Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemySam is joined by David Broder — the Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine and author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy and the forthcoming book, Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy — to discuss the recent victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italian general elections. Meloni's Brothers for Italy party descends directly from the neo-fascist parties of post-war Italy. We discuss the ways in which her victory is continuous and discontinuous with the recent history of right-wing populism in Italy — from Silvio Berlusconi to Matteo Salvini. And David explains how Meloni has incorporated fascist nostalgia and historical revision into a 21st century, identitarian nationalism, which draws heavily on conservative economics, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ politics, and "great replacement" nativist conspiracy. Further reading: David Broder, "Italy’s drift to the far right began long before the rise of Giorgia Meloni," Guardian, Sept. 2022. Natasha Lennard, "It's a Girl (Fascist!)," The Intercept, Sept. 2022.Adam Tooze, "Who is going to vote for Italy's right-wing coalition?," Chartbook, Sept 2022. 

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyKYE super guest John Ganz joins Matt and Sam for a characteristically spirited discussion of The Claremont Institute's "Sheriff Fellowship," which invites county sheriffs from across the country to California for a weekend of West Coast Straussian ideological programing. Drawing on the history of "posse comitatus" movements and recent reports on the role of conservative sheriffs in resisting COVID mandates, propagating 2020 election lies, and cozying up to vigilante militias, we offer a synthesized account of why the mythologized figure of the sheriff — and sheriffs themselves — have such an attraction for right-wing radicals intent on subverting American democracy.Further Reading:Jessica Pishko, "Here’s the Secret “Sheriff Fellowship” Curriculum From the Country’s Most Prominent MAGA Think Tank," Slate, Sept 21, 2022.Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, "2020 Election Deniers Seek Out Powerful Allies: County Sheriffs," NYTimes, Jul 25, 2022.Adam Rawnsley, "MAGA Claremont Institute Honors Sheriffs Who Defy Laws They Don’t Like," Daily Beast, Nov 22, 2021.Ashley Powers, "The Renegade Sheriffs," The New Yorker, Apr 23, 2018. Kimberly Kindy, "Boosted by the pandemic, ‘constitutional sheriffs’ are a political force," Washington Post, Nov 2, 2021.Christian Vanderbrouk, "Notes on an Authoritarian Conspiracy: Inside the Claremont Institute’s “79 Days to Inauguration” Report," The Bulwark, Nov 8, 2021. Michael Anton & Glenn Elmers, "The Stakes: Harry Jaffa’s Philosophy," The American Mind, Sept 19, 2022.

Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he's a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He's also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what's happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsletter he titled Eyes on the Right. In this conversation, Matt and Sam talk with Linker about what his own trajectory can teach us about the Right: his experiences working at First Things while the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq; why thinks Sarah Palin marked a turning point on the Right; and his case for understanding Donald Trump as a political, rather than legal, problem. Sources:"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996Damon Linker, "There is No Happy Ending to America's Trump Problem," New York Times, Aug 21, 2022                                   "A Giving of Intellectual Accounts," Eyes on the Right, Sept 9, 2022                                  "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Donald Trump?" Eyes on the Right, July 18, 2022                                   The Theocons: Secular America Under Seige (Doubleday, 2006)Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, Aug 24, 2015...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

This episode was unplanned, but when Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1, 2022, we felt an urge to honor her memory and the profound influence she has had on the American left, socialism, feminism, and our collective thinking about class struggle. From her work in the women's health movement of the 1960s, to her theorizing (with  ex-husband John Ehrenreich) of the "professional-managerial class" in the 1970s, to her explorations of Reagan-era yuppie pathologies, and her renowned exposé of low-wage work in 2001's Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an essential and nuanced guide to the inner-life of American class conflict in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. To undertake this journey through an extraordinary body of work, we're joined by two brilliant writers who have both — in their own way — taken up  Ehrenreich's profound ethical and intellectual challenge: Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine (and KYE's favorite labor journalist); and returning guest Gabe Winant, University of Chicago historian and author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care.As Gabe writes in his stunning obituary last week, "Ehrenreich’s specialty was to reveal her readers to themselves by showing them the other. Her humor and projection of personal vulnerability were particularly deft techniques for asking the reader to see their own position, often through identification with Ehrenreich: she invites this, beckoning you to follow her into her subject, and then suddenly wheels around on you—and you are caught out." We hope this episode can manage something of that technique for the listener, that you might find yourself "caught out" too, thinking deeply about where you fit into the story Barbara is telling — and what it might call on you to do, fight for, or think harder about. Enjoy.  Further Reading: Barbara & John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America, March 1977. — "The New Left and the Professional Managerial Class," Radical America, May 1977.— "Death of a Yuppie Dream," Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Feb 2013. Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press, 1973.Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Pantheon, 1989. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Metropolitan, 2001. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Preface to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History," U of Minnesota Press, 1987. Gabriel Winant, "On Barbara Ehrenreich," n+1, Sept 9, 2022. — "Professional-Managerial Chasm," n+1, Oct 10, 2019. — "The Right Kind of Worker," Know Your Enemy, May 2022. Alex Press, "On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich." Dissent, Oct 22, 2019. David Rieff, "White Bread, White Dread (review of Fear of Falling)," LA Times, Aug 20, 1989.   This episode of Know Your Enemy is dedicated to Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) and all those who loved and learned from her.

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!  

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.

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.  

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

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!

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