Last Updated on September 19, 2025 by Serena Zehlius, Editor
Devoted Know Your Enemy listeners will recall that, in November 2021, we released a fairly dense, theory-driven episode on Frank Meyer, the communist from New Jersey whose exploits on behalf of the Party in the United Kingdom got him kicked out of the country and back to the United States.
He eventually turned right and became a key figure in the postwar U.S. conservative movement, both as an editor at National Review and an architect of institutions like the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Conservative Party of New York.
Of course, we had more to say about Meyer, and we’re devoting another episode to him, this time focused on the details of his incredible life, thanks to the publication of an extraordinary new biography of Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn’s The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
Flynn discovered a trove of never-before-seen papers of Meyer’s that range from personal documents (tax returns, Christmas cards from Joan Didion, his dance card from college) to his correspondence with nearly every conservative writer and intellectual of note in the 1950s and ’60s.
Armed with these files, Flynn offers a vivid portrait of a brilliant, eccentric political life and mind.
Further reading
Daniel J. Flynn, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (2025)
Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo(Regnery, 1962)
F.A. Hayek, “Why I am Not a Conservative,” from The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition(2011)
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976)
Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative(Doubleday, 1979)
“Against the Dead Consensus,” First Things, March 21, 2019
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