A few examples:
(1)
To those who would accuse him of having a “felt need for authority,” Neuhaus proudly declares that “of course” he does, “as should we all.” . . . But how can we know, by what authority can we determine, which authority is the right authority? . . . Carl Schmitt, the political theorist who devoted a great deal of thought to this dilemma, determined that such men have no choice but to make an arbitrary yet resolute decision to obey some authority, any authority. Taking account of the options in Germany in 1933, Schmitt swore obedience to Hitler. Neuhaus, of course, makes an infinitely more respectable decision in favor of the Vatican.
So: Linker generously allows that allegiance to the Catholic church isn’t exactly the same thing as allegiance to the Nazi party, but he can’t resist putting this otherwise totally irrelevant aside in because. . . well, it’s not clear why. One might almost think that he is trying to insinuate and disown something at the same time.
(2) “The pope, Neuhaus implies, is always right. (When politics intrudes, however, Neuhaus honors this idea in the breach: over the years he has shown himself to be perfectly willing to break from a suddenly fallible Vatican when it endorses economic and foreign policies that diverge from those preferred by the Republican Party.)” Anyone who has read conservative Catholic writers such as Neuhaus, Michael Novak, or George Weigel, or their critics from points left and right, at any time during the last twenty years will find this silly. The conservatives have constantly faced the charge of being “cafeteria Catholics” who reject certain aspects of Catholic teaching. You can find their answers to this charge unpersuasive–I find them persuasive, myself–but you can’t pretend that the answers don’t exist.
(3) Linker includes the obligatory distortion of First Things’s 1996 symposium “The End of Democracy?” (Incidentally, if that symposium revealed that the essence of Neuhaus’s project was an armed struggle for theocracy, why exactly did Linker go to work for him after it ran? Linker is going to have to come up with some kind of explanation for this.) We are supposed to find the following quote, from Robert George in that symposium, “radical” and self-evidently frightening: “[the courts … have imposed upon the nation immoral policies that pro-life Americans cannot, in conscience, accept.” Either Linker is easily frightened, or he’s reading something into this comment that isn’t obviously there.