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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.
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.
I just want to say I loathe French but this is an excellently written post.
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