Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
From the Kimball piece:
[QUOTE] Such passages reveal the core of moral arrogance inhabiting Mill’s liberalism. They also suggest to what extent he remained—despite the various criticisms he made of the master—a faithful heir of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. [… ]Liberty was always on Mill’s lips; a new orthodoxy was ever in his heart. There is an important sense in which the libertarian streak in On Liberty is little more than a prophylactic against the coerciveness that its assumption of virtuous rationality presupposes.
Such “paradoxes” (to put it politely) show themselves wherever the constructive part of Mill’s doctrine is glimpsed through his cheerleading for freedom and eccentricity. Mill’s doctrine of liberty begins with a promise of emancipation. The individual, in order to construct a “life plan” worthy of his nature, must shed the carapace of inherited opinion. He must learn to subject all his former beliefs to rational scrutiny. He must dare to be “eccentric,” “novel,” “original.”
At the same time, Mill notes, not without misgiving, that
In other words, the partisan of Millian liberalism undertakes the destruction of inherited custom and belief in order to construct a bulwark of custom and belief that can be inherited. [UNQUOTE]
This seems an apt description of the libertarian mindset (the progressive mindset is less coherent). If we could only establish a secular orthodoxy, we’d finally have the society we’ve been dreaming of. Utopia.
You seem to be arguing for Ahamri by saying what he wants to be is David French. Which is fine. Condemn David French to be David French. Fine, fine. But why condemn in the first place? Instea just fight alongside of him?
This sounds exactly like David Frenchism. This also sounds like a country where I can invite a Drag Queen to a Bible Study after she is done reading to children, because the Government can’t ban or stop either activity.
The hard right commands the allegiance of (maybe) 12% of the country. Picking up the gun is a sure way to move the decimal point—to 0.012
He seems to be really quick to condemn anyone who tries to do things a different (but legal) way.
French does his fair share of condemning other conservatives as not being on his side.
What’s good for the goose.
This doesn’t follow from anything that was said here.
What WAS said was that if we can’t go through political channels and we can’t organize protests without being condemned by Frenchists, then what is left to us? War is left to us.
So, it might not be your thing or French’s thing or TES’s or HW’s, but it might be someone else’s.
No one wants to pick up our guns, so let us choose the legal means available to us.
I’d also like to point out that David French was one of the people who condemned a 17 year old for standing tall and silent in the face of a native american.
He did nothing illegal or violent. We don’t even know if he said anything, but French condemned him anyway.
I mean, if we can’t even do that by French’s standards, what is left to us?
I’m going to play a little of Pastor French’s game. I think it un-Christian of French to deny the power of God’s grace in Donald Trump and the ability of God to redeem even the awful Orange Man. His unforgiving attitude is unrecognizable as anything I would know as Christianity. No conservative Christian Trump supporter I know is excusing Trump’s infidelity or other moral failings. We just recognize him as a fellow sinner who’s shown a lot of potential by the love he expresses for his country and his fellow Americans (minus a few of the protected class who get the New York treatment from him) and his courage — the essential virtue for all other virtues to manifest.
I don’t mind Pastor French fighting the good fight, I just question who he thinks he’s fighting at times. He has this conceit that he’s “saving conservatism,” when, really, what he’s doing is betraying his fellow conservatives to the real enemy — the Left.
Danger on the Left.
David Frenchism is to first make sure the government does not over step our rights with laws that violate them. Step two convince people, a majority of people that is bad for the government to have their hands in everything. Step Three win elections to that will remove government hands from everything.
Where does Ahmari disagree? He is against protecting our legal rights? I don’t think so. Step two he does think that government hands should be in many things but different from the left. Step three win elections so the government can intervene in ways that Ahamri likes.
Or are we talking about something else?
Link?
The problem is Step Two. Too many people remain unconvinced. I get the sense that the solution is to write more columns at them.
The question I don’t understand is what principles are at play here. So you want to stop a Drag Queen from reading to children whose parents voluntarily bring them to a Drag Queen reading.
David French says persuade people to vote in elections so they will elect more virtuous people to office. By building a political movement that is more vitreous we encourage and people to hold to a more virtuous line in their own lives. This makes us culturally healthier.
In such a society allowing people to peaceable gather and hear a Drag Queen read a story is a must. Is a right we have to respect.
Ahmari is against persuasion? He is against Virtue in office? He is against the right of association? Where does he actually differ from David French beside using more militaristic language? What is the different tactic employed?
But since he disagrees with using the political sphere to affect the culture, what difference would it make to elect more virtuous politicians? That’s the catch in French-ism.
My mistake.
Rather than defend them, he stayed silent until the coast was clear while his coworkers did the haranguing.
The only thing I want from government in cultural warfare is the right to free association to be back in play.
Currently, you are only allowed to exercise it against cis-het-white-males. Everyone else can fall back on a protected status to force everyone else to associate in business, membership, and promotion.
This makes it nigh impossible for the party of old white men to push back against ideological pariahs within their own organizations, businesses, and leadership. Only Brendan Eich and James Damore can lose their jobs over ideology because they have no special status to fall back on. So the left can police their businesses and organizations and the right can not.
(Yes, this matters because we are by far majority white, straight men and the left is majority not)
Change that and we might be able to shift culture or at least build a counter culture.
I think that would be helpful, but personal conversions are key and that can only happen if we can deprogram the kids from the toxic secular/atheistic/leftist cult they’re indoctrinated into.
Protecting your kids in your organizations matters.
Boy scouts could not say no without significant legal cost. Remove the ability to terrorize cultural dissenters through predatory legal shenanigans.
Assure me that if we convinced a majority of the people that it is bad for government to have their hands in everything that it would matter.
The laws are already passed. The bureaucracies already exist, and they are already staffed. Non-profits and companies have already written their procedures and training materials. Courts already have precedents about how bureaucracies and officials and citizens must regulate their behavior.
This is the point of disillusionment. For two decades I have been told that the government would be shrunk, and then I could make my case in an open market of ideas. That has not happened. It has, in fact, gotten worse. The government is now actively opposed to me -on far more than the legal genocide our laws countenance, about which my kind have kept their mouths shut and shaken the bloody hands for nearly 50 years.
And you say “wait.”
I say that at this point it makes more sense to accept that the government’s hands will be in everything. No one has demonstrated any ability to change this fact. And if the government is going to meddle in these affairs, then we should make sure that it meddles to our benefit -and not hide behind platitudes because we don’t want to engage in normal political activism.
From a Canadian Catholic:
I need a meme…
My only regret is I have but one like to give…
Excellent, Scott! Thanks!!