American
culture is past the point of peaceable navigation of conflict. The Left seeks
to destroy all that Christian conservatives hold dear.
By Ben Domenech
MAY 30, 2019
It’s worth
considering the important argument between Sohrab Ahmari of the New York Post and
David French of National Review over the past few days. As
with many stupid arguments, it started on Twitter.
Thankfully,
it bloomed into something more interesting. You can get the background here,
with David French advancing his typical “decency and civility” argument against
the current sentiments of conservatives locked into the culture wars.
I don’t want to pick on Sohrab, but I get this
sentiment quite a bit. According to some folks on Twitter, I don’t “fight.” I’m
too polite for these times. I’m too much of a squish. Apparently, the lesson I
learned from a better lawyer than me has been transformed into a kind of
defect. A weakness.
But in the example above, what did politeness,
respect, and dignity cost anyone? We prevailed in the case. We vindicated our
client and achieved a just result. At the same time, we treated other human
beings with dignity and respect.
[This piece prompts the typical eyerolls I have toward the always
predictable French. Can someone just form the Politeness and Decency Third
Party already? I get it, it’s a view, just form it and Mitt Romney can caucus
with it and then the rest of the center-right coalition can nod and move on.]
But at the same time, French’s argument – concerning a case before
the Kentucky Courts – doesn’t engage at all with the situation Ahmari is
talking about. He is talking about a situation constrained by the rules of
civility required within a court proceeding, where failing to abide by said
rules can find you in contempt. He is not engaging with the culture war
situation Ahmari mentioned, hot-button, toxic, and without any of the
mitigating entities promised by the American court system.
When French asks, “what did politeness, respect, and dignity cost
anyone?”, he sounds like a hockey coach planning to run an all-finesse team out
onto the ice. Perhaps their politeness, respect, and dignity will be awarded
with a honor in defeat medal. Ahmari is more interested in a form of victory, as
he sees it – which could be defined as a restorationist aim, or perhaps “leave
us alone, or else” – and he blames French’s mindset for much of the losing.
Read his
piece at First Things.
It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone
as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently
polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis
facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that
there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.”
(What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading
hour at a public library in Sacramento.)
I added, “The only way is through”—that is to
say, 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.
French prefers a different Christian strategy,
and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular
political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take
issue. Thus, my complaint about his politeness wasn’t a wanton attack; it
implicated deeper matters.
Such talk—of politics as war and enmity—is
thoroughly alien to French, I think, because he believes 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. Even if the latter—that is, the libertine and the
pagan—predominate in elite institutions, French figures, then at least the
former, traditional Christians, should be granted spaces in which to practice
and preach what they sincerely believe.
Well, it doesn’t work out that way, and it
hasn’t been working out that way for a long time—as French well knows, since he
has spent a considerable part of his career admirably and passionately
advocating for Christians coercively squeezed out of the public square. In that
time, he—we—have won discrete victories, but the overall balance of forces has
tilted inexorably away from us, and I think that French-ian model bears some of
the blame.
More here.
I had the good fortune to grow up around a great many Christian
people with Frenchian sentiments. They are very good and decent, but they also
had a skewed perspective on politics and culture that assumed their foes in the
public square would abide by certain rules and expectations that went out the
window decades before.
There is a sweet naïveté and optimism to this belief, unburdened
by awareness of the cultural Hindenburg we all currently inhabit. How could the
ACLU, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders take stands
against the active expression of religious belief when they all endorsed RFRA
themselves two decades earlier? Bill Clinton signed it! Wouldn’t the hypocrisy
shame them straight into the corner? Haha, you bigoted saps, watch and learn.
It is not particularly comforting to recognize we have reached a
point in America where politeness and decency is no longer the best approach to
politics. Most of the political class agrees with French. They would vastly
prefer a world where everyone in politics has an approach like Paul Ryan. But
even as the political elite, both leaders and staff, have insisted on that
approach for years where culture and policy fights are concerned, something has
come along which disrupts their chiding message about a cultural defense with
the ease and give of a soft-boiled egg. It embraces the happy while forgetting
the warrior part. Domesticated animals are always more welcome at the garden
party atmosphere of the plexiglass roundtables shot through the airwaves, where
people say “I think” about the news.
Consider the possibility that the people, honorable or
dishonorable alike, who forever urged politeness and good behavior are wrong.
Consider the possibility that the progressive movement has embraced views that
will no longer tolerate even the presence of offensive views, as they are now
practically the same as violence. Consider the possibility that a lifetime New
York limousine liberal, mugged by the reality of abortion and convinced of the
transactionalism of Christian voters, recognized a more brutal approach, an
approach which actually spells out on national television what happens in a
late term abortion, could be a better cultural defense than a thousand
phone-ins to the March for Life.
It would be comforting to believe David French is correct about
all of this. Many, even if they believe he is wrong, will continue to
personally emulate his approach, unwilling to choose a more confrontational
approach. The distaste with the Molotov is understandable. But the truth is the
culture has long ago passed the point of consensus where it is possible for a
peaceable navigation of the conflict.
Politics today is for the rough, the confrontational, and the
unapologetic. It is not comfortable unless we lie to ourselves about where it
is and where it is going. Instead, American Christians inhabit the position
where their foes are animated by beliefs consistent with an apocryphal quote
from Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you
for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger
than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
And it could get worse: it’s possible both the perspectives of
these Christian conservative thinkers are too optimistic. Social conservatives
should be most concerned that both French and Ahmari are wrong about what the
enemies of freedom believe possible, that the harshest voices in the American
left won’t be satisfied just driving traditional American values from the oped
pages or the universities or the local boards. Instead, the left may be turning
into the culture war white walkers, bent on utter and total destruction of
everything American Christians hold dear – including the liberty to hold
beliefs at odds with the consensus of the elite – and that they will root for
that belief, even when it is hidden in their hearts.
Ben Domenech is the publisher of The Federalist.
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