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David French Is Not a Serious Conservative
The one area where we have had strong movement, gun rights, he attacks. Idolatry? Please. French wants to compromise and give up on progress made.
But, that is not the real reason he is not a serious conservative. No, this is just icing on the cake. Proof, if you will, of his nature. He proved he was unserious when he genuinely considered Bill Kristol’s plan to run for President and try to get the election thrown to the House. A serious conservative would never have courted a constitutional crisis because he did not like the GOP nominee.
So, of course, French is against standing our ground on guns. What else can we expect from a man who thought it would have been a good idea for our Republic to be selected President after 90%+ of the voters voted for someone else.
Published in General
Well, I was NT before the election, but his victory made that a moot and silly position; I subsequently shifted to not focusing on DJT The Man and considered the overall effect of his tenancy in the office, i.e., are the policies sufficiently conservative and do they produce better outcomes for the country. The idea that I should vote D or trumpet D candidates to restore balance and thus ensure mythical future conservative victories seemed ridiculous.
To be honest, I might not have been immune to a D politician who had the character of some Ds of my youth when I was a Good Liberal: belief in American exceptionalism, anti-Communist, pro-defense, pro-middle-class values, sympathetic to the downtrodden, and all that. There were a few of those, once. It’s still a potent combination. Voters can wave away the things on the margins – more social spending, lax immigration, regulations that don’t affect them directly – because they feel good about voting for someone who seems cool and smart and compassionate.
But if the party put up someone like that today, it would be a Trojan horse: the intellectual energy on the D side is utopian, Jacobin, intersectional, and unmoored from economic and cultural realities. Sorry, no. I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it.
How about Jonah Goldberg, David French, Mona Charen. Steve Hayes, Charlie Sykes, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rob Long, John Podhoretz, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Noah Rothman, Matthew Continetti, Christine Rosen, or Yuval Levin? Or given Comment #31, James Lileks?
There is a whole other world that the Trumpsters and Claremonsters don’t acknowledge.
Right now Trump acolytes are ascendant. But Reaganism is Conservatism’s DNA. Some day Conservatives will abandon the Trump Cult of Personality, and will again embrace principles over personalities.
I voted for him on principles. His personality is mostly terrible.
David French is advocating giving ground of the right to keep and bear arms, and you are saying he has been consistent in his conservatism? If you are going to make that claim, you cpulx at least adress my point in the OP. Instead, you have not only not addressed the point, but have reverted to calling Trump supporters cultits. Again.
Wow. How Red pilled I have become where NR is now considered by many of us the enemy where it used to be our gateway drug.
Apparently it works for Commentary and oh that Ricochet place :).
NRO jumped the shark with its ‘Against Trump’ issue and ‘Covington Kids May as Well have Spit on the Cross.’ It still has some good content, but it’s mainly a vestige of Bush-Republicanism.
Warning? lol That is hilarious! Actually Charlie Cooke’s response is perfect (actually read it before this post), I subscribe to NRplus and it’s great.
For me, I still find good stuff at NRO. I just don’t want to pay them for NR Plus or a subscription. Those dollars go to Ricochet, to Powerline, Clairmont Review of Books, and to VDH on his site. I have to be targeted. And if I had more money, I’d look at Reagan status here. I want to support the sites that feel they mostly line up with me. NR has moved away from me, or I them, or both.
Wait! When did Kurt Schlichter start writing for NR?
Sorry James, but Cooke may be both intelligent and a gun-rights advocate, but writing in NR cannot be considered effective. The vast majority of conservative voters have written NR off due to its perfidy in the past six years. Any gem of an article that it manages to publish is lost in a vast desert, devoid of readers’ eyes.
Sad, considered NR’s illustrious past, but true.
NR is a big boy. He’s made his enemies fair and square, and is rather proud to have some. Don’t deny him his legacy.
Which is fine. I just wanted to quibble that commingling funds does not obviate the difference in funding.
Trump is a D of your youth. Just says the JFK quiet things out loud.
I don’t know if I’m a good conservative but that’s what I’ve done since 2016.
That’s ridiculous Phil. The vast majority of Trump followers perhaps but those aren’t the same thing. The groups overlap but are definitely not equal
Believe what you will.
Let’s just say NR isn’t Buckley’s magazine anymore. I can’t say exactly what precipitated it, but I cancelled my damn subscription long before Trump. There are just so many (better) choices for conservatives these days. I read VDH at American Greatness now, along with Roger Kimball, Anthony Esolen, Angelo Codevilla (before he was killed and now in republication), Glenn Ellmers, Salena Zito, Julie Kelly . . . People better aligned with my viewpoint are writing for publications other than NR these days.
Oh, I’d entertain a rebuttal that included recent ten-year trends of paid NR subscription numbers and all of its online traffic.
I suppose one can never have too many smileys. The warning was for those who have taken NR off their reading list because of Trump despite the publication’s numerous and strongly worded conservative positions. In other words, James, I didn’t really mean it.
If it’s down then the argument that their positions are taken for popularity’s sake are demonstrably false, right? My point is that being conservative would not be a reason or even a factor in “writing off” NR. The Bulwark, certainly but NR is a conservative publication no matter if they publish varied opinions on Trump or populism in general :)
Not sure why you would need a warning to go to NRO.
Bryan, thanks for the post.
It might be a good idea to address the substance of French’s article. Cooke may do so, but his article is behind a paywall.
French’s article doesn’t take any substantive position on gun issues. It doesn’t advocate any particular policy, beyond generally stating that he is “more conservative” on the issue than some fellow with whom he had a podcast discussion.
French’s objection is to the tone and imagery of some pro-gun advocates. He seems quite hysterical to me, claiming that this tone is “potentially destabilizing to American democracy.”
I do think that there is an indication that his anti-Trump views are the source of this, at least in part. The first specific example that French gives is a Senate candidate running “on a platform that’s ‘pro-God, pro-Gun, and pro-Trump.'” He also objects to t-shirts and signs declaring a person “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun.” He objects to candidates posing with guns.
He objects to a picture of a young boy holding an assault rifle, with the Biblical quote: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
These all seem like perfectly acceptable messages, to me. The picture of the kid suggests that we should train our sons to be responsible gun owners, not afraid of guns (like many on the Left), and understanding the importance of our right to bear arms and the responsibility that they will have to protect their families when they grow up. I don’t see the problem.
Gun issues seem to be pretty popular for Republican candidates. I’m not going to detail specific polling, but I did look for a few, and there was evidence that both on policy and voter preference, there is a significant gap between the parties on this one.
I also find the political rhetoric that French finds objectionable to be an effective signal of a candidate’s overall position. Pro-life, pro-God, pro-Gun is a pretty good, brief description of social conservative.
I don’t have the fear reaction that French suggests that images of guns create. When I see an ordinary-looking American posing with an AR-15, I react as I would to a Minuteman logo or statue. A free man prepared to take up arms in defense of his family and country, if necessary.
French also comes across as a downer. It seems as if he can’t stand the idea that anyone might have fun with guns.
French claims that there has been a “transition from defense to defiance.” The tone doesn’t bother me, nor is it new. Maybe he didn’t like Charleton Heston’s “from my cold, dead hand” line. I did.
If French does still support substantive gun rights, the timing of this article is terrible, in my view, encouraging the opposition.
Nobody is going to be persuaded or understand your point of view if you don’t say a lot more things that are original thinking about public policy.
I want to comment a bit more about the terrible timing of French’s article.
We’re in a moment after a terrible school shooting, and several others. This typically leads to an emotional reaction in many people, with suggestions of policy changes, most or all of which are bad ideas when viewed soberly, I think. The usual course of events is that people calm down, and nothing is done, because there’s nothing effective to be done (from a cost-benefit standpoint).
But right now, the anti-gun folks are using this tragedy to promote their policy position. Defiance actually seems like an appropriate reaction, to me. Moreover, as far as I can tell, French’s complaints about the tone of some pro-gun advocates are not very recent — not specific excesses since the tragedy in Uvalde. He just chooses this moment to distance himself from many people on his side politically on the issue (assuming, of course, that he hasn’t changed his generally pro-gun position, which he does not say that he has).
So what is the point of French’s article? It seems to give support to the other side of the debate. Why would he do that, at this particular time?
I don’t know. Maybe he’s virtue signaling. Maybe he just needs to get out an article this week. Maybe he just hates pro-Trump Republicans so much that he has to do something like this from time to time, and current events prompted him to do so now. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know. It’s just strange, to me.
It seems, rhetorically speaking, like French has an instinct to shoot himself in the foot, and the rest of us in the back.
I think NR represents the old-right, in the sense that while it does indeed publish “strongly worded conservative positions” it gets squishy when those positions are actually advanced politically. There’s a perception the NR writers like to write about conservative ideas, but are uncomfortable with conservative actions.
This is dead-on. Everybody wants a new law. This is stupid until they resource the laws we have. New York has all kinds of overwrought red flag systems and they didn’t use them on that guy. Broadly speaking, everything is like that.
And he has dozens, if not hundreds, of big players on social media watching everything he says. I don’t get why those guys hired him.
Republicans that are gun grabber-tolerant don’t really study gun policy.
I think gun policy is mostly pretty interesting but some of it is difficult. It’s really bad when Republicans are lazy about it.
I don’t see the big problem of posing with guns. I’ve mostly never seen a good explanation of why it’s a big problem.
Jerry is right on this. Nothing in French’s article supports infringing on gun rights. He takes aim at, in his view, “cultists” who care more about posing with guns rather than being responsible owners. I think he is engaging in nut-picking. Charlie’s response in NRO is spot on.
There is nothing wrong with raising kids to respect guns and learn how to use them. That is what we should do as a society. I do have a particular revulsion to the family Christmas cards with everyone holding firearms, but that’s because it is so obviously a stunt and a troll. It’s dumb, but a very, very small percentage of people do it.
On the actual policies that French has advocated following Uvalde, they are pretty much exactly what Florida has implemented in recent years with respect to red flag laws. I don’t think that makes him a traitor. He’s wrong that a few morons in Congress are representative of gun owners writ large, but I haven’t seen him back down on actual gun policy.
This perfectly describes my position and to this day I cannot understand commentators like Goldberg that could not see the idiocy of voting for Hillary or McMuffin over a guy that seemed to put them off their feed because they just didn’t like him.
That answers my question.