#439 — How to Lose a Democracy

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Damon Linker about the erosion of American democracy. They discuss the right-wing populist movement, the mechanisms by which Trump is consolidating authoritarian control, the Insurrection Act, the Right's weaponization of wokeness, the potential for civil unrest, Trump's punishment of Democrat-run cities, the new Christian Right, 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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	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
0:21.9	at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely
0:27.3	through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider
0:31.7	becoming one. I'm here with Damon Linker.
0:38.4	Damon, thanks for joining me.
0:39.7	Thanks for having me, Sam.
0:41.0	It's great to be here.
0:42.2	So many people will be familiar with your writing, but remind people of what you've been up to low these many years as a writer and a political commentator and where they can find your stuff currently?
0:55.2	Well, it seems like everyone these days, I have a substack titled Notes from the Middle Ground.
1:02.2	And then I also teach political science at the University of Pennsylvania as a senior lecturer there.
1:10.1	And I mainly teach courses in political theory and
1:13.8	the political right. Well, we're going to get into the political right and the theory or
1:19.4	lack of theory that may apply to the current moment. And how would you describe your politics
1:25.3	at this point? You know, for the last decade or so, I've described myself as being a liberal on the center
1:32.9	left. I used to be a conservative about 20 to 25 years ago. I was an editor at First Things
1:41.4	magazine, which Andrew Sullivan once called the intellectual nerve
1:45.4	center of the religious right. And so I spent some time in the midst of that during the Bush
1:50.0	administration and became frustrated with some of the Bush policies, the Iraq war, opposition
1:57.7	to same-sex marriage. And so broke from that, wrote a book about it called Theocons.
2:03.3	And since then, I've been on the broad center-left with the emphasis, mainly on center.
2:09.4	I'm really not that far to the left, but I do incline that way, mostly out of aversion,
2:14.7	to what the right has become. although that's kind of amusing because
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Waking Up with Sam Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Waking Up with Sam Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.