Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 we'll 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. Hi, I'm here with Jonathan Rauch. Thanks for joining me again. Happy to be here. So let's jump right into it. You have recently written yet another important article for The Atlantic where you can often be found.
The title of this one is, Yes, It's Fascism. So that got my attention. I'm sure it got other people's attention. Like you, I've resisted using this term because there were obvious... historical associations that didn't quite and don't quite map on to our current circumstance under Trump 2.0.
But the resistance has seemed more and more pedantic as the months have rolled by and the overreach and indecency of this administration has become more and more obvious and unignorable and odious. Well, let's just start with your misgivings about it, which you expressed to some degree in the article, and yet you've overcome them.
How did you decide to finally pull the trigger on this terminology and what are your concerns about doing so?
Well, it was painful. I'll tell you that. This was the article I had hoped never to write. A year ago in The Atlantic, I wrote an article saying that Trump was not a fascist. He's a patrimonialist.
And that's a style of government that you find not only in states, but in the mafia, criminal organizations, cults, political machines, where the state is, in effect, the personal property and family business of the leader. Mm-hmm. And in that situation, the head of state will go rampage through the bureaucracy, cutting through rules and replacing people with personal loyalists.
And then things get very corrupt and they get very incompetent. And that's clearly what we were seeing. And that, I think, uncontroversially applied to Trump. But patrimonialism, it's not ideological. It's not especially aggressive. It's not interested in the use of force or taking over other countries. for example. And it could have just been about Trump and enrichment.
And I thought initially that's probably where things were headed. But over the course of the last year, and specifically over the course of the past few weeks and couple of months, We saw the emergence of so many properties that are associated with fascism that to me it became perverse to withhold the label.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Jonathan Rauch's article 'Yes, It's Fascism'?
They greenlight a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. There are now scores of examples like this, and the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of at least one, two, or three billion dollars, depending on which account you favor. But there's probably more than that that's happened. I mean, this is all just absolutely despicable and destructive of our standing in the world.
And yet, This was a stop on the train before we reached fascism. I just wanted to emphasize that, you know, whether or not someone agrees that you're naming this correctly, we shouldn't lose sight of, you know, all the ground our country has lost and is losing under this president.
Yes, it was more than bad enough when it was patrimonialism. We've never seen the US government turned into the personal property of the leader where he dials up a prosecution or he accepts gold bars and then bases his tariffs based on stuff that people give him. And that's the opposite under patrimonialism. The opposite of patrimonialism is not democracy, it's bureaucracy.
Because what they want to do is weaken all the tendons in the bureaucracies that make government competent because you don't want experts. Experts are loyal to ideals and professional standards. You want people who are loyal only to you.
So you wind up with appointments like, I don't know, think of your incompetent Trump appointee or think about how they fired all those people who watch over nuclear weapons only to have to hire them back. So you destroy the government's competence with patrimonialism. What you don't do is reorient the direction of the government in a way that's ideological or aggressive or organized.
And that, I think, was, as you say, the next stop on the line.
So there's a difference and you acknowledge this difference in your piece between having a leader and his enablers who are fascists or aspiring fascists or, you know, fascistic to whatever degree and having the full capture of government and society. by a regime that is in fact fascist. And you wouldn't say we have succumbed in that final sense, nor do I think you think we're likely to succumb.
And so this is not going to look like Hitler's Germany, even in the worst case scenario. So to be clear, what you seem to think now is that calling Trump and his enablers, and many of whom are far more ideological than he shows any sign of being, calling them fascist is more or less unavoidable at this point.
It seems more or less unavoidable. I'd actually like to get your take on whether it's advisable because there is a school of thought that says, look, it does no good to use this word. It's just a generalized slur and it will get people's backup without accomplishing anything. I felt that part of what Trump is so good at, I think you've actually mentioned this often on your show, Sam,
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Chapter 3: What are the 18 criteria of fascism discussed in the episode?
So one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy, of course, every government has to use violence. But it's important whether they do that reluctantly and as a last resort and whether they will try to de-conflict a situation, talk it down, minimize the use of violence, or whether their rhetoric and their actions are suggesting, no, this can be a first resort.
You can be standing on a street corner and holding up your phone as a peaceful protester in Minneapolis, and then hurled to the ground, be swarmed by federal agents, and then be shot multiple times. And the government's reaction to that will be that you were some kind of, what did they say about Mr. Preti?
A terrorist, an insurrectionist, bent upon massacre.
Yeah. And when you see that, and when you see people being dragged out of cars, and when you see the kind of rhetoric that Pete Hegseth has been using, there's an article about that, I think, in The Atlantic, I think, just today.
When you see memes that are displaying violence in hortatory terms, people repelling from helicopters to assault apartment buildings in the United States, when you see sharing on government platforms of a children's comic book character with a machine gun, shooting up boats, killing all the people in them, and glorying in that, reveling in that, saying, isn't that great?
That's incompatible with the kind of society that our founders were trying to build.
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Chapter 4: How does patrimonialism differ from fascism in governance?
Yeah, yeah. I did a section of a podcast on this already, but I remain astonished that the Second Amendment devotees in our country, the many millions of them for whom the right to bear arms is the central plank of their civic religion,
that they've been so acquiescent and really just so blind to the implications of the Preti killing, because what happened in the immediate aftermath of that killing, which we saw from at least three different sides, and you can see he never reached for his gun and his murder was totally gratuitous, It was a pure repudiation of the Second Amendment.
And everyone from the president and the vice president on down to Kash Patel and Kristi Noem and everyone who got in front of a microphone in the aftermath of that spoke to the country as though the Second Amendment doesn't exist. Right.
I mean, they basically said in so many words and more or less all of them said this, that if you are in possession of a firearm anywhere near federal law enforcement, that is very likely a death sentence. You know, don't do that. And that's not what something like I would say at least 10 million Americans have been saying is the most important thing in our country for as long as I've been alive.
For as long as I've been alive, we've had millions of Americans over there on the right who have been buying guns, training with guns, cleaning their guns, talking about guns, coveting their neighbor's gun. It's all been about guns, and it hasn't been about guns for home defense. It's been about guns because at some point in the future, we could have a tyrannical government
that will begin to infringe upon our civil liberties, the most important of which is our ability to defend those civil liberties by recourse to the Second Amendment. And here we had a guy who was practicing his First Amendment rights to assemble and speak freely against the behavior of ICE, and he was forced to the ground, disarmed, and then killed.
And then you had the director of the FBI, among others, get on television and speak as though the Second Amendment doesn't even exist. Where the hell are the conservative gun owners on this? 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.
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