The Hi there, and welcome to a whole new season of the Ditchcast.

It's September. It's after Labor Day.

I've had my long two-week soak in the tidal pools of the Outer Cape and have dutifully, as his tradition, developed a bronchial infection called the Cape Cod Crud, which in my case because my lungs are so shitty anyway, is the reason I have this

incredibly sexy, raspy voice today. So forgive me for the slight huskiness of my of my pearls of

wisdom. I am thrilled today to have the author of a book that I found really fascinating.

And that seems to me to be a very important theme in the coming years in our politics

and one that the discast is going to be focusing on a bit this year.

And that is the new right, the alt-right, the thinkers that are generating a

post-liberal version of conservatism, how those post-liberal visions have come about, what their

origins are, what the structure of the argument is, and whether it's viable as a political

project, whether it's actually the future as we face, or whether it's a detour that we will

avoid.

Well, Matthew Rose has written a book, A World After Liberalism, which is a study of several really interesting and important radical right thinkers.

He's currently senior fellow and director of the Barry Center on the university and intellectual life, which is the project of the Morningside Institute.

And he previously taught a Villanova.

He's written for magazines such as First Things and the Weekly Standard.

So he's a man of the right,

and yet this book is also both a kind of strange appreciation and yet also horror at.

It's a strange book because it manages to combine both an awareness of the danger and weirdness of some of these ideas,

but also their compelling nature and how deep accord they strike with us.

I tried to grapple with this myself a few years back when I wrote an essay called On Reactionism,

where I tried to understand exactly the power of reactionary thought

...