david-french-ism

Religious Power vs. Religious Liberty with David French

There are few public thinkers the Holy Post cites more often than David French, and he’s finally here in person! (Well, in person via Zoom.) French is the Senior Editor of The Dispatch, a columnist for Time, and a pro-life conservative attorney. Although many Christians are worried about the erosion of religious liberty, French says, “We have never enjoyed more religious liberty than we do right now.”

The problem is that Christians are losing cultural power, and our attempts to retain it are often doing more harm than good. He helps us understand recent Supreme Court rulings about religious liberty and LGBT rights, why conservatives who are against face masks aren’t really pro-life, and how both the Left and Right get racism wrong. French explains why he will not vote for Trump, and why evangelicals have gone from holding their noses to enthusiastic support of a president who lacks both character and competency. Plus, what is “David Frenchism” and should we be worried about it?

David French and Sohrab Ahmari: What Are We Debating?

Sohrab Ahmari has set off a bitter debate, but it’s not at all clear what that debate is supposed to be about.

Classical liberalism?

Civility?

President Trump?

The collected works of David French?

So far, it seems to be about all of those things put in a blender — which is not a recipe for maintaining useful distinctions. I’ll try to separate some of the discrete issues.

First, about liberalism: Often when people are arguing about it they are using different definitions of it. I don’t know that French believes that government has to aspire to strict neutrality about rival conceptions of the good life, or that it must abjure the promotion of virtue as a goal. I don’t know, either, that Ahmari denies that human dignity requires governments to refrain from coercing people to adopt particular religious beliefs or practices. So, again, I’m not sure what the argument is about.

Second, about civility, politeness, and so forth: Ahmari portrays French as begging liberals to respect conservatives’ freedom of conscience; French portrays himself as insisting that they do. While I think French’s description better matches his career history, the disagreement itself suggests that there is no necessary connection between classical liberalism and the political timidity Ahmari opposes.

Third, about French: His response to Ahmari makes a strong case (so far unrebutted) that his views have been misrepresented. On Twitter, Ahmari commented that he salutes French’s military service and legal advocacy; his argument, he suggests, is with a destructive form of liberalism. So is it Ahmari’s view that French embraces this form of liberalism as an intellectual matter, in what he has written, but has not lived down to his bad principles in practice? But then we hit the problem that Ahmari has not identified the false ideas in French’s work. (Ahmari more or less tells us that he’s not going to be concerned with specifying and refuting particular tenets, since he’s writing in opposition to a “sensibility.”)

Finally, there’s Trump — on whom every conversation in America, apparently, must ultimately focus. Over the last year and a half Ahmari has become much more supportive of Trump than he used to be, and he is criticizing French from this new position. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind after added reflection, and Ahmari has done it before on larger matters, as he describes in his recent memoir. But I think there are two oddities in Ahmari’s case that could stand still more reflection.

I cannot count the number of times that social conservatives have justified support for Trump by reference to the weakened state of their movement. Because the law and the culture have become increasingly hostile to religious traditionalism and traditionalists, they say, they were impelled to defend a deeply flawed man who would at least serve as a defense. If you’re a social conservative who’s unhappy about defensiveness and neutral principles such as religious liberty, you ought to be pushing back on this large strand of pro-Trumpist social conservatism. (As French has.) And if this pro-Trump sentiment is right, it suggests that a social conservatism that demands more than freedom for its adherents will fail.

The difference between French and Ahmari with respect to Trump is also elusive. It’s clear that French is more critical of the president than Ahmari is these days. Ahmari suggests that there is something rotten about French’s welcoming some developments that have occurred under, through, and thanks to Trump while maintaining this stance toward the president. But Ahmari still regularly offers his own criticisms of the president. So what amount or degree of criticism is acceptable before crossing the line? Surely the answer cannot be that all conservatives have to be exactly where Ahmari is on Trump at any given moment.

We should all be willing to listen to one another — if that is not too civil and naïve a thing to say — especially given our many shared convictions. I’m not “against Sohrab Ahmari-ism.” But I wish I had a better sense of what it is.

‘David French–ism’ without David French

French has been unfairly caricatured — but the caricature is worth defending.

Near as I can tell, the David French controversy revolves around allegations that the man is too much of an accommodating pragmatist on social issues. The charge is amusing to me, given that one of my defining experiences here at NR occurred when French denounced a column I wrote last year about the need for conservatives to pragmatically accommodate transgender Americans.

I don’t bear David any ill will over that. Conservatives can read our dueling articles and reach their own conclusions over whose case is more convincing. But I trust the episode does illustrate the degree to which the real-world David French is quite distinct from Sohrab Ahmari’s depiction in First Things: a man uncritically enthusiastic to accept the “pagan and libertine” so long as “traditional Christians [are] granted spaces in which to practice and preach what they sincerely believe” in return.

As Argentina’s longtime dictator Juan Perón entered his later years, many of his onetime followers sought to sever the increasingly unpopular president from the ideology he was associated with. “Perónism without Perón!” was their curious cry for revolution. Without implying any unflattering analogies, this idea occurred to me while reading Ahmari’s piece. “David French–ism” of the sort Ahmari angrily decries struck me as a perfectly defensible philosophy — even if David French himself may not be its best embodiment.

Many of the things Ahmari asserts French “sees” or “views” or “embodies” about the American political order are not French’s opinions, but the Constitution’s. It is that document, not French, that acknowledges the free exercise of religion as a fundamental American right, while also acknowledging the existence of many other liberties against which it must be balanced.

Ahmari at one point quotes Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, who complains that since religious beliefs can’t be “rationally defended,” they are easily “treated as a form of prejudice” by unbelievers. Sam Harris is fond of making a similar but peppier point, that everyone is an atheist about someone else’s religion. Such harsh truths form an unavoidable reality of religion in a diverse democracy — its persuasiveness as political argument cannot be taken for granted. Anyone who is upset, as Ahmari is, that their “orthodoxy” has not triumphed in America must learn to accept this fact.

To the degree that America’s permissive public policy on sexual and gender matters has a single cause, it is the unmoving nature of religiously inspired arguments within a secular legal and political system. Some flatter themselves, believing that ideas such as gay marriage have triumphed only because of a radical conspiracy of far-left social engineers in the judiciary and media. Far less comforting is the possibility that the public-harm arguments of mostly faith-based opponents just weren’t that convincing. The pragmatic religious conservative understands this, which is why the pro-life cause now increasingly makes the case for protecting unborn humans with scientific and medical logic. It accordingly stands as a successful outlier among social conservatism’s many failed culture wars.

It is in the context of a clear-eyed understanding of the limits of religious argument in the American system that the case for “Frenchian” compromise becomes necessary. The religious may lack an ability to dictate public policy according to their view of “the Highest Good,” as Ahmari puts it, but they can find much to value in the Constitution’s guarantee that public policy will not intrude on the individual exercise of their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Now obviously, this promise, like all constitutional promises, is rarely upheld to anyone’s complete satisfaction. Where one American’s right to free exercise of religion begins and the right of another American to be protected from the rules of a faith whose logic they don’t accept is often a complicated calculation. It’s certainly made no easier by a secular Left that increasingly regards religious liberty as something inherently anachronistic and offensive. Whenever this sort of politics makes gains, it deserves to be condemned as anti-constitutional and illiberal, for it is.

But equally illiberal is the other extreme: those who stamp their feet and whine of the unfairness that our courts and laws treat their religious beliefs as merely one public interest among many. In a theocratic system of government, the state is preoccupied with dogma such as the “Highest Good.” But the United States is organized as a religiously neutral republic explicitly uninterested in such projects. Americans are certainly free to dissent from this reality, and decry the Founders for their idiocy in not establishing a divine-right monarchy with a fundamentalist state church, or some other system more inclined to steer the public to a particular path of salvation. Frankly, it would be helpful to all if more writers in the reactionary sphere could muster the courage to state things so bluntly.

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As a philosophy, “David French–ism” — as I’d interpret it, via Ahmari’s essay — means appreciating the balance of liberties demanded by the United States Constitution and concluding that the document’s central promise to protect individual sovereignty has been central to centuries of American success (which is different from American perfection). In forcing the religious conservative to accept religious freedom but not theocratic government, it offers the most practical system yet devised for creating peaceful social order in a diverse society. French-ism as practiced by David French is similar, but is more inclined to take a maximalist view of religious liberty when arguments in favor of affirmatively accommodating the autonomous choices of others are made, as I think his response to my transgender piece attests.

Left-wing anti-French-ism, which argues that religious liberty is inherently worthless and must be sacrificed for mandatory, totalitarian secularism, is an arrogant rejection of the American system. Like Charles Cooke, I have no real clue what exactly the right-wing style of anti-Frenchism favored by Ahmari entails, but to the extent it’s something similarly authoritarian and unconstitutional, it is equally worth rejecting.

What Are Conservatives Actually Debating?

What the strange war over “David French-ism” says about the right.

In March the religious journal First Things published a short manifesto, signed by a group of notable conservative writers and academics, titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” The consensus that the manifesto came to bury belonged to conservatism as it existed between the time of William F. Buckley Jr. and the rise of Donald Trump: An ideology that packaged limited government, free markets, a hawkish foreign policy and cultural conservatism together, and that assumed that business interests and religious conservatives and ambitious American-empire builders belonged naturally to the same coalition.

This consensus was never as stable as retrospective political storytelling might suggest; even successful Republican politicians inevitably left many of its factions sorely disappointed, while conservative intellectuals and activists feuded viciously with one another and constantly discerned crises and crackups for their movement. But the crisis revealed or created (depending on your perspective) by our own age of populism seems more severe, the stresses on the different factions more serious, and it is just possible that the longstanding conservative fusion might be as dead as the First Things signatories argued.

Among them was Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at The New York Post, whose public career embodies some of those shifts and stresses: An immigrant whose family fled the Islamic Republic of Iran, he began his career on the right as an ex-Marxist secular neoconservative at The Wall Street Journal editorial page and has since become a traditionally inclined Catholic (a journey detailed in his striking memoir, “From Fire, By Water”) and also more Trump-friendly and populist into the bargain.

In the last week Ahmari has roiled the conservative intellectual world with a critique of something he calls David French-ism, after David French of National Review, another prominent conservative writer. This controversy, like the debate over Tucker Carlson and capitalism earlier this year, has been a full-employment bill for conservative pundits. But it probably seems impossibly opaque from the outside, since superficially Ahmari and French belong to the same faction on the right — both religious conservatives, both strongly anti-abortion, both deeply engaged in battles over religious liberty (where French is a longtime litigator). Indeed it is somewhat opaque even from the inside, prompting conservatives engaging with the dispute to wonder, “What are we debating?”

I’m going to try to answer that question here. We’ll see how it goes.

Basically the best way to understand the Ahmari-French split is in light of the old fusion, the old consensus, that the First Things manifesto attacked. French is a religious conservative who thinks that the pre-Trump conservative vision still makes sense. He thinks that his Christian faith and his pro-life convictions have a natural home in a basically libertarian coalition, one that wants to limit the federal government’s interventions in the marketplace and expects civil society to flourish once state power is removed. He thinks that believers and nonbelievers, secular liberals and conservative Christians, can coexist under a classical-liberal framework in which disputes are settled by persuasion rather than constant legal skirmishing, or else are left unsettled in a healthy pluralism. He is one of the few remaining conservatives willing to argue that the invasion of Iraq was just and necessary. And he opposes, now as well as yesterday, the bargain that the right struck with Donald Trump.

Ahmari, on the other hand, speaks for cultural conservatives who believe that the old conservative fusion mostly failed their part of the movement — winning victories for tax cutters and business interests while marriage rates declined, birthrates plummeted and religious affiliation waned; and appeasing social conservatives with judges who never actually got around to overturning Roe v. Wade. These conservatives believe that the current version of social liberalism has no interest in truces or pluralism and won’t rest till the last evangelical baker is fined into bankruptcy, the last Catholic hospital or adoption agency is closed by an A.C.L.U. lawsuit. They think that business interests have turned into agents of cultural revolution, making them poor allies for the right, and that the free trade and globalization championed by past Republican presidents has played some role in the dissolution of conservatism’s substrates — the family, the neighborhood, the local civitas. And they have warmed, quickly or slowly, to the politics-is-war style of the current president.

But what, specifically, do these conservatives want, besides a sense of thrill-in-combat that French’s irenic style denies them? I don’t think they are completely certain themselves; in a useful contribution to the Ahmari affair, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, describes their animating spirit as a feeling that something else is needed in American society besides just classical-liberal, limited-government commitments, without any certainty about what that something ought to be.

Still, you can see three broad demands at work in their arguments. First, they want social conservatives to exercise more explicit power within the conservative coalition.

This may sound like a strange idea, since, after all, it is social conservatism’s growing political weakness, its cultural retreat, that led the religious right to throw in with a cruel sybarite like Trump. But there’s a plausible argument that even with its broader influence reduced, religious conservatism should still wield more power than it does in Republican politics — that it outsources too much policy thinking to other factions, that it goes along with legislation written for business interests so long as the promised judicial appointments are dangled at the end, and that it generally acts like a junior partner even though it delivers far more votes.

A more assertive form of social conservatism is already visible in the state-level pushes to substantially restrict abortion, which amount to a demand that all those Republican court appointees actually deliver the latitude for pro-life legislation that generations of religious conservatives voted for. It’s visible in the forays made by Missouri’s new Republican senator, Josh Hawley, who has incited small uproars by imposing sharper abortion and religious-liberty litmus tests than usual on the Trump administration’s judicial nominees, and by taking an explicitly censorious stance toward Silicon Valley.

But a more assertive social conservatism would also pursue the second thing that the post-fusionist conservatives seem to want — namely, stronger state interventions in the economy on behalf of socially conservative ends.

These interventions might include more aggressive versions of the pro-family tax policies championed by Republican senators like Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. They might take the form of a new pro-family industrial policy of the kind Trump gestures at but hasn’t really pursued, some kind of infrastructure spending or manufacturing support that tries to revive the breadwinner wage. Or they might take the form of the kind of trustbusting culture war envisioned by Hawley, in which the new formations of woke capital, especially in Silicon Valley, get regulated in the name of both economic fairness and cultural conservatism.

Then alongside these practical power plays and policy moves, the post-fusionists want something bigger: A philosophical reconsideration of where the liberal order has ended up. How radical that reconsideration ought to be varies with the thinker. Maybe it just means restoring some kind of lost conservative understanding of American institutions, as Yoram Hazony has argued in essays for First Things and the similarly post-fusionist journal American Affairs. Maybe it means questioning the philosophical underpinnings of the American founding itself, as Patrick Deneen argued in 2018’s big-think book “Why Liberalism Failed.” Maybe it means reinventing the Catholic anti-liberalism of the 19th century, and embracing the “integralism” championed by, among others, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School.

The further this reconsideration goes, the more fanciful, utopian or revolutionary it might seem. (The integralists would cop to the last designation.) But the basic concept of a right rooted more in cultural conservatism and economic populism than in libertarianism and individualism isn’t fanciful; it describes the emergent right-of-center ideological formations all across the Western world. The American pendulum may swing back to fusionism after Trump — French is hardly alone in championing the old regime, and most Republican politicians remain instinctive fusionists — but some version of Ahmari’s turn is one that the right is making almost everywhere, for now.

The problem is both moral and practical. Moral, because Trump implicates his supporters in policies and personal behavior, from birtherism to child separation to adultery with porn stars and sexual assault, that are un-Christian in a particularly naked way. Practical, because even if you argue that these compromises are politically necessary, there is no way for the Republican coalition to successfully re-fuse around some mix of cultural conservatism and economic populism without not only the white working-class voters Trump won in 2016, but substantially more minority and/or younger and/or female votes as well.

There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot. And so far post-fusionist conservatism has devoted more energy to devising clever anti-anti-Trump arguments than to addressing head-on an obvious question like, How are you going to persuade more African-American Christians to support what seems like a white-chauvinist formation?

There might be answers to this question. But the point offered most often in response, that Trump has done no worse than Mitt Romney with minorities, is insufficient, since Romney’s showing was terrible and Trumpism’s alienating effects on suburban white voters means that to aspire to a real majority, his coalition actually needs minority votes much more. And the claim from Dan McCarthy, one of the smartest post-fusionist conservatives, that “there’s zero evidence Frenchism produces a broader coalition,” is not quite right, since French supported George W. Bush, and George W. Bush clearly did have a broader coalition. That coalition was squandered and isn’t coming back, but Trump has not improved upon it, and on the evidence of his first two and a half years in office he never will.

Thus the dilemma for the would-be builders of a new conservatism. The rise of Trump has revealed the insufficiencies of the old synthesis, the fault lines within the right, the possibilities for a different fusion altogether. But the brute fact of President Trump, now and at least through 2020, may prevent the new conservatism from being more than a defensive formation, inherently alienating to the converts that it needs.