Know Your Enemy: Political Fictions

Matt and Sam talk to Vinson Cunningham about his debut novel Great Expectations, political theater, and Barack Obama.

Vinson Cunningham (Arielle Gray)

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.

Today, we’re joined by one of our favorite writers and thinkers, Vinson Cunningham, to discuss his excellent debut novel, Great Expectations, which tells the story of a brilliant-but-unmoored young black man, David Hammond, who finds himself recruited—by fluke, folly, or fate—onto a historic presidential campaign for a certain charismatic Illinois senator. A staff writer at the New Yorker, Vinson also worked for Obama’s 2008 campaign in his early twenties (he bears at least some resemblance to his protagonist). And his novel provides a wonderful jumping-off point for a deep discussion of political theater; the novel of ideas, race, faith; the meaning of Barack Obama; and the meaning of Kamala Harris.

Also discussed: Christopher Isherwood, Saul Bellow, Garry Wills, Ralph Ellison, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Pierce, and Kobe Bryant! If you can’t get enough Vinson, check out his podcast with Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz, Critics at Large.

Further Reading:

Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations: A Novel (2024)

— “The Kamala Show,” The New Yorker, Aug 19, 2024

— “Searching for the Star of the N.B.A. Finals,” The New Yorker, June 21, 2024

— “Many and One,” Commonweal, Dec 14, 2020.

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2001)

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

— Shadow and Act (1964)

David Haglund, “Leaving the Morman Church, After Reading a Poem,” New Yorker Radio Hour, Mar 25, 2016.

Phil Jackson, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior (1995)

Glenn Loury, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (2024)