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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.
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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