Know Your Enemy - Grateful Dead Conservatives (w/ Sophie Haigney) [TEASER]

Matt and Sam are joined by writer/editor Sophie Haigney to discuss why (some) conservatives love the Grateful Dead — and why we do too. Subscribe on Patreon to hear the rest!

Duration: 2m
Broadcast on: 11 Aug 2023
Audio Format: other

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

The Grateful Dead Conservative (w/ Sophie Haigney)

Another fun summer-y episode for you, our beloved subscribers: This time, we talked to writer, Paris Review editor, and Grateful Dead super-fan Sophie Haigney about a topic we've long pondered: the phenomenon of the "Grateful Dead conservative."

Why is it that right-wing figures including Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Paul Ryan count the Grateful Dead among their favorite bands? Isn't there something odd about these social conservative luminaries loving the Dead, such avatars of 1960s psychedelia, libertinism, and hippie counterculture? Or else, have we misunderstood something essential about the band — their Americana roots, their individualist ethos, their reverence for transcendent experiences — which makes them particularly suitable to conservative sensibilities?

And also why do we all love them so much — this band that tests our patience, produces largely forgettable studio records, and often sounds, in concert, as if they're playing their own songs for the first time? The mind reels...

Strap in for a long, strange, improvisational trip to the heart of these bewildering matters.

Further Reading:

Sophie Haigney, "Those of Us Who Love the Dead," Gawker, Dec 3, 2021.

— "The Final Dead Shows: Part One," The Paris Review, Jul 17, 2023.

— "The Final Dead Shows: Part Two," The Paris Review, July 18, 2023.

— "The Final Dead Shows: Part Three," The Paris Review, Jul 19, 2023.

Ann Coulter, "I’m A Grateful Dead Fan For Life," Billboard, Jun 24, 2016.

Noah Eckstein, "'Wave That Flag': Meet the Deadheads Who Stump for Trump," Variety, Nov 2, 2020.

Zachary D. Carter and Arthur Delaney, "Why Do Conservatives Love The Grateful Dead? We Ask Tucker Carlson," Huffington Post, Jul 15, 2015.

Dean Budnick, "Behind The Scene: Jake Sherman on Phish, the Grateful Dead and Covering 535 Class Presidents at Punchbowl News," Relix, May 12, 2021.

Martin Longman, "Why Do Republicans Love the Grateful Dead?" Washington Monthly, July 3, 2015

Nick Paumgarten, "Dead Head," The New Yorker, Nov 18, 2012.

Hunter Schwartz, "Grateful Dead fans: Surprisingly Republican," Washington Post, Jul 1, 2015.

Marc Tracy, "Saying Goodbye to the Dead. (Again.)" NYTimes, Jul 14, 2023.

Andy Kroll, "Jon Huntsman: We Need a 'Grateful Dead Tour' to Save America," Mother Jones, Jan 8, 2012.

I do think like a huge thing for why the dead has remained so popular over this course of years in so many different iterations. And it's just that the nature of the concerts is so crazy. You're not going to a concert that you know, you show up, you wait around a while and then the concert starts and you leave. It's ideally kind of like a full day experience where you go to the lot for a while and you're just kind of like in this crazy collective experience that I think there are a lot of parallels you can draw you know, pretty easy parallels with like certain types of religious experiences, sports. - Trump rallies. - Trump rallies, you know, huge groups of people having a really good time, having a collective experience, that kind of yearning for that has always been there. And I think crosses a lot of political boundaries and even can be coded kind of conservative. - Well, there's a seeking of transcendence. You know, all these people from all these different walks of life, different white walks of life are there. But they're all focused on the same point. You know, they're all looking at the stage. And I think that's true at Trump rallies as it is at dead shows. I wanted to say too, something that we're always emphasizing on the podcast about Trump and it's pressure about his sort of like just base of really enthusiastic supporters is that it's kind of a freak show. Like it's really carnival-esque. It's not like the old kind of conservatism of, you know, young guys in blazers and bow ties. The Trump rallies where you see somebody in like a giant cowboy hat and like a drag queen and like a group of like evangelical like kid singers, you know, like there's a quality of the sort of like the misfit toys of America coming to have a collective experience that is, I think, an irreducible part of the Trump traveling show, not unlike "Shakedown Street." (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]

Matt and Sam are joined by writer/editor Sophie Haigney to discuss why (some) conservatives love the Grateful Dead — and why we do too. Subscribe on Patreon to hear the rest!