Know Your Enemy
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Whittaker Chambers, Redux (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)
🕑 Added 2023-04-10 20:35:00 +0000 UTCThe great Sam Tanenhaus (author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography) returns to the podcast for a spirited and gossipy discussion of everything we missed — or only briefly mentioned — in our main episode on Chambers, including: his religious faith, his sexuality, his ideological position in the National Review crowd, Hannah Arendt's review of Witness, and much more.
Plus: we extract from Sam Tanenhaus an update on the status of his HIGHLY-anticipated biography of William F. Buckley Jr... This one is for real heads. Enjoy!
Comments
Know Your Enemy
well said! it's something like that. for my own sake, I just find these transits endlessly interesting. (- Sam)
Benjamin Pletcher
Also, there are so many examples of leftists ‘exiting right’. But I’m hard pressed to think of right wingers who ‘exit left’, besides Matt and Doug Henwood. What do you think accounts for this?
Benjamin Pletcher
I’ve been meaning to mention for awhile what a prominent role political apostasy seems to play in the KYE universe. Is there something particularly telling about our political landscape as a whole in these stories of lost faith, betrayal, defection, and heroic self-criticism? Perhaps the fault lines of axiomatic beliefs and those who fall through them to the other side can be seen as a kind of dialectical mirror—in which the left sees itself in the right’s reflection, and vice versa?
