What does is it mean to be "conservative" in America? My guest on this episode, professor and writer Corey Robin, has spent a great deal of his career thinking about conservatism and its particular influence in the U.S. His most recent book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, investigates the consistent themes and ideologies underlying this movement, and offers some startling conclusions that, perhaps unsurprisingly, make a lot of conservatives really angry. In this conversation, we talk about his coming of age in the Reagan eighties, his college years spent confronting the realities of Ivy League endowments, and his current work in publications from Harper's to the New York Times. You can find more of Robin's political analysis on his blog, coreyrobin.com.