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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.
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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