Liberty Expose: The French-Ahmari Debate
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Context
Back in May 2019, Sohrab Ahmari wrote a provocative essay titled “Against David French-ism,” a polemical and at times personal criticism of David French’s allegedly “earnest and insistently polite” approach to conservative politics. Though seemingly targeted in its scope, the essay ended up generating a heated debate among conservatives over the future of conservatism and its proper approach to the “culture war” that besets the country, inciting a flurry of commentaries (I recommend Wallace-Wells’ as a starting point) and even a live debate with both Ahmari and French as participants.
According to Ahmari, French’s commitment to the classical liberal idea of a “technocratic market society” that can “accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side” is ill-suited to the culture war of our day. Instead, he argues that cultural conservatives should relegate “civility and decency” to the status of “secondary values,” and “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 to the Highest Good.” On this front, he finds an encouraging example in Donald Trump, who having “understood what was missing from mainstream (more or less French-ian) conservatism,” has tried to “shift the cultural and political mix...away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion.”
Generally speaking, I find French’s response in “What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong” to be an incisive rebuttal to Ahmari’s characterization of himself (that is, David French) as well as Ahmari’s disparaging assessment of civility and liberal pluralism in the context of conservative advocacy. As a cogent defense of liberal values and their enduring salience in the context of our tumultuous national culture, it needs no addition on my part.
That being said, one cannot appreciate the fuller significance of this debate from any of the standpoints outlined thus far. Both views contain seeds of possibility for conservatism's future, but discerning which are viable and how they could be integrated together will require a cast of conservative imagination that yet remains in its nascent stage--namely that of a nationalist, democratic conservatism congruent with the moral imagination of the upcoming generations.
Polarity Theory Applied to the French-Ahmari Debate
I've written elsewhere about the value composition of American conservatism and the particular ways these values have devolved into weaker, myopic versions of themselves during the last few decades, thereby worsening the political polarization in this country. In that essay I drew from the work of Steve McIntosh in order to map out the underlying value conflicts that beset the right and how those deeper value conflicts could be resolved. The same can and should be done on the left.
To properly deal with this devolution and overcome polarization, American politics must first undergo a process of value integration within each pole of the political spectrum before either the left or the right will be in a position to understand one another. That is to say, before the tribes can mutually recognize the genuine value of the other, each must first achieve a workable resolution within its own camp of competing values. On the right, the fundamental conflict has to do with the tension between the liberty and heritage value complexes.
Steve McIntosh, “Chart of the value polarity within the American right”
The French-Ahmari debate affords an ideal context on the right to practice this difficult but essential process of value resolution. On French's side, we benefit from a well-integrated articulation of the liberty complex; on Ahmari's side, we get a salient example of heritage values attempting to challenge the primacy of liberal values.
When French defends the classical liberal order, he affirms the twin creeds of toleration and pluralism that mark the foundations of American freedom. These inheritances from the Enlightenment should be guarded as marks of our national honor and defended as essential principles necessary for the success of any democratic project, let alone one as vast and variegated as the United States. Conservatives committed to America’s democratic promise should double down on these values and avoid the temptations to intolerance that naturally arise in an era as polarized as ours.
Furthermore, in drawing from a rich wellspring of “Christian and Burkean conservative principles,” as well as a learned facility in American constitutional principles, French succeeds in avoiding one of the excesses that American conservatism has fallen into over the last few decades: namely, the idolization of the free market. This idolization along with the oligarchic take-over that it facilitates are the primary inhibitors of freedom in America today, and it is on this front that Ahmari’s criticism of “technocratic market society” proves most applicable.
Though Ahmari’s characterizations of French often prove unfair, and his seeming affinity for sucker punch politics should make us pause, his arguments reveal some salient tendencies on the right that need to be acknowledged and re-directed in order for the right to properly evolve into a healthy, 21st century version of itself.
For example, Ahmari’s reading of Trump highlights the implicit collectivism in Trump’s “America First'' message and reveals the underlying motivations that made his candidacy appealing for so many Americans. Ahmari correctly intuits the degree to which the modern Republican Party has lost touch with the collective needs of the American people and failed to forward a programmatic vision that would actually protect “order, continuity, and social cohesion” in the complexities of the new era. He is right to identify these deficiencies as symptomatic of an “autonomy-above-all” politics, and to affirm that “the political community—and not just the church, family, and individual—has its own legitimate scope of action.” Put in value terms, Ahmari detects the excesses of the predominant liberty complex and seeks to correct for that excess with a bold re-affirmation of heritage values.
However, the players in Ahmari’s narrative call for some re-casting. It is not David French’s commitment to liberal values that should be combated, but the excessive, race-to-the-bottom market libertarianism that has taken over the Republican Party. It is not civility and decency that make conservatives suckers in a left-dominated culture war, but the failure of conservatives to creatively re-articulate their values for a new national landscape. It is not the alleged “culture war” that conservatives should gear up for, but rather the battle for American democracy itself.
Integrated Conservatism For The Future
The only way for the right to integrate its liberty and heritage values is to forward a compelling national vision that puts democracy—and all of its attendant dynamism and liberal values—at the center of its enterprise. On the side of liberty, it is necessary for the right to divest itself of its idolization of the free market (which does not align with the economic interests of most Americans) and affirm a federal nationalist vision that restores faith in the power of collective action through government. As long as this ideology remains predominant among Republican leaders, social conservatives and populists alike will rightly recoil from the dehumanizing effects of this flat technocratic order.
On the side of heritage, we must channel the natural impulse to distinct national identity by replacing the old nativist constructions with the felt unity of collective agency, as this is the only unity that will prove sustainable for the increasingly diverse America of the present and future. We must give up any pretensions towards an exclusively ethnic or religious circle for American identity and embrace the cooperative, transgenerational experiment of American democracy. Only then will conservatives be in a position to reclaim the promise of America as a redeemer nation, and restore the grand old tradition of the Federalists and early Republicans, for whom the possibility of freedom was dependent on the agency of an energetic national government.