Know Your Enemy

In this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer returns to the show to discuss her new book, Partisans, about the ascendancy of an angrier, more radical strain of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1990s—a backlash driven by the right's dissatisfaction with the genial, popularity-seeking Ronald Reagan. As the Cold War ended, many conservatives stopped genuflecting to democracy and freedom and used new forms of media—talk radio and cable news especially—to spread their grievances. Topics include: Pat Buchanan's campaigns for the presidency, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich and the GOP's takeover of the House of Representatives, Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza, and the new breed of anti-feminist, rightwing women such as Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.Sources:Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic, 2022)                                     Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Penn, 2016)Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1990)John Ganz, "The Year the Clock Broke," The Baffler, November 2018Know Your Enemy, "The Year the Clock Broke" (w/ John Ganz), March 16, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

31 Elo 20221h 11min

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Matt and Sam bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement, discussing two recent and related articles in the New York Times. The first: Sam’s profile of Arizona GOP senate nominee Blake Masters, who, like J.D. Vance, is bankrolled by his former employer and mentor, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. And second: an in-depth look at the Claremont Institute by Elizabeth Zerofsky, whose excellent reporting gives the boys an opportunity to refine their thoughts on the West Coast Straussian legacy of Harry Jaffa.It’s KYE classico. Enjoy. Cited:Adler-Bell, “The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters,” NYTimes, Aug 3, 2022.Adler-Bell, “The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right,” The New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.Elizabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” NYTimes Magazine, Aug 3, 2022.Marc Fisher & Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute triumphed in the Trump years. Then came Jan. 6.” Washington Post, Jul 30, 2022.Glenn Ellmers, “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” The American Mind, Mar 24, 2021.Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2019Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, U Chicago Press, 1982.Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, Roman & Littlefield, 2000.David Tucker "Why Did Harry Jaffa Change His Mind?" Law and Liberty, Jul 3, 2019.For more on Claremont/Jaffa/Strauss:KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes" Feb 2021.KYE: The Long Farewell to Majority Rule (w/ Joshua Tait), May 2021.

18 Elo 20223min

Christopher Lasch, the late historian and social critic, can be difficult to pin down. Despite writing with startling clarity and verve, Lasch  frustrates his readers' longing for clean partisan taxonomies and explicit programmatic statements. Taken up in recent years by Steve Bannon and  post-liberal populists, he was, in life, a man of the left who never ceased interrogating his own side’s pathologies and historical blindspots — often using Marxism, psychoanalysis, and a rich, idiosyncratic historiography of the American scene to do so. As George Scialabba once put it, “Virtually every political and cultural tendency in recent American history has smarted under Lasch’s criticism."  And even his most devoted readers have been left asking — “plaintively or exasperatedly,” writes Scialabba — what exactly does Christopher Lasch want? For our guest, editor and writer Chris Lehmann, Lasch was more than an admired intellectual iconoclast and gadfly; he was a treasured teacher and mentor — who was nonetheless difficult to get to know well. In our conversation, Lehmann finds fault with tendentious readings of Lasch’s work by his most ardent fans and virulent enemies alike. To unearth the powerful critique running through Lasch’s oeuvre, we spend most of this episode discussing his late-career opus The True and Only Heaven. Along the way, Lasch’s insights frustrate and illuminate in equal measure, inspiring new variations on classic KYE themes: the relationship between particularity and solidarity, tradition and hierarchy, egalitarianism and expertise, and religion and political virtue. Come along for the ride!  Further Reading: Chris Lehmann, "Pilgrim's Progress," BookForum, Summer 2010.Chris Lehmann, "The Betrayal of Democracy," The Baffler, March, 13, 2017.George Scialabba, "A Whole World of Heroes: Christopher Lasch on Democracy," Dissent, 1995. Patrick Deneen, "Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope," First Things, Dec 2004.Matthew Sitman, "Whither the Religious Left?" The New Republic, April 15, 2021. Eric Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, Wm B Eerdmans, 2010. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Norton, 1991. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, Norton, 1978.Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, Norton, 1984.

11 Elo 20221h 32min

Matt is joined by John Huntington, author of Far-Right Vanguard, which chronicles the history of what he calls the "ultraconservative" movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century.John is a history professor at Houston Community College.Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

30 Heinä 20222min

Here's something fun and a little different: your beloved cohost Matt Sitman was recently interviewed by Victor Bruzzone and Matt McManus on their podcast, Plastic Pills, and the ensuing conversation — about Matt's own history, the right-wing intellectual pipeline, and the enduring and contested influence of Leo Strauss on the conservative movement and its minds — is just fascinating. So we're sharing it with you, dear listeners. I do want to acknowledge the elephant in the room: we're in a bit of a summer slow down at KYE headquarters. After sprinting to get the Roe v Wade series done last month, we've all had to take a bit of a breath amid the July heat — our producer, Jesse, has been on vacation — and so there've been fewer new episodes in the feed than we would prefer. But thank you for bearing with us. And trust that many excellent  episodes are in the works!  ...if you're hurting for KYE content, feel free to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access our back catalog of bonus episodes!

17 Heinä 20221h 54min

In the third and final episode in their series on the overturning of Roe v. Wade—recorded on the day it happened—Matt and Sam pick up with 1990s, the George W. Bush administration, and eventually take listeners up to the present. They focus especially on way conservative, mostly Christian intellectuals, many of them connected to the religious journal First Things, brought Catholics and evangelicals together to fight against abortion rights, with figures like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Robert P. George, and Hadley Arkes providing language and arguments in a more elite idiom—a project that deeply influenced Bush's presidency and helped cement the anti-abortion movement's place not just in the religious right but the broader conservative movement and the GOP.Sources:"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994"Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millenium," First Things, May 1994"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday, 2006)Mary Ziegler, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale University Press, 2021)Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Eerdmans, 1984)Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993)Hadley Arkes, "The End of the Beginning of the End of Abortion," First Things, June 24, 2022Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, August 24, 2015Tara Isabella Burton, "The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump," Vox, March 5, 2018

30 Kesä 20221h 47min

Today we're sharing a special "Dig Your Enemy" crossover event, as Daniel Denvir of Jacobin magazine's The Dig podcast puts Matt and Sam in the hot seat. We answer all of Dan's excellent questions about the state of the American right, including: the return of isolationism, the New Right, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano, the prospects for a multi-racial conservative majority, the "groomer" panic, masculinity and gender politics, MAGA, authoritarianism, NYC's new reactionary "downtown scene," and the bad dialectic between racial liberalism and the anti-woke reactionaries. Enjoy! This episode was originally posted by The Dig; find the rest of their excellent podcasts here: https://thedigradio.com/ ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

22 Kesä 20222h 24min

At long last, Matt and Sam dive into the origins of the Christian right—a complicated tale often flattened by contemporary debates. What was the history of Christian anti-abortion activism before Roe, and how soon after the landmark Supreme Court decision did conservative Christians coalesce around the abortion—and other issues—to become the political force we know today? What did it take to get Catholics and evangelicals to join forces, and what were the barriers to them coming together, especially given the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States? And how did all this help reshape the GOP into a vehicle for anti-abortion politics, given that such a scenario was not fated on the eve of Roe? Your hosts take up these questions and more, stopping in the early 1990s—when they'll pick up with the story in the third and final episode in the series.Sources and Citations:Randall Balmer, "The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth," Politico Magazine, May 10, 2022Neil J. Young and Gillian Frank, "What Everyone Gets Wrong about Evangelicals and Abortion," Washington Post, May 16, 2022Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015)Kristen Luker, Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood, (University of California Press, 1985)Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, (Harvard University Press, 2015)Ilyse Hogue and Ellie Langford, The Lie That Binds (Strong Arm Press, 2020)Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-80 (Simon & Schuster, 2020)Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016)Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2005)"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994

16 Kesä 20221h 28min