The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot these days, sometimes so freely that it starts to lose its edge. But what would it actually mean to develop a philosophy of anti-fascism, a sustained, rigorous intellectual framework for understanding how fascism takes hold and what might inoculate us against it? That question feels newly urgent in a political moment when the ideological infrastructure of authoritarianism is being actively rebuilt, and when the thinkers who laid the groundwork for that infrastructure — including, notoriously, Leo Strauss — are being drafted into its service.

Can a philosopher be anti-fascist in method and intention and still have their ideas weaponized by fascists? Is writing that resists easy comprehension — writing that forces its readers to slow down, struggle, and think — a form of resistance or a form of elitism? And is there a meaningful difference between “thinking for yourself” and “doing your own research,” or has that distinction collapsed entirely in the age of the meme and the algorithm?

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at the College of the Holy Cross, whose forthcoming book Adorno and Strauss: An Anti-Fascist Philosophy (SUNY Press) makes the provocative case that these two thinkers — usually filed under opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum — are surprisingly complementary resources for building a philosophical resistance to fascism. Jeff identifies four key areas of convergence: their shared use of Jewish thought as a resource for critiquing political authority; their resistance to what he calls “universal communicability” and the fascist reduction of thought to soundbites and slogans; their critique of the primacy of the practical; and their rejection of teleological conceptions of history. What emerges is a picture of anti-fascism that is less about boots on the ground than about rebuilding the capacity to think in a culture that is doing everything it can to prevent that.

Grab a drink and join us as we sit down with two of philosophy’s strangest bedfellows — and discover that the most unexpected intellectual partnerships sometimes make for the most urgent conversations.

This week’s jukebox picks:

• From Bob: “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” by Dead Kennedys
• From Jeff: “Night by Night” by Steely Dan
• From Leigh: “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” by Woody Guthrie
• From Jen: “Feel It Still” by Portugal, the Man

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc.:

• Theodor Adorno
• Leo Strauss
• The Frankfurt School
• Critical Theory
• Fascism
• Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Sigmund Freud
• Dialectical materialism
• The culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer)
• Esotericism / writing between the lines 
• Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
• Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
• Non-identity thinking (Adorno’s concept)
• Parataxis / paratactic style (Adorno’s compositional method, discussed in relation to Aesthetic Theory)
• Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
• Adorno, “The Essay as Form”
• Martin Heidegger
• Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Beiträge zur Philosophie)
• Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works)
• St. Teresa of Ávila (raised by Jen in relation to “profundity through obscurity”)
• Pierre Hadot (philosophy as a way of life)
• Teleology
• The concept of progress in history
• Maimonides
• The Claremont Institute
• Harry Jaffa (Strauss’s student, “West Coast Straussian”)
• The Declaration of Independence 
• Originalism
• Antonin Scalia
• Samuel Alito
• Clarence Thomas
• William F. Buckley
• Gottlob Frege 
• Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election” (Claremont Review of Books, 2016)
• Bronze Age Pervert
• Curtis Yarvin
• Ideology critique
• Plato, Republic
• Actionism (Adorno’s critique of “concept-less praxis”)
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• Thomas Hobbes
• John Locke
• Autoimmunity (political/philosophical) — as theorized by Jacques Derrida
• Jacques Derrida
• Antisemitism
• Zionism and anti-Zionism 
• Herbert Marcuse 
• Analysis paralysis
• The German Nihilists (1920s context)
• Winston Churchill (“We shall never surrender” — Strauss’s “counter-poison”)
• The etymology of “fascism” 
• Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025)
• Hotel Bar Sessions episode, “Furious Minds” (with Laura Field)
• Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Adorno, Strauss, and Antifascist Philosophy (SUNY Press, forthcoming)
• Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History (SUNY Press, 2015)