Berlin, Trilling, and Niebuhr (and Strauss), Oh My!

Reading List:

• “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin), 2 (Lionel Trilling), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr), by Damon Linker.

• “Philosophy and the Far Right”—Part 1 and Part 2

• “Conservatism and Skepticism”—Part 1 and Part 2

My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias 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).

Damon is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Notes from the Middle Ground newsletters on Substack, is a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and is the author of two books, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders.

I asked Damon on the show to discuss his recent series of essays on three of the seminal thinkers of post-war liberalism, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. We also got into his conflicted feelings about the philosopher Leo Strauss and the movement—Straussianism—that he birthed.