Enemies Within?

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker (Doubleday, 272 pp., $26)

OF the making of conspiracies to undermine the political well-being of the United States, it seems, there isto beno end. In the past couple of years, of course, considerable attention has been paid by the press to the neoconservatives, alleged to be a group of hardened warmongers originally brought together under the auspices of a long-dead refugee professor named Leo Strauss, whose tentacles reached first into the bowels of the American university and from there, through a group of intellectuals and public officials, into the topmost reaches of the U.S. government. From the White House itself, it is alleged, this conspiracy has been able to produce its most dangerous effect so far, namely, to grind the faces of the poor while driving the country into an illegitimate and unwinnable war in Iraq. Now the neocons, who to begin with were not all bad-at least in the view of Damon Linker, the author of this new book-are in danger of losing out to a newer conspiracy: that of a group he calls the theocons.

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Midge Decter

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The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker (Doubleday, 272 pp., $26)

OF the making of conspiracies to undermine the political well-being of the United States, it seems, there isto beno end. In the past couple of years, of course, considerable attention has been paid by the press to the neoconservatives, alleged to be a group of hardened warmongers originally brought together under the auspices of a long-dead refugee professor named Leo Strauss, whose tentacles reached first into the bowels of the American university and from there, through a group of intellectuals and public officials, into the topmost reaches of the U.S. government. From the White House itself, it is alleged, this conspiracy has been able to produce its most dangerous effect so far, namely, to grind the faces of the poor while driving the country into an illegitimate and unwinnable war in Iraq. Now the neocons, who to begin with were not all bad-at least in the view of Damon Linker, the author of this new book-are in danger of losing out to a newer conspiracy: that of a group he calls the theocons.