'Those hoping for an intellectual Rumble in the Jungle were disappointed.'
From left, New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and National Review writer David French at the Catholic University of America’s Institute for Human Ecology on Thursday night. Photo: YouTube Screencap/ Institute for Human Ecology In May, Sohrab Ahmari, the opinion editor of the New York Post and a recent convert to Catholicism, published a polemic in First Things, an intellectual journal of the religious right, called “Against David French–ism.
In Ahmari’s telling, however, French — a Never Trumper, Evangelical Protestant, and First Amendment lawyer — is a “classical liberal” whose cultural conservatism disguises the fact that he shares liberals’ assumption that social choice is the greatest good. Conservatives like French, he charged, accept secularism and licentiousness as the inevitable outcome of liberal democracy; they’re resigned to the modern order and content to carve out a separate, rapidly shrinking, sphere.
Ahmari is part of a faction of “youngish, mostly Roman Catholic” conservatives who want to aggressively prosecute the culture war and defend the nuclear family. They’re about as far from libertarian as you can get: They’re skeptical of capitalism, which they see as corrosive to families and community, and they’re happy to embrace the powers of the state if it can help their cause.
The real crisis, French argued, is larger and cultural and cannot be solved by political means. Millions of Americans “do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said. “Tens of millions of Christian American men” are “addicted to porn.” After an interminable amount of time spent on “Drag Queen Story Hour,” the debate finally got to the real elephant in the room: whether Christians can support Trump. “This has been the most pro-life administration since Roe,” Ahmari said, and Trump controls judicial appointments. Yet “you’re on the record saying we need to defeat Trump at the ballot box.”
French refused to condone an ethic of ends-justify-means. At Harvard Law School, he noted, there was a group of liberal, feminist professors that he assumed “hated my guts.” But when it came down to it, they stood up for due process in Title IX cases.
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