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

Eminent Americans

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

Damon Linker and I dwell on the wise men of post-war liberalism.

Daniel Oppenheimer

and

Damon Linker

Mar 11, 2024

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.

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Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a newsletter and occasional podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it. So people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Yang, Elizabeth Bruenig, Ross Douthat, Nikole Hannah Jones, Jia Tolentino, Freddie Deboer, Rod Dreher, Ibram Kendi, Ezra Klein, Bari Weiss, the Red Scare podcast hosts, Andrew Sullivan, etc.

Although the newsletter will touch on the political and intellectual issues that concern these folks, the focus is less the topics than the people — their backstories, what drives them, how they’ve evolved, who cares the most about them, what role they play in the larger ecosystem, and what trends do they embody or influence.

In one sense, then, it’s a rather meta concept. It’s an intellectual (me) talking about other intellectuals in their roles as intellectuals, and occasionally doing in conversation with yet more intellectuals. From another angle, it’s simply an attempt to investigate and describe the contemporary American scene through and with the people who constitute it.

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