Know Your Enemy

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On Dec. 31, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died at the age of 95. During his long career as a towering figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond—especially his decades helming the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then as Pope and Pope Emeritus—Benedict was involved in nearly all of the Church's crises and controversies. He cracked down on liberation theologians, held a reactionary line on homosexuality at the height of the AIDS crisis, and slowly awakened to the depths and depravity of the Catholic sex-abuse scandal—but he also wrote movingly about God's love and took positions on the environment and the economy that would be mostly ignored by his conservative fans. 

To try to make sense of Benedict's life and work, especially his relationship with American Catholics, Matt is joined by Michael O'Loughlin, the national correspondent at America magazine and author of Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear.

Listen to the entire conversation by subscribing to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!

Merry Christmas! Here's a little bonus content to tide you over until 2023. In April, Matt and Sam appeared on the excellent Jokermen podcast to discuss Bob Dylan's Christian rock records. And now we're sharing it with you. Lots to chew on in here for fans of KYE, Dylan, Jesus, and rock n' roll. Enjoy. 

For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI. In her authoritative new biography, G-Man, Yale historian Beverly Gage brings Hoover to life, uncovering the all-too-human man who played such an outsized role in twentieth-century U.S. political history. Gage's decade of research provides fascinating insights into the troubles that impinged on Hoover's childhood; his formative time in a white supremacist, Southern fraternity at George Washington University, Kappa Alpha; his early years in what was then the Bureau of Investigation and eventual rise to running it; Hoover's personal life and sexuality, including his longterm relationship with Clyde Tolson; and the transformation of the FBI across the 1930s and 1940s, and the ways it drew Hoover into a number of controversies that followed, from the Kennedy assassination to COINTELPRO and the FBI's attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Sources:

Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022)

Michael Kazin, "J. Edgar Hoover’s Long Shadow," New Republic, Dec 9, 2022

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835, 2002)

Please consider making an end-of-year donation to Dissent this holiday season, Know Your Enemy's beloved sponsor. And don't forget to subscribe to KYE on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes.

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 pick up where they left off in their recent mailbag episode and keep answering listener questions. Topics include: KYE merchandise, the existence of Hell, Francis Fukuyama, Mormonism, gun violence, and more. 

Sources:

David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019)

John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Francis Fukuyama, "Still the End of History," Atlantic, October 17, 2022

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)

W.H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1940)

Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)

Sohrab Ahmari, "Urban Jeremiah: Mike Davis, 1946-2022," Compact, October 26, 2022

As the end of the year approaches, Matt and Sam are once again answering questions from you, their beloved listeners. Like previous mailbag episodes, there was an abundance of excellent questions that were submitted. Topics include: the possibilities for the religious left, white Christian nationalism, your hosts' literary habits and favorite novels, conspiracy theories—and more. For those who especially enjoy this type of episode, check out the next KYE bonus episode on Patreon, which will take up even more listener questions!

Sources:

Hannah Gold, "The Loud Parts," Harper's, October 2022

Jewish Currents, "The Jews" (On the Nose podcast episode), November 23, 2022

Alastair Roberts, "On Thomas Achord," Alastair's Adversaria, November 27, 2022

Rod Dreher, "The Thomas Achord – Alastair Roberts Mess," The American Conservative, November 27, 2022

Matthew Sitman, "Whither the Religious Left?" New Republic, April 15, 2021

Ned Rorem, Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999 (2002)

Breece D'J Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (2002)

Breece D'J Pancake, "Trilobites," The Atlantic, December 1977

Andre Dubus, Selected Stories (1995)

Janet Malcolm, "I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist," New York Review of Books, March 2018

John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)

Art Shay, Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures from the Twentieth Century (2000)

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes

This is episode is a little different. Listeners know that Matt and Sam have been following John Fetterman's Senate campaign in Pennsylvania from the start, doing their first episode about him after his primary win in May. After his victory over Dr. Oz earlier this week in the general election, they talked to the Fetterman campaign's Director of Communications, Joe Calvello, for a behind-the-scenes look at how they did it. Topics discussed: Fetterman's strategy of defining Oz early (and, yes, the origins of some of Fetterman's most popular Twitter dunks), left populism, crime, abortion, why voters have a right to be angry, and how the campaign responded to Fetterman's stroke and turned his very public recovery into one more argument about why he'd fight for Pennsylvanians. 

To hear Know Your Enemy's full take on the midterm elections, recorded earlier this week, listen and subscribe on Patreon here —  you'll also get access to all of our previous bonus episodes!

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 recap and analyze the 2022 midterms — as we know them so far. 

Why did Dems do so much better than we thought? Why did the GOP underperform? How cucked were the polls? How happy is Matt that John Fetterman beat Dr. Oz? (Very) What about Blake Masters in Arizona? Was this a bad night for Trump? Was it a good night for DeSantis? How worried should we be about the integrity of American democracy given these results? And how happy should we be that the Democrats managed to stave off the worst possible outcome? Listen while it's hot... 

"What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strength and deficiencies in Richard Nixon." It's difficult to think of a more electric meeting of author and subject than Garry Wills and Richard Nixon, a meeting that produced what might be the best book ever written about American politics, Wills's Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. What begins as reporting from the campaign trail during the 1968 presidential contest—where Wills introduces us to Nixon, George Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, and more—eventually becomes a profound meditation on the fate of liberalism in the United States. Wills found in Nixon the key to unlocking the reigning—but by then faltering—myths of their country's history and self-understanding, and what they reveal about each other. 

Along the way he discusses the complex psychological dance between Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower; takes us on a tour of Nixon's hometown, Whittier, California; describes the Republicans' "southern strategy"; examines the roiling anger and protests over the Vietnam War; and offers on-the-ground reportage from the 1968 conventions (the GOP's in Miami, the Democrats', infamously, in Chicago). Matt and Sam try to make sense of it all and ponder what Nixon Agonistes might say about how we got here and where we're going. 

Sources:

Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970)

                           Confessions of a Conservative (1979)

                           Outsider Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (2010)

Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1968)

Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (1973)

KYE, "Joan Didion, Conservative,  (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)" Jan 13, 2022 

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

With the midterms a week away, Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project (aka @BobbyBigWheel) about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level — where Trumpist state legislators continue to deny the 2020 election and lay the groundwork for ignoring the will of the majority in the future. How did the conservative movement manage to to take over so many statehouses? Can Democrats still turn back the tide? What is the "independent state legislature" theory?  

Aaron helps answers these questions and more — and gives us a useful rundown of the states to watch closely in the midterms next Tuesday. 

At long last, an episode about baseball—America's national pastime, and a sport that conservatives in the United States seem to especially love. To understand baseball's appeal, both to conservatives and the rest of us, Matt and Sam are joined by David Roth of Defector Media, a brilliant, funny writer who also is a long suffering Mets fan. Topics include: the start of the MLB playoffs, baseball's interesting place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more!

Sources: 

George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (Macmillan, 1990)

                                  "Foul Ball," New York Review of Books, June 1991

Donald Kagan, "George Will's Baseball—A Conservative Critique," Public Interest, Fall 1990

Tim Marchman, "Did George Will’s Men at Work Anticipate Baseball’s Statistical Revolution?" Slate, April 27, 2010

David Bentley Hart, "A Perfect Game," First Things, August 2010

Greg Hillis, "Quit Trying to 'Fix' Baseball," Commonweal, March 27, 2018

David Roth, "Replacement-Level Billionaires," The Baffler, March 2020

Leander Schaerlaeckens, "Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?" Slate, May 5, 2020

Michael Serazio, "The GOP hates baseball now. But it has always been a conservative sport," Washington Post, April 7, 2021

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!