All right, welcome listeners to episode 85 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host.

I'm not here as always with my great friend Sam of the Bell.

Sam is currently out west doing some skiing, getting some richly deserved R&R.

But don't worry Sam fans, of which I'm the biggest of course.

You're only going to be missing him during this brief introduction.

He was, as you've come to expect, A brilliant and eager participant in the conversation we're about to share.

This episode is one we thought was just right to start off the New Year with.

We're taking a step back and doing an episode on the historiography of US conservatism,

of the American right, which is to say we're looking at some of the debates mostly but not entirely among academic historians

about how they've tried to understand the rise of the right in the second half of the

20th century in the United States and beyond.

Where do you start that story?

What might be the periodization scheme you have in mind?

How do you trace continuity and discontinuity over these decades?

How do you parse the relationship between movement

organizations and think tanks and groups in terms of how they relate to something

like the Republican Party, to our political parties and institutions.

How do you relate the conservative movement and the rise of right-wing politics to other

currents in our history going on during those same decades.

These are questions that historians had been debating for some time, but they really were

catalyzed in a new way and kind of reinvigorated with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and in particular it caused many historians

...