Yesterday, New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari published a lengthy essay with the rather eye-catching title, "Against David French-ism." While the essay takes rather direct aim at me personally, it also uses me as a kind of proxy for two competing visions of American life.
Ahmari's desire, he says, is "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good." By contrast, he says, I believe "that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side." Thus, he constructs a dichotomy between people like him, who understand "politics as war and enmity," and people like me, who possess an "earnest and insistently polite quality" that is "unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives."
What is singularly curious about this, and Ahmari's essay on the whole, is the extent to which it depends on the creation of two fictional people: a fictional David French far weaker than I think I've shown myself to be over many years of fighting for conservative causes, and a fictional version of Donald Trump as an avatar of a philosophy that Trump wouldn't recognize. It is within the framework of these two fictional people that my approach is allegedly doomed to fail and Trump's approach has a chance to prevail.
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