#439 — How to Lose a Democracy

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 will 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. I'm here with Damon Linker. Damon, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. It's great to be here. So, many people will be familiar with your your writing, but remind people, of what you've been up to below these many years as a writer and a political commentator and and where they can find your stuff currently. Well, like, it seems like everyone these days, I have a sub stack titled, Notes from the Middle Ground. And then I also, teach political science at the University of Pennsylvania as a a senior lecturer there. And I mainly teach courses in political theory and, the political right. Well, we're gonna get into the political right and the, the theory or or lack of theory that may apply to the current moment. And how how would you describe your politics at this point? You know, for the last decade or so, I've described myself as being a liberal on the center left. I used to be a conservative about, twenty to twenty five years ago. I was, an editor at First Things Magazine, which Andrew Sullivan once called the intellectual nerve center of the religious right. And so I spent some time in the midst of that during the Bush administration and became frustrated with some of the Bush policies, the Iraq war, opposition to same sex marriage, and so broke from that, wrote a book about it called The Theo Cons. Mhmm. And since then, I've been on the broad center left with the emphasis mainly on center. I'm really not that far to the left, but I do incline that way, mostly out of aversion to what the right has become. Although that's kind of amusing because that break, as I just said, was initiated under Bush. And now I look back at the Bush administration, and it seems like the good old days. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As do I. But I don't think we've ever crossed paths, but I seem to remember you having some critical things to say about the new atheists. I don't know if, those same criticisms still apply and perhaps we'll we'll get to some areas of disagreement. But when I look at your writing now, certainly on the topic of politics, you know, we you and I are more or less in lockstep in how we view the current moment. That sounds about right. I would expect that. Everything I've I've heard of you and …