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INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 26: Will liberals elect Ron DeSantis?

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 26: Will liberals elect Ron DeSantis?

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Tom Scocca's avatar
Tom Scocca
Mar 02, 2023
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
THE WORST THING WE READ™

The Panicky Complacency of Damon Linker

MONDAY MORNING, THE New York Times opinion section greeted its online readers with the headline "My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis," atop a column by Damon Linker. The headline was annoying in a very standard way, coming the day after "Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco" (by a billionaire venture capitalist who spends millions on influencing local politics) and two days before "My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right" (by a right-wing campus operative from Princeton who worked for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's campaign at the age of 14 and was the head of Youth for Ted, as in Ted Cruz).

Linker, the former editor of the right-wing religious magazine First Things, may currently call himself a liberal—in the post-Trumpian, aggressively centrist sense of the label—but his invoking "fellow liberals" was, at minimum, a rhetorical stretch. Linker might not fit the model of the standard lifelong Democratic-voting liberal, per se, but he does want to see the far right defeated, which will require him to work in coalition with more normal liberals, which means he feels a duty to boss them around. 

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