Damon Linker

Pundit Damon Linker: Conservative Intellectuals Should Denounce GOP Presidential Field As ‘Ignorant, Insulting, and Dangerous’
By Tom Johnson | November 15, 2015 | 10:26 PM EST

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” person of any political stripe could have watched last week’s GOP presidential debate “and not come away disgusted.” He issued a challenge to “conservative intellectuals...to speak up and call the GOP field what it is: ignorant, insulting, and dangerous.”

Pundit Damon Linker: GOP Base Sees the World ‘Through a Fog of Paranoia and Conspiracy’
By Tom Johnson | July 10, 2015 | 4:12 PM EDT

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 conservative activists, who tend to view events “through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy,” have gradually dragged down the party as they’ve become a larger and larger share of it. In Linker’s words, “They’ve grown and spread like a fungus (thanks to the fertilization efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes).” One recent consequence: the popularity among GOPers of the “vulgar blowhard” Donald Trump.

Columnist: 'Reform'-Minded Conservatives Will Rise After ‘Loony’ GOP Nominee Gets Trounced in 2016
By Tom Johnson | August 5, 2014 | 6:10 AM EDT

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 radical” who's crushed at the polls a la Barry Goldwater. “Only that kind of blowout,” wrote Linker, “will exorcize the demons that have taken hold of the Republican soul in recent years.”

From Linker’s piece last Wednesday (emphasis added):