time, if there is further interest in the topic.
My friend Karl Nord and I discuss James Burnham, one of the intellectual forebears of modern conservative thought in the United States. Remarkably, upon a closer look into his life, we find that Burnham is an iconoclast who could have been called a socialist, a nationalist, a conservative, a Trotskyist, a neoliberal, a centrist or a social democrat at various times in his life - and yet, he repudiates and attacks all of these ideologies at various times as well. This is a thinker who once thought a communist revolution was inevitable for America, who wrote briefs for the CIA, who supported McCarthy, and who shaped the worldview of generations of conservatives. In the end, the only label that suits him is "Machiavellian", which is fittingly the title of one of his books, which we take a cursory look at during this episode.