Know Your Enemy

In this unlocked bonus episode, Matt is joined by historian Eric Rauchway for a deep-dive into his new book, Why the New Deal Matters. It's Rauchway's latest effort to recover Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an anti-fascist political leader who sought to expand the meaning and practice of American democracy—that in a robust democracy, people don't just need enough to live on, but something to live for. Topics include: Herbert Hoover's and FDR's different responses to the Bonus Army's march on Washington; why Hoover is the true founding father of modern conservatism; how FDR understood the New Deal as more than just a pragmatic series of experiments; the importance to the New Deal of public art and projects like building libraries and theaters; why, despite its compromises with white supremacists in the Democratic Party, the New Deal continues to inspire; and more! 

Further Reading:

Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021)

Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal (Basic  Books, 2018)

Jamelle Bouie, "F.D.R. Didn't Just Save the Economy," New York Times, April 16, 2021

...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

Matt and Sam are back in the same room — Matt's  study — enjoying brown liquor, each other's company, and a surprisingly coherent discussion of the right's latest fixations: our "rainbow regime" and "critical race theory." 

Listen to find out how Matt's mother feels about his porn-stache, if Sam feels bad about boosting the career of Robin DiAngelo, whether the term "white fragility" has any utility, and why queer community is a metaphysical conundrum for Christian post-liberals. It's fun!

In this episode Matt and Sam discuss Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's roman à clef about the Straussian political philosopher Allan Bloom, who achieved late-in-life wealth and fame after publishing his controversial bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. Along the way they consider the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, eros and the intellectual life, love and friendship, Bellow and Bloom's shared Jewishness, and much, much more.

Sources and Further Reading:

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (Penguin, 2000)

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987)

                              Giants and Dwarfs (Simon & Schuster, 1990)

                              Love and Friendship (Simon & Schuster, 1993)

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," from The Complete Works (trans. Donald Frame)

D.T. Max, "With Friends Like Saul Bellow," New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2000

Christopher Hitchens, "The Egg-Head's Egger-On," London Review of Books, April 27, 2000

Patrick Deneen, "Who Closed the American Mind? Allan Bloom, Edmund Burke, & Multiculturalism," The Imaginative Conservative, May 29, 2013

PLUS: 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

Every June it happens: conservatives get all hot and bothered by Pride celebrations, and this year has been no different. Why do banal corporate expressions of support for LGBTQ+ rights drive them so mad? How does religion factor into their opposition to basic protections for LGBTQ+ people? What part do these culture war flareups play in their broader political strategy? In this bonus episode, Matt and Sam offer a survey of hyperbolic rightwing reactions to the start of Pride month and break it all down. 

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

What is the status of "equality" in the American political tradition? What place does it have in the inheritance that conservatives are trying to preserve? 

Matt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent conversation with historian Joshua Tait, this time focusing on Harry Jaffa's devastating review of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey's The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. In it, Jaffa defends Abraham Lincoln against Kendall and Carey's charge that he "derailed" our political tradition by putting the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the principle of equality at its center—a move, in their account, that opened the way to Ceasarism, the rights revolution, and more. 

Sources and Further Reading:

Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970; reprint, The Catholic University of American Press, 1995)

Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)

Harry V. Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1, 1975

Joshua Tait, "Why Willmoore Kendall and James Burnham are the Prophets of Modern Conservatism," National Interest, April 30, 2021

Matthew Sitman, "Farewell to a Constitutional Conservative," The American Conservative, June 27, 2013

For a slight change of pace, we invited our dear friend Brandy Jensen—author of the world's best advice column, Jezebel's Ask a Fuck-Up, and features editor at the new Gawker.com—to answer listener questions about reentering the world post-vaccine, dating, conservative relatives, whether the "Trad Caths" are right, and mourning the lives we did not live.  

As you'll see, we ended up addressing many classic Know Your Enemy themes—mercy, redemption, humility, etc.—and we had a great time doing it.  Thank you to everyone who wrote in with such intimate and profound questions. You're all very beautifully fucked-up. 

Further Reading:

Adam Philips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Macmillan, 2013

Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, October 3, 2020

Brandy Jensen, "Ask a Fuck-Up on a Fucked-Up Year," Jezebel, December 31, 2020

In this follow-up episode to "Democracy and Its Discontents" (listen here), historian Joshua Tait joins Matt and Sam for a conversation about the intellectual origins of the American Right's hostility to democracy—from John C. Calhoun's invention of the filibuster in the nineteenth century to the writings of conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and others, in the 1950s and '60s. 

Sources and Further Reading:

Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy (Liveright Books, January 2021)

James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Regnery, 1959)

Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)

Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970; reprint, The Catholic University of American Press, 1995)

Saul Bellow, "Mosby's Memoirs," The New Yorker, Jul 12, 1968

John A. Murley & John E. Alvis, eds., Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)

Harry V. Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1, 1975

Joshua Tait, "Why Willmoore Kendall and James Burnham are the Prophets of Modern Conservatism," National Interest, April 30, 2021

Joshua Tait, "The Long History of Fighting Over the Term 'Conservative,'" The Bulwark, April 2, 2021

Matthew Sitman, "Farewell to a Constitutional Conservative," The American Conservative, June 27, 2013

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

Note: This bonus episode was  first published on April 13. We're unlocking it now because  we're working on a companion episode that explores in greater detail the intellectual origins of, and justifications for, hostility toward democracy among the founders of the modern American conservative movement. 

***

In state legislatures across the country, Republicans are unleashing a fierce assault on voting rights. Hundreds of proposals aimed at restricting ballot access are being considered, and in a few states—most notably Georgia—have already become law. These obvious efforts at suppressing turnout have been justified by the deranged lie that Donald Trump had a landslide victory stole from him in November, along with the usual evidence-free worries about election integrity peddled by conservatives. Of course, the debates all this has generated have been remarkably unintelligent—just more fodder for the culture wars. 

Matt and Sam breakdown where voting-rights bill have been passed, what provisions they include, and how it all fits into both the GOP's current strategy of minority rule and the right's longstanding suspicion of mass democracy.

Sources Cited and Further Reading:

Brennan Center for Justice, "Voting Laws Roundup," April 1, 2021

Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein, "What Georgia's Voting Law Really Does," New York Times, April 2, 2021

Ari Berman, "Republicans Say the Georgia Law Wasn’t Designed to Suppress Voting. Don’t Believe Them," Mother Jones, April 8, 2021

Ari Berman, "361 Voter Suppression Bills Have Already Been Introduced This Year," Mother Jones, April 1, 2021

Daniel Dale, "Fact Check: Biden and Kemp Misleadingly Describe Parts of Georgia Elections Law," CNN, April 2, 2021

Daniel Dale, "Fact Check: Republicans Falsely Equate Georgia and Colorado Election Laws," CNN, April 7, 2021

Michael Wines, "In Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite Rules," New York Times, February 27, 2021

Glenn Ellmers, "'Conservatism' Is No Longer Enough," The American Mind, March 24, 2021

William F. Buckley, Jr., "Why the South Must Prevail," National Review, August 24, 1957

Kevin Williamson, "Why Not Fewer Voters?" National Review, April 6, 2021

To listen to more bonus episodes like this one, subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.

In this episode, Matt is joined by historian Eric Rauchway for a deep-dive into his new book, Why the New Deal Matters. It's Rauchway's latest effort to recover Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an anti-fascist political leader who sought to expand the meaning and practice of American democracy—that in a robust democracy, people don't just need enough to live on, but something to live for. Topics include: Herbert Hoover's and FDR's different responses to the Bonus Army's march on Washington; why Hoover is the true founding father of modern conservatism; how FDR understood the New Deal as more than just a pragmatic series of experiments; the importance to the New Deal of public art and projects like building libraries and theaters; why, despite its compromises with white supremacists in the Democratic Party, the New Deal continues to inspire; and more! 

At last, Know Your Enemy takes on climate change! Kate Aronoff, staff writer at The New Republic and Dissent editorial board member, joins Matt and Sam to discuss her new book, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back. The conversations traces the history of collaboration between fossil fuel executives and conservative think tanks; then we discuss what comes after climate denial and try our best to imagine a post-carbon world. 

What will it take to avoid a future of eco-apartheid, fortress nations, and "lifeboat ethics?"  Listen to find out.

Further Reading:

Kate Aronoff, "The European Far-Right's Environmental Turn," Dissent, May 31, 2019.

Kate Aronoff, "With A Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like For The Next Generation," The Intercept, Dec 5, 2018.

Sam Adler-Bell, "Appalachia vs. the Carceral State," The New Republic, Nov 25, 2019.

Sam Adler-Bell,  "Why White Supremacists are Hooked on Green Living," The New Republic, Sept. 24, 2019.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!