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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