Fred Siegel, RIP

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

 May 8, 2023

Very sad to get the news this morning of the passing of historian Fred Siegel. It is hard to know where to begin expressing how great Fred was. He was one of my favorite human beings on the entire planet. Spending time with Fred was always intellectually exhilarating, as he was a cornucopia of knowledge (much of it first hand if you brought up liberal writers such as Irving Howe or Dwight MacDonald), always with the accents of his native Brooklyn Jewish community, which was quite foreign to this California-born WASP. He was the last of the truly conservative New York City Democrats, though by 2020 his disgust with the Democratic Party was so complete that he put aside his dislike of Donald Trump and publicly explained why he was voting for him.

Fred turns out to have been the most repeated guest on the Power Line podcast, and if you missed them, go back and take some of them in, especially his two-part “origin story” interview I did with him back around 2015, here and here. Also not to be missed is our podcast conversation from 2020 on “how the sixties never ended.” If I can find the time in the midst of this week’s heavy travel, I may try to put together a special greatest hits podcasts with highlights from these old shows.

(Snip)

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Mar 27, 2015

The first installment of our long conversation with Fred Siegel.

[Valin]

Mar 28, 2015

The second installment of our long conversation with Fred Siegel. The material about Irving Howe and the Frankfurt school is especially good.

 

 

Apr 2, 2015

The third installment of our long conversation with Fred Siegel. Here Fred reflects more about the 1960s and early 1970s, the radical thinker Michael Walzer, current Israeli politics, and the unseriousness of Howard Dean and John Kerry.

[Valin]

Apr 5, 2015

The fourth installment of our long conversation with Fred Siegel. Here Fred talks about his latest book, "Revolt Against the Masses," and the how the roots of contemporary liberalism can best be traced back to the 1920s.

 

 

Apr 7, 2015

The final installment of our long conversation with Fred Siegel. Here Fred talks about the peculiarities of urban politics today, the effect Obama's failures are having on the left, and how a conservative president ought to govern if elected in 2016.