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

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becoming one. Hi, I'm here with Jonathan Rausch. 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, you know, 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 is 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.

...