Damon Linker

Damon Linker, a self-described former “conservative intellectual” (he was an editor at First Things) believes that Hillary Clinton’s policy positions are “good enough” to earn the votes of current conservatives, given that a Donald Trump administration would pose a “national threat” and that most right-wing Hillary-hatred “lack[s] any rational connection to reality.” Take Hillary’s scandals --…

The kids in The Family Circus blame their misbehavior on gremlins with names like Ida Know and Not Me. The Week’s Damon Linker believes grown-up conservatives do something similar when they deny what Linker sees as the plain truth: that they run the Republican party. In a Tuesday column, Linker contended that the right-wing “counter-establishment” that first gained a share of power in 1981 now “…

Over the past several years, many former or reformist conservatives have wondered how the Republican party might be reclaimed from its volcanically angry, Fox-News-and-talk-radio-driven base. One ex-conservative, The Week columnist Linker, suggests that righty intellectuals ought to catalyze the process. In a Friday column, Linker wrote that he couldn’t understand “how an intelligent, well-read…

The late NFL head coach George Allen had a favorite saying: “The future is now.” Conversely, The Week's Linker believes the Republican party’s future “will be delayed so long as [its] candidates remain beholden to voters who view politics primarily as a megaphone for broadcasting an ignorant, garbled howl of anger, fear, alienation, and resentment.” In a Friday piece, Linker remarked that…

Damon Linker, who opines for the newsmagazine The Week, thinks the so-called reform conservatives have a chance to pull the Republican party back towards the center, but predicts it won’t happen until after the GOP base -- currently “gripped by a form of political psychosis, doing furious battle with ideological phantoms of its own creation” -- nominates for president a “genuine right-wing…