Morbid Symptoms (w/ Ross Douthat)

The right's romance with odious foreign dictators didn't start with Putin or Viktor Orbán, and their profound contempt for democracy long predates January 6. In his new book, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn traces this tradition on the right—in many ways their most deeply rooted and enduring tradition in foreign affairs—back over a century to the embrace of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I and envy of Mussolini to the present. In this discussion, Matt and Sam ask Heilbrunn about the connection between race science and fear of democracy in the early 20th century, what the right saw in Italian fascism, the machinations of the right's pivot from Nazi revisionism to the onset of the Cold War, Jeane Kirkpatrick and the supposed distinction between authoritarianism and "totalitarianism," the profound consequences of the failure of neoconservatism, the coming disaster of a second Trump term, and more.

Sources:

Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (2024)

                                        The Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008)

RJB Bosworth, Mussolini (2010)

J. Valerio Borghese, Sea Devils: Suicide Squad (Regnery, 1954)

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships & Double Standards," Commentary, Nov 1979. 

Listen:

Know Your Enemy, "The American Right’s Hungary Hearts,  (w/ Lauren Stokes and John Ganz)"  

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Matt and Sam return to René Girard via Pope Francis—whom Matt personally met at a recent general audience at the Vatican, and whose homily at that audience addressed the problem of envy, and what Christianity might have to teach us about it. Topics include: how to think about Girard's Christianity, in terms both of how it informs his work and his own attachment to it; the politics of Jesus, and whether or not any of the preceding can actually help us avoid the apocalyptic violence Girard thought was building as we hurtle toward "the end times."

Read:

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999)

Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis (2015)

Pope Francis, "Envy and Vainglory," Full text of general audience remarks, Feb 28, 2024

John Ganz's Unpopular Front series on Girard: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

Herbert McCabe, "Class Struggle and Christian Love" in God Matters (2012)

James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (1998)

James Allison, "Girard's Breakthrough," The Tablet, June 29, 1996.

Patricia Lockwood, "When I Met the Pope," LRB, Nov 30, 2023.

Listen: 

Know Your Enemy, "René Girard and the Right" (w/ John Ganz), Feb 26, 2024

View:

Pericle Fazzini, "The Resurrection" (statue in the Paul VI Audience Hall in Vatican City)r

The late René Girard, former Stanford professor of literature and mentor to Peter Thiel, is having something of a moment on the right these days—as Sam Kriss recently put it in a Harper's essay, Girard's name is being "dropped on podcasts and shoved into reading lists," and "Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought." Why might that be the case? To unpack this question, Matt and Sam welcomed back John Ganz, whose four-part series on Girard is one of the best primers available. What does Girard have to say about who we are as human beings, why we want what we want, the origins of both violence and social order (and what they have to do with each others), the uniqueness of Christianity, and the nature of secular modernity? What use is all this to the right? And to what uses do they put it? 

Also: please pre-order John's book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s — it's sure to be excellent.

Sources:

John Ganz's Unpopular Front series on Girard: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1976)

                              Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987)

                              The Scapegoat (1989)

                               I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999)

Sam Kriss, "Overwhelming and Collective Murder: The Grand, Gruesome Theories of René Girard," Harper's, Nov 2023

Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis (2013)

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Matt and Sam return to some historiographic questions from our episode with Kim Phillips-Fein — especially how to think the relationship between "right" and "far right" — and then discuss the troubling return of scientific racism to mainstream conservative thought. 

Further Reading:

James Alison, "Facing Down the Wolf," Commonweal, June 10, 2020.

Matthew Sitman, "Time in the Eternal City," Commonweal, Dec 24, 2024.

Samuel L. Popkin, Crackup: The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Politics, Oxford UP, May 2021. 

Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism, Yale UP, June 2009

John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism, Penn Press, Oct 2021.

As listeners might have noticed, 2024 is a presidential election year, and already the prospect of Donald Trump returning to power is looming over the campaign and the media's coverage of it. In a second term, Trump has promised to weaponize the Justice Department to punish his enemies, deconstruct major portions of the administrative state, and mobilize the largest deportation force in US history — to cleanse the nation of immigrants who, as Trump says, "are poisoning the blood of our country." 

The key to achieving these goals, conservatives believe, is ensuring that this time — unlike in 2016 — Trump is surrounded by the right people: populist true-believers who are sufficiently loyal and sufficiently competent to implement his extreme agenda. "Personnel is policy" is the watchword. And think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) are busy building rival rosters of ideologically-vetted political appointees. (And pissing each other off in the process.)

This episode explores how movement conservatives are refashioning the "conservative pipeline" for an anti-establishment era — through their efforts to recruit, credential, and train political professionals for a second Trump term. The question is: can these initiatives overcome the candidate's own erratic style, his weakness for sycophancy, his preference for hiring devoted courtiers over disciplined ideologues? If push came to shove, would Trump submit to the Heritage Foundation's plans for his presidential transition? Or would he resent being managed by these self-understood "adults in the room?" 

In other words, can the eggheads of the conservative movement clean up the mess that is MAGA? Or is that just another intellectual fantasy? After all, as we often say on Know Your Enemy: "MAGA is the mess."

Sources:

Sam Adler-Bell, "The Shadow War to Determine the Next Trump Administration," New York Times, Jan 10, 2024

Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Devlin Barrett, "Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term," Washington Post, Nov 6, 2023. 

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, "Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportation: Inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans," NYTimes, Nov 11, 2023. 

Jonathan D. Karl, "The Man Who Made January 6 Possible," Atlantic, Nov 9, 2021.

Zachary Petrizzo, "Trumpworld Is Already at War Over Staffing a New Trump White House," Daily Beast, Nov 16, 2023. 

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, "Behind the Curtain — Scoop: The Trump job applications revealed," Axios, Dec 1, 2023.

Ian Ward, "The Brash Group of Young Conservatives Getting Ready for the Next Trump Administration," Politico, Nov 3, 2023. 

Michael Hirsh, "Inside the Next Republican Revolution," Politico, Sept 9, 2023. 

Dylan Riley, "What Is Trump?" New Left Review, Nov 2018.

Timothy Snyder, "Not a Normal Election," Commonweal, Nov 2, 2020

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Journeyman actor Peter Crombie, who appeared in films such as Seven, Born on the Fourth of July, and Natural Born Killers, died earlier this month, on January 10, 2024, at the age of 71. But his most famous, or at least memorable, role probably was his five-episode arc in season four of Seinfeld as "Crazy" Joe Davola, a struggling writer who becomes obsessed with Elaine and believes Jerry is sabotaging his career.

The "Crazy" Joe Davola episodes come at a major turning point in Seinfeld's nine seasons. The grittier, nearly vanished working-class New York City that's depicted in its earliest episodes, filled with dingy laundromats, struggling actors, immigrant relatives, and people who are literally poor, begins to drop out of view as Jerry's career takes off and the settings, references, and concerns of the show becomes more absurd and removed from the day to day life of ordinary people in Manhattan and beyond.

Using the death of Peter Crombie as the thinnest of excuses to do an episode on the politics of Seinfeld, Matt was joined by KYE producer Jesse Brenneman and historian Gabe Winant to explain its "Jewish humor"; how the class politics of New York City in the 70s and 80s informed the show; the deeper meaning of its many references to dictators, Nazis, communists, and others; the Dinkins vs. Giuliani race for mayor; and more!

When did the American conservative movement begin? Who were its chief protagonists? What were their main motivations? Is the conservative movement a social movement, like any other, or is it something different? Should scholars have "sympathy" for their conservative subjects in order to study them? And are there important distinctions to be drawn between "conservative," "the right," and "the far right?" 

These are the sorts of questions historians ask each other and themselves. The changing ways they answer them — and the reasons their answers  change — is the subject of today's episode. In other words: we're discussing the historiography of the American right. (Fun!)

In a highly influential 1994 essay, historian Alan Brinkley referred to conservatism as "something of an orphan in historical scholarship." By 2011, when our brilliant guest, Kim Phillips-Fein, surveyed the historical literature on conservatism, she found a dynamic, prolific, even "trendy" field, but one with many unsettled methodological debates. In 2017, friend of the pod Rick Perlstein wrote that historians, himself included, had made a mistake, privileging the more respectable and intellectual dimensions of conservatism over the more irrational, rank, and racist. "If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story," Perlstein mused, "might historians have been telling that story wrong?" Since then, several studies and popular books have emerged which correct the record, and take up Perlstein's call to study "conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage." 

To start off the year — an election year, no less — we're taking up these questions again. What is the state of the field of conservative studies now? Have historians, popular writers, and/or podcasters over-corrected, in the Trump era, for the mistakes Perlstein cites? What might we be missing this time? We're so very lucky to have long-time friend of the show Kim Phillips-Fein, the Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University, as our guide. Let's get big picture and take stock. 2024, here we go. 

Further Reading:

Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," The American Historical Review, Apr 1994. 

Kim Phillips Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," The Journal of American History, Dec 2011. 

— Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (2010)

— Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017)

Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong." New York Times, Apr 11, 2017. 

Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," The American Scholar, Winter, 1954. 

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

John Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (2021)

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Writer Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."

Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?

Further Reading:

Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023

Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.

— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.

— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s," New York Magazine, June 1972

— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)

— A Man in Full (1998)

— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)

Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017

For our final main episode of 2023, we're dipping back into the Wills well to discuss Garry's under-appreciated 2010 book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.  Joining us is our great friend Erik Baker, lecturer in the History of Science Department at Harvard University and an editor at The Drift magazine. 

In Bomb Power, Garry Wills elegantly demonstrates how the imperatives of secretly conceiving, building, and deploying the nuclear bomb fundamentally changed American democracy — massively empowering the presidency, disempowering Congress, and setting the nation on a permanent war footing. At the same time, secrecy and deception metastasized through the American system, enabling the rise of extra-judicial assassinations, coup plotting, domestic surveillance, torture, and clandestine war.  "Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission..." writes Wills, "Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began specializing in secret keeping.” 

Also discussed: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer  (2023), Henry Kissinger (RIP), Bush and Obama, Snowden, Ellsberg, and the ways in which Bomb Power is a profoundly Catholic book. Enjoy!

Sources:

Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner (2017)

Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (2021)

Archbishop John Wester, "Living in the Light of Christ's Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament," Jan 11, 2022

Erik Baker, "Daniel in the Lion's Den: On the Moral Courage of Daniel Ellsberg," The Baffler, June 17, 2023

John Schwenkler and Mark Souva, "False Choices: The Unjustifiable Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Commonweal, Oct 14, 2020

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In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by Stanford historian Jennifer Burns to discuss her new biography of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose influence would reach far beyond the academy when, during his last decades, he became one of the most effective popularizers of libertarian ideas—in books, columns, and even a ten-part PBS program, Free to Choose. How did the son of Jewish immigrants in New Jersey come to hold the often radical ideas that made him famous? How does Friedman's variety of libertarianism differ from, say, that of Mises or Hayek? What made Friedman, unusually for the times, someone who valued the intellects and work of the women around him? And what should we make of Friedman now, as Trump and elements of the conservative movement and Republican Party supposedly jettison the "fusionism" of which Friedman's free markets were a part? 

As mentioned in the episode's introduction, listeners might want to revisit episode 16 with economist Marshall Steinbaum for a broader, and more critical, look at the Chicago school.

Sources:

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)

Jennifer Burns, Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market (2009)

Naomi Klein, "40 Years Ago, This Chilean Exile Warned Us About the Shock Doctrine. Then He Was Assassinated." The Nation, Sept 21, 2016.

Tim Barker, "Other People’s Blood," n+1 , Spring 2019. 

Pascale Bonnefoy, "50 Years Ago, a Bloody Coup Ended Democracy in Chile," NY Times, Sept 11, 2023.

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