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.