French responds

 . . . admirably. I don't completely align with what he lays out here, but that's mostly at the tactical level.

First, the points on which I do align:

I noticed that his take on the business about the VSG and social cohesion was also mine:

See if you recognize this person as the 45th president of the United States: 

With a kind of animal instinct, Trump understood what was missing from mainstream (more or less French-ian) conservatism. His instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community — and not just the church, family, and individual — has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control.

Donald Trump wouldn’t even fully grasp what this paragraph means, much less recognize it as a governing philosophy. He is a man of prodigious personal appetites. A man who proudly hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office. A man who marries and then marries again and again, yet still feels compelled to find porn stars to bed. In his essay, Ahmari condemns the man who craves autonomy above all else. He is, without knowing it, condemning Trump.

So, there you have it. To Ahmari, the alignment of forces looks like this: In one corner is the nice milquetoast libertarian, David French. In the other corner is the strong instrument of social cohesion, Donald Trump.

If this were a real binary conflict and I had to choose, I’d go with Trump, too. Ahmari’s version of me sounds useless. But of course, Ahmari has stacked the deck, grossly misrepresenting both me and Trump to make his case.

Now, here's where it gets sticky:

Here is the absolute, blunt truth: America will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.

One solution is grounded in the wisdom of the Founders. The other refutes the fundamental firm insistence of the Declaration of Independence that “governments are instituted among men” to secure our “unalienable rights.” While governments should of course seek the common good, they do not and should not have the brute coercive force to “re-order” the public square to achieve that good as they define it.

The triggering event for Ahmari’s first attack on me was a tweet announcing a “drag-queen storytime” at a public library in Sacramento. For whatever reason, his initial instinct was to blame me as, in his mind, an example of a conservatism too “nice” to prevent such a thing from happening. It is curious, however, that he never got around to proposing a concrete course of action that would have achieved the desired result. Does re-ordering the common good mean using the power of the state to prohibit that form of freedom of association? And if the state assumes for itself the power to stop such an event and perhaps fire the librarian who organized it, why does anyone think that the forces of Christian statism will continue to prevail and prevent, say, a radical member of a President Kamala Harris administration from wielding the same power against a public reading of The Screwtape Letters? 

It's a compelling argument, don't we agree?

But here's the thing: A bit later, he speaks of Colin Kapernick's organizing of the take-a-knee movement as being as deserving of legal defense as "libertarian Googlers who question Silicon Valley orthodoxy." Well, yes, but it's a parallel I don't find at all satisfying on a moral level. There is more to the world - more to our society and culture - than courtroom settings.

I yearn to see French bring the same kind of palpable ire to the spectacle of Colin Kapernick that he brings to Donald Trump's very real failings. Use some strong words, like "rotten." "Maybe even "shit." Call him out as the liar and race hustler that he is, given the statistics regarding unarmed black young men and law enforcement officers.

The other side of the coin is that to go very far down this path is to risk becoming an agent of ossification. More than once as I've contemplated Ahmari's essay, I've considered that it's possibly not much more than loftily expressed Kurt Schlichter-ism. And, as LITD has argued on many occasion, that is anything but productive.

I understand what French is arguing for. In my own confluence of professional and social experience as a journalist covering local government, I'm often tempted to give rein to my outrage at what I witness at city council meetings, school board meetings, human rights commission meetings and the like. Steam comes out my ears as I sit there and scribble my documentation of remarks about "implicit bias" and "the city upping its game in addressing climate change" and "palpable concern in the undocumented community." I could upend the card table, be the skunk at the garden party, toss aside all objectivity, but I'd then have to encounter the people before whom I'd done so in stores, in restaurants, at parties. And I'd thereby render impossible any productive interaction with them. And society would thereby get a few tragic degrees more brittle.

And we must defer to Mr. French regarding comparisons of the post-American Left and jihadism. As he says, he was, during his Army stint, in "eastern Diyala under al-Qaeda's thumb" and saw "the most dreadful things that haunt me today."

Still, I really and truly wonder if he's fully taken in the magnitude of the grotesque distortion of the basic design of God's universe that the Left has succeeded in imposing on our society in the last few years. As we know, we live in an age in which big-shot celebrities and major corporations boycott states over transgender bathrooms and legislation protecting the lives of unborn post-Americans whose heartbeats can be detected. Here's some shorthand: drag queens at libraries reading to little kids is as wrong as wrong can be.

I guess I am among that camp I've seen express itself on Twitter about this. I fall somewhere between Ahmari and French. Maybe, since they are both Christians, some prayerful deliberation on what they see as their differences can lead to something like a way forward.

There is a war going on, and I think that ultimately, both French and Ahmari recognize that.

Reflections on Sohrab Ahmari's essay "Against David French-ism"

I've had to read it over a few times in order to feel ready to write about it. I've also digested several other people's takes on it. (French himself tweeted yesterday that he'd be responding at National Review soon. Definitely anticipating that.)

Here's the link.

He sets the table thusly:

In March, First Things published a manifesto of sorts signed by several mostly youngish, mostly Roman Catholic writers, who argued that “there is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” that “any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”

Against whom, concretely speaking, was this declaration directed?

I don’t claim to speak for the other signatories. But as one of the principal drafters, I have given the question a great deal of thought, both before and since the document’s publication. And I can now say that for me, “Against the Dead Consensus” drew a line of demarcation with what I call David French-ism, after the National Review writer and Never-Trump stalwart.   

What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. And that sensibility is, in turn, bound up with the persona of one particular writer, though it reaches beyond him to pervade a wider sphere of conservative Christian thinking and activism.

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.)

I'm still trying to decide how much of a case Ahmari has in asserting that French's position is that the war with the forces of civilizational rot have to be fought purely in the cultural arena, lest those forces succeed in decrying any attempts to take it into the policy arena as the imposition of one "viewpoint" among many on a populace entitled to come to its own conclusions about morality.

It seems pretty compelling on first consideration:

in the long term, religious-liberty absolutism will put Christians and other traditional believers in a bind. If the moral law is merely a matter of ancient, if sincere, conviction, then of course it must give way to the demands for autonomy of people in the here and now.

Archbishop Charles Chaput made this point in his 2017 book, Strangers in a Strange Land. If traditional moral precepts are “purely religious beliefs,” he wrote, then “they can’t be rationally defended. And because they’re rationally indefensible, they should be treated as a form of prejudice. Thus two thousand years of moral truth and religious principle become, by sleight of hand, a species of bias.”

Again and again, French insists on the sincerity of the believers whose causes he takes up, as if asserting sincerity of belief can move the heart of an enemy who finds you and your beliefs repulsive: “The biblical sexual ethic is based on a sincere conviction. . . .” “Evidence of devout faith is frequently evidence of a sincere commitment to fairness, compassion, and the faithful discharge of one’s constitutional duties. . . .”

But they won’t listen. Tub-thump long enough about your sincere but irrational (in the eyes of the reigning ideology) views, and soon opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, polyamory, kids in drag, and much else of the same kind will come to resemble the wrongheaded and indeed irrational opposition to vaccination mounted by ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. Sorry, Pastor French, but your superstition will have to give way to public health and the smooth functioning of the autonomy-maximizing society.

Ahmari kind of points up a certain irony in French's position, namely, that, for all his fealty to tradition and bedrock Judeo-Christian institutions, he gives an awful lot of elbow room to those who insist that their immediate revelatory experience is as valid as, say, scripture or doctrine:

This goes back, I think, to its roots in English non-conformism. In Culture and Anarchy, his great Victorian critique of this mode of thought, Matthew Arnold says of the nonconformist that, because he has encountered the Word of God by his own lights, he sees no need for the authority and grand liturgies of a national church (still less the Catholic Church).

But as Arnold notes, while the nonconformist vision of an austere, no-frills, solitary encounter with God might be suitable in one context, it doesn’t satisfy other necessities, such as collective public worship befitting public needs. Or again, while free trade might have provided for growth in Britain’s urban cores, something middle-class liberals welcomed, it also created public misery and overcrowding that needed to be addressed—and not by individual initiative alone. And so on.

Mutatis mutandis, David French-ism. Forced to reckon with the fact that autonomy unbound hasn’t yielded freedom but new and insidious forms of digital tyranny, French treats as a nonstarter conservative proposals to intervene (“I oppose government efforts to regulate social-media speech policies”). Instead, he urges essentially a cultural solution. Silicon Valley should voluntarily adopt First Amendment norms, per French, and I wish him good luck persuading our programmer-kings to go along. 

Where I think Ahmari gets onto quite shaky ground is this assertion:

Voters across the developed world have had enough of depoliticized politics. In the United States, this great “no” culminated in 2016’s election of Donald Trump. With a kind of animal instinct, Trump understood what was missing from mainstream (more or less French-ian) conservatism. His instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community—and not just the church, family, and individual—has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control. 

Order, continuity and social cohesion? From the Very Stable Genius? Methinks he reads way too much into the Trump phenomenon in this regard.

I'm on board with Ahmari's most basic argument. This is a war and we underestimate the enemy's viciousness and determination to obliterate us at our peril. But I think David French sees this, too. Both men are Christians and conservatives. At this point in my reflection on the matter, I think Ahmari is making way too much of their differences.

The Very Stable Genius jeopardizes his own North American trade deal

Spin this, shills:

In a surprise announcement that could derail a major trade deal, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is slapping a 5% tariff on all Mexican imports, effective June 10, to pressure the country to do more to crack down on the surge of Central American migrants trying to cross the U.S. border.

He said the percentage will gradually increase — up to 25% — “until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied.”

The decision showed the administration going to new lengths, and looking for new levers, to pressure Mexico to take action — even if those risk upending other policy priorities, like the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal that is the cornerstone of Trump’s legislative agenda and seen as beneficial to his reelection effort. It also risks further damaging the already strained relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, two countries whose economics are deeply intertwined.

The VSG takes the notion of winging it to new levels. It's as if he can't remember having had his team carefully craft the deal. That was so yesterday:

. . . the sudden tariff threat comes at a peculiar time, given how hard the administration has been pushing for passage of the USMCA, which would update the North American Free Trade Agreement. It comes less than two weeks after Trump lifted import taxes on Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminum, a move that seemed to clear an obstacle to its passage, and the same day that both Trump and López Obrador began the process of seeking ratification. The deal needs approval from lawmakers in all three countries before it takes effect.

“The tariffs certainly put the USMCA on ice,” said Gary Hufbauer, an expert in trade law at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who panned the move but said Trump does have the legal authority to impose the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by citing a national emergency.

“The drama is legal, but it’s preposterous,” he said. 

Unless one is an ate-up member of his cult, he makes it awfully hard to consider voting for him.

This is how the writer of beautiful letters rolls when things don't go his way

If you don't get the results he's looking for at a summit with the Very Stable Genius, you get accused of espionage and executed:

North Korea executed its nuclear envoy to the United States as part of a purge of officials who steered negotiations for a failed summit between leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, a South Korean newspaper said on Friday.

Kim Hyok Chol was executed in March at Mirim Airport in Pyongyang, along with four foreign ministry officials after they were charged with spying for the United States, the Chosun Ilbo reported, citing an unidentified source with knowledge of the situation.

"He was accused of spying for the United States for poorly reporting on the negotiations without properly grasping U.S. intentions," the source was quoted as saying.

The February summit in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, the second between Kim and Trump, failed to reach a deal because of conflicts over U.S. calls for complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.

And consider how fast one can go from being Kim's top policy advisor to breaking rocks in the hot sun:

The Chosun Ilbo story said that Kim Jong Un’s top aide Kim Yong Chol, “who was also involved in the summit, is reportedly undergoing hard labor.” He had been said to be Kim’s “most trusted policy advisor. He was North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s counterpart since Kim entered nuclear talks with the U.S. early last year.”

Kim seems to have gone to Hanoi ill-prepared and, well, somebody has to take the heat for that:

Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Seoul, also weighed in. She said, “Kim Jong Un may have gone into the summit with a faulty assessment from his team of Washington’s position and got caught flat-footed without a “Plan B” after Trump rejected North Korea’s disarmament offer. If the Chosun report is true, it may mean more delays for the sputtering nuclear talks…Perhaps this explains why Pyongyang has been ghosting Washington and Seoul since Hanoi because it might have needed to clean house and regroup before negotiating again.”

Memo to Pompeo and Bolton: press hard with the VSG for a stop to the patty-cake.

Mueller

Federal-level justice and law enforcement make for some enigmatic characters. There was J. Edgar Hoover, who was a strange person brought with peculiar obsessions. More recently, we've had Attorneys General such as Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, on whose watches Fast and Furious and the Bill Clinton tarmac conversation occurred.

But some of these figures are hard to read. Those who have recently been embroiled in controversy, such as James Comey and Rod Rosenstein are not overtly ideological the way, say, Holder was. It's hard to read what drives them at their cores, given the bearing they show to the world.

How about Robert Mueller? A former FBI director with distinguished military service among his accomplishments. He's spoken of favorably by a number of seasoned colleagues.

But what he said yesterday kind of puts the cap on what had been suspected about the entire way he'd carried out his two-year investigation.

He turned a basic premise of American understanding of the relationship between the individual citizen and the law on its head.

As Alan Dershowitz puts it:

No responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict. 

As Greg Jarrett, legal analyst at Fox News, puts it:

 He set forth in luxurious detail “evidence on both sides of the question.” But this is not the job of any chief prosecutor, anywhere.

Mueller was not retained to compose a masterpiece worthy of Proust. He was hired to investigate potential crimes arising from Russian interference in a presidential election and make a reasoned decision on whether charges were merited. 

As Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review puts it:

 That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are notsupposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence.”

I understand that the main conversational point going forward is going to be whether this sufficiently emboldens Democrats to pursue impeachment, but I'd like to know how we can get a closer bead on what motivates this guy.

Seriously, what compels him to put it that way?

I understand that some are absolutely certain that the answer is that Mueller had the long knives out for Trump from the get-go, but he just hasn't given that indication.

I think. As I say, he's one of those enigmatic types.

The Devil is not a fictional character

Here at LITD, I have gone into the tipping-point moment at which I unequivocally became a Christian before, but it's worth revisiting at this horrifying moment in the life of our nation.

I had my ideological conversion experience long before my spiritual one. It began with an opportunity to stare into the dark heart of the "peace" movement of the 1980s, which led to my pursuit of a master's degree in history in order to ascertain when that strain of thought emerged within the overall development of the West. Some circumstances in my work life around that time made for my first real exposure to identity politics as well. Within a short time, I was off and running, subscribing to National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator and Insight and attending every think-tank conference that time and money would allow.

But with regard to questions of God's nature and ultimate meaning, I languished in the zone somewhere between vaguely Eastern all-is-one-ism and secular agnosticism. As time went on, the entire matter slid further down my list of important things to think about.

When Christians would invite me to consider their take on it, I would buck at the remaining sticking points I had. Without belaboring them, given that I've discussed the subject of sticking points in past posts, they included my sense that salvation looked like a rigged game to me, and the patriarchal design for the universe which Christianity proclaimed.

As I worked through those, my resistance narrowed down to the matter of an actual Devil. So immersed in modern sensibility was I that I just couldn't take that step. The notion of an anti-God in the form of a being at work in the world flew in the face of what I thought I knew about reality.

My prior conversion to conservatism served me well at the moment of my tipping point. So aware was I of the foul nature of Leftism's essence that I kept coming back to the word "demonic" to describe it. The events of the past decade - dustups over homosexual "marriage and transgender bathrooms, distortion of the notion of rights beyond all recognizability (to include, among other things, health care), the disregard from nearly all corners for the disastrous debt the nation was imposing on itself, and the mutations into which that "peace" movement that started it all for me into rank appeasement of the most radical and threatening regimes the West had ever faced - forced me into a position of seeing Lucifer's face in the daily life of our civilization.

And now, with the latest flare-up of the abortion issue, we can feel his hot breath on our necks. I'm not the first observer to note that we are irreversibly past the point of any "safe, legal and rare" smokescreens. No one bothers to talk that way anymore. We now have industries, particularly the film industry, that want to quit doing business in Georgia because that state's legislature and governor enacted a law that protects a person when an obstetrician can detect the person's heartbeat.

There is no shortage of accounts of what abortion actually is. Two recent movies, Gosnell and Unplanned serve well to drive that home. I came across a piece today that likewise makes plain the evil of the procedure:

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

In the course of my morning persusal of various opinion outlets, I also came across an absolutely chilling piece to which I will not link.  I will tell you that it is at Buzzfeed and that it is by NARAL's Amy Everitt. It is entitled "CEOs Must Stand Up For Abortion Rights," and its thrust is that America's corporations are lax in ensuring that women have the opportunities for career advancement  that they deserve.

Everitt is the Devil's mouthpiece. She advocates for a world in which selfishness - indeed, the obsolescence of familial connectedness - is placed among the highest values that people ought to embrace. Oh, she gives perfunctory lip service to women "choos[ing] if, how and when to have a family," but does so in the context of the imperative that women not "miss out on opportunities."

So much for the idea that the family as the basic unit of societal organization is a creation of almighty God, and that it is the environment in which we first learn about trust, nurturing, teamwork, accountability, humor, and a number of other conditions for being fully human.

It's a mean, cold world that these people intend to impose upon us. Their invitation is for you and me to willingly offer our souls for devouring.

That's how late in the day it is.

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