Tanenhaus, who joined the hosts in August for a discussion of Buckley’s unsuccessful 1965 campaign for mayor of New York, is not the only nonsocialist to be pleasantly surprised by Know Your Enemy’s intellectual heft. Since its launch in 2019, Know Your Enemy, which bills itself as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement,” has become the go-to resource for political junkies and history buffs trying to get a grasp on the protean history of the American right. Despite the openly socialistic sympathies of its hosts, the podcast has found an audience with listeners of all ideological stripes — including dyed-in-the-wool conservatives and Republican shakers-and-movers alongside lefty journalists and liberal academics.

That makes it a unique artifact of the ideologically scrambled post-Trump era: A podcast designed to give committed leftists a critical take on the American right that became a trusted source for old-fashioned rightists and many others in between. Along the way, it has exposed a growing appetite on both the left and the right for a new style of political discourse that avoids predictable Trump-bashing and takes seriously the ideas behind the conservative movement.

“They’ve read more conservative political theory than most conservatives — I mean, they’ve read more political theory than most political theorists, probably,” said Nate Hochman, a fellow at National Review and at the conservative non-profit Fund for American Studies.