Know Your Enemy - How They Did It, Pt. 3: The End of the Beginning

Matt and Sam conclude their in-depth exploration of the overturning Roe v. Wade, this time focusing on the way conservative intellectuals helped bridge the gap between the religious right and the institutional GOP.

Duration: 1h 47m
Broadcast on: 29 Jun 2022
Audio Format: other

In the third and final episode in their series on the overturning of Roe v. Wade—recorded on the day it happened—Matt and Sam pick up with 1990s, the George W. Bush administration, and eventually take listeners up to the present. They focus especially on way conservative, mostly Christian intellectuals, many of them connected to the religious journal First Things, brought Catholics and evangelicals together to fight against abortion rights, with figures like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Robert P. George, and Hadley Arkes providing language and arguments in a more elite idiom—a project that deeply influenced Bush's presidency and helped cement the anti-abortion movement's place not just in the religious right but the broader conservative movement and the GOP.

Sources:

"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994

"Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millenium," First Things, May 1994

"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996

Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday, 2006)

Mary Ziegler, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale University Press, 2021)

Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Eerdmans, 1984)

Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Hadley Arkes, "The End of the Beginning of the End of Abortion," First Things, June 24, 2022

Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, August 24, 2015

Tara Isabella Burton, "The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump," Vox, March 5, 2018

Oh, right listeners, welcome to episode 58 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my friend, Sam Ellerbell. Hi, Matt. Hey, Sam. Usually, this is why I ask how you're doing, but I think I know how you're doing, Sam, which is how a lot of us are doing. Yeah. Not great. You know, this is our third and final episode about how they did it. The overturning of Roe, we actually recorded this on Friday. So we knew that they had done it when we recorded this, and I think that affected how it went. Yeah. I think for listeners looking for our fresh reactions to this terrible ruling that we knew was coming, you'll get it at the beginning of the proper episode. Right. In this our third episode, we really pick up in the early to mid 90s, and we could have approached this a lot of different ways. And we focused on the coterie of intellectuals around First Things magazine, which was founded in 1990, the kind of intellectual organ of the religious right we talk about by the Richard John Newhouse, people like Robert George, Princeton professor, and Hadley Arches, an important figure in the anti-abortion movement himself, who also is an academic and political philosopher, and go through the Bush administration then and kind of take it to the present. So this is how we wanted to close out. And I think it's a story that I haven't read as much about elsewhere. It's a very know your enemy style approach to this history, which our listeners will appreciate, but I think we do kind of justify why looking at the relationship between the popular energies that we talked more about last time and the elite project of anti-abortion politics, which became so much more important in the 90s and leading into the Bush administration. I think we justify why that approach makes sense. And it gives us a lot of opportunity to explore a side of this history that, like you said, I haven't listened to or read as much about elsewhere. Yes. And of course, we talk about a lot of these figures that I knew. So you get some matte stories too in this. I should say from my perspective, one of the real advantages of this episode is that we get somewhat of an insider account of this intellectual milieu because of your erstwhile engagement with it. So listeners will enjoy that, I'm sure. And again, there's two previous episodes you can listen to, so do go back and listen to those if you'd like. It gives some of the context and kind of we pick up where we left off. But other than that, Sam, I think we should just do some housekeeping items and get to it. Yeah. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent, who sponsor the podcast. We love working with them. And one of the things they do for us is they provide free digital subscriptions if you subscribe to know your enemy at $10 a month on patreon.com/knowyourenemy. And of course, for $5 a month, you have access to all of our bonus episodes.

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