I have wondered for quite some time now if someone today read through all my posts on this blog prior to the candidacy of Donald J. Trump and none of them since, they might reasonably come to the conclusion that I am obviously a Trump supporter. I've written at some length on the idea that sometimes "we", meaning evangelicals, social conservatives, conservatives of other stripes, are often too "nice" and accommodating. I've argued against the business wing of the GOP, whom Reagan called "fraternal order" Republicans, whose main concern appears to be power rather than principle. But they would be quite wrong. I could not bring myself to vote for Trump even in the general election. My objection to Trump wasn't his character or his methods, his obnoxious tweeting or his public image. My objection to Trump was very simple: he wasn't, and still isn't a conservative. Everybody seems to know this but it doesn't appear to make much difference vis a vis the battle lines on the right.
Sohrab Ahmari recently wrote an article outlining a position he calls "David French-ism", which he is against. David French, the man, the myth, the legend, wrote a response, and for some reason the whole dust-up ballooned into something rather larger than it ought to have been for all the same reasons that public discourse in the age of social media, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald J. Trump is often ridiculous. A complete fucking moron says something moronic that happens to align with one side but has patently obvious and egregious flaws. The other side jumps on those flaws immediately and en masse, not because it is hard but because it is easy, and the first side then defends the patently obvious, often absurd flaws as not really being flaws at all simply because they think they must defend their own. Finally, the whole debate becomes ridiculous and everybody misses the point that actually matters. Obviously, "David French-ism" is not very similar to the positions, ideas, and actual life lived by one David French. Neither does "Sohrab Ahmari-ism" bear much resemblance to the life and times of one Donald J. Trump. In that respect, David French's response to the attack on his person is accurate.
In other respects, I found French's response almost equally as frustrating as Ahmari's original article. David French appears to believe that everything is going quite swimmingly in the culture wars, i.e., we are winning. French's idea of this references the situation in the early 80s compared to today and claims progress on a number of fronts. I can't help but recall Jerry Falwell's belief that the Moral Majority had won the issue of gay marriage. He probably died believing it. Less than a decade later gay marriage became legal in the entire country. Why did someone like Jerry Falwell, who had fought this battle for years up close and personal, believe so wrongly that he had won? Is David French making the same mistake? Can people like David French and Jerry Falwell ever wrap their heads around the idea that maybe, just maybe, Ellen DeGeneres coming out was far more important than the passage of DOMA? Could they ever be impressed upon to understand that it doesn't matter how many laws you pass or cases you win protecting the free speech of college students when all their professors are leftist radicals? Jessie Owens, Joe Louis, and the Tuskegee Airmen made a much larger impact in the fight against racism than the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why is this so hard for people on the right to understand?
IT DOES NOT MATTER what the law is today, tomorrow or any other day. It matters what people believe. People make the law. The left owns every institution in our society that informs belief: education, media, arts and entertainment, everything. They even took over the mainline Protestant denominations and have a disturbingly large foothold in the Catholic Church. It's a minor miracle Protestant conservatism survived at all. Our entire K-12 public education system was built by progressives openly advocating character formation of young children taken away from their parents as a means to societal revolution. Hollywood has always been a blatantly liberal propaganda machine. Conservatives disappeared completely from higher education in the 1920s, and the last gasp of theologically conservative academics became a byword and a derogatory term for us ever since. Progressives of one stripe or another have owned all of these things since roughly the 1920s. That means that no matter how hard the David French's of the world work, in the end leftists will be making the law, because everyone is a leftist except those exceptional few who have managed to escape the long arm of leftism either by some miracle or plain old contrarian obstinance. Leftists can, and will, get anything they want in a generation or two not because they have the best arguments, not because they win court cases or align with the Constitution, but because they have POWER, and they are experts at wielding it to do the only thing that matters: molding the minds of ordinary unaligned people.
Since progressives took over the culture conservatives have operated as a subculture with essentially no voice anywhere in the culture where it really matters. Where does it really matter? It matters where one can speak with authority to an audience that hasn't yet made up its mind. That's primarily in educational institutions and tangentially in the arts and entertainment. Nobody reads the court opinions that David French and others have worked so hard to procure, and nobody cares. They care whether Elsa is gay or not. They care that they were taught evolution in the third grade by a teacher who believed it, and not only is the Bible just wrong, it's so irrelevant that it's never even discussed. People do NOT generally form their beliefs in their 20s and 30s based on argument, evidence and reason. Most people, and by "most" I mean the vast, vast majority, form their opinions in only hazy, vague, barely understood snippets of random feelings when they are very, very young. Once they reach their late teens it's far too late to do anything about it. Life takes over, and virtually all of these people will be far too busy just getting by to think much about their basic beliefs.
So I don't take much comfort in the existence of the Federalist Society or David French's faith in the ability of classical liberalism to appeal to those people. There is only one way we win back the culture, and that is the same avenue by which the left won it in the first place: the long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean passing laws or winning elections. It means getting OUR PEOPLE in positions of POWER within the institutions that matter to the formation of common and public belief in this society. And I shudder to think that none of our supposed thought leaders, be it French or Ahmari, appear to understand that.
Now that's whack.
Sohrab Ahmari recently wrote an article outlining a position he calls "David French-ism", which he is against. David French, the man, the myth, the legend, wrote a response, and for some reason the whole dust-up ballooned into something rather larger than it ought to have been for all the same reasons that public discourse in the age of social media, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald J. Trump is often ridiculous. A complete fucking moron says something moronic that happens to align with one side but has patently obvious and egregious flaws. The other side jumps on those flaws immediately and en masse, not because it is hard but because it is easy, and the first side then defends the patently obvious, often absurd flaws as not really being flaws at all simply because they think they must defend their own. Finally, the whole debate becomes ridiculous and everybody misses the point that actually matters. Obviously, "David French-ism" is not very similar to the positions, ideas, and actual life lived by one David French. Neither does "Sohrab Ahmari-ism" bear much resemblance to the life and times of one Donald J. Trump. In that respect, David French's response to the attack on his person is accurate.
In other respects, I found French's response almost equally as frustrating as Ahmari's original article. David French appears to believe that everything is going quite swimmingly in the culture wars, i.e., we are winning. French's idea of this references the situation in the early 80s compared to today and claims progress on a number of fronts. I can't help but recall Jerry Falwell's belief that the Moral Majority had won the issue of gay marriage. He probably died believing it. Less than a decade later gay marriage became legal in the entire country. Why did someone like Jerry Falwell, who had fought this battle for years up close and personal, believe so wrongly that he had won? Is David French making the same mistake? Can people like David French and Jerry Falwell ever wrap their heads around the idea that maybe, just maybe, Ellen DeGeneres coming out was far more important than the passage of DOMA? Could they ever be impressed upon to understand that it doesn't matter how many laws you pass or cases you win protecting the free speech of college students when all their professors are leftist radicals? Jessie Owens, Joe Louis, and the Tuskegee Airmen made a much larger impact in the fight against racism than the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why is this so hard for people on the right to understand?
IT DOES NOT MATTER what the law is today, tomorrow or any other day. It matters what people believe. People make the law. The left owns every institution in our society that informs belief: education, media, arts and entertainment, everything. They even took over the mainline Protestant denominations and have a disturbingly large foothold in the Catholic Church. It's a minor miracle Protestant conservatism survived at all. Our entire K-12 public education system was built by progressives openly advocating character formation of young children taken away from their parents as a means to societal revolution. Hollywood has always been a blatantly liberal propaganda machine. Conservatives disappeared completely from higher education in the 1920s, and the last gasp of theologically conservative academics became a byword and a derogatory term for us ever since. Progressives of one stripe or another have owned all of these things since roughly the 1920s. That means that no matter how hard the David French's of the world work, in the end leftists will be making the law, because everyone is a leftist except those exceptional few who have managed to escape the long arm of leftism either by some miracle or plain old contrarian obstinance. Leftists can, and will, get anything they want in a generation or two not because they have the best arguments, not because they win court cases or align with the Constitution, but because they have POWER, and they are experts at wielding it to do the only thing that matters: molding the minds of ordinary unaligned people.
Since progressives took over the culture conservatives have operated as a subculture with essentially no voice anywhere in the culture where it really matters. Where does it really matter? It matters where one can speak with authority to an audience that hasn't yet made up its mind. That's primarily in educational institutions and tangentially in the arts and entertainment. Nobody reads the court opinions that David French and others have worked so hard to procure, and nobody cares. They care whether Elsa is gay or not. They care that they were taught evolution in the third grade by a teacher who believed it, and not only is the Bible just wrong, it's so irrelevant that it's never even discussed. People do NOT generally form their beliefs in their 20s and 30s based on argument, evidence and reason. Most people, and by "most" I mean the vast, vast majority, form their opinions in only hazy, vague, barely understood snippets of random feelings when they are very, very young. Once they reach their late teens it's far too late to do anything about it. Life takes over, and virtually all of these people will be far too busy just getting by to think much about their basic beliefs.
So I don't take much comfort in the existence of the Federalist Society or David French's faith in the ability of classical liberalism to appeal to those people. There is only one way we win back the culture, and that is the same avenue by which the left won it in the first place: the long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean passing laws or winning elections. It means getting OUR PEOPLE in positions of POWER within the institutions that matter to the formation of common and public belief in this society. And I shudder to think that none of our supposed thought leaders, be it French or Ahmari, appear to understand that.
Now that's whack.
