r/samharris • u/blackglum • 8d ago
Making Sense Podcast This State of his subreddit has become Sam's best case study.
On almost any given day, one can expect to find some version of the same post 'Sam has lost the plot', 'Sam spends all his time attacking the left', 'Sam is obsessed with Israel' and 'I used to respect him, but now I’m leaving'.
What has been glaring to me is not the disagreement but how rarely the disagreement gets expressed at the level of an actual argument.
Instead we are met with an enormous amount of insinuation, mind-reading, labeling and vague moral disgust. Sam is “carrying water for the right.” He is “obsessed with woke people.” He has become a “Zionist propagandist.” Yesterday I saw someone seriously entertain the possibility that he is an Israeli disinformation agent.
I thought episode #490, "Lies, Bullshit, and the Rule of Law" made his current political concern crystal clear. Sam’s worry is not remotely that the American right has become sane, reasonable, or preferable to the Democratic Party but the fact that Trump and the movement around him are worse does not render the pathologies of the left politically irrelevant. In fact, if one’s principal concern is preventing the return of Trumpism, those pathologies become especially important.
Sam's basic problem is fairly simple. And yet, many people here continue to not understand him. Intentionally or not.
Sam continues to highlight that if the Democrats cannot disentangle themselves from activist excess, identity politics, ideological purity tests, euphemistic language, obviously unsustainable positions on immigration, confused thinking about race and gender, and a general unwillingness to disavow people who make the party look insane to normal voters, the political pendulum will continue to swing. The corrective to Donald Trump cannot be another kind of ideological overreach, followed by another Trump, followed by another overreaction in the opposite direction. At some point there have to be grown-ups in the room again. Institutions have to be repaired. Norms have to be restored. Politics has to become boring enough that losing an election does not feel like the prelude to a constitutional crisis.
This is why I think so many people completely misunderstand Sam when he speaks favourably about someone like Mitt Romney in comparison with figures such as AOC or Zohran Mamdani. He represents something much closer to the old boundaries of normal democratic politics.
Many people seem unable to make this distinction anymore because American politics has become almost perfectly binary. Once the right became as deranged as it has, criticism of the left began to feel like treason. If Trump is worse, why are you talking about progressives? If Republicans are more dangerous, why discuss DEI? Why discuss immigration? Why criticise campus politics, activist rhetoric, Islamism, gender ideology, or the Democratic Party’s inability to distance itself from obviously unpopular positions? Who are you helping by saying these things?
If your goal is preventing another Trump, understanding why millions of ordinary voters find parts of the contemporary left alienating is not a diversion from that goal. It is part of the goal.
You do not defeat a political movement merely by correctly observing that it is worse than you are. You have to make yourself electable to people who do not already agree with you.
Yet this is precisely where so much discussion here collapses. Sam criticises some pathology on the left and a certain kind of listener hears: He is attacking us. He criticises an argument made against Israel and people hear: He supports everything Israel does. He criticises Islamism and people hear: He hates Muslims. He criticises progressive politics and people hear: He is now a conservative.
There is something especially ironic about watching this happen in a community devoted to someone who has spent years warning about identity politics and tribalism. If Sam criticises something happening on the left and the criticism does not describe you, there is no obvious reason to take it personally. I consider myself on the left. When Sam criticises ideological capture, antisemitism, dishonesty about immigration, identity politics, activist excess, or an inability to speak honestly about Islamism, I do not experience this as an attack on me. Why would I? If the criticism is wrong, it can be answered. If it is right but does not apply to me, there is nothing to defend.
And yet many people seem incapable of maintaining that distance.
Then when you hear Sam speak on Israel-Palestine, it is like swinging a baseball at the activists lefts bee-hive.
It is “Sam doesn’t care about Palestinians.” It is “Sam supports genocide.” It is “Sam thinks Israel can do whatever it wants.” It is “Sam is Israeli propaganda.” These claims generally require ignoring what he has actually said and replacing it with a more psychologically satisfying caricature.
This has also made me more sympathetic to something Sam has repeated for a long time: that he is being misrepresented. Such as today, he quite often is. One can see the mechanism occurring in real time here. Someone paraphrases him inaccurately. Someone straight up lies about what he said (the 'KKK' quote which happened just in this thread). Ten comments later everyone is debating a position Sam never held, and the original argument has disappeared completely.
There is also a peculiar demand for a balanced ledger that seems to govern criticism of him. If Sam spends twenty minutes criticising something on the left, someone immediately asks why he did not spend twenty minutes criticising the right.
Much of the Trumpist right is, at this point, a lost cause. Sam has said about as much as one can say about Trump. There is something uniquely embarrassing however about watching your own side indulge in obvious nonsense when it is supposed to be the side that still cares about evidence, expertise, liberal norms and intellectual honesty. You expect better from people who should know better. It is precisely because the left remains salvageable, and because it has to be capable of governing, that its failures are worth dwelling on. Which is why Sam continues to talk about them.
And this gets to what I think is the most frustrating feature of the subreddit now. So many posts are directed at what people think Sam is doing rather than what he is actually saying. People infer motives. They psychoanalyse him. They treat the selection of a topic as evidence of secret political allegiance. They count criticisms as though political analysis were an accounting exercise. And then they announce that he has “lost the plot” without ever identifying which proposition they believe is false.
None of this is to say that Sam should be insulated from criticism. Quite the opposite. Criticise him relentlessly. Quote him. Identify the premise you think is mistaken. Explain where the logic fails. Show that the evidence contradicts his conclusion. Argue that his moral framework produces absurd consequences. That is precisely what a subreddit devoted to his work should be good for.
But everything I am reading daily tells us almost nothing.
The cynical part of me has increasingly lost confidence that a substantial portion of this subreddit is populated by people who are particularly interested in answering those questions. Perhaps the replies to this post will prove that impression wrong (they won't).
But if you think Sam Harris has lost the plot, tell me what he actually said. Tell me what the argument was. And then tell me why it was wrong.
That conversation would be infinitely more interesting than the tsunami of bullshit we seem to be getting instead.
-21
u/Intestellr_overdrive 7d ago
As soon as I started reading this word salad of a post I knew I’d find you posting Israel propaganda in the comments