Know Your Enemy: From Neocon to Never-Trump

Know Your Enemy: From Neocon to Never-Trump

Matt and Sam talk to Bill Kristol about his journey from neoconservative thought leader to anti-Trump liberal.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

There’s perhaps no living person who better embodies the themes, contradictions, ethos, and pathos of Know Your Enemy than William Kristol, this week’s guest. Today, Kristol is editor at large of The Bulwark, a valuable redoubt of unreconstructed Never-Trumpism, which he helped found in 2018. But before dedicating himself, full-time, to the admirable if quixotic mission of undermining Donald Trump from the center-right—alienating many of his onetime friends in the process—Kristol was best known as an influential practitioner of neoconservatism: a staffer in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations; cofounder (in 1995 and 1997, respectively) of the Weekly Standard and the Project for a New American Century; a prominent champion of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and faithful son of one of neoconservatism’s First Couples: Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Kristol was also trained in political philosophy by the Harvard Straussian (and frequent Know Your Enemy subject) Harvey Mansfield. As such, we had an enormous amount to discuss in a limited amount of time. A few things we covered: What was neoconservatism? How should political theory inform political action? Why didn’t Never-Trump conservatism work? Where did Trumpism come from? Are Straussians to blame for the Iraq War? And, why does Kristol (a longtime proponent of regime change in Iran) oppose Trump’s current war with the Islamic Republic?

Sources:

Harvey Mansfield on Political Philosophy, Conversations with Kristol (2014)

Know Your Frenemies, with Samuel Moyn, Know Your Enemy (2020)

Further Reading: 

William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,  Foreign Affairs (1996)

William Kristol and David Brooks, What Ails Conservatism, Wall Street Journal (1997)

Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (2011)

William Kristol and Steven Lenzner, What was Leo Strauss up to?, National Affairs (2003)

Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (2004)

Sam Adler-Bell, How the War on Terror Fuels Trump, Jacobin (2016)