Transcript:

Mark Oppenheimer: And so First Things made you this offer despite the fact you were, not despite, and you were still a Jew.

Damon Linker: Yes. Although I was in the process of converting and that was also part of the interview.

MO: Oh, they must have loved that.

DL: Oh, of course. Neuhaus was a convert.

MO: That’s what got you the job. I mean, sure, you’re smart and all, but let’s be honest.

DL: It certainly contributed to it. I’m sure it did.

MO: I’m Mark Oppenheimer and this is ARC, the podcast, the audio companion to the web magazine Arc, Religion, Politics, et cetera, which is online at arcmag.org. That’s ARC with a C, ARCMAG.org. And all of these things are productions of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. This week on the podcast, I interview Damon Linker, who is one of my favorite turncoats. I want to spend a moment on that word turncoat. It has really negative connotations. It makes one think of a traitor or someone who’s treasonous. But in the context of American politics, what I really mean by it is somebody who started on the right and moved left or someone who started on the left and moved right. I just mean somebody who was firmly ensconced in one particular political camp and then decided, “You know what?

This camp isn’t for me and I’m going to turn my coat and go in the other direction.” And this is a topic I’m really, really interested in, in part because my brother Daniel wrote a book on it called Exit Right: The Men Who Left the Left and Made The American Century or Remade the American Century. I might be getting that subtitle wrong. But it’s a really good book. It’s about people in the 20th century who started on the left and moved right. Some of them were very significant. President Ronald Reagan, for example, had been a labor leader and somebody very sympathetic to the left. And then in the years before he ran for governor of California, he became more and more conservative and ended up moving over to the right. Of course, the neoconservatives, people like Irving Crystal and Norman Podhoretz fit that description as well as some older characters like James Burnham or Whitaker Chambers, the famous spy.

These were all people who started on the left, often in the communist party or in socialist circles and moved right. But I’m also interested in people who are on the right and then end up moving left. We’re currently in a period where a number of people have done that. If you read a magazine like The Bulwark, you’ll find writing by people like William Kristol and David Frum. People used to be very associated with the Republican Party and may still think of themselves as conservatives, but they really have left behind the Republican Party of Donald Trump and they are now more identified with at least moderate Democrats, let’s say. They are people who are on the center or the center left or maybe even the center right, but compared to where their party is gone, they have moved left of it. And one of the really interesting characters in that set is a guy named Damon Linker.

I’ve been reading Damon Linker’s writing for it must be 20 years now. He too has a substack called Notes from the Middle Ground. He teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s working on a book about the political theorist Leo Strauss, somebody very often associated with the right or even the far right. But I wanted to spend some time with Damon talking about his own story. He was an editor at First Things Magazine, now very much an organ of the Christian right. He also wrote a column for many years for the week and he wrote for the New Republic. And in a lot of his writings, he was identified not just with conservatism but with Catholicism in conservatism. He was a Catholic convert. At some point he left that behind and renounced his conversion and now identifies as some sort of Jew. He has Jewish ancestry and that’s the identity he claims right now.

But I don’t know if he’s particularly religious or observant. We get into that a litle bit in the interview, but the main thing is that he moved from being someone who was very much in the overlapping circles of Catholicism and right-wing politics to being somebody who is neither, neither identified as Catholic nor as a conservative. So an interesting and somewhat special turncoat in the American political scene. As I said, very prolific author, fascinating guy, good newsletter writer, and it was a delight to have him on the podcast. Here’s the first part of my conversation with University of Pennsylvania teacher and substacker and author and political theorist Damon Linker. Damon Linker, thank you for joining us.

DL: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

MO: I want to begin by quoting the introduction my brother gave you on his podcast, Eminent Americans in I think December of 2024. Daniel began, “My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation’s most enthusiastic unapologetic center leftist. He and Matt Iglesias occasionally punch it out for the title in an underground fight club built in the tunnels under the charred timbers of the former headquarters of the New Republic.” Now, of course, Dan was never at that building. I was, and of course it was like on the seventh floor of some DC glass box. So it’s unclear if the whole building burned down because you couldn’t burn down just the floor where Charles Lane and Michael Kelly and Andrew Sullivan edited the magazine. You’d have to burn down the whole building for there to be an underground charred bunker, I think.

DL: Yeah. I actually don’t know if that ever happened. I mean, I was never a staffer at the New Republics. I merely visited there once or twice to have lunch with Frank Foer or something. So I don’t know if there was an event like that, but I think he may have been speaking metaphorically, your brother.

MO: Oh, well, shocking to think of that. Anyway, you teach political science at Penn. You write the Substack notes from the middle ground and you’re the author of soon to be three books. When does your book on Leo Strauss come out?

DL: Not for quite a while. The manuscript isn’t due in for another year. And then of course, the way these things go, that means almost another year until the book actually comes out. So look forward in early 2028.

MO: Sure. So I wanted to have you on, first of all, because I love your writing. I think it’s really interesting and really smart and also because I do have a strong interest in the intersection of religion and American politics and that’s been a consistent interest of yours for a long time. You wrote a book in the early 2000s called the Theocons Secular America Under Siege, which was dismissed by the Times and maybe a couple others as a good book, but perhaps making too much of the threat from particularly right-wing Roman Catholics. And we’re now in a moment where actually there, I don’t want to say it’s a threat. I don’t want to put my finger on the scales, but right-wing Roman Catholics are ascendant in American politics as they never have been before. So I think that there was something prophetic about your book. I think you were clearly onto something and I want to get to that, but I want to get to it by way of hearing a litle bit about your own history because, of course, when you wrote that, you were, I think, in the first blush of being a newly baptized Roman Catholic, having grown up in a secular Jewish home.

Is this all correct so far?

DL: That is indeed correct, yes.

MO: So let’s get the backstory. I mean, let’s get the tea, as my kids would say, having appropriated drag culture via RuPaul, via the internet. Let’s get the tea. So when were you born and what was the religious culture of your house and the culture of your house generally?

DL: Well, I was born in October 1969, so I’m 56 now. My father was secular Jewish. He had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home by immigrants from Eastern Europe in the Bronx. And so he abandoned any pretense of there being any religious content to it. So I was very much raised in a house where we were culturally Jewish, had pride in Jewish achievements and kind of cultural inheritance, but there was no theological content to it whatsoever. And this was so extreme that there was no Hebrew school education, no bar mitzvahs, no celebration of high holy days. I probably went to a synagogue twice in my life before I was 10. So that’s the kind of household I was in. My mother had converted to Judaism in some nominal way, but she didn’t really take to it much and sort of resisted it a little bit.

But she had mental problems, eventually had a breakdown, left, abandoned us. They were divorced. And then I was raised by that father who had that kind of distinctively very secular Jewish outlook that is what he handed on to my younger brother and me.

MO: Where was this? Where’d you grow up?

DL: Well, we grew up in New York City and Stuyvesan Town, if you know where that is on the Lower East Side, until I was eight when we moved out of Southern Connecticut in Fairfield. So that’s where I was raised right around the time of that divorce.

MO: The Jefferson’s theme song about moving on up was playing the whole time you drove up the Merritt Parkway to- Exactly. Yes. … your new digs in Greenwich or New Canaan or wherever you were.

DL: Well, Fairfield the town itself.

MO: Oh, Okay. Next town. A

DL: Al ittle further out. A little more mixed, not quite as Tony as Greenwich.

MO: No, for sure. My wife’s from the Lower East Side, so I know Stytown well and they’re still there. Did you go to Fairfield High, the public high school?

DL: My high school was called Andrew Ward. So I believe it is now Fairfield High, but there were two high schools in town that consolidated and they separated again later. But yeah, so I went to Andrew Ward, which is sort of the Fairfield High School of the ’80s.

MO: And to the extent you were raised with any politics, was it a liberal politics?

DL: It was sort of a kind of center on cultural issues, very much liberal on economic issues. My father was sort of receptive to Reagan and don’t have taxes too high because I’m trying to make myself rich like a good American, that kind of an outlook. My dad also was on foreign policy, was very anti-war. He hated the Vietnam War, always was sort of suspicious of whichever president happened to be president at any given moment. So in some ways I have done what the psychoanalysts will say tends to happen. I’ve sort of become a version of my father because I too am kind of offsides on foreign policy, very critical of war as a method of pursuing foreign policy aims and am sort of center left on most things, but sometimes in a quirky, unpredictable way.

MO: Okay. But at some point in college or in your doctoral work, you got a doctorate in political science, you became a conservative or you became more comfortable in the conservative movement because you graduated into jobs in journalism for conservative magazines.

DL: Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s a complicated story, but it has to do with the Strauss stuff. I mean, I was very influenced when I was in college by Alan Bloom as the closing of the American mind and its vision of a very high-minded, noble vision of philosophy that like one reads great old texts of Plato and Aristotle and Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Heidegger and then studies them about great political questions, but also with kind of even higher questions of how one should live as a human being, the Socratic view of a life that’s examined being the only one worth living. I found this very appealing and I tried to live with it and that sort of on the one hand, it tended to make me a kind of cultural conservative while also being not particularly engaged by day-to-day politics. I don’t really remember having any strong political views through most of the 1990s.

I was just reading philosophy books and didn’t really have a lot of partisan commitments at the time. I don’t even remember who I was voting for in those years. I might have even not voted in some of those elections just because of a kind of indifference and feeling like I was living a life leaving the cave and the cave is politics, the platonic cave that is. And it was only when I left graduate school, I got the PhD. I taught for a couple of years at Brigham Young University as a non-Mormon visiting professor teaching political philosophy and I enjoyed that. They were very conservative and I kind of respected that about them. I had kind of strong longing for a kind of moral rootedness in a kind of like I wanted my moral convictions to kind of match up with some kind of order in the objective world, be it like a vision of nature that has teleology embedded in it or a kind of religious orientation, though I was not at all religious up until that point in my life, but I simultaneously had those longings that were accentuated a little bit by being among the Mormons, these very impressive, very pious, earnest young people and my colleagues there as professors combined with the fact that I was facing the crisis that lots of young academics then and now face, which is, wait, where am I going to get a job?

How many times do I have to move to a totally different part of the country to take a job for kind of modest pay for one year and then have to uproot myself yet again and then yet again while I hope that maybe someday I get a tenure track job, I sort of was unwilling to live this way and wanted a way out. So I decided in my infinite wisdom as a 30 year old that really what I should be doing is instead journalism because that’s such a better, more solid career path.

MO: Well, it was then. I mean, me too. There were more jobs that lasted longer on average in journalism than there were academic jobs in, it depends on the field, certainly in the humanities. I always got the sense, well, you do political theory, which is kind of like a humanities and that’s sucked for a long time also. I mean, the quantitative side of political science is burgeoning. I mean, the number of majors at most schools of people who just want to study election returns and congressional districting, I mean, that side of polyside that’s adjacent to economics is doing extremely well in terms of course enrollment, but political theory is not.

DL: Yeah. And data science and regression analysis and all that stuff is quite popular.

MO: They’re crushing it.

DL: And like at Penn, the PPE major philosophy, politics, economics is very popular because that blend is maximally applicable-

MO: Because they can tell their parents, “I’m taking econ also,” is basically what it is. Exactly. Throw in some econ, all of a sudden they want to do it. It’s amazing.

DL: Right. Well, I’m teaching a political theory course right now and every day I walk into the classroom, the board is just covered in formulas from the econ course that’s taught in there before me and I always begin by erasing every last bit of this.

MO: That’s important.

DL: Yeah. Anyway, so as the story unfolds, when I decide, okay, I want to go into journalism, I wasn’t really qualified to be a reporter. I was going to be something like opinion journalism. And then the question was, well, what kind of opinion journalism? My resume says Straussian, which means center right. I had studied at an earlier point in my education with Mark Lila, who had been a kind of neocon in the ’80s. And so he had a lot of connections still in the neocon world. And so I could draw on those to get introductions to people and network on the center right. So that’s what I did. I spent several months flying myself from Utah out to New York to meet with Adam Bello at National Review and Eric Eichman at the Wall Street Journal and people at Policy Review and the Weekly Standard.

Basically every center write magazine or newspaper and they all said the same thing, write book reviews for us. So if you go back in a search engine and search my name in this like nine month window of like late 2000, early 2001, you’ll find like 18 hits from me in every single center right magazine or newspaper of the time as I was trying to get my name out there and kind of identify myself as I am a center right neocon intellectual, hire me please. But that didn’t work right away and it was a kind of crisis

MO: Period. It’s funny, I met some of the same people. I’m younger than you by a few years, five years, but when my first job out of college was as a research assistant, this is between college and grad school, was as a research assistant for Jim Sleeper, whom you may remember and he doesn’t write so much anymore, but he was very out there in all these magazines. And then I briefly worked at The New Yorker as an assistant to Joe Klein, who was a reporter, but also kind of like in that centrist world. I mean, he of course helped make Bill Clinton with that great Time Magazine cover story, The Anointed or Newsweek, I think, time. And they set up introductions. At some point, Adam Bello hired me to do a little research. At some point I too started writing for Eric. What I remember is everyone at the Wall Street Journal was named Eric. There was like an Eric Gibson and Eric Eichman. There was at least one other Eric and some of them were CH. They had that sort of Germanic CH.

DL: Eric Eichman was that way.

MO: Eric Eichman, right? And what I remember is, yes, they’d assign a book review to just about anybody, which always struck me as weird. I thought that was something you grew into when you had wisdom, but it seems like maybe I think the pay is so low for book reviews that the really credentialed people don’t want to write the book reviews or they don’t want to make enemies. They don’t know. They figured out-

DL: Doing a 900 word book review for the Wall Street Journal is a lot of work.

MO: Lot of work.

DL: You got to read the book very carefully, research the author and their

MO: Right

DL: Other work and then you have to say a lot in a very short amount of space. So it’s kind of thankless work and then you get like 300 bucks at the end of it. So yeah, it’s perfect for like a grad student trying to transition.

MO: Yeah. And there were just a lot of, I mean, not to pick on any of these people in particular, but there were a lot of these men who would take you to lunch. They were sort of 10 or 20 years older than one and they would take you to lunch and just kind of … There was a kind of entitlement and arrogance. They would tell you how it is. They would just tell you how it is because at the time to have a job at one of these publications felt infinitely secure. It was like a 10-year job, but you didn’t have to live in Ohio or Utah. You got to be a New York and have an expense account.

DL: It was a different world. I assume some version of it still exists today Probably. Although all of these outlets are more marginal in our maximally niche oriented culture, they’re all smaller in some way than they just-

MO: So you could have just as easily gotten pulled into the center left world. Again, there are no centrist publications anymore because everyone wants a kind of polarized niche, but back then a magazine like The New Republic or a Common Wheel … I mean, there were a bunch of magazines that were center leftish as opposed to center right-ish. It could have gone that way.

DL: Yeah, it could have although it just didn’t fit. I don’t mean to make it entirely a mercenary that like, well, my resume said center right because of the Straussians, so therefore I must be on the center right. Because of the Straussian education, there was just a kind of grammar to the way of talking about and thinking about politics and morality and how things fit together that just kind of fit like a puzzle piece with the way the Neocon world thought at the time.

MO: Let me ask two other questions.

DL: I thought that I fit in it more than elsewhere at that moment. Yeah, go ahead.

MO:  I don’t want to belabor this too much, but just again, and here I’m perhaps I’m talking about myself and people I knew in my early years. So two questions, which you can take in whatever order, was part of it aesthetic? There were people who ended up working for the new criterion because they were just bow tie people and they just wanted to be around a certain kind of formality. They were formalists, they liked formal poetry, they liked formal dress, they were temperamental conservatives and so that fit better in certain places. And then the other question is, a lot of these people who ended up, let’s say on the right without being particularly right wing, it was because of a shared disgust with something on the left. That is to say they weren’t particularly affirming of rightist positions, but they felt that the left … I mean, Alan Blumen, for example, is somebody who, it’s not that his own politics were so far right, but his disdain for the people who had torn down the cannon coded him as right.

DL: Yeah. It was not the first one about an aesthetic thing. I was never a bow tie wearing…

MO: You weren’t a bow tie guy.

DL:  And to the extent that when I was on then the right for several years, the Manhattan Institute used to hold a monthly soiree, sort of like a cocktail hour once a month and you could go and it was always held in a very large ballroom in Midtown and there would be like 300 people who were a mix of the journalists in that world from National Review and the Wall Street Journal and so forth combined with like the people who funded these projects. So like finance guys who like to hobnob with intellectuals and I never felt at home among those people just as I didn’t really feel at home with a lot of the people in the eventual First Things orbit in which I ended up situated shortly thereafter. So it was never that. It was some of the second question though. I’ve never been that right wing, but I have never liked the left.

I am comfortable with the center left. I liked the old New Republic quite a lot except on foreign policy. I had been reading the New Republic since the early ’90s, so like through most of Andrew Sullivan’s tenure as editor and I loved it. It felt very simpatico with me. So if I could have snapped my fingers and ended up at the New Republic, that would have been wonderful. I simply didn’t have connections there. And again, I wasn’t groomed to be in that world. I sort of spoke a slightly different language. It overlapped with it somewhat because of Leon Weaseltier’s education and philosophy and Jewish culture and history and a kind of literary outlook that I could have had a good conversation with him at this time, but I wasn’t really from his world. He would have had no idea who I am and so forth.

So that just didn’t seem realistic. Now later, after I broke from First Things, that did end up where I sort of ended up parking myself even though not as an employee but as someone who wrote for them a fair amount and ended up as a contributing editor for the magazine.

MO: So let’s get to, how did you end up at First Things, which is now I would say a conservative Christian magazine. It was less predictably conservative then.

DL: Well, I don’t know if that’s exactly right. It was pretty conservative, but it is now more narrowly Catholic than it aspired to be when I was there where it really did want to be a kind of interdenominational Judeo-Christian magazine and very much tried in most cases to be kind of just in conversation with the rest of the neocon right.

MO: Okay. So how did you end up there and why was … And you ended up editor, weren’t you the-

DL: I did end up being the editor for about a year or so and was an associate editor before that.

MO: For people of no idea what First Things is or was, why don’t you talk about what it represented as a magazine there and how you ended up there?

DL: Right. Okay. Well, the first step in this, I left the story with flying myself out to meet with all these editors so I could get my name out there and hopefully get a job. Well, the first job I eventually did get was as a speech writer for Rudy Giuliani. And my boss in that position was a guy named Michael Anton who has kind of become quite notorious in more recent history as the guy who wrote the Flight 93 essay saying that everyone on the right has to vote for Trump. This was in September of 2016.

MO: That if you’re in a plane and it’s crashing, you got to vote for the one person will save you, whether you like him or not. Well, the

DL: Terrorists have taken over the plane and are going to fly it into the White House like the people, the passengers on Flight 93 and the terrorist is Hillary Clinton. And so if you don’t rush the cockpit and vote for Trump, you might die if you do that, but you’re guaranteed to die

MO: Right

DL: If you don’t. That was the incendiary argument. And he served the Trump administration both the first time and the second time in high level jobs. But back then he was merely the communications director for Rudy Giuliani. So he hired me to be one of three speech writers, the junior speech writer for Rudy Giuliani. And I did that job for only about six months. Just a month or so into that job I heard through the network on the right that First Things had an opening for an associate editor, basically the book review editor of the magazine. So I applied for it, got an interview, sat down with the Regal Father Richard John Neuhaus over lunch and apparently impressed him enough to get the offer for the job. I very quickly put in my resignation to Giuliani and left again after only about six months

MO: Before we move on just quickly, was Michael Anton a good dude? What was he like?

DL: He was intense. He came from the Claremont faction of the Straussians. So like automatically we didn’t really gel because the Claremont Faction of Straussians were always kind of harder right and very aggressively on the kind of cultural right, like thinking that, I don’t know, homosexuality is sodomy and should be outlawed and just taking very hard edged positions on things that I found just unappealing and that I thought had nothing to do with my education and philosophy. So we weren’t that compatible, but he was a fine guy, aggressive. He’s the kind of guy who when I got the job offer from Neuhaus, I knew I had to tell Anton pretty quickly, but within two hours I received a call on my office phone and I pick it up and the first thing I hear is, “When are you going to tell me you’re quitting?” It was him. Didn’t say hello.

MO: How do you know?

DL: Just because he heard the right wing world is a small world and he had already heard that-

MO: And so First Things made you this offer despite the fact you were, not despite, and you were still a Jew.

DL: Yes, although I was in the process of converting and that was also part of the interview.

MO: Oh, they must have loved that.

DL: Oh, of course.

MO: Neuhaus That’s what got you the job. I mean, sure, you’re smart and all, but let’s be honest.

DL: It certainly contributed to it. I’m sure it did. It was my way of saying, yes, I’ve been persuaded that you are correct in all things. So I had made the decision in October of 2000. So the interview was in February 2001. I started at First Things in May 2001. So the previous October before I got the interview or even I think before I applied for the job at First Things, I had made the decision to convert to Catholicism. And that was partly because of this career crisis I was in. What am I doing? Where am I? That desire I spoke of earlier to feel like my moral commitments were embedded in some larger objective reality. And the Catholic Church has a corner on that market. They’re really good at that. They have a thousand page catechism for you to read with all the rules.

MO: I remember finding … I was in a Barnes & Noble or a Walden book sometime in my teenage years and I was in the religious studies section just browsing, I guess. I wasn’t so into religion then or so deep or whatever. I was killing time. And I saw that you could buy in the paperback put out by Ave Maria Press or whatever, who knows what press, The Catechism. And I thought, holy cow, it’s just a book.This is all you need to know right here. They put it all between two covers.

DL: Yes, with each entry numbered in a certain way. So its all ordered just like something out of the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas.

MO: Right

DL:  It’s quite something. So my disposition then and now is pretty skeptical. I tend to be skeptical. And so I had one level desperately wanted to believe in something like this and on the other hand, I didn’t. So this was sort of like maybe if I follow what St. Augustine says and I like pray and go to church and read the catechism and read paper and cyclicals and then take the job that’s now been offered me working for a priest at First

MO: Right.

DL: Things Magazine. If I do all of these things, I’ll end up kind of assimilating into this thing that I can’t believe is true right now.

MO: Right. I was going to say, it’s not quite faith seeking understanding because the faith wasn’t there yet.

DL: Right.

MO: It’s more understanding, seeking faith, I guess if I …

DL: Well, it was sort of a conviction that if I go through the motions and do the things one does when one is a believer that I would end up believing in the end. And whether that’s exactly what Augustine is talking about, I’m not sure, but that’s how I understood what I was doing, that I was not a believer, but I wanted to be and I was going to try.

MO: And your wife was Catholic, right?

DL: She was raised Catholic, although she was pretty much lapsed and not particularly close to the church at that point. She remained very nominally Catholic because her family is a big Midwestern Catholic family and every time we’d go home, we’d go to church with her mother and so forth. So it was on the one hand it made things a lot easier. We didn’t have kids yet. We planned to have them soon and now this resolved the question of how we’d raised them and so forth. But she was also ambivalent about the idea that her secular Jewish husband who she was attracted to in part because I was not a Catholic, that like now I had kind of joined the team.

MO: They didn’t want you to be dad.

DL: Exactly. So it was complicated.

MO: But I mean, let’s pause here for a minute because as somebody … By the way, my upbringing as a Jew was pretty much identical to yours. I was in synagogue maybe twice for cousins, bar mitzvahs. We did do Hanukkah and Passover. I don’t know if you did any, the sort of more fun holidays.

DL: We did Hanukkah as a substitute for Christmas because it looks bad if you don’t give the kids something like what all the other kids have. But Passover, no, we never really never did.

MO: So we were a little more attached to the religion than you are, but not by much. I vibe with everything you were saying and still there’s no version of me in my 20s that would have been drawn to Catholicism, number one, because I’m so skeptical. Number two, because it coded sort of, I don’t know. Aesthetically, there’s part of me that I guess could have been looped into the Anglican church or something. Catholic, the people I grew up around who were the most religious Catholics were not, it was not an intellectual journey. I mean, you had met some intellectual Catholics. I guess there was a mode you could be assimilated into, but for the sort of upwardly mobile aspiring intellectual gentry, Catholicism wouldn’t have sat well with me, which is just a prejudice that I’m owning. But also there is a sense, and you’ve written about this, in which you’re turning your back on a very small people who kind of do need some headcount and need some … And there’s this history of the world trying to erase us.

I could only imagine doing it if I’d had some experience that led me to believe that it was pretty damn well certainly true. Christ was resurrected. And given that I’m not hearing that you had that experience, I’m just trying to like think myself into the person who’s so hungry for something that he becomes a fricking Catholic, which is a very strong commitment. It’s not Unitarian or contemporary Quakerism. It’s Catholic.

DL: True enough. Although it’s also true that I just spent two years with the Mormons and compared to Mormonism, it’s not that big of a commitment because the Mormons spend like all day Sunday doing stuff and they go to the temple and they baptize the dead and it’s this all encompassing world that you’re in when you’re LDS. Whereas for Catholics, you go to mass once a week and you’re supposed to go to confession periodically, but other than that, it is not. Now, but then again, I was working now for Neuhaus for a priest for a magazine that was increasingly taking a Catholic line. Catholicism of it was ever increasing in domination at the magazine.

It began in the early ’90s very much as a kind of interdenominational thing. I mean, when it was first started, Neuhaus was not yet a Catholic and not yet a priest. He converted and became a priest within the first year or so of the magazine But like the guy I was succeeding as associate editor, a guy named Matthew Burke was Jewish. So they had one of their top editors was Jewish, Jim Nichterline, who was the number two editor above that guy and above me was a Lutheran. Neuhaus used to be a Lutheran, but then became a Catholic priest. Before I started there, you sort of had Protestant Catholic Jew. You had like the classic American combo at work there.

MO: But I want to linger a litle bit more on the psychology of becoming something else. I mean, I’ve known a lot of converts from Christian traditions into Judaism and from Judaism into Christian traditions. I’ve known fewer people who have gone into or out of Islam, but not zero. But I’ve been at this religion journalism game a long time, met a lot. And for a lot of them, again, if it’s not a powerful conviction that the New Testament is true, that the resurrection is true, it’s often a kind of hunt for a family and as you said, a sense that it all lines up and Catholicism seems to be very powerful for people who want to say that it all lines up, that there’s this natural order, that the politics fits the theology, fits the cultural milieu, fits all of it. And I guess for me, again, I had no interest in being Catholic, but if I were drawn that way, I would feel terrified, not terrified.

I’d feel desperately sad to leave the albeit secular Jewish milieu that I was from. In other words, being part of even the neo-contradition of people whose politics I don’t agree with at all is like the Jewish intellectual stuff is such a great heritage that leaving it would feel like a tremendous loss done only under the duress of some intellectual conviction that I couldn’t shake. But I’m guessing, and I don’t mean to make you stand in for kind of some stereotype, there are people like, they want to move seamlessly. The first thing’s world, the Catholic intellectual world, conservative Catholic world feels better to them. It feels more integrated, feels like more of a home, it feels more intellectual. They like it more. Can you say a bit about what it was like to move into that world as your home as one of them? Now I’m one of you. Now I’m a Neuhaus or a Buckley.

DL: It is the case. I say this often to students of mine at Penn who come to me for career advice like, “Oh, I like ideas. I want to go to grad school, but I don’t think I’ll end up as a professor.” So to give me advice based on your trajectory. And I’m always like, “It happened to me yesterday. Story is so idiosyncratic. It is applicable to anybody else.” And this aspect of it is too. I mean, you’re dealing with a guy who not only like you came from a secular Jewish family, but also I came from, I don’t know about your situation, but a very broken family where my mother abandoned the family. I was raised by my father. I was very turbulent as a kid. I did have these kind of longings for a kind of metaphysical anchor for morality. I guess I tended to be on a kind of journey that would swing between a certain access of extremes.

On the one hand, a kind of Isaiah Berlin style deep pluralist that

Morality is ultimately and human life is in a deep way tragic in the sense that the pursuit of any higher moral principle or ideal entails the loss of some other moral principle of ideal that they sort of conflict at a deep level. So if you pursue equality like the left often does above all other goals, you do sacrifice liberty, you do sacrifice other things, you can sacrifice solidarity in certain respects, you can sacrifice fairness. And so on the one hand, I affirm that and that goes with my skepticism well, but then I also long to belong to something where it all makes sense and as you described, like Neuhaus used to talk about how economics is downstream from politics, politics is downstream from culture and culture is downstream from theology, like a series of nested shells. And I found something very appealing about the idea of like I get up, I do a little prayer, I go to the office, I work for a priest, I contribute to this political moment.

And then especially shortly after I started there, what happens with nine eleven and I’m in this kind political ideological world that’s allied with the Bush administration waging this war for the defense of Western civilization against barbarians who want to blow us up and like all of this sort of like echoing and resonating with everything else. So it all fits together, which is sort of the diametric opposite of Berlini and tragic pluralism. So for a while, a short while in the scheme of my life, I was very drawn to see if I could get that like going to church, being at home, going to my wife’s family, going to work, writing what I write all of it is sort of informing everything else and I’m in this nice enclosed shell of meaning where everything reinforces everything else. Now it turns out, I’ll pause now if you want to ask something else, but like the story of how I broke from that is effectively that within a very short amount of time I learned definitively, because I’ve never gone back since then, this is impossible at least for someone who has my disposition like this is a dream, it’s a fantasy and it very quickly became clear that this is not possible for someone who is intellectually honest about the way the world really works.

MO: Right. I mean, I think this isn’t quite what you’re saying, but when I ask friends of mine who have what I see as sort of, maybe I’m using integrialists in the wrong way here, but fantasies of that kind of perfect integration in a society, I will always say to them like, “Okay, so what country do you want us to look like? Do you want us to look like Franco Spain? Who has instantiated this? ” Which by the way, I asked Rusty Reno about return to the strong gods. I said, “Okay, so the strong gods are coming back, what should our country look like? ” And actually when push comes to shove, they never have an answer because I mean what they say, if they’re being honest, someone will say, “Well, we’re not there yet.” I mean, it’s a utopian vision. And I mean, he gave me an answer.

He’s like, “Actually, it should look like sort of Wilsonian America, 1920s Protestant Catholic Jew or Will Herberg’s America.” Actually, you can’t really point to anything that radical because the second you look for actual societies that attempt some sort of integration like that, it’s always fascistic. It’s always pretty ugly. There is no sort of Hamish, warm, lovely, pre-modern, integrated. I mean, this is the thing Paul Kings North wants too and it’s like, well, except nobody’s ever done it because human nature doesn’t actually conduce to that world.

DL: Right. I mean, part of this, I think this is at best only partly true, but it is partly enough to be worth noting that in the pre-modern world, there was a truth that things were more unified like this.

I mean, not as much as we like todaydream about and Rusty Reno fantasizes about, but it’s true that kind of almost from the bottom up, despite the fact that it was not democratic, there was a kind of unstated consensus that we agree that there is a God, he wants certain things from us, wants us to live a certain way and the order of different institutions sort of are all set out under those metaphysical assumptions. The problem is that under modern conditions, this tends to crumble and pluralize and there’s dissent and then you have this kind of wistful nostalgic longing among people on the right to kind of put it all back together. The problem is once it’s broken and it isn’t kind of permeating up from the culture, it has to be imposed from above using state power and that’s why it becomes fascism when it’s attempted to be imposed after it’s already shattered.

And so there’s this hope that somehow we can catch our own tale and get back to a place where it again spontaneously emerges from below. This is why the writer is always talking about how it’s a new great awakening. I know it is, but it never turns out to be.

MO: Well, and also it’s always being imposed in essays written by intellectuals and yet ironically to the extent there was ever a kind of premodern organic consensus, it relied on the fact that there were no intellectuals. There was massive literacy. People weren’t reading and interrogating … It was pre-enlightenment, right? So what’s the role? How exactly is this going to be created while still leaving space for people to be rigorous free thinkers? I mean, that’s not likely-

DL: Because then you end up just being a propagandist for the political movement you support so it can make the world the way you want it to be.

MO: Well, which is what you see with people get to this, which sadly is exactly, and you’ve written about this to some extent, the sort of desperate attempt of some of Trump supporters and like Victor Orban supporters to say, “No, no, no, I’m still an intellectual. I still speak truth and this man’s the Messiah.” And you say, “But wait a second, there’s a problem there.” Okay. So I want to move into your book on the Theocons, which as I say, I see as pretty prophetic. But the last thing I want to say, just my own chauvinistic Jewish special pleading is when you were studying to be a Catholic, somebody must have said to you, or if not, that’s a pretty strong indictment of the Jewish world. Have you looked into Judaism to see if it has some of the resources you’re looking for?

DL: I don’t recall … Yeah, go ahead.

MO: And I’m curious, so did anyone say that to you? But second, am I right and again, this might not accord with your own experience. I might be thinking of other people I’ve known, but am I right that there’s kind of a sense on the Christian right, but particularly the Catholic right that like Judaism really is this kind of silly thing that you’ll grow out of, that once you’ve read certain people and if you’re subscribing to certain magazines, if you’re in a certain world, the natural fulfillment of that is to be a Roman Catholic, maybe a Lutheran, maybe a high Anglican, but that Judaism really is this kind of atavism and Jews must be loved, but they’re not doing serious work. There’s no Jewish theology in first things. There’s some Jewish columnists, but they don’t see Jews as having interesting answers. Nobody is saying, “What does the Talmud think about physician assisted suicide or the death penalty or just war?” It’s not really a tradition to them. The tradition is Catholic.

DL: Yeah, certainly now it is. I think we did used to try to publish some things like that. There’s a guy named, his last name is Solavechik. It’s I think one letter spelled differently than the famous-

MO: He’s a nephew. Yeah, Mayor Solovicik.

DL: Yeah. Yeah. And we published a piece of his about the virtue of hate or something in first thing. So I guess that was a contribution theologically of the

MO: Jews. Not normative Judaism, but okay, yeah, I hear you. He’s a major guy.

DL: But yet today though, the magazine is much more kind of sectarianly Catholic. I mean, I don’t recall many people saying exactly that to me like, “Have you looked into Judaism?” But part of that was that I preemptively would say exactly that when explaining my decision to people like, yes, of course I could have looked into Judaism, and then my explanation would be I received what I already told you, no Jewish education, I know no Hebrew. I have a PhD in political theory which involved a deep study of people like Augustine and Aquinas and some other Christian thinkers. So I feel more at home in that mental world

And as an intellectual, the intellectual side of these things is always going to be more prominent than for most converts. And so it just felt easier and more natural frankly at that point than what I would hear by that point I had been to some seders and been to some synagogue services because of family and friends and things and it always felt so foreign to me like sitting there. And I would hear it like just hearing the Hebrew and not understanding a word of it and it felt like that despite my upbringing, that was like 10 times harder the idea of like becoming closer to that and trying to learn the Jewish tradition, which if you become educated in it, it is a lot. There are a lot of rabbis commenting on a lot of passages. The Talmud is formidable.

MO: It’s hard to know where to first dip your toe in the ocean. You’re listening to Arc The Podcast and that is the first part of my conversation from last month with Damon Linker. We have a lot of great episodes coming up. I’m going to be interviewing Paul Eli about his book on religious art in the 1980s. I’m going to be talking to Amy Laura Hall, the Duke Divinity School professor about her new forthcoming book on muscular Christianity, Machismo in Christian theology and culture. I’ve recorded a joint interview with poet Christian Wyman and theologian Miroslav Volf, who have a new book out of their letters back and forth, a co-written epistolary volume and we’re going to be releasing a video version of that conversation as well. So a lot of really cool stuff coming up on the podcast and some related video cast product. We also have some really terrific articles over at the website.

You should go to arcmag.org. You can read about the Pentecostal Christian who’s running a quixotic Republican run for governor of California. You can read a review of the new book, A Scandal Kerningsburg by Christopher Clark about an 18th century heresy trial in Germany that involved cults and accusations of sexual impropriety and who doesn’t love a book that involves both cults and sexual impropriety and so much more. Head over to ARC, religion, politics, et cetera, online at arcmag.org. And I should say that if you have any questions, concerns, complaints, harums, harangues, send me an email. I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s Washington Universitystouis.edu. And now back to my conversation with Damon Linker. So you become a Roman Catholic around the time you take this job in early 2001. When did you become a Catholic? I’m sure you know your birthday.

DL: Right around that time, the Easter 2001, whatever the date was.

MO: And then you’ve taken the job two months earlier and then nine eleven happens and you’re all in for this civilizational war. And First Things, by the way, was a very interesting magazine at that time. Still is. But by 2007, you’re writing a book that’s a pretty scathing critique of the Neocons. Well, I went

DL: Before that because I got the book deal in late 2004 just after the election where

MO: Carry law. Okay. So let’s talk about those three years. You went from being associate editor, soon to be editor at a fairly young age of this major conservative Christian, Catholic, but broadly Christian magazine that’s all in for the civilizational battle against infidels and Islam to being somebody writing a very scathing book about the theocratic impulse at this magazine among other places within three to four years. So what happened?

DL: Well, the outlines of the story are that for the first … I started May 1st, nine eleven happens obviously a few months later, but even in those first few months as book review editor, I was already having some conflicts with Neuhaus over certain books and reviewing and who I was assigning to review the books because I already was skeptical of some of the impulse behind the magazine to always be bringing religion into politics. I was much more interested in pointing to points along those Berlinian pluralist lines of points of conflict between politics and religion. Not that I thought religion should be banned in a kind of strict UCLA way, but obviously I would never have taken the job there if I didn’t believe it should have some role in public life. But I also thought that when you bring religion in, it doesn’t solve the problem.

It just creates new ones and those tensions should be explored. Whereas Neuhaus sort of wanted to be contributing to always the positive side of the story. And so it wasn’t a major problem, but we were butting heads a little bit. Then we have nine eleven and I sort of put my head down. I’m like, “All right, rah, rah, this scared the crap out of me. The first plane flew over my head while I was walking to the office I was terrified. There were soldiers with machine guns in Grand Central when I was going to and from the train every day now and I was terrified of what was happening, very much supported the Afghanistan war, but then things started to happen. It became clear to me extremely early that we were going to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake.

And I began saying so in meetings and saying I wanted to write things about that in the magazine kind of taking a conservative argument against going to war in Iraq and Neuhaus wouldn’t have it, didn’t want me doing it, thought it would make me appear unreliable to our allies on the right. And then the priest’s sex abuse scandal blew up in that period as well.

MO: Right

DL: After 9/11.

MO: Yeah, ’01, ‘o2, for sure.

DL: And Neuhaus began writing about it incessantly every issue, his very long column at the end of the magazine, which would regularly run to 10,000 words, would begin with long essays and he would begin every single column in every issue by talking about it. And it began in a way that I could affirm, very critical of the church for allowing this to happen, but it’s over the months it evolved into a kind of defensiveness and he took this line that he repeated on television shows where he would just say,” The answer is fidelity, fidelity, fidelity. “In other words, just be more Catholic and that would make this never happen. It was basically all these left wing morally corrupt members of the church who like little boys and they’re gay and instead of being Catholics, they were bad people who were gay and they should be repressed and kicked out and so forth.

And this ended up culminating in us, Neuhaus going down to the White House and counseling Bush on how he should support an anti-gay marriage amendment for the Constitution and giving him language to support that, which I thought was wrong and didn’t like it, but I couldn’t really even fully say that in staff because I was already making such a stink about Iraq that we would’ve gotten to a point where Neuhaus would’ve said,” You don’t belong here. “And I felt increasingly like I didn’t belong here. I had at that point applied to succeed Jim Nichterline as editor and then I withdrew my application because I was seeing myself at loggerheads with him and his vision of the magazine for so much that it was absurd to think that I was applying to be the number two guy here and the next day he came in and offered it to me.

It was like I had done a Play-Doh with who’s qualified to be the leader, well, only the one who doesn’t want

MO: Yeah

DL: To be the leader. So he saw that as a great testament to why I’d be a great editor. So what was I going to do? If he didn’t pick me, it was going to be Jody Bottum coming in and doing it and he probably would have fired me because Jody had very different vision for the magazine. I don’t think he would have thought I fit in. I had already had some conflicts with him because he was on the ed board. So for one year I struggled through trying to be Neuhaus’s number one lieutenant putting out the magazine, but it was pretty hellish for me.

MO: So he was the editor-chief, but you were- Yes.

DL: He had final say about absolutely everything. I was just an executor of his will, kind of overseeing the reviewing of manuscripts and the production of the magazines and the multiple reads of the tens of thousands of words and every wall of word issue. The magazine would regularly that in those days would regularly run to over a hundred pages of just words.

MO: Yeah

DL: It was like reading a substantial book multiple times every month, looking for typos.

MO: You must have wanted out.

DL: Well, and now we’re in 2004, so Bush is running for reelection. I no longer support Bush. I think he’s a disaster. I think Neuhaus is regularly … I’m now quite friendly with and admiring of Pete Wehner, but back then he was Carl Rove’s number two guy in the political operation at the White House and he would regularly send faxes to us giving the administration spin about how everything was going great in Iraq and Neuhaus would just read these and turn it into items in his own column, like launder them and treat them as authoritative statements, which I knew from reading a wider range of journalism were

MO: Yeah

DL: Just bullshit. And I would say to him, “You are laundering nonsense for the administration. This is not what an intellectual should be doing. You need to read other outlets.” And he just didn’t want to hear it. So it was hell. It was really bad. I hated it.

MO: And so you got the book deal and then quit or quit and got the book deal?

DL: I worked on a proposal in the couple of months before the election, so September, October, the election happened and then I immediately used whatever leads I could to get it in the hands of some agents, an agent who was a very good agent. Tina Bennett took it on. It was perfectly timed. You may remember that the immediate exit poll spin on the 2004 election is that Bush won reelection because of moral values. And so for a month, every liberal in the country was like, “Moral values, what does that mean? Where does this come from?” And I had this ready, made 80 page book proposal to explain what that meant, where it came from. And I tied it to the magazine and its ideology of bringing Christian conservative religion into politics, kind of interpreted Bush and his whole thing as a kind of enactment of this ideology that was a blend of what Neuhaus had been trying to do with Michael Novak and George Weigel, plus JP2’s encyclicals

MO: And so forth. Okay. So what was it? I mean, it’s very hard to pin down people who say they want more religion and politics on specific stuff. Sometimes they’ll say, “Okay, we want to bring prayer back in schools.” But that’s pretty weak sauce actually. What do they really want? I mean, they don’t want to compel people by the sword to … I mean, there’s a liberal fantasy, paranoid fantasy that secretly they all want to compel people by the sword to become Christians. I don’t think anyone wants that. What did Wigal and Novak and Neuhaus want?

DL: Well, all right. So it’s good that you put it that way because I do think there have been some pretty major changes in all of this from then

Till now. So if we’re going back to the middle of the Bush administration, they were very much enacting a kind of Catholic theological spin on what was originally Jerry Falwell’s moral majority argument. They thought that looked at in the right way, all good things go together. American democracy, majoritarianism, the Republican Party, the Reagan Bush agenda on economics and foreign policy and social conservatism, all of those things are like an equation with one equaling the other across a black board where if you don’t have this corrupt minority of secular liberals thwarting it using these institutions in the media and in universities and in the courts and stuff, they’re the ones who are screwing it up. If you just neutralize those people and then replace them with majoritarian sentiment, you would have percolating up from the ground up a majoritarian democratic small democratic sentiment that American politics and government and culture is Catholic Christian, that we are a Christian nation who have socially conservative impulses and beliefs and convictions and we could have that without any conflict with our form of government.

It would be the truest expression of our form of government going all the way back to the reading of the Declaration of Independence is an enactment of this and we would just be updating that.

MO: Okay. So to take one example, if I’m reading you right, like to take one example, if only the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled in Roe v. Wade, hadn’t come in in this sort of bullying way, this anti-Democratic way with Roe v. Wade, if we can overturn that and kick these questions back to the states, the natural democratic majoritarian impulse, which is broadly pro- life they believed would win out. And in most states abortion would be beaten back by the goodwill of the people.

DL: Right, right, exactly. And on euthanasia-

MO: And on euthanasia, similarly, we probably would have, I don’t know how they handle divorce laws because those are state laws, but presumably there’s some way back away from divorce on demand and things like that as well, or probably the liberal media and the universities have persuaded people.

DL: I mean, you have to also bring in the other dimension to it, which is that Neuhaus and his allies along with John Paul II and then Benedict IV who wrote most of those encyclicals that JP2 put out and that they loved so much that they were trying to fashion a governing ideology that would enact exactly what we’re saying. So at the level of policy, yes, it would mean more pro- life laws passed at the level of states, maybe something at the federal level to kind of state a basic minimal protection for the fetus in the first trimester, but then just a general public, a kind of updated right leaning more explicitly, like they used to use the formulation mere orthodoxy. Like this was Neuhaus’s project of combining John Paul II style Catholicism with evangelical Protestantism with Orthodox Judaism and then before nine eleven also Muslims too-

MO: Conservative Islam.

DL: Conservative Islam. All of these together, they would fashion a governing ideology that would sort of be the successor to the postwar liberal mainline Protestant public ethic of like the 50s of like Eisenhower saying like, “I don’t care what you believe about God as long as you believe

MO: Something about that. ” And so more faith-based coalitions, more money to churches as opposed to government agencies. The anti-pornography piece of it was probably a huge area of consensus. All of these groups can get together and outlaw, get that out of the public square, out of the newsstand.

DL: It was, although I do think that on that issue, the little I talked to him about it, I think Neuhaus was probably closest to like 1971 Irving Kristol on that. Irving Kristol wrote a great essay in 71 titled Pornography Obscenity and American Democracy, something like that, where he just said, obviously we can’t like throw you in jail for buying a penthouse magazine, but you can have a public ethic that treats that as shameful. And so you have the old liberal censorship of if you really want porn, you can get it. You’re not going to be thrown in jail, but you make it shameful. You put it behind the wall of cardboard on the top shelf of the newsstand and you have to be humiliated to bring it to the cashier.

MO: So this is the, but what I take you to be saying is the most interesting thing about that iteration of Christian conservative political philosophy is they assumed that it was majoritarian and populist, that you could do it all without being anti-democratic. It didn’t have to be imposed from the top down. In fact, it was the people, the top-down impositions where the liberals, the Supreme Court, the secular apparatus, the media, that the bottom-up will of the people would mesh nicely if allowed to with a cultural conservatism. To be very crude, let’s leap forward to today when I think we would say we have a more theocratic impulse in the administration, in terms of who’s working in Washington than perhaps at any other time though, we could debate that, but there certainly is a strong one. What does it look like now? What’s changed?

DL: First of all, among those like the post-liberals, the integrialist Catholics, people like Patrick Deneen and Sorab Amari and-

MO: Gladin Papin.

DL: Gladon Papin and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law, all those people

And Rod Drayer, they are more militant than Neuhaus was. Now there were moments when Neuhaus and First Things became more militant, like in the End of Democracy Symposium in 1996 where he would … There were moments where the first things crowd back then would become more despairing about how entrenched the secular liberals were and despair that the democracy, the natural democratic sentiments would ever be able to topple them. And at those moments, they became much more like talking about how we need a kind of revolution in America to overthrow these secular liberal institutions that are so entrenched. Those were glimpses of what we would get now with the post liberals. They’re basically doing the end of democracy symposium today. So that’s one change is that that’s become more the default position, much less hopeful, much less believing in majoritarianism. I mean, like Rod Dreer’s book on the Benedict option is an expression of despair that like we’ve lost, we no longer have the culture, we don’t have the numbers, we’ve become much more secular and so we need a kind of more militant outlook.

But that’s then the second point of change is that the place of those genuine religious believers within the right wing coalition, the Republican coalition has changed because it is true that the country as a whole and the right has become more secular. And so weirdly what we end up with is that a lot of people on the Republican right who support Trump are actually in favor of cultural conservatism that would make a Neuhaus very happy, but in the name of a kind of identity as a Christian civilization but not actual religious practice. So there are a lot of people on the right who are in favor of conservative social conservative views and identify themselves as Christians who never go to church, never read the Bible, never actually practice faith and aren’t really believers in any of the kind of content of any faith, but they identify as Christians because they now see a different kind of equation than the old Theocan equation.

They see it as to affirm the Trumpian position on immigration, on foreign policy, on trade and all of these things means to defend Christian civilization against the forces that would tear it down and destroy it. And those forces are both secular liberalism and Muslim forces and immigrants from outside, brown people. It’s just a different configuration of hates and it comes with a different configuration of affirmations that have less theological content and they treat religion more as an identity marker than it used to be.

MO: And of course, Trump would be first among equals with this, right? I mean, he talks about Christian civilization all the time and has no, and I just say this descriptively, not judgmentally, has no religious practice that we know of.

DL: Has no scriptural literacy known. He’s the most unChristian person you can imagine and somehow note that like those people who love him, who aren’t that religious and still they see themselves as Christian, like they see him as Trump as Christian despite all of those anti-Christian elements because he defends us against them and us as defined as Christian.

MO: So right, I mean, they don’t have the language for it, but a lot of them are, they don’t mean Christianity, they mean Christiandom. Yeah, something like that. Crudely speaking, a kind of white European, historically Catholic or Christian civilization that is underseed from immigration, from secularism compared to- Yeah,

DL: Various kinds of outsiders who-

MO: Various outsiders. So one would think this would create tremendous intellectual pressure for actual Christians of an intellectual bent on the right. You would think this would be really hard for a Rusty Rino or a Rod Drayer to process, to eth, because they would feel like I’m part of a movement that’s increasingly anti-Christian, but we’re getting a lot of wins. And one of my great frustrations as an interviewer, and I blame them rather than myself, but perhaps the fault is mine, is when I talk to people like this, I can never get them to say that the wins come at some sort of cost. They seem to be enjoying the wins too much. It’s so much fun to see Trump owning the liberals doing what they want on immigration, making gestures they want towards a kind of protectionism or whatever, that they won’t say he’s radically unChristian and he’s making it okay to say you’re Christian even when you’re behaving in unChristian ways, which just seems demonstrably true.

I always feel like, and I’ve said this to several people both on this podcast, but also in my own life, the delta, the gap between what they’ll say publicly to stay in good stead with their allies and the movement and what they’re saying to their spouses on their pillows at night when they’re complaining must be very great, but maybe not. Maybe they’re doing the work internally to reduce cognitive dissonance and they think that, I mean, I guess if they think Trump is a kind of weird King David figure who’s personally flawed but is heralding great things, I don’t know, how do you see as somebody who’s worked with them that they’re processing this?

DL: Well, I think it depends on the person I’m not privy to what’s going on on the pillow. I mean, Rob Drayer I think has more integrity than most. He did vote for Trump the last two times and I wish he didn’t. I wish he … For someone like that and for most of these people, it’s just hatred of the left. They hate and fear the left so much. They’ve worked it up into such a demon, maybe literally, because they do like talking about-

MO: They do believe in demons,

DL: Yeah. That somehow that made, it doesn’t matter how bad Trump is, he’s going to defend me against them and so I’ll do it. But Drayer has been quite willing, especially since the surge of renewed and fervent antisemitism that we’ve seen on the online right with Carlson and Fuentes and all that. When that exploded over the last summer, Dre was very outspoken in taking it down and it meant that Tucker cut him off from their friendship. JD Vance stopped responding to his texts and so forth. So a lot of his high level contacts distanced themselves from him and yet he did it anyway and he’s continued just to be … Even since the Iran war heated up, he’s been very, very hostile to Trump in almost every post on Substack. At the same time, bless his heart. So Rob, God, like the guy who evolves every month

MO: Amar.

DL: He’s now pretty stridently anti-Trump despite he was all rah-rah Ice during

The killings in Minnesota over the winter, but the war combined with a lot of his other ineptitude and kind of senile acting out has Amari now turned on him. Another reason why I give Rod a lot of credit for his critical stance is that Orban butters his bread. He’s been getting part of his income I think from the Danube Institute and he’s now going to have that cut off. But a lot of these other people like Gladden Pappin, he can’t say anything critical because he works at this big foreign policy institute in Budapest and that’s not a position. He’s an employee of Victor Orban. So what’s he going to do? And then I think someone like Vermeule, I think for him, all of this is like he’s like a scholastic a century after Thomas who’s like tending to the beautiful edifice that he’s created and it all has to fit together and that’s kind of his project.

So he had a very funny tweet after Orbán’s loss and some of the things that Vance has been saying that sound like there’s been this conflict between Trump and Pope Leo this week. And so you have this specter of like Vance saying like, “The Pope shouldn’t get messed up in American politics.” And I’m like, “Oh, so much for integralism.”

But then Vermeule responds with this long tweet explaining how actually this is a sign that post liberalism is further along than we even thought, which is just so obviously rationalization. So you see this spectrum where like some of them are intellectually honest enough to admit that yeah, there is a price. Trump’s a total maniac and a loser and he’s actually going to hurt us in the long run more than he’s going to help. And then you have others who just, they’re in for the long haul of doing the intellectual work of being propagandas.

MO: So that brings me to my last question except for the five very quick speed round questions I’ll ask you at the end of 10 seconds each, which is what do you make then when you look back at your old magazine at First Things?

DL: I think that I will be honest and say I do not read it much these days. I sort of follow some of the big people there. So I see when they’re promoting new pieces and if I want to read it, I’ll read it. But it’s a much narrower magazine. They seem to, as far as I can tell, they exist to provide theological justification for what the populist right and nationalist movements want to do and occasionally they publish things that are like pretty offensively out there on the right, like this Pankowski guy who loves the respill novel Camp of the Saints. So they’ll publish him on how actually this is a great novel about the true threat to Western civilization, the flotilla of a million stinking, masturbating Indian brown people who are invading France that like this is some great insight into the West and its future.

They’ll publish things like defenses of, I forget the guy’s name, but when the Pope in the early 20th century or the late 19th century stole the Jewish kid and made him live with Catholics so he

MO: Could be raised,

DL: Got him baptized. They’ll publish that stuff and when I see that, I roll my eyes and I’m like, “Russ, you’re trying way too hard here.” So beyond that, I don’t have much of an opinion about it. I mean, I obviously dissented from the older version and the new harder version holds even more, even less intellectual interest for me so I sort of don’t pay much attention.

MO: These are definitely not the droids you’re looking for.

DL: Exactly.

MO: All right. Well, Damon Linker, you’re a great guide to the Theocratic, Theocon, theoskeptical, theodorable world. I want to give you five quick questions. These need no more than a five or 10 second answer because I know you have to run. So first of all, I usually ask people, do you believe in God? But I want to ask you, I’ll give you a different version of that. What’s your religion these days, if any?

DL: It is not any. I am a secular person. I never call myself an atheist because that presumes more knowledge than I could ever hope to possess. So I’m a skeptical agnostic who’s still open to the possibility, but at the moment, yeah, not anywhere.

MO: If you could have had any other career, what would it have been?

DL: I don’t really … I mean, I guess ideally I would be like some singer, song, writer, musician, because I love music and I play piano and guitar and sing and I would love to have a life of music at the core. So I guess that would be my fantasy career.

MO: Alright. Well, and I know you’ve written widely on music. You write on The Beatles, for example, more than once. So one of my questions is name a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia.

DL: Oh, gee, because I’m not great at coming, sorting through the 10,000 options under the gun, since you mentioned The Beatles, I’ll say like Penny Lane, even though I’m not from Liverpool, so the cultural references don’t work.

MO: But what does it bring you back to? Do you have a moment or a time or

DL: Being a child and finding the sounds of that music to be the most perfect thing I’d ever heard and somehow everything is measured according to itsines.

MO: I do love Penny Lane. I think it’s one of their great songs. It is. Okay. So two more. Do you have a big regret? What’s a big regret you have?

DL: Oh, the regrets. I regret converting to Catholicism. I think that was an impulsive and kind of ill-advised decision on my part. And it makes for sometimes difficult interviews like this where I have to try to explain this to other people where it really doesn’t make any rational sense. I sort of try to drape a rational explanation over it that sort of makes sense, but it clearly is, it can only be explained by my therapist of many, many years who-

MO: It’s good to find a therapist you want to stick with. That’s a win.

DL: Well, I’ve moved beyond that now. I’m out of therapy finally after all those years, but I did take a long time.

MO: And finally, can you give our listeners a recommendation of a book or a TV show or a movie or a song or something that they should go seek out?

DL: Well, because it’s been on my mind, I mean, I wrote about it in a piece a few months ago, but I saw … What is the name? It’s going to escape me right now. I’m so bad at pulling up names. The television show, there was three seasons of The Leftovers.

MO: Yeah

DL: Since you have a lot of religious resonances and

MO: Yeah

DL: Listeners and your conversations, I loved that show. I only saw it for the first time fairly recently within the last six months and I was kind of blown away by how thoughtful and interesting and confounding it was. And so I very highly recommend

MO: That. And wasn’t the showrunner the other Great Damon? Wasn’t it Damon Lindelof? He was the showrunner? Yeah. You’re the two Great Damons.

DL: Exactly. Yeah. One Damon has to stay close to the others.

MO: You should read the novel by Tom Perrotta. It’s based on a great novel.

DL: I tried after seeing the show and I didn’t really like it. I

MO: Ok

DL: Think it has a kind of smart alecky tone to it that I don’t think fits. I became very addicted to the mournful melancholy tone of the show that I think fits the material very well and the novel seems like it’s almost like a joke to it, even though obviously he does deserve the credit of creating these characters and the premise and everything, all power to Perrotta.

MO: I take that point. The show is a more profound … I think he’s a great writer, but I think that show is more profound in certain ways and more atmospheric and moody. I totally take that.

DL: I mean, he deserves also the credit because he co-wrote the second two seasons, which are not the novel. They’re elaborations on the novel, which is, I think, pretty much covered in the first season. So he clearly still had great material to develop with Lindelof, but there’s something about the … That’s a criticism of mine for a lot of contemporary novels that turns me off, is this a kind of knowingness and kind of ironic … I like irony a lot in philosophy, but in a novel about a heavy and existential subject, I find it off-putting if it isn’t treated with the requisite gravity. Interesting.

MO: Yeah. I kind of now want to go revisit it and see what I think, but it may be one of those novels that yielded a better TV show or a better movie than as opposed to something like Queen’s Gambit, which is a great novel and was a perfectly adequate Netflix series. But usually, let’s face it, usually the book’s better, but you might be right here about the leftovers.

DL: Or it could just be a Linker quirk like so many.

MO: You are definitely one of the two great Damons in American culture, so Dr., professor Damon Linker. Thanks for your time.

DL: Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

MO: You bet. That was me in conversation with Damon Linker in April of 2026. His newsletter is notes from the middle ground. He’s the author of a forthcoming book about the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Some cool religious holidays coming up. The coolest of them all, Shavuot is the evening of June 1st. It goes until June 3rd in the diaspora. It marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai of the commandments and it’s the holiday that you celebrate by eating dairy. This is for real. It’s a holiday you celebrate by eating cheesecake, ice cream, dairy treats. There are various theories, old wives’ tales, old husband’s tales about why this is, but we just know that it is. So on the night of June 1st, either celebrate Shavuot with some ice cream or stand in solidarity with Jews the world over celebrating Shavuot by eating some ice cream.

A few days before that, May 27th, 28th, we celebrate Eid al-Adha, the major Muslim holiday that commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son. It’s known in Jewish traditions as the Akedah, that event, and the Muslims celebrate it with Eid al-Adha. Again, May 27th, 28th. Pentecost is May 24th in the Christian traditions, the Hindu celebration, Raksha Bandhan, which honors sibling bonds. Now, that’s a cool holiday, honoring sibling bonds that comes up in late August, August 28th, but we can be looking ahead to it by honoring our siblings, by being nice to our brothers and sisters. Another way that we can honor really just all of us, just good in the world is by listening to Arc, the podcast. You should also rate it and subscribe to it, go on your favorite platform and help juice our algorithms by giving it five stars and saying lots of nice things.

I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I work at the John C. Janforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University where my colleagues who help make this all possible include Director Abram Van Angan and deputy editor David Sugarman. Till next time, this has been Arc, the podcast.