Up From Straussianism (w/ Matt McManus & Victor Bruzzone)
Matt answers questions about his intellectual, political, and spiritual journey on the Plastic Pills podcast.
Duration
1h 54m
Broadcast on
17 Jul 2022
Audio Format
other
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Here's something fun and a little different: your beloved cohost Matt Sitman was recently interviewed by Victor Bruzzone and Matt McManus on their podcast, Plastic Pills, and the ensuing conversation — about Matt's own history, the right-wing intellectual pipeline, and the enduring and contested influence of Leo Strauss on the conservative movement and its minds — is just fascinating.
So we're sharing it with you, dear listeners. I do want to acknowledge the elephant in the room: we're in a bit of a summer slow down at KYE headquarters. After sprinting to get the Roe v Wade series done last month, we've all had to take a bit of a breath amid the July heat — our producer, Jesse, has been on vacation — and so there've been fewer new episodes in the feed than we would prefer. But thank you for bearing with us. And trust that many excellent episodes are in the works!
...if you're hurting for KYE content, feel free to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access our back catalog of bonus episodes!
Welcome listeners to Know Your Enemy. I'm Sam Atherbell, and very shortly you will hear the voice of my co-host Matt Sitman. Because what I'm introducing here today is an appearance he made on the Plastic Pills podcast, which is a philosophy podcast hosted by Victor Prezone and Matt McManus. I listened to this interview with Matt the other day and convinced him that we should share it with you guys, our listeners, the Know Your Enemy listeners, because it's incredibly good. And a lot of stuff that Matt covers about his experiences as a young conservative intellectual. And in particular, his ideas about Leo Strauss and the Straussian influence on American conservatism that I am certain you all will find fascinating as I did. So in a few seconds, I'll play that interview for you. I did want to offer an apology for the summer slowdown we've been having here at Know Your Enemy headquarters, we haven't been putting out as many episodes as we'd like to. There are various reasons for that, but I won't try your patience with excuses. Instead, I'll just say that we have some incredibly great episodes coming up. And thank you for bearing with us in the dog days of July. With all that said, I'm going to throw this off to Matt McManus and Victor Prezone, who interviewed my beloved co-host, Matt Sittman, on their podcast, Plastic Pills, enjoy. For those of our listeners who have no familiarity with you or Know Your Enemy, can you tell us a little bit about how it is that you can't be so interested about in conservatism and you're all a little bit about your own political journey? Sure. The short version is that, I mean, Know Your Enemy is a podcast, as I mentioned. I do with my great friend, Sam, Heather Bell. We started it, I think, spring of 2019. So it's actually—we've been doing it for a few years now. But it's focused on the right, on the conservative movement in the United States, mostly the post-war movement, the conservative intellectual movement that we associate with the rise of Ronald Reagan and kind of the rightward shift in our politics. But my interest in that stem from the fact that I was a young conservative. I'm on the left now, I don't hesitate to call myself a socialist, a democratic socialist. I'm on Descent's editorial board now. Yeah. And I should say the Descent tradition is really the one I feel most comfortable identifying with some of the emphases they've had over the years. So I'm very proud of that. And one reason I became connected to Descent was, as a young conservative, when I was 23 years old, I took a graduate seminar with Michael Kason in the history department at Georgetown. It was on the American conservative movement, actually. And this was like spring of 2005 after George W. Bush had won re-election. And it was really like, maybe there's something we're missing here. Why do they keep winning? And he said that at the start of the class. That's partly why he was drawn to those figures and those questions. But I was a young conservative. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, both religiously and politically conservative. I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church. Fundamentalist is not my pejorative, it's their self-descriptor. King James Bible, a lot of end-time stuff.
Transcription truncated.
Matt answers questions about his intellectual, political, and spiritual journey on the Plastic Pills podcast.
