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A few layover thoughts on the argument concerning @SohrabAhmari's writings and what followed after, including this @lizzywol piece: thefederalist.com/2019/05/31/wil…
Much of this argument has become too personal, when it ought to be a debate about whose frame of the moment is correct.
There is a divide on that cultural premise which needs to be adjudicated before we even talk about what comes next.
Because if the American public square does not represent a clear and present danger to the faithful, if things are essentially unchanged from where they were in say 2008, none of this is an existential threat
For the past few months we have been confronting a court order that would ban The Federalist in the entirety of Canada because we quoted a father using his daughter's birth pronoun.
The corporations driving the culture wars are all of one mind with the left. The Catholics, the comedians, the religious non-profits are the canaries.
The leftist politicians running for president aren't promising a return to normalcy. They are promising to pack the court, eliminate the electoral college, and have nationwide unlimited abortion funded by you.
That is not an agenda of retrenchment, it is an agenda that says: we will seize power, and it will never be taken from our grasp again.
I read everything Sohrab writes because I think he speaks for a portion of Americans coalescing around an idea. I don't know much about David French because I don't read him that often. But what he's written about this strikes me as deeply naive.
I really wish he wasn't. But I worked in the White House, the admin, and the Congress, and the people I worked with are universally terrified by what they see happening now.
This, for instance, is definitely a thing that will happen.
The rhetoric of Anton's Flight 93 piece bothered me, and I said so at the time, but his core construction spoke to the fears of many Christian conservatives and has been borne out since.
In conversation with Niall Ferguson the other day, I raised Chesterton's comment that "War is not ‘the best way of settling differences;’ it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you."
Drilling down to the core, this is an argument about how to fight the culture war. You can section off Sohrab's Christian statism if you want, but that's not really the main argument.
Instead, this is an argument between a meek, tolerant, Ned Flanders approach to the culture wars, and those who seek not to bring peace, but the sword, and maybe they watch the Young Pope YouTube clips without irony
I don't know that the tradcon Catholics are right about this. My own views are expressed well by Liz. But I do know the Flanders people are wrong, and worse, they ignore all the ways the enemies of free thought are coming for them.
And when French describes me as a "Christian statist" for daring to critique his naivete, it only bolsters my opinion that he's never actually seen a wight.
The Americans who hold to the tenets of Judeo Christian belief that undergirded these United States for centuries are getting cancelled now. What should worry us is if both French and Ahmari are too optimistic about what comes after cancellations.
What can that bullish, enthused, vengeful Left achieve if they eliminate the breakers? Fueled by corporate America, Silicon Valley, a corrupt education system, and the confidence of immense moral authority?
The answer is an utter eradication of all the institutions that kept us free.
This culture war cannot be settled for us by the enemies of free thought. We cannot allow that. So while I am not on the other side of the Tiber with so many of my friends, their arguments cannot be dismissed or disrespected. They see the threat most directly.
So to the extent I speak for any of the Free Folk, knowing we may not agree with what comes next, I agree with the understanding of the threat, and we will stand with you against the long night.
