Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ January 21, 2025

Matt and Sam talk to historian Erik Baker about his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

This is a fascinating episode that takes up figures that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: the entrepreneurial work ethic.

Historian Erik Baker’s superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour of this most American of ideologies, one that has emerged again and again, in various guises and in different circumstances, to reconcile workers to the contradictions of the U.S. economy, especially the shortage of jobs that has come with its many “innovations” and changes.

What are the historical and even spiritual sources of the entrepreneurial work ethic, and what ideological needs does it serve for bosses and managers? Why is it so seductive to Americans? How does it relate to deeply American impulses relating to responsibility, guilt, and shame? In what ways did the entrepreneurial work ethic serve U.S. aims during the Cold War? And how has it endured in our age of Silicon Valley tech overlords and the re-election of Donald Trump, entrepreneur?

We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.

First Aired on Dissent Magazine’s Know Your Enemy.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ February 10, 2025

Matt and Sam talk to historian Jennifer Burns about the fascinating life, and brutal philosophy, of Ayn Rand.

An atheist, a radical for capitalism, a caricature of a greedy libertarian, a best-selling novelist, a difficult partner and passionate lover, and the self-proclaimed greatest philosopher since Aristotle: Ayn Rand was many things, and we talk about almost all of them in this epic episode.

To do so, we called upon historian Jennifer Burns, whose intellectual biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, is enormously helpful in trying to understand an idiosyncratic writer who, both then and now, fits ambiguously into the “fusionist” postwar conservative movement. Rand remains a controversial figure whose ideas permeate our culture and continue to inspire some of the most consequential (and least appealing) political figures in the United States.

To understand Rand and her influence, we examine her family’s experiences during and after the Russian Revolution; her journey to the United States and early success in Hollywood; the arduous path she trod to become a writer; Rand’s involvement in anti-New Deal politics in the 1930s and ’40s; her ideas, philosophy, and scandalous personal life; and much more.

First Aired on Dissent Magazine’s Know Your Enemy.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Matt and Sam talk to Damon Linker about the George W. Bush administration and the conservative religious publication First Things, his own Straussian-tinged skeptical politics, and how today’s Right became so deranged.

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ September 20, 2022

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Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he’s a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He’s also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what’s happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsletter he titled Eyes on the Right.

In this conversation, Matt and Sam talk with Linker about what his own trajectory can teach us about the Right: his experiences working at First Things while the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq; why thinks Sarah Palin marked a turning point on the Right; and his case for understanding Donald Trump as a political, rather than legal, problem.

First posted on on Dissent’s Know Your Enemy.

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