Avoiding Zoological Contempt

An interview with Sam Adler-Bell

I’m back with a Q&A with Sam Adler-Bell, an amazing magazine writer and co-host of the popular podcast Know Your Enemy. Enjoy.

I found your essay on women leaving the New Right really fascinating. I think you report deftly on the fractures of the right and their ideology. What was it like talking to these women? What did you learn that surprised you and did the reception of the piece shift anything for you?

Thank you! I really enjoyed reporting that piece. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love talking to conservatives. (And although those women were leaving MAGA, they were basically all still quite conservative and religious.) I don’t like debating people, however. Basically at all. So it’s especially fun for me when I’m reporting — and not podcasting — because I can get somone on the phone and just have a long conversation, without pointing out all the little things we disagree about. (People love to be paid attention to, and they say really interesting things when you make them feel heard.) That piece was also challenging because I found I genuinely liked all the women; they were pleasant to talk to, curious, and at least somewhat searching and self-critical. They had been humbled by an experience and were trying to figure out what to do about it. Humility isn’t always in high supply on the right. That made me feel a special obligation to represent them accurately, to avoid being contemptuous or zoological. And I think maybe some people — on the left — who reacted negatively to the piece were reacting against that impulse in me, the lack of contempt in the tone. A more serious journalist would probably say it shouldn’t matter whether you like your subjects, or that you shouldn’t allow those personal feelings to bias your reporting. But I’m not a very serious journalist. And I don’t really believe those journalists are telling the truth anyway.

The reaction from the right was more or less exactly what I expected. Basically: “The right doesn’t have a problem with women, and I hope those lying bitches get raped and die!”

Your column at New York is mostly thinking about politics and culture on a tight turn around it seems, from Luigi Mangione to Gaza to Biden’s incapacity, how do you try to sort out the signal from the noise for these pieces? Do you find it difficult to illuminate something or do you feel ready to jump into the discourse? How did you get into writing a column?

I started writing columns at New York a few years ago to fill in for a staff writer who was on leave. At the time, I was very plugged into the daily churn of discourse, especially on the left, because I was addicted to Twitter. That made it easy to churn out takes. Nowadays, I am mostly repulsed by Twitter/X, and I get a lot more of my news from magazines and newspapers. I’m becoming a boring old person with conventional opinions. So it’s harder. But I think that can be an advantage, sometimes, because the audience I have in mind for the New York column is not necessarily “leftists” or even people who are particularly interested in politics. My column appears in the print, so folks who pick up the magazine to read the cover story (a celebrity profile, say) might flip to it. That’s cool. I just want the column to be stylish and morally serious and legible to people who aren’t politics nerds. I hope it usually is.

Your cultural criticism at Dissent and the Baffler is often interested in these sort of steely figures. Janet Malcolm, John Le Carre. I guess the Marvel World piece is a different scene, but you see my drift. And of course Know Your Enemy is also choosing often cold, enigmatic, sometimes intelligent right-wing figures. How do you decide what art and culture is worth writing about?

That’s a very interesting observation, Grace! It might also apply to the psychoanalysts I’ve written about, like Adam Phillips and Winnicott. My first instinct is to say that I’m drawn to people like Malcolm — who is so very poised and controlled and inheld — because I am not like that at all. I’m very talkative and bubbly and people-pleasing. I am incapable of cultivating an air of mystery about myself. I am always saying too much and betraying myself, which Malcolm never does. (But I aspire to reticence!) On the other hand, the thing I discovered about Le Carre, especially from reading his correspondence, was that he was much more neurotic and prone to excess than he seems on the page; very self-loathing and narcissistic and variously obsequious and resentful toward his peers. Today we would say he had a bad case of “imposter syndrome.” He exchanged a lot of letters with Philip Roth. And like Roth, he was obsessed with status and excelled at making money. I fear I have some of these impulses too.

As for how I decide what art and culture to write about, it usually finds me. I have a few recurring interests that my editors are aware of — Freud, spy novels, Bob Dylan, Jewish stuff — and they often assign me good stuff. I am supposed to be writing a book right now, so I say no to a lot of assignments. But the best editors are able to make me offers I can’t refuse.

Are there any political trends you think are being underreported on or strains of discourse you’re keeping tabs on?

I am very distracted by the book, so I’m not paying enough attention to know what’s being underreported. I would say that everyone should be much more concerned about what’s happening in Cuba — the suffering, and the very high likelihood that the administration is going to pull a regime change operation there — but I am now remembering that The Daily just did a Cuba episode. If Barbaro is on the case, it can’t be an underreported trend. Nonetheless: eyes on Cuba.

How have you been making sense, if at all, on the discourse of liberal versus leftist? Especially as the DSA tries to blur the gap.

I fear I also have conventional old man opinions about this. I am so happy that the socialist movement continues to grow and mature. I often say that I became a socialist when being a socialist was embarrassingly uncool and anachronistic. Like being a model train hobbyist. I think it’s fantastic that chic people are socialists now, and that socialists have learned how to win. We’ve come a long, long way. There’s no time to rest on our laurels, but I do think it’s worth remembering. I have deep wells of contempt for the parts of the Democratic Party that are still trying to marginalize and stigmatize the left. But I also don’t think they’re doing a particularly good job. It’s basically guaranteed that every viable 2028 candidate will talk about affordability, inequality, and Gaza. That’s amazing. And the left is largely responsible for that. I am perhaps less invested in policing the distinction between liberal and leftist; if the liberals are talking like leftists, that’s a victory in my book.

Rapid fire over/under

1. Raymond Chandler

Under

2. Zizek

(whispers) under

3. Reagan

Over

4. Video games

Over

5. The term neoliberal

properly rated

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Image: Francis Bacon.

Charli XCX for The Fader.