This conversation is a little different. We wanted to take a break from the election-year political jousting to talk to the poet Christian Wiman about Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, one of the most singular books published in recent memory—part memoir, part commonplace book, part poetry collection. As with his previous My Bright Abyss, Wiman, more than any other contemporary Christian writer, manages to shake off our culture's desiccated religious tropes to write and talk about matters of ultimate concern in ways that are bracing, even exhilarating. How does poetry tap into reality, or, even better, what does poetry reveal about it? How does he think about the relationship between "life and art"?  Why does he resist "Saul on the Road to Damascus"-style accounts of religious conversation? Why did he almost not write about his cancer diagnosis in My Bright Abyss?Why might postmodernism be good for religion, actually? How does the love of another person connect to the love of God? And how does any of this matter for how we live? We take up these questions and more with Wiman.

Sources:

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (2023)

— My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013)

— Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004)

— Every Riven Thing: Poems (2014)

— "The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians" in Once in the West (2014)

Matthew Sitman, "Finding the Words for Faith: Meet America's Most Important Christian Writer," The Dish, Sept 3, 2014

Casey Cep, "How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith," New Yorker, Dec 4, 2023

Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story," in Selected Stories of Andre Dubus (1996)

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)

Robert Bringhurst, "These Poems, She Said,"  from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copper Canyon Press (1982)

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Historian Ronnie Grinberg's new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals couldn't be better "Know Your Enemy" fodder. (Main characters include: Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy!) These writers, Grinberg shows, built and sustained a novel, secular, Jewish, and masculine concept of the intellectual life, an ideology that would profoundly affected the development of  Cold War liberalism, neo-conservativism, Zionism, and right-wing reaction against feminism, gay rights, and black power. 

As we discovered in this conversation, it's impossible to make sense of the creative and scholarly contributions of the New York Intellectuals — good and bad — without gender as an essential lens. Moreover, Grinberg shows how scholars can easily misapprehend the deeper motivations for neoconservative reaction (among those such as Podhoretz and Decter) if they are not attentive to the centrality of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy in these thinkers' work.  

Further Reading:

Ronnie Grinberg, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Mar 2024)

Sam Adler-Bell, "The New York Intellectuals Were a Boys' Club," Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr 10, 2024

Matthew Sitman, "Midge Decter to Howard Meyer, April 15, 1987," Friends and Enemies, Apr 8, 2024

B.D. McClay, "Of Course They Hated Her: The Uncomfortable Honesty of Mary McCarthy," Commonweal, Dec 18, 2017

William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982)

Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963)

Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed (1934)

Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (1979)

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (1976)

Further Viewing:

D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus,"Town Bloody Hall" (1979)

Further Listening:

KYE, "Midge Decter, Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior (w/ Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub," Jul 28, 2023

KYE, "What Happened to Norman (w/ David Klion)," Jan 16, 2020

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

It was inevitable that Know Your Enemy would eventually discuss Arguing the World, the 1998 documentary about four Jewish intellectuals who emerged from the alcoves and arguments of City College in the 1930s and influenced American politics and letters for much of the rest of the twentieth century, and beyond: Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer.

Why now? Most of all, it's the kind of documentary we love—the personal rivalries, the gossip, the self-conscious intellectuality, and the, well, arguments. But we'll also be publishing an episode next week with historian Ronnie Grinberg about her new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, and while the overlap in subject matter is not perfect, this documentary would make for a great primer for listeners (since we know you're the kind of listeners who do not despise homework). It's also an excellent chance to revisit the history of the left, old and new, and their fraught relationship with each other; to consider the place of intellectuals and thinking in a time of urgent action; and, as ever, to talk about the ways the subjects of Arguing the World might fit into America's right turn and "how we got here."

Watch:

Arguing the World, dir. Joseph Dorman (1998); YouTube, PBS, IMDB

Read:

Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity," Partisan Review, Jan-Feb 1954

Irving Howe, "Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?" Dissent, Winter 1977

Irving Kristol, “of-a-trotskyist-memoirs.html">Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” NYTimes, Jan 23, 1977

Why are Republicans and the right losing their minds over Taylor Swift, the gifted songwriter and globe-bestriding pop star? Why do they think her NFL-playing, Super Bowl-winning boyfriend is secretly gay—precisely because he's dating Taylor Swift? Why is this slice of Americana being portrayed as a deep-state op meant to hand the 2024 election to Joe Biden? To try to answer these, and other, similarly bewildering questions, Matt and Sam talked to writer B.D. McClay, whose Substack, Notebook, has become the essential guide to understanding Taylor Swift, her place in our culture and politics, and why she drives right-wingers (but not just right-wingers!) crazy. 

Read:

B.D. McClay, "taylor derangement syndrome: on losing the normies," Notebook, Feb 3, 2024

— "cruel summer is going number one," Notebook, Oct 22, 2023

— "your future is me: let's talk about (sigh) swifties," Notebook, Oct 7, 2023

— "Taylor Swift studies takes a detour," Sept 4, 2023

— "Taylor Swift, Rockist," Notebook, Aug 4, 2023

— "Taylor Swift studies, contd," Notebook, July 3, 2023

— "(but I'm only looking at you)," Notebook, May 29, 2023

— "A Decade of Sore Winners," The Outline, Dec 31, 2019. 

Clare Coffey, "Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince," Notebook, Sept 25, 2023

Mark Harris, "swift-look-what-you-made-me-do-pure-trump-era-pop-art.html">Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ Is the First Pure Piece of Trump-Era Pop Art," Vulture, Aug 30, 2017

Edmund Smirk, "Swiftian Normality and the Freak Right," The American Mind, March, 7, 2024.

Watch:

Taylor Swift arguing with her Boomer Republican father about Tennessee U.S. Senate race (YouTube)

Taylor Swift, folklore: the long pond studio sessions (2020)

Bob Dylan, "Murder Most Foul" (2020)

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What can four generations of men named "L. Brent Bozell" tell us about the trajectory of modern American conservatism? Well, quite a lot. In this classic KYE bonus episode from February 2021, newly unlocked for these last weeks of Lent, Matt and Sam discuss one of the first families of the postwar right, which ends up being a story about faith, fanaticism, and the "awful grace of God."

From the union-busting, ad-man scion (Brent Sr.), to the fiercely brilliant and troubled National Review editor-turned-Catholic zealot (Brent Jr.), to the insipid media watchdog and Trump apologist (Brent III), and finally, to the ball-cap-wearing January 6 capitol siege participant (Brent IV, aka "Zeeker") — the Bozell epic has all the elements of a great family saga: pathos, intrigue, tragedy, farce, decline, and even a bit of redemption. 

In classic KYE fashion, we over-prepared and over-imbibed to bring you this story. Please enjoy responsibly!

Further Reading:

Jeet Heer, "Meet the Bozells, America’s First Family of Right-Wing Violence," The Nation, February 22, 2021

Jon Schwarz, "Accused Capitol Rioter Brent Bozell IV Comes from Right-Wing Royalty," The Intercept, February 17, 2021

Timothy Noah, "The Rise and Fall of the L. Brent Bozells," The New Republic, February 19, 2021

Eve Tushnet, "Order, Chaos, Peace," The American Conservative, November 18, 2016

L. Brent Bozell Jr., "Freedom or Virtue?" National Review, Sept 11, 1962

Daniel Kelly, Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell Jr., Intercollegiate Studies Institute, January 2014

Further Listening:

"Conservative Intelligentsia with Sam Adler-Bell & Matt Sitman," The Dig, February 18, 2021

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)"  

...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 premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy 

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, "udienza-generale.html">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, "your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/rene-girard-w-john-ganz">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)

...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 premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy 

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, "war-trump-transition.html">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, "2025-immigration-agenda.html">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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