The long-awaited Trotsky & the Wild Orchids interview with Kimberly Phillips-Fein, about her book, Fear City, is now out. @RayHaberski thinks he sounds particularly smart in this episode. 🤔#USIH #twitterstorians wildorchids.libsyn.com/ep-thirty-fear…

Our guest: Kimberly Phillips-Fein, professor of history at Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, & Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis & the Rise of Austerity Politics. #USIH

A few of the questions we asked Kim: Like most historians of 20C US we first became familiar with your work when we read Invisible Hands, about how rich right-wingers created a libertarian intellectual movement. Why did you focus your early scholarship on the political right?

In a 2011 JAH state of the field essay, you wrote about recent volume of historiography on conservatism: “With this work done, the field has arrived at a new maturity. As a result, we now have the opportunity to move beyond the closely focused studies of movement history..."

"that have dominated the scholarship thus far & to reconsider our ideas about the relationship of the Right to the broader trends of American political history. While we now know a great deal more than we once did about the internal history of the conservative movement..."

"we're just beginning to rethink the broad sweep of the twentieth century in light of what we have learned.” Do you think scholarship since 2011 is moving in this direction? How would you survey the field now? (She dropped LOTS of historiographical knowledge in answer to this.)

We focused most of conversation on Fear City. Most surprising thing was how deep social democracy was embedded in the city prior to the crisis of 70s. Was this surprising to you? Is this a gap in our collective memory? If so, what explains the gap?

Main takeaway of Fear City seems to be that understanding this history is important to our larger understanding of the rise of neoliberalism. Which makes sense as it being a piece of your larger body of work—a sort of sequel to Invisible Hands.

The question, that I believe @RayHaberski asked, was something along the lines of- does neoliberalism provide a new umbrella to understand conservatism, and Kimberly Phillips-Fine ended up talking about the transformation of liberalism. . . My follow up question for all of you is