Know Your Enemy

Matt and Sam are joined by KYE all-star John Ganz to discuss Compact: A Radical American Journal, a new publication founded by Sohrab Ahmari, Matthew Schmitz, and Edward Aponte. It's launch coincided with a profile in the New York Times—and a party that Sam attended. What are the ideas behind Compact? How should the left approach the perspective it offers? Your hosts answer these questions, and more, drawing on Ganz's excellent Substack post on these topics, "Compact Magazine's Unholy Alliance."

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Matt and Sam are joined by Ari Brostoff, author of  Missing Time: Essays, to explore David Horowitz's 1996 memoir, Radical Son. Like a number of prominent conservatives, Horowitz is a convert from the left. But he's younger than most of the first neocons, and his journey to the right went through Berkeley and the New Left more than the alcoves of City College. Radical Son is his account of that journey—an evocative, angry, revealing text that takes the reader from his red-diaper baby childhood in Queens's Sunnyside neighborhood to his involvement with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in Oakland to his break with the left and turn to the right. What does Horowitz's trajectory reveal about the rightwing politics today? 

Sources:

Ari Brostoff, Missing Time: Essays (n+1, 2022)

Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977, reprint Verso 2020)

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (Simon & Schuster, 1996)

Fran Lebowitz, "Speaking of New York," Commonweal, February 7, 2019

Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern, "Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist," New Republic, May 5, 2021

Cole Stangler, "David Horowitz: 'Conservatives are So F**king Well-Mannered," In These Times, December 12, 2013

Reinhold Niebuhr, "Augustine's Political Realism," from The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (Yale University Press, 1987)

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Matt and Sam talk to Gillian Branstetter,  press secretary for the National Women’s Law Center, about the spate of anti-trans laws sweeping the country: What do these interventions do? Who is pushing them? And why? 

The American right has long been invested in policing gender boundaries, but its fixation on trans people — and trans children, in particular — has  become more acute in recent years. Over 100 anti-trans state-level measures have been passed this legislative session alone, including athletics bans, curriculum/book bans, religious refusal laws, and bans on access to health care. Perhaps most alarmingly, states like Texas are instituting policies that equate gender-affirming care with child abuse, terrorizing  trans kids and their families. With Gillian's help, we explore the conservative forces behind these bills and reveal the ideological fixations, misapprehensions, and contradictions driving this panic. It's a difficult but necessary conversation.

If you'd like to help fight the right's anti-trans onslaught,  consider donating to The Trans Justice Funding Project. 

Further Reading: 

J David Goodman, "How Medical Care for Trans Youth Became ‘Child Abuse’ In Texas," NY Times, March 11, 2022

Melissa Gira Grant, "The Groups Pushing Anti-Trans Laws Want to Divide the LGBTQ Movement," The New Republic, Feb 17, 2022. 

Jeremy W Peters, "A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground," NY Times, Nov 3, 2019. 

Judith Butler, "Why Is the Idea of ‘Gender’ Provoking Backlash the World Over?" The Guardian, Oct 23, 2021.

Jules Gill-Peterson "The Anti-Trans Lobby’s Real Agenda," Jewish Currents, Apr 27, 2021.

— Histories of the Transgender Child, UM Press,  2018.

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In the first half of this conversation with Buzzfeed’s Joe Bernstein, Sam asks: What is “disinformation?” Who gets to decide? And does it explain what's wrong with our politics? And in the second half: why is Trump’s favorite venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, funding New York City’s downtown arts scene? And what are the political stakes of "anti-woke" art? 

This was a fun conversation with one of our favorite journalists! Enjoy. 

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The past few months have seen much talk of a "second Civil War" in the United States or a "national divorce" between red states and blue states. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joins Matt and Sam to discuss why the analogy to the Civil War fails, what such rhetoric does for those who deploy it, and what the challenges really are to a better politics in America.

Listening: Check out Jamelle's podcast, co-hosted with fellow KYE guest John Ganz, Unclear and Present Danger!

Reading:

Jamelle Bouie, "Why We Are Not Facing the Prospect of a Second Civil War," New York Times, Feb 15, 2022

Michelle Goldberg, "Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?" New York Times, Jan 6, 2022

Nate Hochman, "Let's Stay Together," Spectator, January 2, 2022

Michael Anton, "Right Flight: The War Between the States," Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021

Helen Andrews, "Reconstruction Revisionism," American Conservative, Dec 11, 2021

Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (University of Chicago, 1959)

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Matt and Sam talk to Michelle Nickerson about her brilliant book, Mothers of Conservatism, which explores the lives and political activism of conservative women in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s and 50s. Unlike many other conversations on the show, this one is less about intellectuals and ideas than social history—a description of how, as Nickerson puts it, housewife activists worked to "protect the nation from aliens, internationalism, and power-hungry bureaucrats in Washington." Topics include: the Great Depression and the rise of "housewife populism," conservative bookstores and "Americanism" centers run by women, the networks of activism that conservative women built and deployed, fierce battles over public education, the menace of psychiatry and the social sciences in shaping education policy, and more.

Sources:

Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2012)

                                              "Stefanik's Rise and Cheney's Fall Mark a New Role for GOP Women," Washington Post, May 13, 2021

Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," American History Review, April 1994

Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (Basic Books, 2002)

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Matt talks to writer Phil Christman about his new essay collection, How To Be Normal. They talk about the meaning of "normal" (especially in these pandemic times), religious fundamentalism, Christian conspiracy theories about rock music, Mark Fisher, love, and much more.

Sources:

Phil Christman, How To Be Normal (Belt Publishing, 2022)

                               "Turning Nothings Into Somethings," Commonweal, Dec 3, 2020

                               "What Is It Like To Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018

It seems almost every  big culture-war battle of the moment—from "Critical Race Theory" to COVID mandates—is being fought in America's schools. Meanwhile, Democrats, anxious about a midterm rout driven by angry Republican parents, too often are conceding these battles to the right, adopting their rhetoric and their terms of debate, and have been for a long time—despite supposedly being the party of teachers' unions.  Does it have to be this way? 

We put that question, and many more, to our guest Jennifer Berkshire, the coauthor (with Jack Schneider) of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and co-host of the education podcast Have You Heard.  Jennifer guides us through the recent history of conservatives' war on public education—fights over desegregation, the Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk, the "parents' rights" movement of the 1990s, Obama-era ed reform, and the CRT gag-orders sweeping the nation today. Along the way we tease out some illuminating contradictions in the right's nationalist coalition, which  seeks to cultivate a shared, sanitized story about American history while simultaneously dismantling the only system by which that narrative can be imposed. We also cast a critical eye on the triangulating, moderate Democrats who have utterly failed to provide a galvanizing, alternative message about the purpose of public education. As Jennifer makes brilliantly clear, the crisis of American education is real; the question is, who will be empowered to solve it? 

Further Reading:

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door:  The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, November 2020)

Jennifer Berkshire, "The GOP Has Revived Its Obsession With Parents’ Rights," The New Republic, Dec 9, 2021

— "The GOP's Grievance Industrial Complex Invades the Classroom," The Nation, Oct 28, 2021

— "'Corporate Democrat Goes Down to Defeat in Virginia,'" The Nation, Nov 8, 2021

— "How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party," The Baffler, Nov 17, 2017

Sam Adler-Bell, "Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown," The Forum, Jan 13, 2022

Sarah Jones, "We're Having the Wrong Conversation About Schools," New York Magazine, Jan 12, 2022

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Author, podcaster, and New York Times Magazine staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Matt and Sam for a spirited discussion of some treacherous topics: identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture (oh my!). Jay is our charming, intrepid guide to these touchy subjects, those that liberals and leftists are sometimes loath to engage, offering his idiosyncratic (though not contrarian!) takes on each — and inspiring some of our own.

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When Joan Didion died at the age of 87 in December, her early conservatism figured into a number of obituaries and commentaries, but was rarely discussed in detail. Matt and Sam turned to Sam Tanenhaus, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s biographer and knower of all things National Review, to discuss Didion's early writing for the magazine, her roots in California conservatism,  and how her politics changed—and didn't—over the course of her long career.  Along the way, they discuss why she loved Barry Goldwater and hated Ronald Reagan, why she finally stopped writing for National Review, and how she compares to other writers from that era—from Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe to Gore Vidal and Garry Wills. 

Sources:

Joan Didion: 

"On Self-Respect,"  Vogue,  1961

‘I want to go ahead and do it,' (Review of Mailer), NYTimes, Oct 7, 1979

"The Lion King," (Review of Dinesh D'Souza), NYRB, Dec 18, 1997

"New York: Sentimental Journeys,"  NYRB, Jan 17, 1991. 

"John Wayne: A Love Song," Saturday Evening Post, 1965

Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968)

The White Album  (1979)

Salvador (1983)

Political Fictions (2001)

Where I Was From  (2003)

A collection of Didion's National Review Writing 

Commentary on Joan Didion:

Ross Douthat, "Try Canceling Joan Didion," NYTimes, Jan 5, 2022

Parul Sehgal, "The Case Against the Trauma Plot," NYTimes, Dec 27,  2021

Louis Menand, “Out of Bethlehem,” New Yorker, Aug 17, 2015

Stephen Schryer, "Writers for Goldwater,"  Post45, Jan 20, 2020

Haley Mlotek, "It’s All in the Angles," The Nation, June 15, 2021

Caitlin Flanagan, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," The Atlantic, Feb 15, 2021

Jacob Bacharach, "Joan Didion Cast Off the Fictions of American Politics," The New Republic, Dec 27, 2021

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