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Ahmari vs. French-ism
Sohrab Ahmari is my new go-to conservative writer after reading the autobiographical story of his conversion from elite intellectual leftism to Catholic conservatism. My conversion was similarly simultaneously religious and political, though not as dramatic as his. Still, we share a worldview which he expresses much more eloquently than I ever could.
In his piece for First Things, Against David French-ism, he takes up a theme I have long considered sorely neglected by conservatives debating the culture wars: the necessity of asserting moral authority in the political realm, rather than adopting the modernist’s faith in individual autonomy. We must understand that, by living a Christian life, we already stand as a rebuke to the Left, which it aggressively will not tolerate.
Only, the libertines take the logic of maximal autonomy—the one French shares—to its logical terminus. They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human, lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.
They have a point: Individual experiments in living—say, taking your kids to a drag reading hour at the public library—cannot be sustained without some level of moral approval by the community. Autonomy-maximizing liberalism is normative, in its own twisted way. Thus, it represents the interiorization, and fulfillment, of French’s worldview. And this is how David French-ism gets trapped.
You want to teach your kids the sacredness of marriage and the marital act? Do you think public schools are going to let you get away with that? That’s insulting and bigoted toward the unwed parent(s) raising your kids’ classmates. Your stance in favor of the unborn is a hardship you impose on women who want to solve their problems with abortions. How dare you be so uncompassionate?? How does it hurt your marriage if everyone gets to define marriage according to his or her (or ze’s or zir’s) own appetites? Why not monagamish? Or throuples? Or wedlease? And who are you (we, the polis) to say?
I realize Ahmari and I are in dangerous waters with this argument. We’ll be accused of wanting to establish Catholicism as the state religion. Or, worse, a Catholic theocracy. I do not expect my Protestant brothers and sisters to agree with us on the necessity of a living moral authority; it is one of the greatest divisions between us. But, I adamantly believe we need to have the discussion about drawing lines, who gets to do it (preferably, we, the people), and where the lines ought to be drawn. By neglecting this premise, we are forfeiting the culture war to the Left, which has no such compunction about asserting its authority over our lives.
Published in General
Your point is that unless we use the tactics of the left we are “shoved down into the catacombs.” The same tactics that have repeatedly got them thrown out of offices and have made you so hostile to them that you consider yourself at war with them- unless we use those tactics to get others on our side, we will continue to lose? Political power cannot promote a moral code. Look where it has been tried. The citizenry need to already have the internal infrastructure for a moral code. It’s personal, familial, and local- not political.
Wrong. It’s political too. Politics is people (individuals, families, communities) arguing, persuading, and, eventually, voting. It’s all of the above.
That isn’t answer to my question really. If it has been replaced are we fighting to get it back or simply to rule in the new order? Once we have power what shall we do with it? Put our enemies to the sword? Reeducate them against their wills? Force them to go to mass and fast on Fridays?
Offer a solution, Mr. Power of Positive Thinking. French offered his, and his depends on the left spontaneously adopting a moral code that aligns with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
What’s yours?
Cass Sunstein, who was part of the Obama White House suggested the political use of the “nudge.” And indeed we had 8 years of nudging, elbowing, shoving leftward and now our culture celebrate child-trannies, pretends that men can have periods, and is on the way to approving infanticide.
I say we nudge the other direction.
Here are those straw men you were looking for, Kelsey.
Agreed.
Political power reflects moral codes more than it creates them.
It’s not as though, way back in the mists of time, some enterprising Cro-Magnon chieftain decided to forbid the common practice of abortion, thereby convincing his people that killing a child in the womb was a moral evil. Rather, a general sense of horror at the thought of disemboweling a pregnant woman and slaughtering her dependent offspring mutated, as civilization developed, into codified law — a law which received widespread support because . . . well, isn’t abortion the sort of horrible thing that ought to be illegal, like rape or murder?
Small children excepted, a law never convinced anyone of anything.
Hmmm. I’d be careful applying the “never” here. Off the top of my head — seat belt laws so thoroughly convinced people to wear seat belts that few people today consider not wearing them. And we don’t wear them just to avoid a ticket. Through the use of law, we were nudged into all declaring them a great social good. But the thing is, they were just as good before there was a law mandating their use. Yet before the law, fewer people thought very much about it, and I don’t know anyone who used them.
Then let’s talk about abortion. Abortion, as noted, was considered a terrible thing. When it occurred it was hidden, it was shameful. We all agreed as a society that it was not to be done.
Jump ahead to today and we have a culture that celebrates it and declares “shout your abortion!” and Illinois just passed a law declaring partial-birth abortion to be completely legal. Thanks to legalizing it, fewer people will agree that it’s a horrible act.
The culture may be a lagging indicator, but the law can definitely convince people of the rightness or wrongness of acts.
The examples of David French’s consistent intolerance for those Christians/voters who place high value on adherence to Constitutional values became frequent enough for me to stop reading him as often as I once did. Trump is unique among US Presidents in multiple ways; flawed personal characteristics is not one of them.
My preference is for commentators to call balls and strikes with an initial default to ascribing positive motive until someone’s actions/words indicate otherwise. I’ll look for the next positive article from Mr. French when the president says or does something good. Who more than a Christian should seek positive reinforcement over negative to influence repeat good behavior?
Ben Domenech has a good response here.
Excerpt:
I’m glad he included that last quote, because it was the first thing that came to mind when I read the Ahmari piece, and I couldn’t quite remember exactly how it went. It’s what I was getting at above when I said: “When out of power, the left demands that we abide by our principles of individual freedom and autonomy and allow them to live as they wish. But when in power, the left refuses to allow us the same individual freedom and autonomy and demands we live by their principles.”
Boy, I can’t wait to see these examples of French’s intolerance to voters who place a high value on adherence to the constitution.
Westy, I am talking about morality. Morality is upstream of politics. Only after it manifests itself to the point of critical mass on the individual, familial, and community level will it flow into the political. We as a moral people can vote with that in mind, but we need more to do so. We cannot simply persuade at the political level and expect results. It needs to occur before then to be effective.
You still have yet to advocate anything other than dislike for the moment. I am trying to get beyond it and you are hung up on Ru Paul. Forget the nonsense and project what you wish to see. All I see is anger, resentment, and disillusionment from you. You are revving an engine in neutral and going nowhere.
The solutions are not easy. It starts at the community level. Make an impact in your home. Raise a family that projects the morality and tradition you want to see across society at large. Get involved in your church and make it a stronger institution. Be an active neighbor and involved community member. Let others within your community benefit from being around you and your family. The impact spreads out from there. Make sure you promote , defend, and articulate your beliefs to others. I think you got that one down! The more we can do to create better communities to live in- the more it will spill over into the rest of society.
I don’t think so. Otherwise, how did we experience such a sudden and drastic cultural shift to the left during the Obama years? I don’t know if we have yet grasped or come close to cataloging just how much changed during that short time. Something caused it. And I don’t think the fact that it happened during the Obama years was just coincidence.
Of course, as I said above, the left controls all levers of culture. But Washington is one of those levers. And they are embedded.
Drew, you need to learn to answer questions, brother. That is bad faith on your part.
He don’t know me very well, do he?
Sorry, Drew. I am direct. I understand that can be off-putting. It appears you have a different way of going about things. “Different strokes for different folks.” We are Ricochet’s David and Sohrab, you might say. (Come on, laugh people) Many of your responses have been quotes of others. That’s frustrating, as my goal is to get a better understanding of your thoughts. Mostly, I want to understand where you are coming from and what you think we can do. You are right, I am a glass half-full kind of guy. We differ greatly on prescribed solutions- so any greater knowledge I can gain as to where you think we can go practically is helpful. But understand, this is all meant to be good-natured. If you do not like it, I will no longer do it.
Drew is a “who the hell drank half my water” kind of guy. :)
It will take time to grasp all the change, I totally agree. I think most of the change was already happening below the surface and began with the sexual revolution and war on poverty. We were late to pick up on it. There was a post Cold War afterglow that made us complacent in many ways.
I don’t care about French’s actions. It is the actions of the Left that is at issue. Immediately after the Obergefell decision, they started collecting the scalps of bakers and pizza joints (pizza joints!) that failed to bend the knee. Remember how the more pragmatic, reasonable wing of their movement urged magnanimity and restraint? Neither do I — they don’t have a pragmatic, reasonable wing.
We could try a few like this one
Then there is this one where David French tactics don’t look like surrender at all
Next we have David French defending Trump against an activist Judge.
Here he is defending Barr from House Democrats
Here is a piece celebrating Trumps victory and the rule of law.
Here is a video David French defending Trump over his Executive order
I could go on but I think this gets to my point. French is consistent and is no way advocating surrender. He is for persuasion not surrender.
One can acknowledge this point and also strive to protect classical liberalism . . . which, unless I’ve grossly misunderstood his position, is precisely what David French seeks to do.
Why are the moralistic efforts of today’s leftists so incensing to conservatives? Not merely because of their substance, but also because of their methods. What makes compelled speech (as in the case of transgenderism) such an evil? Not merely the fact that the speech being compelled might be wrong, but also — and especially — the very fact that it’s compelled in the first place. (Charles Cooke makes a similar argument.)
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you think that the problem lies not in the compelling, but in the veracity of the speech being compelled. But, if so, we really are fairweather friends, and we don’t really belong in the same political movement.
I, frankly, don’t see how the Sohrab Ahmari–Ben Domenech approach leads to anything other than more of the same Twitter-drenched enmity we’ve had to endure for the last decade.
Oh but this didn’t happen there were anti-sodomy laws on the books for decades and of course the Defense of Marriage act turned these cultural shifts right around. We nudged everything back in the right direction. Even Obama had to run opposed to Same Sex marriage.
He just does not think Christians should support Trump.
None of the above therefore, matters. If it were up to him, Trump’s base would desert him.
The man actually considered a run at the White House to throw the election into the House. I am sorry, Brian, but anyone contemplating that just to stop Trump has a judgement I cannot trust on anything.
To make this quote work it should read, “They expected their foes in the public square would abide by certain rules and expectations, the Left had abandoned decades before, and when the Left didn’t abide by those rules they sued them, crushed them in Court and forced them to abide by the rules.”
Then you crush them court and then expose their extremism and ridicule them in them the public square and beat them in elections and persuade people that they do not want extremism and hatred to rule the country.
Consider this view is held by a minority even in the Democratic party and that it should be resisted, sued and voted against to be exposed as small minority and then de-fanged and mocked out of the public square. Fear gives them power.
Acquiring a taste for the molotov is to acquire a distaste for the Constitution and our founding documents. If it is the gun and the molotov there are no elections and Trump should cancel the 2020 elections don’t you think? If peace is no longer an option it is time for the gun, who needs elections anymore, elections are the weak who cry peace, peace, in a time of war.
In the end that is to our advantage. Every pizza joint and scalped baker were precious votes lost in the Mid-West and apathy in the big cities of Philadelphia. Voters rarely reward the aggressors in the Culture Wars. As Obama found out as his culture war tactics gutted the Democrat party.
Amen!
Edit. oops.
Excuse me? Links to when we have done this? Crushed them in Court? I’d love examples.
Again, when does this actually happen? Examples.
Bull. The Majority of Democrats are A-OK with violence. If there were not, they would protest. They don’t. They keep voting for the leaders that support the violence.
Find me a Democrat who decries Antifa.
Drew is not calling for violence ins the streets. But if that is a Strawman you want to kick down, please do so.
He has written that he believes the transactional calculus social conservatives used for voting for Trump is very much defensible and even moral. He has no quarrel with that. He also thinks that Evangelical witness against immoral and dishonest behavior should cut against both parties and should not be held hostage to our partisan interest.
That is fair. I think it is wrong but if that was the biggest issue for you then it was the biggest issue. I would have gladly voted for David French for President. I am also glad he didn’t run.
I think Evangelical voters would do well to keep a little distance from Trump and not abandon all principle to fawn over him as some Evangelical leaders do. I find that most rank and file Evangelicals don’t have trouble doing that.
So, for you, what is a few scalps then? Mayters to the grand cause. Don’t need to defend them, because if we just sit back and wait, the American people will wake up and come to their senses.
Bull.