Know Your Enemy - After the Theocons (w/ Damon Linker)

Matt and Sam talk to Damon Linker about the George W. Bush administration and the conservative religious publication First Things, his own Straussian-tinged skeptical politics, and how today's Right became so deranged.

Duration: 1h 28m
Broadcast on: 20 Sep 2022
Audio Format: other

Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he's a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He's also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what's happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsletter he titled Eyes on the Right.

In this conversation, Matt and Sam talk with Linker about what his own trajectory can teach us about the Right: his experiences working at First Things while the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq; why thinks Sarah Palin marked a turning point on the Right; and his case for understanding Donald Trump as a political, rather than legal, problem.

Sources:

"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996

Damon Linker, "There is No Happy Ending to America's Trump Problem," New York Times, Aug 21, 2022

"A Giving of Intellectual Accounts," Eyes on the Right, Sept 9, 2022

"How Do You Solve a Problem Like Donald Trump?" Eyes on the Right, July 18, 2022

The Theocons: Secular America Under Seige (Doubleday, 2006)

Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, Aug 24, 2015

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All right. Welcome listeners to episode 62 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my great friend, Sam Edler Bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. We're covered from my birthday party yet. Honestly, it took a whole day, but yes. I'm glad you only get a year older once a year because I couldn't handle it. Well, we're here to introduce a really great episode one I'm excited to share. Sam, who's our guest today? We have Damon Linker on the pod. Yes. Our listeners should know something about Damon. He's someone I've actually known for years. We mentioned his book, The Theokons, in the third of our row trilogy episodes. Right. Used to be an editor at First Things. Kind of broke with that crowd, that scene for reasons we get into in this episode. But now this will be of interest to our listeners too. He runs a sub-stack newsletter called Eyes on the Right, which is really dedicated to analyzing, well, what's happening among conservatives and on the right. And he does that from his own kind of idiosyncratic political position, which is different from ours because he's not a leftist. And it's useful. It's useful. His sub-stack is really good and comes at these questions from a slightly different vantage point than we do. And I like reading it. Yeah. He's also, this might help situate him a little bit. He's a fellow at the Niskanon Center, the kind of bleeding heart libertarians, former libertarians. Yeah. They also have us to describe their project. For many years, he wrote a column for The Week. I remember when he was writing for The Week, it seemed like his column came out like every day, but maybe it was like three times a week or something. He has incredibly prodigious output in general and manages to be interesting in almost all those columns. So we were happy to have him on. And his listeners will get a sense of very quickly. He's got a little bit of a Straussian background. He obviously worked very closely with people at First Things. He has a sort of perspective on that part of the sort of Know Your Enemy universe, extended universe. So I think there'll be lots and lots in this conversation for our listeners to chew on. There's also a sort of political transition narrative here, which of course is something that we're always interested in. Yes.

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