Know Your Enemy
patreon
The History of the History of the Right (w/ Kim Phillips-Fein)
🕑 Added 2024-01-17 23:05:02 +0000 UTCWhen 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)
Comments
Jennifer Delton
To understand Trump, you need to look at Pat Buchanan, the Iraq War and conservative rejection of Reagan internationalism and neocons. Buckley’s fusion undone by war on terror, which had bipartisan support.
Craig Lammes
Fantastic episode.
pixlaw
posted in the wrong thread: Concerning the continuity thing, I'm a little surprised that no-one has seemed to discuss The Spotlight, an incredible source of anti-semitism and conspiracy mongering that basically flourished until right before 9/11. Just full of profoundly weird stories that Q-Anon seemed to recapitulate. Just an incredibly rich text; think Twin Peaks as written by Pat Buchanan on 'shrooms. I hope Ganz in his new book covers it at least in passing. But certainly an interesting source for you guys to delve into.
Olivia Weeks
Hi writing here because idk how to email you guys…. I just finished Max Fraser’s book “Hillbilly Highway” and I would really love to hear you guys speak with him. It’s about 20th century white migration between Appalachia and the rust belt. its a real corrective to some dumbass narratives about rural backwardness but most importantly it has a chapter on how country music became nostalgic and therefore conservative with the advent of “the Nashville sound” that I think is perfect.
Jerry Callen
I was caught by Matt's comments towards the end of the episode regarding the unrecognized-until-recently importance of the 90s. This prompted me to go back and watch the 1992 presidential debates, among Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and -- Ross Perot! I've so far only made it through the first, and started the second, but they are fascinating. I can't decide WHAT Perot was. His opposition to NAFTA was spot on. Bush and Clinton were both creepier than I remembered. Anyway - I'd be interested in hearing what you KYE guys think of Perot, 30 years on.
DrJRad
Every time I heard one of these analysis about blindspots to the dark aspects of the Right, I wonder about the blindspots on the Left. Who are the Left's enemies' enemies that are not its friends? What gets ignored in the name of solidarity? I know this beyond the scope of the podcast but the questions pop into my head.
DrJRad
Wasn't the Congress of Vienna Kissinger's dissertation topic? The roots run deep.
The fed in your bushes
Thank you for the discontinuity discussion about the nativist/nationalistic wings. So many people forget that Trump only won the 2016 primaries due to Bush, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich splitting the “moderate” vote, and the quirks of a winner take all, FPTP, no-runoff voting system. Trump won many states with as little as 30% of the vote. Without so many factors lining up in Trump’s favor in 2016 (none of which were inevitable), we may still be having the same conversations about the far right today as we were in the Obama era.
Matthew
Great ep. Can we get a pow report from Sam?
erik w bjorke
The historiography of conservatism needs to go all the way back to end of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution and also discuss the Congress of Vienna and Metternich. The Congress of Vienna was reaction’s finest hour and Metternich is one of the most important figures in the history of conservatism.
David in Brooklyn
OK, I've heard it, but I felt as if there were only brief flashes of reality in the discussion. Somehow, those of us who approach things intellectually need better ways of dealing with the anti-intellectualism that characterizes the Right. Buckley, Kirk, Hayek, you name it -- they were never central to what the Right ever was. Even if they believed otherwise, the main function of "ideas people" on the Right is to create the appearance of credibility and respectability for those who need that--which certainly isn't everybody or even most people; there's a much larger number of them that get it more from owning guns and being ex- or pseudo-military. When we engage with their ideas as if ideas meant to them what ideas mean to us, by definition we aren't engaging with what the Right mostly actually is. Rather, it's like we're wrestling with mannikins in its shop window. Mostly we as a movement don't articulate our own ideas nearly well enough. But when we must engage with the "ideas" of the Right, we should point out more often the viewpoints on history, economics, military policy, etc. that have been thoroughly debunked decades ago through the hard lessons of history--over a century ago in some cases. Intellectual dishonesty deserves to be called what it is, not lent further fake respectability by our treating it respectfully.
Blackford Oakes
Matthew Dallek’s Birchers is an excellent window into the conversation around continuity
mark o'hare
Pls. do a complimentary ep. on conservative status and anxiety threads relative to global tectonic shifts? American adventures in Vietnam, collapse of the Soviet Union, adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan? In hindsight, my liberal blindness to Trump was tied up in my inability to connect that similar conservative movements had already been washing across the world. MAGA clearly rhymed and then accelerated all of it. Over the centuries, science and technology shrinks the world. What is clear to me is that capital A mass Anxiety about capital S Status track in exactly the opposite direction that one would expect. That is to say that conservative personal and then group psychology seems to not respond to a more connected and interdependent world with seeing the world as smaller - but as much larger. Yet the opposite is true. And so larger in the mind does not just cash out as personal and then mass fears of the unknown. It also remarkably embraces the belief that this "larger" world allows for the need for using the latest technoligical advances to rectify and "make right again" what causes this mass anxiety. They double down on "large world." I believe conservatives when they use social media to drive violence and inssurection. I believe them when they threaten to drop nuclear bombs. We needed to believe Hitler when he believed the world was large enough to embrace the justification and so-called morality of Lebensraum, and finally the mass industrial extermination of people. The world is materially and psychologically smaller. Now more than ever does the world drop at your doorstep daily. Actually by the minute. That makes it smaller, and puts a premium on educating ourselves in order to protect a very specific and careful political economy. Conservatives educate their ranks in the ways that cannot but result in ever more horrific results - that the world is large enough to absorb what they clearly want to do.
Ryan Erickson
Awesome ep, love me a good historiography discussion, and in particular appreciated the (brief) note on status as a powerful force in motivating right anti-woke churlishness (trollishness?). I think, though, that over-emphasizing status occludes something else about conservatism and distrusting "the invention of fire/the wheel" that's occurred to me the older I've gotten and perhaps yearned for a different world on some subconscious level I've yet to unpack. There's something about tendency toward conservatism and notions of safety, and the status point is one manifestation of anxiety over loss. This isn't a phenomenon restricted to "conservatives" at all -- I feel like it's very human, but that culture and shifts in it might motivate someone more to conservatism depending on their degree of integration in that culture and the relative sense of safety they derive from it. I feel the tug, too, sometimes -- even if it still seems a lot less compelling to me on a bunch of levels than whatever my version of being on the left is.
Know Your Enemy
Lol no, but you COULD traverse the 4th wall and come back on the pod to discuss these matters sometime soon… (-Sam)
Rick Perlstein
No need to go all Marshall McLuhan on y'all! xoxo
Rachel Leap
Hoovers politics were shaped by his power and not the social movements at the base?? I'm not sure that can be stated. If there hadn't been social movements to enjoy and approve of Mccarthy witch hunts and interventionist policies in leftist states around the world, there would have been outcry. While many people would not have been members of "far right" groups as you describe, just as today those conspiracies have a way of being watered down for mass consumption. The myths the right tells themselves is the justification for shaping world policy to the benefit of white people, not the other way around.
Nico Villarreal
It seems strange the lack of self reflection in this episode: kym has consistently been a kind of psychologizing of the right. Yes you talk a bit about these big state associated structures and civil society groups as objects, but only as being piloted by these psychologically driven personalities. Do some political economy and class analysis why don't you?
erik w bjorke
The politics of Seinfeld sounds very interesting.
David in Brooklyn
I haven't heard the podcast yet, but this is an absolutely essential course correction, to judge by your description. Thank you in advance.
