Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor, chief of Current Affairs

Magazine, and I am joined today by Matt McManus. He is a lecturer in political science at the

University of Michigan, the author of the books, The Emergence of Post-Modernity and Liberalism and Liberal Rights.

His upcoming book is The Political Right and Equality, but most importantly for our purposes,

he is also a contributor to the excellent magazine, Current Affairs, where he and I have

co-authored several pieces recently.

Matt McManus, welcome to current affairs.

Yeah, I think it's great to be here.

I've been thinking we should have a chat for a long time, so I'm excited for this.

I have two, and first thing I wanted to ask you is I gather from social media that you are at present,

you and I both have a similar task that we engage in a lot of the time, which is the

perusing of deep research into the texts of the right-wing ideological canon.

It appears, from what I gather, that you are currently reading the memoirs of one Mr.

Ronald DeSantis.

Is that true?

I am, yeah.

I'm writing a review of his book for Jacobin.

That should be out hopefully pretty soon, And it's something, you know.

How is it? What's your take? Well, in the introduction, he rails against elites for about a

page and a half of the name of the people. And that's pretty standard stuff. But there's a really

striking moment about halfway through the introduction where he's like,

by elites, I'm not referring to people of great wealth accomplishment or somebody like

...