More Questions, More Answers
Added 2023-11-04 18:49:06 +0000 UTCIn which we answer more of your excellent questions, including: the right-wing panic over children; how to leave grad school; Tillich, Niebuhr, and Dorothy Day; 21st century Bob; how to teach a course on post-war conservatism; and more!
Sources cited:
Matthew Sitman, "Anti-Social Conservatives," Gawker, July 25, 2022.
— "Whither the Religious Left?" The New Republic, April 15, 2021.
Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 2018.
Kyle Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001, (2020)
Paul Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, (2020)
Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism, (2021)
John S Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism, (2021)
Kim Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," Journal of American History, Dec 2011.
Allen Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," The American Historical Review, Apr 1994.
Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong," New York Times, Apr 11, 2017.
Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement, (1979)
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, (1986)
Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, (2017)
Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, (2017)
Never Ending Stories: a Podcast About Bob Dylan & the Never-Ending Tour
Comments
This episode made me feel seen.
Jacob Tootalian
2024-03-01 20:49:43 +0000 UTCI don't even know if you all read comments this long after the episode came out, but I have to suggest, perhaps as a Patreon episode, that you 2 do another episode with Jesse Brenneman, intrepid producer and KYE film critic. In particular, I'd love to hear your takes on the oft-cited but rarely discussed (at least so far as I know) proposed Goldwater ad from the '64 campaign. It is literally one of the most surreal things I've ever seen. Alternately called "Choice" or "The Peoples Choice", it featured John Wayne, and was written by a TV guy and produced by Clifton White, the man who pushed for Goldwater to be drafted as a candidate in 1964. You could spend hours unpacking this movie, which features protesting teens, rioting 'Negroes,' children saying the Pledge of Allegiance, cliffs crumbling, rockets going up, hot young women water skiing, tons of cops in helmets, and a million other disconnected images all intercut together in a bewildering mess, which made it clear that both the youth and the African-American communities were getting out-of-hand. Not to mention the shots of porn-shops, naked parties and other forms of licentiousness. Oh, and quick snapshots of newspaper headlines reading "Smut," "Rioting," "13 Dead," "Terror" and the like. Please. You want to get a sense of what conservatives had going on in 1964, this is your film.
pixlaw
2023-11-20 21:22:54 +0000 UTCHave you lads ever thought about doing an episode on Arthur Bentley?
Ben Rosengart
2023-11-19 22:03:10 +0000 UTCMatt: I loved your, as usual, heartfelt, empathetic response about leaving academia. And there is a weird thing going on over on Twitter about your proposal to host some sort of episode/gathering on the issue. If you decide to do so, and I hope you have the time to do it, please consider including some folks who didn’t leave, but found a different path. Plenty of us out here are forging a difficult, but rewarding path through teaching, service, and just generally being there for undergrads. Like I say, it’s not easy…the academic job market is a mess, and the working conditions can be brutal. These are not reasons to cede this particular ground to the right. In fact these are reasons to fight for that ground, especially at smaller liberal arts schools and community colleges. Love you guys both — your commitment to honest intellectual inquiry is so vital.
Greg Hazleton
2023-11-17 05:32:44 +0000 UTCI’d especially like Sam’s perspective on Oakeshott
natesicles
2023-11-12 02:19:09 +0000 UTCThe public theologians conversation could be continued with an ep on Ivan Ilyich. Fascinating, contradictory person. I’ve heard conservative professors say, “the two biggest influences on me were Leo Strauss and Ivan Ilyich.” Unschooling seems like it would be particularly relevant to the topic of homeschooling that was brought up at one point.
natesicles
2023-11-12 02:16:53 +0000 UTCI'm so glad you caught that! Thought it worth mentioning as an aside. Thanks for listening (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2023-11-10 16:58:53 +0000 UTCI laughed out loud at the description of the KYE audience demogrpahic as "non-tenure track faculty!" As a visiting assistant professor on the market that cut deep.
Daniel D.
2023-11-09 20:03:16 +0000 UTCSlightly off topic as a leftist homeschooler of three I appreciated the s/o to unschooling and the fact that not *all* homeschoolers are right wing religious fanatics. There are dozens of us!
Jennifer Reft
2023-11-08 00:40:07 +0000 UTCThanks Dan! A while back I bought Hall’s essay collection on Thatcherism etc and look forward to digging in
mjs
2023-11-07 19:47:45 +0000 UTCReally glad to have been subscribed for this one. Also want to add that Stuart Hall's "Policing the Crisis" is an awesome read for reconciling the neoliberal turn / Thatcherism, and policing. It was a hugely important text I read a few years before the 2020 uprisings, and really clarified the conflicting interests, power structures, and systematized moral panics that underpinned the contemporary crisis in policing. Huge part of why I became a lawyer and started working in civil rights.
Dan L
2023-11-07 19:32:32 +0000 UTCI’m gonna need at least two more hours of Sam & Matt waxing rhapsodic about late period Bob Dylan. Jack Frost hive rise up!
Sean Keeley
2023-11-07 02:42:13 +0000 UTCIs it worth doing an episode on the paleocons? Or are they just moronic reactionaries? For example, paleocon greybeard Paul Gottfried is a prolific scholar, obviously intelligent, self-possessed, and highly connected. He’s also a crank, a fantasist and a not-so-cryptic race and gender bigot. His stuff in Chronicles magazine makes a mockery of his reputation as man of the mind. The fawning, crazed readers’ comments should be an embarrassment to him but he continues to churn out dross. His dross is far better hinged than the rest of the ideas expressed in Chronicles, btw. Do the paleocons still have influence, are they important, or are they just vicious nutters. Should I cancel my subscription to Chronicles?
Matt Gately
2023-11-07 00:34:48 +0000 UTCThanks for your very thoughtful answer to my question! And I thought your point on the rise of the therapeutic was spot-on. I came across the "age of the crisis of man" through the history of science but it's really all over the place once you look out for it (to my mind, a work of fiction that absolutely nails the weirder corners of that era is PT Anderson's The Master).
Nik
2023-11-06 21:46:42 +0000 UTCsince ribuffo came up, here's a youtube video of a recent conference held in his honor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5pYZKTp1Os
Nic Palar
2023-11-06 20:54:36 +0000 UTCThank you two so much for taking theology and religion seriously as an intellectual pursuit. So many podcasts (especially on the left), have no curiosity (even as a cultural or literary piece) at all about religion, even when it's the subject of the episode.
Shane Montoya
2023-11-06 14:38:38 +0000 UTCBecome a librarian if you want an engaging intellectual life. More academic jobs. NB: you might even get mistreated by former classmates and professors, fun!
Ian McDermott
2023-11-06 13:58:21 +0000 UTCAwesome episode. I especially loved the discussion of late era Dylan. I saw him in Toronto at Massey Hall last weekend and he was incredible. So moving to see him operating at this level at this stage. I wrote a 3700 word piece (lol) about it for my own music Substack: Joel On Records if anyone is interested.
Joel
2023-11-06 00:52:45 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Thank you.
Richard Lauber
2023-11-05 23:53:22 +0000 UTCNTT gang!
Ian Derk
2023-11-05 21:39:46 +0000 UTCSpeaking of Niebuhr, psychology, and immanentizing the eschaton... From his 'Moral Man and Immoral Society' (1932): "A parliamentary socialism which presses toward the goal of social ownership by exerting the full force of the worker's political power in the shifting equilibrium of social and political forces, without certainty that the ultimate goal can be reached, and which is forced to use the method collaboration with other parties, is, however, under some moral and psychological difficulties which have not been fully appreciated by socialists. The abandonment of the eschatological element in socialism means the sacrifice of its religious fervor and the consequent loss of motive power."
DC
2023-11-05 21:39:33 +0000 UTCThis was a really great set of questions, thanks Matt and Sam for your great set of answers! 1. On public theology, and following on from Sam's point about changing religious landscape of American culture and the shift toward the therapeutic. Part of why figures like Bonhoeffer, Day, Tillich, etc. have appeal on both left and right is because they were, in various ways, critiquing modernity and the way its worst excesses had shaken out in the cascading crises of WW1/Great Depression/WW2/Atomic Age. That's a critique both the traditionalist right *and* those of us on the postmodern left want to level now. Our reasons for doing so are very different, but we're aiming at some of the same issues: rampant individualism, the cult of the commodity, disenchantment of the world, loss of place and community, etc. 2. Thanks, both, for selling me on 21st Century Dylan as a vital creative force! I'd stalled out around Modern Times and wasn't really interested in Bob's American Songbook phase, but you convinced me to check back in with Rough and Rowdy Ways for sure. I saw him live in 2012 on the tour for Tempest, at the height of his gravel-and-razor-blades vocal attack; I'm glad I went but think I might enjoy him live even more now. 3. Thanks also for the "history of conservatism" syllabus at the end. I'm a relatively new listener to the pod (since this past summer) and have caught up with a lot of the material, but having a list of must-reads led to me picking up Nash's 'The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945' and also Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' from my uni library. Cheers!
Tom
2023-11-05 20:58:58 +0000 UTCI swear I was thinking about that. It was in a different Kazin seminar I read all that stuff, which is fascinating; the historiographic debates on the Second Klan are basically recent debates about Trumpism! Nancy Maclean is even in the mix! (Matt)
mjs
2023-11-05 20:45:10 +0000 UTCI think that’s how I read it the first time! But in terms of topic and broad approach (APD) it came to mind (Matt)
mjs
2023-11-05 20:42:30 +0000 UTCI think what I was getting at is that the left embraces a kind of secular multiculturalism that dismisses the relationship between religion and culture.
Vincent
2023-11-05 19:44:39 +0000 UTCMatt and Sam - thanks very much for such a thoughtful answer to my question, I appreciate it!
Sean Scanlon
2023-11-05 17:23:50 +0000 UTCNeed a ticktock or yt video of the grad school conversation so I can share it with the uninitiated
Klaus Yoder
2023-11-05 16:41:51 +0000 UTCAn excellent book that addresses the transition from the theological to the therapeutic is Bob Abzug's biography of Rollo May: Psyche and Soul in America. It touches on many of the intellectual connections raised in this episode. May's work bridged that transition.
Michael Young
2023-11-05 15:58:56 +0000 UTCJust started Lexapro. Life changing.
Tim Combes
2023-11-05 15:44:13 +0000 UTCI don’t think many American Muslims feel all that ambivalent about using the language of “genocide” and “occupation” in reference to Israel, especially based on turnout at recent protests. Sure, the left could do more to not alienate religious Democrats and the liberal wings of Christianity and other religions could do more to make their voices heard and not let the right have a stranglehold on religion and religious communities. Religion is not inherently reactionary (liberation theology and the role religion played in the civil rights movement can attest to that), but it's also not surprising that a political ideology that has throughout history often been at odds with the reactionary forces of religious establishments is having some difficulty appealing to religious voters.
Axel Herrera
2023-11-05 15:09:22 +0000 UTCI'd be interested in how you guys would react from a re-read of Teles's book on the Federalist Society. To me, it rreads like a well-intentioned, and accidentally, apologia, falling for its self-representation as basically a debating society, which now feels more like a front for Leonard Leo's rewiring of the judiciary.
Rick Perlstein
2023-11-05 14:58:24 +0000 UTCOn the syllabus question, I would strongly urge bringing in the 1920s KKK, which was an ENORMOUSLY powerful movement--perhaps a million or more members, basically controlled governments in Oregon and Indiana and also many towns, drove the 1924 immigration reform, and is 100 percent consonant with what you've been calling populist conservatism. Start with this 1926 essay and W.E.B. du Bois's response. https://archive.org/details/Klansfightamericanism/page/n19/mode/2up
Rick Perlstein
2023-11-05 14:51:37 +0000 UTCSee also Mark Grief's "The Age of the Crisis of Man" for an analysis of the high-flown rhetoric characteristic of post-WW2 intellectual tomes ("The Nature and Destiny of Man," "The Human Condition"). We imagine that back before multiculturalism this is just how white intellectuals talked, but MG points out that it's a phenomenon specific to the midcentury moment, for some of the reasons mentioned on the pod. It dovetails interestingly with the history of anti-communism in that this sort of language saturated all of the Great Books programs that were created at the time to create a Western Culture counter-myth to the Soviet ideology of history.
Sebastian Lecourt
2023-11-05 13:38:09 +0000 UTCAnother thought: For an on-the-ground look at the difference between mainline, evangelical, and Black churches in the 1970s, there was a BBC program done on the subject in 1977 available on YouTube (part of a series on world religions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SuvACDxGPA
Mark K
2023-11-05 12:43:16 +0000 UTCa few years ago i found this podcast and, after a few episodes, asked the twitter account for a starter book. sam responded with nash’s book. it was a wonderful partner read for that initial dive into the pod. and helped me understand which threads of conservatism i wanted to pull at a little further.
Connor
2023-11-05 12:19:24 +0000 UTCFlourishing intellectual life of German emigres... Thrown back to the most elemental questions about who we are in an age of the kind of atrocities human beings commit against each other... Finding an intellectual community outside of academia (WAY outside)... (cough cough Eric Hoffer, check him out cough)
Mark K
2023-11-05 01:39:46 +0000 UTCThe failure of the mainline churches to capture enthusiasm is also covered in "The Orange Wave", mentioned in my other comment.
Mark K
2023-11-05 01:27:26 +0000 UTCSpeaking of the Sunbelt, I recommend the recent (paid) podcast series "The Orange Wave" by Bradley Onishi which filled in a lot of gaps for me (Vineyard Christian Fellowship was onetime spiritual home to one Bob Dylan). This as well as the recent movie "Jesus Revolution" take seriously the whole Jesus movement that was ascendant during some of our formative years, started by southern Christians moving to cheap land in California. (Hang out near Disneyland if you'd like a free sermon!)
Mark K
2023-11-05 01:21:13 +0000 UTCThe question of what happened to public theology is, in part, the question of what happened to mainline Protestantism. David Hollinger's "After Cloven Tongues of Fire" and Matthew Hedstrom's "The Rise of Liberal Religion" both show what a large role in American culture the mainline Protestant churches played in the early- and mid-twentieth century. Both argue that they successfully laid the groundwork for the secular liberal culture that subsequently forgot about them. Retracing the history of this mainline Protestantism now is a bit like looking for a lost planet by identifying its gravitational shadow.
Sebastian Lecourt
2023-11-05 00:32:04 +0000 UTCThe inability of the left and of the Democrats to acknowledge and appreciate its religious base is infuriating. It’s taken for granted that the left is secular but that is true only for a very specific demographic: urban, college educated, upper middle- and upper-class whites. The reality is that the party is home to the majority of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, religious nones, and (depending on the day) white Catholics. Many (white) progressives were surprised when Muslim parents protested LGBTQ-friendly curriculum in schools. Their shock was emblematic of the left’s cultural and religious myopia. They mistakenly assume that because ethnic minorities overwhelmingly vote Democrat that they do not (or cannot) hold views typically associated with evangelical Republicans. While it may seem very “what’s the matter with Kansas,” it’s not surprising that the GOP has siphoned off Black and Hispanic voters. Church and faith are essential to these communities, and only one party is seemingly capable of speaking to those values. Meanwhile you have well-intentioned but misguided liberals tearing down flyers of missing Israelis, shouting “genocide” and “occupation.” Little wonder religious Democrats feel abandoned by the party and progressive elites.
Vincent
2023-11-04 23:47:35 +0000 UTCOn teaching conservative history after 1945, I heartily recommend ‘From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism’ by Darren Dochuk. Especially for its history of alternative institutions founded by Christian Right entrepreneurs, which cast a long shadow into the later movement.
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-11-04 23:31:39 +0000 UTCWonder if Irving Howe wrote any of the unsigned book reviews in the Niebuhr issue of Time -- that was right around when he joined their staff. ("Although it is as much meditation as fiction in certain parts, and the meditation is not always as profound as it is impassioned, Cry, the Beloved Country has moments of distinction.")
David Glenn
2023-11-04 23:30:29 +0000 UTCI wrote this one on the first q. https://forummag.com/2022/07/22/they-want-your-child/
Rick Perlstein
2023-11-04 22:33:55 +0000 UTCI think I speak for many of us former/current/recovering academics when I say that having a recurring segment of “Matt’s Stories from Grad School” would be extremely popular and appreciated.
Jenna Harmon
2023-11-04 22:30:40 +0000 UTCThanks for More, I appreciate this gift of grace
Matthew Theisen
2023-11-04 22:08:49 +0000 UTCAlso, yes to a homeschooling episode (six year survivor here)
Gavin Dluehosh
2023-11-04 21:54:33 +0000 UTCRegarding your convo about the turn from religious to therapeutic, and questions about anxiety and existence, I commend to you intersubjective psychologist Robert Stolorow’s short book _Trauma and Human Existence_.
Gavin Dluehosh
2023-11-04 21:53:47 +0000 UTCJust read a quick hit Politico profile of "American Moment" — a newish organization fronted by a couple of twenty something dorks focused on beefing up the bench of junior Hill staffers who're committed to a "New Right" orientation and outlook. Already awash in right-wing dollars and already throwing off big bowtie guy meets falangist frat boy vibes. (seems like theyre embracing the typical reactionary "populist" hodgepodge of positions and policy prescriptions: profamily, pro[white, male] worker, anti [all] immigration, ultrahawkish Sinophobia, some version of a slightly less viscous laissez-faire capitalism, isolationism, etc) Would love to hear them get the full KYE treatment at some point in the future. Meanwhile, you're absolutely slaying, keep up the amazing work!!
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2023-11-04 21:48:58 +0000 UTCNon TT faculty right here!
Dónal Gill
2023-11-04 20:11:21 +0000 UTCYes to an all-Oakeshott episode, with or without AS.
Sam Timme
2023-11-04 20:04:57 +0000 UTCYay, mailbag!!
Dan Anderson
2023-11-04 19:16:30 +0000 UTC
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