When Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell sat down within the spring of 2019 to start out the podcast “Know Your Enemy,” all they’d was a microphone, a cheeky title and the obscure hope that “yet one more podcast the place two leftist bros information you thru the swampy morass of the American proper,” as they put it, may be one thing different individuals would really take heed to.
“We had no thought what we have been doing,” Adler-Bell, 31, mentioned throughout an interview final month in Sitman’s house in Manhattan, groaning on the point out of that first episode, which featured loads of awkward fumbling and jokes about Sitman’s Leo Strauss tattoos.
Sitman, 40, a self-described “recovered conservative” (with no tattoos), supplied a considerably extra charitable take.
“We simply love speaking to one another,” he mentioned.
Practically three years and 100 episodes later, “Know Your Enemy” has moved from being a cult favourite to one thing of a must-listen for the form of one who is as within the inner politics of Nationwide Assessment, circa 1957, as within the present jousting on Capitol Hill.
The podcast contextualizes at this time’s hot-button debates just like the battles over important race concept in faculties. But it surely principally provides deep dives into conservative mental historical past, going into the weeds of the weeds armed with studying lists, reams of footnotes and archival paperwork.
Its viewers of roughly 25,000 to 50,000 listeners per episode (in keeping with the hosts) could also be tiny by the requirements of Joe Rogan, and even the socialist podcast “Chapo Entice Home.” However in our hyper-polarized occasions, “Know Your Enemy” has emerged as one thing middle-aged liberals, younger democratic socialists and Gen Z conservatives hungry for deeper perspective on the tumult of the Trump period can all love.
“They actually do their homework,” mentioned Nate Hochman, a 23-year-old author for Nationwide Assessment who described himself as fan “earlier than it was cool.” “They’ve learn extra conservative political concept than most conservatives.”
Whereas “enemy” could give the title its juice, the operative phrase is “know” — and, probably, emulate?
Younger progressives “don’t perceive why the suitable retains profitable,” mentioned Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Instances E book Assessment who’s engaged on a biography of William F. Buckley.
“What Sam and Matt say is, have a look at it a distinct means,” Tanenhaus continued. “Don’t simply see the suitable because the enemy, pure and easy. See them as good — and possibly smarter than you’re.”
The podcast started at a fortuitous second in 2019. Early salvos within the fractious (and hard-to-decipher) debate between the conservative writers David French and Sohrab Ahmari had began lighting up the conservative pundit-sphere, and the primary Nationwide Conservatism Convention, the place a Who’s Who of the suitable tried to hash out an ideologically coherent model of Trumpism, was just some months away.
“By that time, many of the magazines and think-tanks and funders on the suitable had began making the Trump pivot,” mentioned Sitman, who’s leaving his job on the liberal Roman Catholic journal Commonweal later this month to put in writing and podcast full time. “Because the mud was settling, you could possibly see the place issues have been at.”
A couple of months in, the democratic socialist journal Dissent grew to become sponsors, as listenership steadily grew. (The podcast presently takes in about $17,000 month from subscribers, who join tiers, starting from “Younger American for Freedom” to “Unreconstructed Monarchist.”) The “breakthrough,” Sitman mentioned, got here in January 2021, with an episode on the roiling debate over whether or not President Trump is a fascist.
The Jan. 6 rebel, Sitman mentioned, felt “very vindicating” of “the penchant for authoritarian minority rule” on the suitable, which the podcast had been noting from the start.
The (relative) calm of the primary yr of the Biden presidency created extra room for scholarly explorations, like episodes on the friendship between Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, and on Frank Meyer, the ex-Communist Nationwide Assessment editor and creator of “fusionism,” the wedding of free-market economics and social traditionalism that outlined postwar conservatism.
And in a very head-snapping installment, the hosts, joined by Tanenhaus, examined the conservatism of Joan Didion, who contributed frequently to Nationwide Assessment early in her profession (and who in 2001 wrote that she would have voted for Barry Goldwater in each election after 1964, if she’d had the prospect).
These biographical dives discover favourite “Know Your Enemy” themes of mentorship and friendship, conversions and trajectories, with a wealthy sense of psychology and literary shock. Sitman likes to cite a former professor: “The connection between gossip and philosophy is tenuous however actual.”
As for his personal trajectory, Sitman grew up in a working-class, fundamentalist Baptist household in central Pennsylvania, steeped in “God and weapons conservatism,” as he put it in a 2016 essay. He graduated from a small Christian school, and after an internship on the Heritage Basis, enrolled in graduate college at Georgetown, finding out political concept with the conservative scholar George W. Carey.
What peeled him away from conservatism, beginning in his mid-20s, he mentioned, was disgust at conservatives’ assist for torture, in addition to rising embrace of sophistication politics, which pulled him towards democratic socialism.
He transformed to Catholicism in 2015. His religion, and the way in which he sees human vulnerability as central to politics, is a touchstone on the podcast.
“I really feel responsible about making Sam be taught a lot in regards to the Catholic Church,” Sitman mentioned. Adler-Bell shot again: “I’m going to make you learn Freud in some unspecified time in the future.”
Adler-Bell, grew up in a progressive, secular Jewish household in Connecticut. He was lively in a student-labor alliance whereas an undergraduate at Brown, and later labored on the advocacy group Demand Progress and interned at The Nation.
He mentioned his immersion in conservative thought “defamiliarized the left,” forcing him to assume tougher about why he believed what he believed.
“Lots of people on the left solely come into contact with the stupidest variations of right-wing arguments — the least subtle, the least attention-grabbing, the least literary,” he mentioned.
On the podcast, and in individual, Sitman has a genial professorial vibe, spiking his discovered explications with anecdotes about distinguished figures, a few of whom he knew personally. Adler-Bell is saltier, all the time keen, as he half-jokingly places it, to spotlight the extra “lurid and prurient” features of the suitable.
Sitman mentioned the podcast has broken some “already frayed” relationships with former mentors and associates. However he emphasised that, not like another apostates from the suitable, he wasn’t “embittered.”
“I’m!” Adler-Bell interjected, slapping his knee. “That’s why it’s good to have me, an argumentative Jew.”
Not all conservative listeners are unqualified followers. Matthew Schmitz, 34, a columnist at The American Conservative and former senior editor at First Issues, mentioned Sitman and Adler-Bell have been “extraordinarily good at their jobs,” calling the podcast “higher than virtually something on public radio.” That wasn’t fully a praise.
“‘Know Your Enemy’ falls right into a type of ideological orientalism, presenting right-wing concepts as a mélange of the backward, regressive and decadent,” he mentioned.
Which brings up a still-unsettled query for the hosts: How a lot to speak with conservatives, versus simply speaking about them?
Up to now, solely a handful of “enemies” have appeared as company, together with Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist for The Instances. All of the conservative company are “slightly bit heterodox,” Sitman conceded. Adler-Bell added: “Now we have a ‘no hacks’ coverage.”
Nonetheless, after an episode with Hochman (one of many younger conservative radicals featured in a much-discussed latest article by Adler-Bell in The New Republic), some listeners wrote in with issues the hosts had “platformed” him with out pushing again onerous sufficient.
The hosts say they thought they have been robust, urgent him, for instance, on the position of white racial backlash in fueling postwar conservatism. “We belief the intelligence of our listeners,” Sitman mentioned. However in addition they acknowledged that, “as two white guys,” they’re much less prone to expertise some issues conservatives say as “deeply offensive or dehumanizing.”
Their objective isn’t any squishy mutual understanding or bipartisan compromise, however clarification — and the sheer pleasure of dialog. “It’s nice to have an opportunity to speak to individuals you disagree with, with out pondering the mission is to seek out widespread floor,” Adler- Bell mentioned.
Sitman, once more hitting the extra professorial notice, paraphrased the British thinker Michael Oakeshott, from his essay “On Being Conservative.”
“The purpose of going fishing isn’t to catch fish,” he mentioned. “It’s to be out on the water.”