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Directly related to one of the top line comments from last week is an opinion piece by David French - non-paywalled link.
Half of it is snark. The title and lede are designed to get the pearls clutched. A paragraph later, French gives up the sarcasm and goes on at length about how "akshually, Men can be real meanies!"
The complete dodge of any real intellectual engagement with the original Helen Andrews piece is, sadly, totally on brand for what passes as journalistic "editorials" these days. Sohrab Amari previously called out French for being a conserva-cuck. His conclusions remain unchallenged.
And that's the culture war angle I'm actually interested in. The latest battles in the Gender War were pretty well covered in the thread from last week (linked above). Any new insights are welcome on that front, however, my focus is on what I see as an intra-male conflict between boomer conservatives and the Young Right. Now that I think about it, this also links to the "Nasty Republican Group Chat" thread. I am too lazy, now, to link to it.
David French, and many boomer conservatives like him, despised Trump all the way back in 2016 and haven't changed their tune one bit. They do hold some bedrock right/conservative views; taxes shouldn't be so high, gun rights (to an extent), free speech even if it makes people feel icky, pro defense in a broad yet milquetoast sort of way. I suppose they are, at their most "extreme", still committed neo-cons of the Bush 2 era.
And they're all still living in The Matrix. They all believe that we can go back to that perfect little period when ole Ronny was in the White House and everyone was getting rich and you could come home to a steak dinner with the little lady - who, of course, had a degree from Radcliffe and was totally smart and independent but just so happened to truly want to be a stay at home mom. The insane conceit of the BoomerCons is that their worldview rests on a stone foundation of traditionalism establish, through blood, but the Greatest Generation. Where the BoomerCon looks at women in the military without too much worry - well, maybe not in the infantry - the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs, saying, "I can't imagine a broad landing in Normandy". Where the BoomerCon rolls his eyes at political correctness yet makes sure to use the appropriate terminology ("Dude, Chinaman is not the appropriate nomenclature"), the Greatest Generation Grandpa, that one Thanksgiving, "couldn't believe the number of Spaniards at the grocery store!". Where the BoomerCon pinched his nose during the 2008 bank bailouts - "It's a systemic issue, we have to act!", the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs "Oh, The Bank lost all your money?! Yeah, I remember the 30s!"
The Young Right is a kind of double-bounced mirror image if the Greatest Generation in terms of their hard-bitten suspicion of the world. Coming of age in the late 2000s, they saw a financial collapse in the middle of an expeditionary war of questionable strategic import. The young men, especially, then had their place in society not changed but neutered starting in about 2013 (the first "cultural appropriation" fracas at Yale). On a larger scale, any economically aware young person sees how the Boomers have systematically rigged the system against them; social security, Medicare/aid, and the home mortgage ponzi scheme. It's intergenerational theft plain and simple.
But the David French's of the world want to, you know, guys, c'mon, pump the breaks. Turn down the temperature. Feminization of American is totally fine...actually, let me tell you about the summer of 1969, oh man, I was at this Grateful Dead show and....
But there is no going back to that. The damage is done and now it's a rebuilding effort in the middle of a hot (culture) war.
I think French is basically right.
Andrews is making one of those famous totalizing theories of history, which invariably take a single phenomenon affecting a single place and time and attempt to make it into a completely general theory of cause and effect. A good analogy would be Marxism.
Totalizing theories fail because the actual material of history is far, far richer and denser than any monocausal theory can provide for (outside of extremely limited forms - think “crop failures drive starvation”). Right now, America specifically is under a great number of pressures, including: an aging population, immigration, the arrogance born of global superiority, gutted industries, old and new racial tensions, the rise of left and then right wokism, the intergenerational humiliations of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and yes, the monumental rise of women into the public sphere and corresponding retreat in men’s public influence. Each one of these is going to have its own effects and pressures, and to select one as the Cause of Causes is misguided or even benighted.
What I think Andrews is mostly describing is a sharpened tribalistic trend in the public sphere. Calls for ingroup violence are responded to more generously, as points of difference or even decorum are sufficient for a breach. At the same time, objective measures of advantage are taken less seriously, along with other dispassionate perspectives. Overt efforts towards creating entirely new value, or at least taking from the actual Other, are devalued compared to squabbling over internal resources.
But this happens over all places and times, and if I were to offer a theory, is probably more closely related to where people can expect the greatest return on investment for their efforts. While Rome had easy access to the Mediterranean and rich France, she expanded; when she reached the borders of the Sahara, the Atlantic, the Levant, and the Rhine, she turned inward and began warring over what she already had. This is not a complete analysis, but I think it’s a strong gearspring in this particular mechanism. In contrast, ONLY in the modern West have women penetrated the public sphere to such a degree. If there were consequences to this, we should expect to see unique ones, not regurgitations from every struggling power. And indeed, on the family and interpersonal level, we do see massive changes in gender relations. But interestingly, I don’t think those replicate directly to the civilizational level. The problems we are having were experienced by the men of yesteryear. Late Athens is, as always, an apt comparison.
I’m coming at this from a fairly sympathetic perspective. I think there are major problems with how America operates right now, I personally dislike how it feels to operate in a feminized institution, I think the legislative defenses of women have by and large exceeded their period of use now that women are paramount in many areas… and yet I find her overall piece to be lacking. It’s like she’s got cause and effect backwards.
Let me give an analogy. We all know that universities became dramatically more leftist over the past sixty or so years - I think that’s fairly established and supportable. But why? The simple reason is that more conservative individuals did not see the universities as worth fighting over. I know I didn’t. They don’t pay enough, you don’t get enough respect… so I went into industry, and I think that’s where most similar people went too. So the universities were ceded to people who wanted them for reasons nothing to do with wealth or status.
I think the women in industry question is similar. In the areas where women are most dominant, or increasingly dominant, one reason is that they want the job for reasons other than what men want, and are willing to effectively undercut men on that principle. As they do so, the costs for men to enter that industry go up and the rewards go down, so they hit a tipping point and become much more female. If a field were to become more profitable but also more demanding, we’d see a reverse effect where men flood in and squeeze the women - who frequently want more flexibility in their work and don’t like demanding and stressful positions - out. And I think this is happening to some degree in fields like nursing. It’s basically gender roles painted over industrial culture. So what does it mean that, say, being a judge or a lawyer or a Congressman is decreasingly attractive to men, such that they’d push through whatever feminine culture to be one anyway?
So, contra Andrews, my basic thesis is that the basic facts of gendering make some careers more suitable for men than women than vice versa, and that this tends to lead to dramatic differences in sex ratio and subculture, but that the larger cultural differences are separate from this phenomenon. Certainly there is some effect from civil rights legislation, but it’s not the whole story. If you took all the women out, I suspect the men that remain would act, by Andrews’ lights, like a bunch of girls.
Have you read what Andrews wrote ?
Do you truly think we are blank slates disconnected from our biology ? How then do you account for the extreme similarity of social institutions among primitive tribes ? There is no evidence of a matriarchal society - only ever matrilineal. Every known human society has marriage and jealousy. And so on.
Only if they were the kind of men who buy perfume and engage in what used to be called sodomy.
Yes, no, not necessarily, respectively.
No kidding, that's what you believe? That we're some sort of quasi-rational agents not biased by millions of years of mammalian psychology ?
What a strange thing to say. Didn’t I answer “no” there?
If you’re looking for an opportunity to be offended, then I can’t really help you.
Being too terse has its risks.
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There's a big gap in the middle of this argument.
For a start, yes, David French is an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA conservative. That much is obvious - he says it plainly himself. He wants the right to go in a direction other than the one in which Trump is leading it.
But you then gloss that as French wanting to go back to an idealised, dead Reaganism. What makes you think that's a fair or charitable description of his position? If you asked French himself, do you think that's the position he would advocate for?
I'm struck that you, like many people, cited Sohrab Ahmari's broadside against David French, without mentioning the debate between them. Ahmari and French sat down together after the publication of that piece and had a discussion, moderated by Ross Douthat, and, well... so, the thing is, French makes Ahmari look like an absolute clown. Ahmari's criticisms of French don't land (his 'David-French-ism' is a confection that has very little to do with what French actually believes), and when Ahmari starts fantasising about making people sweat in front of hearings, French correctly criticises it as empty and performative. French kills it in the debate to the point that, multiple times, Douthat needs to come in to make a defense that Ahmari was apparently unable to make himself. It made it quite hard, actually, for me to take Ahmari seriously after it.
French has a clear vision - Christians can prosper in a viewpoint-neutral public sphere, viewpoint-neutral provisions have both protected and benefitted Christian groups, and removing those provisions would do immense harm. On a moral level, the Golden Rule means that both he individually and Christians in general should fight for the same legal provisions for his opponents that he would want to apply to himself. Theologically, insofar as the gospel is true and inspired by God, it will survive and even prosper in the public sphere. He supports this with a narrative of Christian activism in the last half-century or so that has substantial room for optimism - there have been great awakenings, the abortion rate steadily decreased for decades before Dobbs, and so on. This vision may be wrong or incorrect (in particular I'm not sure the situation for Christianity is as sunny as he thinks), but it's at least relatively robust, and it prescribes some clear courses of action.
Ahmari's vision is... something else. Not that. Ahmari is not ideologically coherent enough to explain his alternative. French was thus regularly able to push him - "what laws would you pass, and how would they be constitutional?" Ahmari thinks that classical liberalism is insufficient but does not have a clear route to an alternative. He thinks that viewpoint-neutrality isn't needed, at least, not in the French way, but flounders at the obvious response that if it were made constitutional for public accommodations to just discriminate against messages or groups they don't like, Christians are going to suffer a lot more than they're going to gain. Maybe Ahmari's ideal is some sort of Catholic integralist regime, but he has no plausible way to get there, and defending the Trump administration seems like a bad way to try to get there given that administration's almost total disinterest in the common good or in morality legislation.
I'm not wholly behind French overall. My broad reading of the situation is that there are, roughly, three conservative Christian strategies for engaging with the culture in the offering here.
The French Option is to accept the terms of classical liberalism, and just do it better than the other side. The laws protect us all equally, so now all we have to do is win the argument. Go out there and share the gospel! Be righteous and charitable to others! We can have an equal playing field, and we can win on that playing field.
The second two options deny that this kind of victory is possible. The Ahmari Option, so to speak, says that the playing field is tilted. The terrain is unfriendly, and the idea that classical liberalism is neutral is a lie. What we need to do is more like Deneen's Regime Change - use our political strength, seize control where we can, and move the state in a more overtly illiberal direction. And the final option is what I'll call the Dreher Option: Ahmari is right that liberalism is inherently biased against Christianity, but he's wrong that there's a political solution to this. French is wrong that we can win on a liberal playing field, and Ahmari is wrong that we can change the playing field ourselves. Instead what we need to do is bunker up, retreat, and survive as long as possible, waiting until the playing field changes - by some other means - before advancing again. This may mean a centuries-long process of fortification.
If you ask me all those options are flawed. French's strategy is based on an optimism that doesn't seem particularly justified by the evidence - if the French Option would work, why hasn't it already worked? Churches are declining and culturally progressive messages and policies have been consistently winning for most of a century. Ahmari's strategy is wishful thinking; there is no constituency for the massive, structural changes they want, and the best they can do is fantasise that MAGA might turn to aristopopulists like them, which of course it will not. And Dreher's strategy is more likely to, as Dreher himself has conceded at times, degenerate into little purity cults, at war with themselves. He is unlikely to build fertile gardens, but rather graveyards.
There isn't really an easy answer for what theologically conservative Christians ought to do in the US today. There is no straightforward, obvious path to redeeming the culture, and I do not think it will happen in the immediate future. But of these commenters, French is the one who has won the most respect from me, if only because he seems perhaps the most genuinely principled of the lot. I don't think the French strategy can lead to an overall 'victory', in the sense of re-Christianising the United States, but of these three I think it is the most likely to produce and sustain Christian communities within the United States. And that matters.
This comment is better than my original post by leap and bounds. Thank you.
I'll do my best to offer a similarly effortful response.
On David French
You asked;
I do think that, if asked, French would say that liberalism from about JFK to George H.W. Bush was "working." He'd crow about this or that policy and perhaps bemoan the decline of mainstream church attendance more than your average political commentator, but the conclusion would be a general approval that "the liberalism of my youth" worked in terms of resolving political arguments and was based on "shared values." He would point to Trump / MAGA, wokeism, an the progressive left of today as obvious evidence that we're so much worse off and that we need to go back to suit-and-tie, groovy Ivy League liberalism.
As others have pointed out, going back is impossible, so French's remedy is nonsensical. I'd take it a step further. French's appreciation of the liberalism of yesteryer is itself not only misguided but fails to appreciate the system that led us to our current state of affairs. To me, it's like saying "Man, I know I'm an alcoholic. I wish I could just go back to my late 20s and early 30s when I was drinking every day and nothing was wrong!" Rewinding the tape doesn't mean we get to change how the movie unfolds.
On The Rage Against 20th Century Liberalism
I agree with your critiques of Ahmari and Drehrer. In a previous post I even presaged some of the same things you said about Drehrer. I cited Ahmari 1) because I was having a little fun with the original post (always try to!) and 2) The (broadly inclusive) New Right is not yet at the point of offering real solutions, but has done a good job of pointing at the problem. The most comprehensive works on it are what Deneen has written and the criminally underreported The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell. The latter does the most comprehensive breakdown of how and why the Baby Boomers are not only greedy etc. but have an incoherent political worldview which gives you things like a real estate hustler from Queens being the champion of the West Virginia coal miner, and trans twelve year olds as the rallying cry of retired Berkeley-grad grandmas. Ahmari's hyperbolic critiques of French - flawed as they are - are still a principled expression of frustration. I'm not electing him to be the intellectual core of the New Right, but I'll take him over the weird post-post-post-irony nonsense of Nick Fuentes and your average "Republican Group Chat" Z-llenial. 6 7? 6 7? Am I doing this Right?
On a Solution
There's not yet an emerging consensus for "wat do?" on the new right. Right now, this is largely due to the fact that Trump and MAGA take all the air out of the room and the various sub-factions (Deneenists, Frenchists, Ahmarists, etc.) are trying to figure out how to square-peg-that-round-hole to ride MAGA coattails after the departure of Trump or, in the case of French, decamp entirely to a kind of conservo-liberalist island. I think we can, however, point to some major elements that will, in some way, be foundational parts of whatever a post-Trump right looks like.
Techno-industrialist revival. Vance (noted Thiel acolyte) being VP solidified this for me. If, however, you spend the time to go through the list of folks who ended up in the Trump Admin after 2024 (and I mean folks way, way down the latter. Not secretary level, but like "deputy under other whatever for x") you'll see lots of folks with obvious connections back to the Silicon Valley right - Palantir and Anduril types being significantly represented. Also, a LOT of GWOT veterans (specifically special operations) who then picked up MBAs a Stanford / Harvard. These people are in the places they need to be to truly redirect the industrial policy based of America to something that is a) responsive to a kinetic event with China and b) poised to produce a much higher volume of physical goods instead of software, IP, and financialized products. Now, will they be successful? Totally different question, totally different post.
Pro-natalism. Strong pro-natalism. Again, made obvious with the Vance pick, but also supported all over the place by even totally secular or atheist folks who can do the simple math of demographics are realize there aren't enough Americans. With immigration being what it is because of what it was under, mostly, Biden, no one on the right is going to be making the argument that we can solve the demographic shift by importing people.
Strong traditional gender identities. Hanania, I believe, had a recent article on observations about hanging out with liberal vs conservative women in DC. One of the major takeaways was that conservative women dress ... women-ly. Skirts, heels, tight tops with low necklines, makeup, jewelry. Liberal women wear flats, oversized blazers, those weird big-box pants, little to zero makeup, subdued hairstyles. On the other side of the coin, half of the MAGA appeal (at least) is that men can and do men stuff. There's a vaguely military aesthetic, but mostly it's about male coded activities; lifting, combat sports, general bro'ing out. This is part of the reason, I think, Trump picked up more male latino and black votes in 2024. The key here, however, is that the New Right - beyond the heavily religious new right of TradCaths etc. - isn't going to ask women to completely go back to being SAHMs. Without a strong religious fealty, women today, even extremely and truthfully conservative ones, cannot commit the social suicide of actually "only" being a Mom. Even if it isn't traditional careerism, they'll want to be out of the house a lot. Here is not the place to comment on why that is or if its good. All I'm saying, in this context, is that The New Right will be totally fine with women doing whatever they want, so long as they do it as very obviously women.
** On Getting There **
So let's say I'm right and the three points above are the only "reliable" proto-planks of a New Right platform post Trump. How do we actually get there?
That's the danger. There's no real consensus. It's all being held together by the force of personality that is Donald Trump. Once he is off the stage (and, no, he cannot be some sort of shadow president following a potential Vance win in 2028), there's going to be some kind of War of The Roses. I put money on the Thiel people just because they run real deep, have lots of money, and aren't reflexively anti-intellectual and, frankly, bizarre, the way the OG Steve Bannon and current Stephen Miller wings are. The Trump children will have a lot of influence and I think it's key to remember that Barron Trump was and is, allegedly, the social media guru within the White House.
The other option, of course, is that the Democrats win in 2028. This would require them to not fuck up an election. Color be doubtful. If a compromise Dem candidate wins -- let's just say Mayor Pete, even though that is impossible - the David French's of the world will rejoice. But nothing will happen and nothing will get done. You'll have some sort of MAGA redux in 2032. The democrats need to violently eject the progressive part of their party to remain relevant - but they won't do that. I truly am utterly perplexed by this.
** My Very Online Solution **
I'll spare you a full blueprint, because I don't have one, but the crux of it, specifically, gets down to repealing the Civil Rights Act. Look at it's legislative history and you'll see how horrifically it's morphed over time to become a orwellian "general fairness" law that is close to nonsense and so can be weaponized at will. Of course, if any Senator apposes appealing it, they're walking directly into the woodchipper of "the racisms!"
Without a CRA, identity politics and the politics of resentment become electoral losers because you can no longer make the case to specific voting demographics that you'll be able to help them specifically. You wouldn't be able to. Politicians would have to, instead, make the case that their policies have the best chance of being broadly beneficial. I think you might even see a general decline in gerrymandering.
And this is where I run out of steam. I hope this response to your excellent comment was at least a C-.
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That's the least clear thing I've heard in a while. What is "viewpoint-neutral" even supposed to mean?
One of French's limitations, in my view, is that he's a lawyer and tends to think in positivist terms. The Ahmari/French dispute was ignited by an argument over drag queen story hour in public libraries, which Ahmari understandably thinks is disgusting and would like to get rid of. French argues that the public accommodations that allow drag queen story hour to happen are the same public accommodations that allow for e.g. prayer groups or Bible study groups to meet in and use public libraries. He mounts a solid case for that, I think, particularly because his own background is legally defending Christian groups using these accommodations. The basis for that defense is viewpoint-neutrality - a library or similar institution cannot deny a group the right to meet there simply because the library doesn't like that group or its message. This kind of neutrality allows Christian groups to use public resources like this.
French fears, to my mind reasonably, that revoking this neutrality and allowing institutions to discriminate against groups whose messages they don't like (such as drag queens) would inevitably result in Christian (or other conservative) groups being denied the use of those spaces as well. If we tear down the wall to attack the drag queens, we will be vulnerable to attack in return, and because many of these institutions are dominated by progressives, we would take more damage.
Thus he recommends supporting viewpoint-neutral public accommodations as strategically wise for conservative Christians.
Then there's also the moral/theological argument that I alluded to, that Christian charity and the Golden Rule should mean that we should extend to our opponents the same accommodations that we would like them to extend to us. French would, I think, see liberalism and Christianity as deeply compatible - perhaps even liberalism as outself an extension of the Christian ethic into secular law.
More pessimistic Christians might reply to French, "Hang on, a few problems here. Firstly, they won't reciprocate if we do this. They will still try to ban us. Why are you saying we should offer succour to an enemy? Secondly, this kind of 'neutrality' is a sham. A few concessions like meeting in libraries does not constitute true neutrality. It's just a cover for more legal attempts to hound Christians out of public spaces entirely; we've seen the progression of hate speech laws, for instance. Thirdly, you focus far too much on what's legally allowed, when law is actually just a frontier of this dispute. The bigger issue is culture - not just what one is legally allowed to say, but about what can say without being culturally ostracised."
I think the third problem is a significant one, and that's why I say that French is a bit too positivist. Legal protections are good and necessary, but what happens underneath the law's umbrella is important as well, and I think that without a more robust cultural shift in the direction of the values French ostensibly espouses - Christian faith and morality, or just conservative values more generally, such as responsibility, duty, initiative, French has written about positive masculinity before, etc. - the law will count for little. So while French's legal efforts have been praiseworthy, to look at those legal victories and conclude that everything is fine is myopic.
I agree with that perspective I just laid out. I think part of the issue is that French does not have a natural home for his values. When he was more straightforwardly affiliated with the right, in the early and mid 2010s, when he was a National Review columnist, you could see more consistency, but he is basically a Romney-ite - small government, individual freedom, personal character and traditional virtue. Since 2015 or so, the wider conservative movement in the US has gradually reconciled itself to Trump and MAGA, and those groups are profoundly opposed to the values that French stands for. Nobody can look at Trump and see someone championing Christian virtues, responsibility, courage, stoicism, self-control, or the like. Thus French praising Erika Kirk while condemning Trump, and writing blisteringly about the moral failures of MAGA. So now he's ended up with the New York Times and a group of liberals, many of whom share his proceduralism and his sunny American patriotism. But liberals are deeply out of step with him on cultural issues, and he can only prosper there by muting his criticisms of left-wing culture. (Which he does, I think to his shame. There is probably also a dispute to have about how much his actual positions have shifted, and they have a little, but not completely. For instance, he's gone from opposing gay marriage to supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, conceding ground that I don't think he would have in 2012.) There just isn't a natural home for him at the moment.
I don't agree with him on everything and he has limitations as a thinker, but I do feel a level of respect for him, and I think hatred for him is overblown.
Anyway, what does this all mean for conservative Christianity? I think French is right that it's not as bad as it might seem, especially legally, but it's not great either, and evangelicals should be careful not to sleepwalk into destruction. At the same time, French is correct about a crisis of virtue on the part of the church and the corruption of MAGA, even if he does not have a solution to that crisis.
I think it's all of them. Regarding the second one, access to an abundant public resource, such as a meeting room in a public library where it's usually only a question of when they will have an open slot, is probably the easiest case for the concept of "viewpoint neutrality", it would just mean "give the slot to whoever asks first, you can't say 'no'". Even then it's an open question of whether we are currently living under such a regime - there's been cases of cancelled meetings that the librarians didn't like - but fine I can accept the validity of having this sort of "viewpoint neutrality" as the goal, and to the extent there are deviations, fighting against them. Though the other issue is what counts as a "viewpoint"? Do I have a right to give public lectures about public infrastructure sabotage which use local power plants. water treatment facilities, and mass transit as examples (for purely educational reasons, of course)? How about a lecture on the most effective way to sanction Israel-affiliated institutions?
Of course the bigger difficulties start when we consider more scarce public resources. Take for example the shelf space of that same public library, does it have to stock every book in existence? Well, obviously it can't, so the answer to that is "no" and some curation will always take place, but then what kind of curation is "viewpointly neutral" and what kind isn't? A while back I got into a conversation about that with my interlocutor claiming it would be highly inappropriate for parents deciding which books to drop from their library, but apparently fine when the librarians do it, and I still can't make heads or tails out of that argument. Then you can take it even a step further than that, a library can stock books, but it can't force you to read them, but what about institutions that can? What does "viewpoint neutral" education look like? I've seen people propose a "teach the controversy" approach, but aside from "viewpoint neutral" institutions like the Supreme Court deeming it unconstitutional with regards to certain subjects, it runs into the very same resource limitation problems that the library shelves do - you don't have unlimited time to teach every perspective. Finally, even if you did, it would be dubious whether teachers can accurately portray every perspective.
As far as I can tell "viewpoint neutrality", at least outside some very narrow scenarios, is a spook. A pipe dream at best, and outright incoherent at worst.
And regarding the first problem:
...and that's the tragedy of David French. He'll be trotted out to be put as an obstacle for his fellow Christians, but the moment he'll want to cash-in any of that "respect", the people who put him there will suddenly realize his limitations as a thinker again.
...This is, of course, assuming he doesn't know perfectly well what's happening...
I think French would take two tacks here. Firstly, he'd argue that you underestimate what is and remains possible for Christians in the United States. It's all very well for you say that viewpoint neutrality is a spook, and only applies in some narrow scenarios, but those narrow scenarios undoubtedly matter. If you're proposing abandoning the kinds of constitutional protections that grant Christians rights to public spaces, it seems reasonable for people like French to point to the cost. Secondly, he'd challenge you as to what your alternative is. Fine, abandon the idea of viewpoint neutrality, and perhaps even the whole idea of classical liberalism. What then? What do you want to build instead?
For what it's worth I think that final crack about "assuming he doesn't know perfectly well" is conspiratorial and beneath you. Nor do I think French is particularly an obstacle to other Christians. French's entire position is for more free expression, more free association, and more free use of public resources, even for people whom he profoundly disagrees with. In what way is he standing in the way of anyone, much less other Christians? French has never to my knowledge said or done anything to limit the expression or mobilisation of people like Ahmari. What are the obstacles? I see French as one American Christian among many, who is trying to hold to a set of principles and navigate a very difficult cultural moment. His existence in no way inhibits others.
One side note that I'd meant to put into my last post, and which I am tossing up maybe putting into a top-level post - I think it is very relevant that French is an evangelical Protestant and Ahmari is a Catholic. Evangelicals tend to be much more skeptical of institutions and more in favour of liberalism, in part because of the role of Protestantism in the American founding, and in part because, going back to the modernist controversy, they have experienced betrayal by their own institutions. So they tend to be very skeptical of any argument that we need a strong, paternalistic authority, whether secular or religious, to get us all on the same page. Ahmari is an Iranian (cultural background more comfortable with religious authority wedded to state power) convert to Catholicism (a top-down hierarchical institution that up until the 1960s explicitly held that states ought to follow the direction of the church). If you'll pardon the slur, it does not surprise me that Ahmari is, by disposition, more of a bootlicker than French. Ahmari is coming from traditions that accept the right and even the duty of religious authorities to order society in a top-down way for the common good; French is coming from a tradition that sees that vision as prone to corrupt both true religion and civic society.
Well, I made my argument without reference to pragmatics of the current culture war, so this seems neither here nor there, but either way my point is that French's pointing to the cost is highly selective. Christians are already systemically excluded from public spaces, and are having hostile ideas actively promoted by the means of their own taxpayer dollars. If French wants to argue that access to public libraries in California outweighs the benefits of having a truly Christian education system in conservative pockets, he's welcome to make the case, but I need to see it before responding to it.
This might vary from country to country, but for the west, something like Orban's "illiberal democracy" is probably the best option, or from what few glimpses I saw of him, Bukele seems to have a good vision for his country as well.
What?! How dare you! I consider myself to be the conspiracy theorist of the forum, have you not seen my flair?!
...are you sure? I don't follow him at all, but I didn't have him pegged as one of those anti-CRA guys.
In that he's an influential speaker arguing for staying the course, when we're obviously headed for an iceberg.
Asking me to pardon that is a bit of a tall order, to be honest (you were saying something about things being beneath me?), but aside from the insult I think this is an astute observation. Technically I'm in neither camp, but as the joke goes, I'm a Catholic-atheist, and I think Ahmari is just straightforwardly correct here. The Protestant approach relies on overwhelming levels of values uniformity and values adherence, and between mass migration and secularization, we are seeing the levels of both falling off a cliff.
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French is a good debater that despises conservatives that disagree with him and the South, and has absolutely no vision of how to deal with opposing ideologies that don't support viewpoint-neutrality.
The French strategy is at best a slow defeat but without even Tolkien's literary merit, which is why the post-Christian right hates him so much. It doesn't just not lead to an overall victory, the French strategy spends a decade in court just for Roberts to write into an opinion how Harvard can keep doing racial discrimination the 'right' way.
On balance, I like that David is principled. Given the choice of a dinner party guest, I'd choose him over much of the "dissident right," though to be fair I'd rather dine with a rabid badger than someone like Hanania. But I also think French is a much bigger asshole than most of his fans are willing to admit.
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Yes, I have no love lost for David French, and I can see why everyone was happy to see the debate as a total rejection of Frenchism, but this is why Ahmari is also not the way (if his regular temper tantrums on twitter didn't make it obvious). Integralism attracts a lot of smart zeal-of-the-convert Catholics that the Right can theoretically use, but it's a bad fit with coalition politics. Integralists generally seem to think that everyone else in their coalition is stupid, only they know the single Truth of the Catholic Church, and they're just manipulating the useful idiots until they can take power and rule by Papal ukase. There is plenty of room in MAGA for aristopopulism, but not for would-be theocrats whose sectarian commitments are fundamentally different from that of the American founding and the majority of American Christian populists. Nor is there room for such thinly-veiled sneerers - not of the Hananian type and not of the Ahmari type, as we can see from his career, always searching for the nonexistent base that would support his integralism and currently ending up at "multiracial working class socialism but based" with the Compact crew (I do know and like some of the Compact team and feel bad for them having to defend Ahmari's twitter meltdowns). What also keeps integralism limited is that it's all converts - Ahmari is a convert, Vermeule is a convert - and tends to ride the coattails of the work of cradle Catholics without actually grokking their relationship to Church and State. You mention Patrick Deenen: cradle, not convert, and produces ideas that are compatible with both Catholicism and a wider populism rather than treating the latter as a vehicle for the former (also a trained Straussian, which matters). To give another example, Angelo Codevilla was born in a town in Italy so Italian that "Voghera housewife" is used there in the sense that "John Q. Public" is here, and his work powerfully argued (RIP) for a natural-law conservatism which is not only entirely compatible with big-tent Trumpian populism but which synergizes with it and is advanced by it. Christian conservatives should forget egotistical Frenchism/Ahmarism/Dreherism and learn to work with populists to advance natural law on earth, not dream of manipulating populists to reach their Super Special Perfect
CommuChristian Regime That Has Never Been Tried.The initial section lauding natural-law as a fundamental building block of an ideal society was great. But then it immediately tried to smuggle the assertion that natural law can be revealed through theological text rather than discovered through interaction with reality. This is a bad trick attempting to smuggle credibility from natural-law into religion. It smuggles an ontological claim “there are objective structures of human flourishing” into a doctrinal one “those structures are what our religion already says”. It's sophistic.
If this passes for a serious intellectual political system then its a bad joke. Worse its a bad joke that was already tried and was specifically repudiated during the Enlightenment because it did not work. This is right version of the Marxists: "No true natural-law conservatism has ever been tried". The tragedy is that Conservatives could do that using the Enlightenment version of natural law, but that version requires trusting human reason more than faith, and modern religious conservatives of this variety are pathologically incapable of accepting classical liberalism.
EDIT: Not attributing any of this to you. Reading that article left me with a very strong opinion/urge to object.
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I just want to say I loathe French but this is an excellently written post.
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From French's article:
It's always this line of thought that leftists use against the right. They were poorer in the past, sure. But they also had more functional governance. People knew how to build things in the 1950s and 1960s, they didn't sit around in committees all day umming and ahhing about boxticking and getting permission from stakeholders. They had superheavy spacelift capability we're still struggling to replicate.
Crime was lower in the 1950s, it just was. Despite a younger, poorer population and police with less forensics and CCTV, despite doctors less capable of turning 'murder' into 'grievous bodily harm', Western countries had a more stable social system. Not all aspects of the 1950s should be copied (after all, we ended up where we are today), only the useful parts. Denying that anything was ever better in the past than today is ahistorical, literally Orwellian too.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today. The black jurors statistically favouring their own race, this ridiculous 'he deserves a thirty-second chance' de facto jurisprudence, this incredible homage going to Emmett Till while random black thugs go around shooting white kids for zero reason and never get any kind of serious scrutiny beyond a fairly small part of twitter...
Why would French need to justify it when he enjoys this huge framing advantage, where all the schools (not just in America but around the world) teach his historical narratives, assert the vibes he relies on? He can just wave the magic wand of 'Jim Crow' and that's good enough, no further logical argumentation is needed. Truly the only way to fully oppose this is to deny the whole frame, 'no French, your fantasy world does not exist and never has, it has been debunked by me and mine. The facts are mine, I have chosen them and only I get to decide what is important and relevant. The narrative is mine, the premises and vibes are mine. Your books are not reliable sources, you are spouting pseudoscience.'
To be fair and kind to the modern struggle, Apollo spent around three times as much (inflation-adjusted, as are all of the numbers below) as we're spending to replicate it, considering "we" to mean the Constellation + Orion + SLS + ground systems + public HLS expenses. We have higher-quality tools to make work cheaper these days, but quantity has a quality all its own; also, salaries these days have to be at least somewhat competitive with modern private tech salaries, and people cost more than tools.
To be fair and somewhat unkind to the modern struggle, you can already see some of its cracks just by looking at that brief description. Constellation (around $13B sunk cost, starting in 2004) was cancelled for being over budget and behind schedule, after estimates suggesting that continuing it would have taken more like two thirds of the Apollo budget. We have to separately consider Orion (around $25B, mostly complete except the heat shield is a little iffy, development started 2006), SLS (roughly $35B for "Block 1", plus a marginal cost that makes "Block 2" look increasingly unlikely, development 2011), and HLS ($8B public, for two landers, starting work in 2021 and 2022) as three programs, because it's really hard to call something a single coherent program if you spend ten years building a super-heavy launcher for lunar exploration and then realize you probably want to start working on some sort of lander to go with it. Oh, and also the primary lander comes with its own super-heavy launch system, whose development will either fail (in which case we have at least a three year delay with nothing to do but fly around the Moon while waiting for the backup lander), partly work (in which case it's twice as powerful as the one we spent nine times as much on, sending five or ten times as much payload cislunar, in a spacecraft better than the one we spent another six times as much on, for half the marginal cost), or work to design (in which case make that a twentieth of the marginal cost and twenty times the embarrassment, as we realize that from the beginning we should have been struggling to surpass Apollo, not replicate it).
I thought the Saturn V was just outright cheaper and more powerful than SLS (at least the SLS in current condition)? I guess it's more complicated if you consider the Apollo project as a whole but on the other hand, there would also be cost savings from experience going to the Moon and doing all that stuff for the second time and not the first time. $35 Billion for the project and a billion per launch, inflation adjusted, for Saturn V, whereas SLS 1 has already cost just as much to develop and is more expensive to launch, while providing less lift.
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
You've got the right of it. There's more, sure, but "more" really just boils down to the meta-boondoggle that was the space shuttle, the latest fruit of which is another iteration of
graftboondoggle that is the SLS and its shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters and engines. If anything, calling that epic grifting sells it a little short, I think!More options
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Like many people, French is stuck in the perception of his childhood and still runs high on the liberal's nostalgia for the Civil Rights movement. One could say he groans for a nation that never existed.
And, in a very human error, he overindexes on his personal experience of being insulted for adopting an African kid and ignores the broader context of crime disparities.
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There are black people like Jesse Lee Peterson who even say that blacks had it better under Jim Crow laws that they have it today. Especially when looking at crime, family dynamics, fertility and abortion, drug and alcohol abuse etc. The argument is not dissimilar than what is often heard from South Africa after fall of apartheid and impact on living situation of black majority.
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A core question I don't know the answer to, that seems at the heart of the issue. Are young men of 2025 better or worse off than young men of 1985?
In a world where things are generally and genuinely trending up, French seems more compelling. In that frame, whatever annoying cultural things have developed, good or bad, it's pretty petty to worry about the feminization of society or whatever. If the pie is growing, why fight over the who gets more of the growth of the pie, when that fighting could put everything in jeopardy?
In a world where the pie is stagnant or even shrinking, raging against the system that shrinks the pie is much more appealing. French is then someone who rode a lucky wave of growth under Reagan/Bush/Clinton and now is preoccupied with defending a system (and his own place in it) that, even if it once worked, is now failing.
And what's the truth of it? We're far richer now, and comparing me (who got screwed graduating college in the late 2000s) and my father (who got screwed graduating in the early 80s), I did a lot better and really don't envy his experience. But that seems a bit myopic: most young men I meet (mostly through work, white collar) seem miserable, and all that economic growth doesn't seem to have improved their lives any (with the possible exception of access to video games and porn).
In the end, I end up against French. Whatever his concerns about the propriety of questioning the order of society, they wouldn't be an issue if the society he (probably among the top 1000 most influential people in the USA for the past couple decades) created actually made people want to sustain that order.
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I commented on the original article last week so I have nothing to really add on that, but this piece is typically Frenchian, with an interesting addition of ahistorical ignorance.
Did French not read any history, or even historical fiction like Tale of Two Cities? There was no lack of female influence amongst the French Revolutionaries. Some even did the violent violence themselves like Charlotte Corday and Théroigne de Méricourt.
I suppose the claim that there was not multiple "squadrons of women" who ran guillotines might technically be true. I am not actually well versed enough in French history to know of such a female guillotine squad. But I do know that on top of the violence doing women participants there were many more agitators like de Gouges and Pauline Leon who essentially helped construct lists of folks they think should be sent to their deaths, and eventually I think one or both of them were victims of their own success.
The Bianca Censori red carpet incident was a heavy blow, but this might just be the final nail in the coffin of the Theory of Nominative Determinism.
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I would push against your point here, though I agree French is off base (for different reasons). Men and women have different roles in society (by nature or nurture, doesn't matter), and inflicting violence has been and is squarely men's domain. Women simply do not inflict violence of the sort that actually physically harms someone, compared to men. They will and do participate in violent structures but always at arms length.
Where French is wrong is that it's silly to blame the bad cop when two cops are playing a good cop/bad cop routine.
You do not find women often in the trenches of wars. But you will find them very often acting violently when the situation stabilizes and they have ability do do petty violence safely. Famously Mao's cultural revolution was heavily supported by women, who had at least 50% membership in Red Guards. They were amongst the most ferocious when it came to struggle sessions, parades - including parading with severed limbs of victims etc.
I'd say that women are much worse when it comes to controlling their violent impulses compared to men as they were never socialized for it, in fact they are often initiating physical violence such as slaps etc. The only mitigating factor is that they are weak. But if they are put in safe place of power such as owning slaves, they are perfectly capable of extreme cruelty and torture. The same goes for other natural experiments. For instance in countries where corporeal punishment of children in education is legal, female teachers have no compunction physically abusing their students. The whole schtick about fairer sex is a myth, I'd argue that men are more benevolent compared to women accounting for strength difference. If the situation turned and women were stronger than men, I do not think that men would have it nearly as good as women have it now under patriarchy.
Very specious but I have always felt that rivalries in female MMA tend to be significantly more personal and women are more likely to crank submissions with the intent to injure.
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French, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, Tom Nichols... man I could go on.
Just a whole generation of writers who need to be put out to pasture. HAVE been put out to pasture, but continue to emit the same annoying noises that anyone important stopped listening to 5+ years back. They've been replaced by a whole host of new annoying-noise emitters to take their place, mind.
Their failure to maintain and protect anything they claim to find important or dear is complete, their usefulness to the regime is completely at an end, their legacy will be at best a footnote.
But still they bleat. And still they completely fail to engage with a new generation that is learning that no amount of argument, criticism, or data can penetrate their ossified mental barriers, and so learns to ignore and route around them.
The most successful actors on the right are the ones willing to actually engage with attacks and critics, although they do so with varying levels of snark. J.D. Vance has gotten pretty adept at that game.
If nothing else, these guys' insistence on remaining in their ivory towers and dropping their proclamations down upon the peasantry without bothering to listen for a response reads as a level of cowardice that, in the age of the internet, is basically inexcusable if you want to be taken 'seriously' as a commentator.
I'm cooking up a top level post on this topic.
Compare and contrast to Joe Scarborough
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The feminine = delusion and the corollary of masculine = truth-seeking take is mostly nonsense, but I think Hanania has a better take on why that is.
It's just a reheated version of "women are emotional, men are rational"-type thinking with a few sprinkles of facts-and-logic-tm conservatism.
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Hanania is the Ibram X Kendi of white people.
Ah, but is Ibram X Kendi also a tsundere like Hanania-chan?
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Well that was 30 seconds of skimming I'll never get back, and fails to truly engage with anything she's actually saying.
Nor does it offer a practical alternative argument.
Kinda like when he argued Tim Walz was more likeable than JD Vance, its just surface-level contrarianism.
Hanania remains a hack.
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LOL, this period didn't exist. The Reagan era was also the era of latchkey kids (so called because they came home from school and let themselves in, because both parents were working). Politically, Reagan was hated by the good people of the media almost as much as Trump is.
(BTW, if you mean the former Harvard-associated women's college, it's Radcliffe. Ratcliffe is the CIA director and doesn't give degrees, at least not degrees you're allowed to talk about)
But while French is all the c-words anyone ever called him, the reaction French has is shared across wide swathes of the political spectrum. If you suggest a problem might be caused by women, or something about women, or that the solution may involve restricting women in some way or even allowing them less power over men, it's just automatically rejected. Problems where something like that is the actual solution simply cannot be solved because of this.
We're already at a point though where Boomers and GenX-ers are understandably nostalgic for the age of latchkey kids, because kids at least went outside together and were physically active instead of being phone addicts rotting their own brains in isolation.
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Thanks. Fixed.
Exactly! But there is a weird BoomerCon rose-colored-glasses rembrance of the 1980s nonetheless.
I mean, compared to the 1970s, the post-1982 period was pretty damned good. Not just economically, but no major wars either. But a tradcon paradise it was not.
The eighties were the last period when tradcons believed that our ways could take over society again in the near future. We happened to be wrong, but that's why we look back on it nostalgically.
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Based on the boomercon rose-tinted remembrance of the 80s and the boomerlib ability to trace every modern ill to something Reagan did (military spending and mental health funding for the two most common, but for a way out of left field example, my boomer father recently complained that all these airport troubles really started with Reagan breaking the Air Traffic Controller Union), there is apparently a point in one's mid-30s-to-mid-40s where the mind decides that's where all modern good/bad things stem from. For the boomers, all modern domestic issues can be traced to Reagan (international diplomacy is still Hitler-centered). It's going to be fascinating to see where millennials end up fixated when they reach their 70s. Will it be Obama or Trump?
Either Thatcher or Blair, depending on political affiliation.
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Maybe both will fade and the true Millennial antichrist will be Bush II; 9/11 and the GFC both happened on his watch, after all.
People really do underestimate the GFC right now. I think in a just world it will be remembered much more prominently 60 years from now than it is today. Will this happen, I don't know, but it really is staggering to me the sheer number of people who graduated in that era and just...never found a real job and have been in a nearly 20 year state (at this point) of constantly applying for jobs they are technically qualified for and being rejected, while desperately clinging to whatever low paid sales/admin/service job they can swing.
In my corner of the world (government work), I think it's because it didn't impact boomers and older Xers much. They didn't get raises for a few years and their home lost value for a while, but that's about it. They weren't looking for work or getting cut due to a federal sequester (that hit the most recent hires, not the guys who'd been around forever) or going way upside-down on an ARM because of an inflated market, etc. They kept getting paid, kept their houses, and kept working their way towards platinum pensions (which got reformed during the GFC to the detriment of new hires, but not towards people already in the system).
It's been close to a decade now, but I remember some higher-ups at work talking about some applicants and they were commenting negatively on all the employment gaps many had from 2007-2014ish. It literally did not occur to them how awful the legal job market was during those years and that even good candidates might have some gaps.
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"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
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Admittedly those certainly didn't help; the Bush administration was fairly disastrous.
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Why not both? It seems boomerlibs do blame everything on Reagan, but boomercons like to blame Carter and/or "the hippies" similarly ("JFK started the closings of asylums, and the ACLU was for it"). Two screens and all that.
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