A discussion on Philip Rieff, a conservative sociologist concerned that society was being driven by therapeutic ideas and psychological institutions rather than by religious or political ones.
For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI.
Matt and Sam answer listener questions about religion and the left, literature, white Christian nationalism, conspiracy theories, and more.
Matt and Sam discuss Garry Wills’s 1970 masterpiece of political reporting and analysis, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man.
A conversation on the MLB playoffs, baseball’s place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more.
A conversation about the George W. Bush administration, the conservative religious publication First Things, and how today’s right became so deranged.
Barbara Ehrenreich was an essential guide to the inner life of American class conflict.
A conversation about Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.
What exactly did Christopher Lasch want?
Conservative intellectuals helped bridge the gap between the religious right and the institutional Republican Party in order to end the right to abortion.
Matt and Sam dig into the origins of the Christian right, its eventual embrace of anti-abortion politics, and how it joined forces with the GOP.
Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael of the 5-4 podcast discuss the impending end of Roe v. Wade—and how the right used the courts to achieve its aims.
The story of how William F. Buckley Jr. defied expectations and showed mercy to a death-row prisoner.
Gabriel Winant joins the podcast to discuss what the populist right gets wrong about the history of the American working class.
Writer and advocate Gillian Branstetter joins the podcast to discuss the right’s war on trans people.