A serious intellectual dispute broke out this week between different factions of the conservative punditocracy. On one side is the Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari, who is advancing a line of attack from a recent First Things manifestotitled "Against the Dead Consensus." The dead consensus is a pre-Trump conservatism that operated within a broad framework of individual liberty and thus "failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism."
Now Ahmari has given this failure a name and a face. You will be surprised to learn that it is David French.
French is a well-liked National Review writer who received some national attention in the 2016 election when the neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol, another avatar of this dead consensus, recommended him as a potential Never Trump presidential candidate. He was formerly president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. As such, he has an extensive history of defending the First Amendment rights of students and religious groups. The American Conservative's Rod Dreher notes, "I have banged out acres of prose over these years about religious liberty, and I can't imagine that any of that holds a candle to what David French, as a lawyer, has actually done for religious liberty."
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