated with fascism that, to me, it became perverse to withhold

00:02:57.820 the label. So I finally dropped my resistance, sat down, thought of all the things I could think of

00:03:02.940 that are usually associated with fascism. There's no standard definition or bright line in-out kind

00:03:09.180 of status. And I had no trouble coming up with 18 of them. And at that point, I threw in the towel

00:03:14.100 and I said, we got to name this thing. So yeah, I want to walk through those 18 or many of them

00:03:20.300 as you present them in the article. But let's just linger on patrimonialism because it's certainly bad

00:03:26.640 enough, right? This has taken us to a place, you know, if he were merely a patrimonialist, he's taken

00:03:31.120 us to a place that we don't want to be, or at least shouldn't want to be, despite the fact that

00:03:35.600 half the country still seems to be cheering. So when you talk about patrimonialism as an approach

00:03:42.640 to governance, in this case, where the state and its, you know, where America, let's not speak so

00:03:49.680 generically, America and her policies, her institutions, you know, everything is considered

00:03:56.900 effectively Trump's personal property to be sold off for personal advantage. And we've seen him do

00:04:05.380 that with the tariff policy. You know, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam. And how does Vietnam try to

00:04:11.140 get that tariff removed? They greenlight a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. There are

00:04:17.000 now scores of examples like this. And the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of at least

00:04:24.640 $1, $2, or $3 billion, depending on which account you favor. But there's probably more than that

00:04:31.300 that's happened. I mean, this is all just absolutely despicable and destructive of our standing in the

00:04:38.560 world. And yet, this was a stop on the train before we reached fascism. I just wanted to emphasize

00:04:46.180 that, you know, whether or not someone agrees that you're naming this correctly, we shouldn't lose

00:04:52.860 sight of, you know, all the ground our country has lost and is losing under this president.

00:04:57.780 Yes, it was more than bad enough when it was patrimonialism. We've never seen the U.S. government

00:05:04.340 turned into the personal property of the leader where, you know, he dials up a prosecution or he

00:05:09.760 accepts gold bars and then bases his tariffs, you know, based on stuff that people give him. And that's

00:05:16.340 the opposite under patrimonialism. The opposite of patrimonialism is not democracy, it's bureaucracy.

00:05:25.060 Because what they want to do is weaken all the tendons in the bureaucracies that make government

00:05:31.660 competent because you don't want experts. Experts are loyal to ideals and professional standards. You

00:05:37.600 want people who are loyal only to you. So you wind up with appointments like, I don't know,

00:05:41.960 think of your incompetent Trump appointee or think about how they fired all those people who watch

00:05:48.440 over nuclear weapons only to have to hire them back. So you destroy the government's competence

00:05:53.320 with patrimonialism. What you don't do is reorient the direction of the government in a way that's

00:06:00.560 ideological or aggressive or organized. And that, I think, was, as you say, the next stop on the line.

00:06:09.120 So there's a difference, and you acknowledge this difference in your piece, between having a leader

00:06:15.340 and his enablers who are fascists or aspiring fascists or, you know, fascistic to whatever

00:06:24.520 degree, and having the full capture of government and society by a regime that is, in fact, fascist.

00:06:31.620 And you wouldn't say we have succumbed in that final sense, nor do I think you think we're likely

00:06:39.460 to succumb. And so this is not going to look like Hitler's Germany, even in the worst case scenario.

00:06:47.520 So to be clear, what you seem to think now is that calling Trump and his enablers,

00:06:53.320 and many of whom are far more ideological than he shows any sign of being, calling them fascist is

00:06:59.840 more or less unavoidable at this point.

00:07:02.300 It seems more or less unavoidable. I'd actually like to get your take on whether it's advisable,

00:07:06.920 because there is a school of thought that says, look, it does no good to use this word.

00:07:11.820 It's just a generalized slur, and it will get people's backup without accomplishing anything.

00:07:17.220 I felt that part of what Trump is so good at, I think you've actually mentioned this often on

00:07:23.060 on your show, Sam, is throwing up so many distractions and outrages on any given day that

00:07:30.860 our minds can't stay tuned on the big picture of what it is he's doing, and that people need these

00:07:36.800 labels. They need these boxes to put things in, in order to be able to keep their eye on the bigger

00:07:42.180 picture, and that fascism is now the appropriate box, and in fact, maybe the only appropriate box.

00:07:49.320 So that's why I thought this was important. Others may think it's premature. I don't know.

00:07:54.880 Well, so I pulled up a definition of fascism. As you point out, this is a term that is pretty 0.99

00:08:00.040 loosely defined, and you can, you know, it has blurry borders. There's no question. But here's

00:08:06.080 one definition. I went to chat GPT for this. Fascism is an ultra-nationalist, anti-liberal political

00:08:12.940 project organized around a promise of a national rebirth, a cleansing restoration after a story of

00:08:19.220 humiliation and decay. It rejects pluralism as a sham, treats opposition as an enemy rather than

00:08:25.600 as a rival, and elevates coercion, often outright violence, as morally necessary to purge internal

00:08:32.140 quote, traitors and reassert collective greatness. In its mature form, it becomes a leader-centered

00:08:37.880 mass movement that fuses with the state, corrodes neutral institutions, and renders genuine political

00:08:43.680 competition functionally impossible. So all of that resonates with the current moment. I mean,

00:08:48.980 the only piece that has not been achieved, but I don't think it will be for want of trying,

00:08:55.580 is this final line of, you know, renders genuine political competition functionally impossible,

00:09:01.000 right? So it'll be very important what happens in November around the midterm elections. One could argue

00:09:07.240 that not all of these variables have been fully achieved, but there's certainly been movement

00:09:11.940 directionally across all of these domains. And so you put this in slightly different language in

00:09:18.660 your piece. So let's just kind of run through your 18. We might not get to all of them. And let me know

00:09:23.880 if you want to skip ahead to any that you more favor, but let's just start with the first one,

00:09:28.160 demolition of norms. What do you mean by that?

00:09:30.680 The first thing I should say, if I can have a word of preface, is that there is no bright-lying,

00:09:37.880 settled definition of fascism. Even fascists don't agree on what fascism is. And in different

00:09:43.180 countries over many years, it's taken different forms. You know, Japan looked very different from 0.99

00:09:47.600 Franco, who looked different from Mussolini, who looked different from Hitler. So my method here 0.62

00:09:52.700 was to assemble characteristics that most people would agree are, first of all, consonant with

00:10:01.520 fascism and second of all, dissonant with, incompatible with liberal pluralism. And I think

00:10:07.680 everything on this list fits that bill and everything on this list fits Trump and the direction he's

00:10:15.700 trying to take the country. It does not fit the country as a whole. We'll come back to that. But we

00:10:20.640 don't live in a fascist state. We live in a mixed state, hybrid state, with a liberal constitution

00:10:26.620 and a fascist leader. That gets complicated. Okay. So what are the things we're talking about? About

00:10:32.380 half the items on this list, you know, more or less, are things that are new since his first term,

00:10:37.860 or things that have gotten so much worse that we have to recontextualize them. Others are old,

00:10:42.560 but now looking back, we can say that they fit into fascism and the demolition of norms is one of

00:10:47.400 these. You know, he starts his campaign in 2016, 15, I guess, with trolling, with extreme insults,

00:10:56.320 with making comments about a news anchor is apparently her period, with insulting John McCain

00:11:03.000 and saying he's not a war hero. Insult after insult. And we think this is just because he's some kind of

00:11:08.960 crazy person or he's mentally unbalanced. But this is what you do if you're a fascist and you want to 0.99

00:11:14.560 dominate the dialogue. Because liberals, people like me, people like you, who are kind of trained

00:11:20.120 to be civil and tolerant, we can't function in that space. We just become dumbfounded in that space.

00:11:26.900 We don't compete there. And fascists know that. And it's why something Hitler says in Mein Kampf is,

00:11:32.900 it doesn't matter if they laugh at us or ridicule us. All that matters is that they can't stop

00:11:37.640 thinking about us. And that's what they're doing in the context of fascism.

00:11:43.900 Yeah, it's interesting. And recalling Hitler in this context is relevant. It has been the case 0.99

00:11:49.200 historically that fascist figures present, certainly before they achieve their aims, they present as

00:11:58.420 comical figures. I mean, they present as clowns. They present as easy targets of ridicule, right? 0.96

00:12:05.200 So the cultural machinery of satire gets working against them. But in these cases where they

00:12:13.940 succeed, the satire proves ineffectual, right? So if you look back in the late 20s and even early 30s

00:12:21.320 in Germany, Hitler was very often portrayed as a buffoon, as somebody who was not going to achieve

00:12:27.900 his aims, quite obviously, because he was so comical and tawdry and norm-breaking. And that 0.61

00:12:36.440 was clearly, clearly has been our attitude toward Trump all the while. I mean, on some level it still

00:12:41.460 is, because I do think he lacks some of the things that proper demagogues like Hitler had. But the fact

00:12:49.580 that he's so entertaining and so seemingly harmless because he's just a colossal jackass on some basic

00:12:57.680 level causes many people to, I think many people hearing this conversation will feel that we are 0.81

00:13:03.540 at every point exaggerating the danger, exaggerating the harms already committed. Because when you take a

00:13:12.360 look at this guy and what he, and the things he says, there's something deeply unserious about him

00:13:18.820 as a person. I mean, this is why we have, you know, his defenders effectively, I mean, the main defense

00:13:23.800 of him for now going on nearly a decade is, or has been, you know, take him seriously, but not literally.

00:13:30.960 I mean, this is the first time in my lifetime where I've noticed people, serious people, seemingly

00:13:35.500 serious people, telling everyone in sight not to care what the president of the United States says he's

00:13:40.980 going to do, as though that could make, ever make sense. And yet that's been the attitude. It's just

00:13:46.280 like, oh, he doesn't mean it. You know, he's not going to take Greenland. Oh, he just, he and his

00:13:51.820 director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just accused the previous president, President Obama,

00:13:56.940 of treason, which is a killing offense in most cases. That's not serious. You don't have to listen

00:14:02.140 to any of that. He's just playing around, right? And so there's something about the lack of seriousness

00:14:07.440 that is the style of presentation here that is, it's a pattern. It's not just Trump.

00:14:13.560 Well, it's a historical pattern. You're correct. Hitler was seen as a buffoon in the 1920s.

00:14:19.220 Mussolini was seen as this kind of strutting pop and J. Actually, even Hitler wound up thinking 0.81

00:14:25.220 of Mussolini as something of a buffoon, but Mussolini was not a buffoon. In fact, he was a 0.97

00:14:29.740 brilliant guy. He was a former journalist. He had been a socialist before he became a fascist.

00:14:34.360 No coincidence there. These are smart people and they are intentionally and deliberately

00:14:39.880 manipulating the public discourse and dialogue. First, to hijack people's minds so that you think

00:14:46.200 about them all the time. Second, to move the grounded public discourse to an arena where

00:14:50.720 liberal Democrats, you know, small d, cannot compete. And third, to show that they're in control

00:14:56.580 of what can and cannot be said. All the stuff your mom taught you about what you can and can't say,

00:15:01.020 throw it out the window. They're in the driver's seat now. And that's the message you get.

00:15:06.540 So the second point you raise, the glorification of violence. Now, this, I think, has not been pushed

00:15:12.440 nearly as far as most people think it must be pushed to justify any kind of analogy to

00:15:19.760 what they consider fascism. And this is one place where I even wonder whether Trump is the sort of

00:15:27.640 person who's capable of this. I mean, you think of, you know, the Night of Long Knives.

00:15:31.420 It's a finally secured Hitler's power, right? So this is a night where Hitler, having become 0.95

00:15:36.340 chancellor, decides, all right, the SA has too much power, is not totally aligned with the SS and the

00:15:42.960 army. I need to keep the conservatives on board. And so what we're going to do in the next 24 hours

00:15:47.680 is murder, you know, the top 200 people or the 100 to 200 people in this organization who have been

00:15:53.880 my loyalists all the while. So what people think about here when you mention violence is

00:16:00.300 the propensity to actually start rounding up people and killing them, right? So now that's,

00:16:05.860 I must admit that, you know, as sinister as some of these guys seem to me, people like Stephen Miller

00:16:10.600 and J.D. Vance, you know, who seem far more ideological and on that level dangerous than Trump

00:16:17.160 himself. It is hard for me to imagine the murders, right? So tell me what you're referencing here and

00:16:22.740 how far your imagination ranges.

00:16:26.240 Well, remember, this list is not about describing America as being right now in the end state of

00:16:34.120 fascism. It's not. I don't think it will be. In fact, I'm slightly more optimistic on that score

00:16:38.700 than I was a few months ago. I'm instead looking at the characteristics of the rhetoric and the

00:16:44.820 leadership. So one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy, of course, every government has to use

00:16:49.400 violence. But it's important whether they do that reluctantly and as a last resort and whether they

00:16:54.960 will try to de-conflict a situation, talk it down, minimize the use of violence, or whether their

00:17:01.840 rhetoric and their actions are suggesting, no, this can be a first resort. You can be standing on a

00:17:07.840 street corner and holding up your phone as a peaceful protester in Minneapolis and then hurled

00:17:16.400 to the ground, be swarmed by federal agents, and then be shot multiple times. And the government's

00:17:22.700 reaction to that will be that you were some kind of... What did they say about Mr. Preddy?

00:17:27.680 A terrorist, an insurrectionist, bent upon massacre.

00:17:31.100 Yeah. And when you see that, and when you see people being dragged out of cars, and when you see

00:17:36.260 the kind of rhetoric that Pete Hegseth has been using, there's an article about that, I think,

00:17:40.460 in The Atlantic, I think just today. When you see memes that are displaying violence in hortatory terms,

00:17:48.620 you know, people rappelling from helicopters to assault apartment buildings in the United States,

00:17:54.440 when you see sharing on government platforms of a children's comic book character with a machine gun

00:18:02.680 shooting up boats, killing all the people in them, and glorying in that, reveling in that, 0.71

00:18:09.860 saying, isn't that great? That's incompatible with the kind of society that our founders were trying 0.90

00:18:16.460 to build. Yeah. Yeah. I did a section of a podcast on this already, but I remain astonished

00:18:24.780 that the Second Amendment devotees in our country, the many millions of them for whom, you know,

00:18:30.740 the right to bear arms is the central plank of their civic religion, that they've been so acquiescent

00:18:38.480 and really just so blind to the implications of the Preti killing, because what happened in the

00:18:47.100 immediate aftermath of that killing, which we saw from at least three different sides, and you can see

00:18:53.840 he never reached for his gun, and his murder was totally gratuitous. It was a pure repudiation of the

00:19:02.160 Second Amendment, and everyone from the president and the vice president on down, to Kash Patel and

00:19:07.880 Kristi Noem, and everyone who got in front of a microphone in the aftermath of that, spoke to

00:19:12.920 the country as though the Second Amendment doesn't exist, right? I mean, they basically said in so many

00:19:18.240 words, and more or less all of them said this, that if you're in possession of a firearm anywhere near

00:19:24.160 federal law enforcement, that is very likely a death sentence. You know, don't do that. And that's not

00:19:30.060 what something like, I would say, at least 10 million Americans have been saying is the most important

00:19:36.860 thing in our country for as long as I've been alive. And we've, you know, for as long as I've been

00:19:41.720 alive, we've had millions of Americans over there on the right who have been buying guns, training with

00:19:48.080 guns, cleaning their guns, talking about guns, coveting their neighbor's gun. It's all been about

00:19:52.920 guns, and it hasn't been about guns for home defense. It's been about guns because at some point in the

00:19:58.180 future, we could have a tyrannical government that would, will begin to infringe upon our civil liberties,

00:20:04.080 the most important of which is our ability to defend those civil liberties by recourse to the

00:20:09.700 Second Amendment. And here we had a guy who was practicing his First Amendment rights to assemble

00:20:14.960 and speak freely against the behavior of ICE, and he was forced to the ground, disarmed, and then

00:20:22.560 killed. And then you had the, you know, the director of the FBI, among others, get on television and speak

00:20:29.240 as though the Second Amendment doesn't even exist. Where the hell are the conservative gun owners on

00:20:34.700 this? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 04, 2026

#456 — American Fascism

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