The Future of American Conservatism: David French vs Sohrab Ahmari
The face of the right-wing has been changing, both in American and Europe.
What was once dominated by a general centre-right compassionate conservatism that would bargain with neoliberals and progressives on issues has been steadily getting replaced by a new tide of populism that says no to the transatlantic consensus of neoliberalism. That says no to Pax Americana influencing nations through means of consumerism, soft power and global enforcement.
In America in particular this has led to a bit of a civil war within the American conservative movement.
American conservatism in its history could best be described as the Fusionist alliance built around free market economics, hawkish foreign policy and Christian Right moral values that really took off during the Reagan revolution. This form of conservatism was entirely build as a coalition against the godless Communism of the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was the perfect enemy for this form of conservatism to thrive. State atheism made Soviets the enemy of Christians, communism made it the enemy of business owners, its threat to America’s growing dominance made it the enemy of security hawks and patriots. It was a well funded natural coalition that had the side of the churches, the industrialists and the average patriotic American.
But now let’s fast forward to the 21st century. The Soviet Union is dead, socialism is marginal as a global power, the left has shifted its goal from economics to culture and now uses global capitalism as its vehicle for the modern culture war. The great Reagan-Bush coalition of the 20th/early 21st century is not equipped to face this new form of leftism.
And thus what we are seeing are mainstream conservatives such as Ben Shapiro and the National Review respectively trying hard to maintain this coalition, while up and coming right-wing movements have been trying to take its place. And that has led to strong debates among American conservatives as to where this movement should go. The rise of Trumpism although mitigated by an administration ruled by neocons was a serious kick in the face to conservatives who largely ignored the immigration issue, Tucker Carlson opened up a can of worms by criticizing the market fundamentalism of conservatives and made a plea for a blue collar focused conservatism. And now once again a conservative debate has started.
This time the argument was kickstarted by Sohrab Ahmari making a Twitter storm about the David French way of approaching the culture war, which was followed by a First Things article called “Against David French-ism” written by where he elaborated on the magazine opposing the pre-trump conservative consensus and used David French as a specific example.
To give a short summary of the article Ahmari argues that David French-ism is a tendency to believe that in the culture war the best thing to hope for is that both Christian and progressive-libertine values should be able to co-exist under a marketplace of ideas, and then hope that on a cultural level Christianity will ultimately win.
Ahmari argues that the problem with this is that individual autonomy is not merely some neutral state but rather a normative ideology and that the ultimate logic of pure individual autonomy means the destruction of Christian morality. Because if these moral virtues are merely a form of personal conviction, then they are merely seen as forms of prejudice that stand in the way of individual autonomy. He rejects David French’s idea that we can simply call for a cultural religious revival without the need of some government intervention, and ultimately there is no third way when it comes to the culture war.
Ahmari’s article was blunt, which as a Dutch person I’m quite used to bluntness, but for David French and the National Review crew and other crowds orbiting that general sphere it was seen as an evil plea for right-wing authoritarianism, a delusional attack on such a nice and polite person. But ultimately he started a conversation that conservatives seriously do need to have.
A culture war is a war described for a reason. The left is not merely trying to create a destructive culture for themselves, they want everyone else to also accept it. You must make dick cakes for gay couples, you must let your child transition, you as a Catholic doctor must perform late term abortions, and you are going to like it. That is the mentality of the left, it is not even enough that you give them the autonomy to destroy themselves, you are not allowed to disagree with them, because that makes you bigoted and prejudiced and that is unacceptable. That is the logical conclusion of pure individual autonomy.
But I want to rewind a bit and actually talk about the mentality of conservatism and where the fundamental difference between French and Ahmari lie.
I have argued before that conservatism is a default state of society, where all the moral virtues such as care, fairness, liberty, authority, sanctity and loyalty exists within an equilibrium. This is evident when you look at the studies done on moral foundations by Jonathan Haidt, you will find conservatives balancing all these foundations near perfectly. However society is dynamic and things such as technology will disrupt these foundations, leading to new ideologies that rival conservatism. These new ideologies regarding what was seen a balanced equilibrium of virtues as authoritarian and oppressive.
And that brings me to a new class of conservatives: The urbanite conservative.
There have been many ways to describe these type of conservatives such as reform conservative, compassionate conservative, neoconservative or the pejorative cuckservative. But these are fundamentally conservatives who end up having to alter and reform their moral foundations in order to hold acceptable views within an urban climate that generally favors an atomized individual society over a traditional one. Hence why I call them urbanite conservatives. This was very evident for example when Palmer Luckey was being accused of funding Pro-Trump troll groups and he had to insist that he’s a libertarian and Gary Johnson supporter.
So what you then see is conservatives adopting labels like libertarian in order to have somewhat of an acceptable reputation in urban societies. This is the general “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” strategy where you can say okay i’m a conservative or libertarian but I’m not one of those evil homophobic bigots. This is the most acceptable way for conservatives to act because they don’t mind you being for free markets as long as you concede the social argument to them. And in fact being free market benefits them as well in many ways such as letting social media companies do what they want so there is a certain acceptability to it compared to someone who is explicitly socially conservative.
This is why the general thinktanks and punditry of conservatives have heavily moved towards socially liberal, fiscally conservative ideals even though virtually every study shows this to be rather unpopular and instead it is actually economic leftism and social conservatism that is the ideal combination. But of course the left benefits far more from some Cato Institute intern who will make articles why Paypal has the free market right to completely cut off people’s ability to make payments for opposing mass immigration than a rugged blue collar worker explaining how mass immigration is displacing him and his colleagues.
And the National Review, especially David French embodies this urbanite conservative politeness where everything always has to be a bargain with the left which is then dishonestly framed as some reasonable centrist third way.
And quite frankly while this is maybe the Dutch bluntness talking and maybe I just don’t get American politeness but when I see David French I do not see a polite person, or squish, or nice. I see a moral coward, a weak man, an utter pushover, someone who really isn’t someone fit for the blunt world of politics.
A world where no matter how much you try to bargain, to push for “live and let live” you are only setting yourself up to be hounded by the left. David French embodies the ideology of the Munich Agreement. Just give them a little bit and they’ll leave us alone. Let’s just concede this cultural issue to the left, because there’s no way they’ll actually take it to the extreme, right? But they always do. They will always take it a step further. Because when the left wins they get arrogant, they don’t merely win culture wars, they’ll see how far they can take it before people can no longer stand it anymore.
Ultimately I just do not get David French’s stance, I do not get his reasoning. He wants to allow Drag Queen Story Time hours as some kind of free association thing, because otherwise you’d be promoting evil Christian statism. But what is the actual argument to allow something like that to continue? Because it’s freedom? Because it doesn’t harm anyone? But surely a conservative like him should understand that this does harm children, that it exposes them to something inherently sexual and that it has led to the actual sexualization of drag children. But to our “nice” conservative that’s just free association, that’s just individual autonomy apparently.
What about say polyamory? Studies have constantly shown that polyamorous societies are far more violent, destructive and less equal than monogamous societies. If we know that encouraging polyamory is ultimately destructive then should we not be forced to encourage monogamy and discourage polyamory in any way we can? Be it through government incentives or not?
David French’s nice conservatism relies on the same morally bankrupt argument as the NAP libertarians. That anything that’s technically voluntary is inherently non-aggressive and therefor should not have any government interference. He prides himself in the fact that America is a neutral space of different cultural values and ideologies, which really makes him no different from the left-wing diversity mongers in this culture wars. But this idea of America or any other nation being some magic neutral space where ideological differences can thrive is simply not the reality. America is utterly divided, street violence is rampant, in fact i’d go as far as argue that America is quickly becoming a failed multicultural experiment that either has to rediscover its WASP roots or go into the dustbin of history like many other failed enlightenment experiments.
What French ultimately misunderstands is that he thinks his “polite” third way approach where we pretend we can all live in this neutral space is in itself the type of normative enforcement that he claims to oppose. When the left imposes costs on us, our children, our demographics that is a form of force, and thus we ought to have a right to retaliate against that force. But French’s staunch opposition to retaliate is in itself a retaliation against us, French wants to pretend to be a neutral non-violent arbiter but he himself forces his normative position where we cannot defend ourselves against rampant leftism. And it makes you wonder on which side he really is on this culture war.
