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.

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ September 20, 2022

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.

First posted on on Dissent’s Know Your Enemy.

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