Know Your Enemy
patreon
Hindsight is 2021
🕑 Added 2021-12-23 19:18:24 +0000 UTCWith another year of the podcast, the pandemic, and American decline in the rearview, we turn to Know Your Enemy's absurdly brilliant listeners for guidance and intellectual stimulation. That's right, folks, it's a mailbag episode! And thanks to you, our cups runneth over with fascinating questions. Along the way, we discuss the intellectual legacy of one-time National Review wunderkind Garry Wills; why Bill Buckley never wrote a great book; right-wing half-wit propagandists like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk; conservative feminism; Richard Nixon's role in conservative history; Vatican II; Bob Dylan's artful incoherence; our favorite books; and our favorite bourbons. We also take a few minutes to discuss listener feedback from our last episode with Nate Hochman. We are truly blessed with the most curious, sophisticated, and intellectually voracious listeners in the podcast game. We love you freaks so very much.
So strap in! Like the year 2021, it's a wild ride, with many twists, turns, and digressions.
Further Reading:
Matthew Sitman, "There Will Be No Buckley Revival," Commonweal, Jul 28, 2015.
Garry Wills, "Daredevil," Atlantic, Aug 2009.
Bare Ruined Choirs (1979)
Confessions of a Conservative (1979)
John Wayne's America (1997)
Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.
Leonard Coen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
Kaya Oakes, The Defiant Middle (2021)
Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1945)
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1982)
Dan Georgakas & Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1998)
Norman Rush, Mating (1991)
Comments
Loved the episode, but was quite surprised at Sam's assertion that human nature, whatever it ultimately is, has little bearing for a political project. Maybe I misunderstood this admittedly brief aside, but I've always taken the project of liberals and neoliberals to be very firmly grounded in an idea that their ideal of freedom comes from a kind of ignorance of true human nature and that no government ought to ever try to maximize well-being because that would be taking a stance on human nature when none can be made. I take leftists to in general be saying that there are fundamental principles of human nature and well-being that we ought to organize around (e.g., that human nature ultimately guarantees that a free market system will be exploitative; that human nature requires social contact, rest, cooperation, etc. for us to be well, etc.). I'm wondering if there would be value to exploring some of this in a future mailbag episode. Thanks for an amazing KYE year!
Bob Dylan believing he could do political songs better than anyone else is a pretty sick joke given the section about Bob in the Phil Ochs documentary. Never thought much of his music but that story disgusted me with him as a person.
