More Ahmari-French Thoughts

Regarding the French-Ahmari debate I've been writing about: I got through the next third last night on the elliptical. I do wish a transcript existed. Ahmari's mic in particular faded in and out, making his contributions difficult to hear (I wondered several times why moderator Ross Douthat, sitting right next to him, did not simply offer him his own, working microphone).

I stopped right before Douthat turned the floor over to questions for the debaters. The debate itself mostly solidified my initial impressions that French had the better arguments overall. Once again I was struck by a generational difference between the two that mirrors a similar difference on the left.

Ahmari presents a passionate frustration at the status quo, sounding an emergency alarm that things are very, very bad and that something must be done right now. He proposes a better (for him) future in which Christian (read: conservative Roman Catholic) thought rather than secular liberalism forms the basis for governance. But he offers little in the way of concrete proposals for getting the USA from the status quo to that that vision. More significantly, he seems ill-equipped or disinclined to grapple with the dilemmas that his suggestions would breed. Whose Christianity would triumph? As was pointed out to him, a Christo-centric public sphere has not in the past worked out that well for minority Christian faiths (especially Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). How would the governmental mechanisms that realize his vision not be easily turned back against Christians themselves?

French by contrast found himself cast as the moderate, a position that seemed surprising to him given his long history of battling in courtrooms for conservative Christian stances. French generally pushed back against Ahmari's sense of crisis. The Colosseum, he said, isn't imminent, even in a Sanders presidency. Indeed, he argued, no single presidential election lasts long enough to provide the ultimate, decisive victory for either side. He related a long history of abortion restrictions that grew under the presidencies of both Republicans and Democrats.

I especially appreciated French's tweaking of the "Flight 93 Election" rhetoric--that is, the sense that 2016's election (or any election) constituted a "win or die" crisis point for conservatives. Storm the cockpit and support Trump, this analogy goes, or be eradicated by a Clinton presidency. French suggested that, in reality, the plane experienced turbulence. The passengers battered their way into the flight cabin, choked out the pilots, and settled themselves at the controls--only to realize they had no idea how to fly the plane.

French stands instead on the principles of liberal democracy enshrined in the Constitution, principles he admits at one point existed in tension with the lived realities of slavery during he nations first few generations. In that French almost sounded like an advocate for radical democracy a la Chantal Mouffe. The system's ideals are good: liberty, justice, and equality for all. But the status quo has some catching up to do with the ideal. Mouffe and French would disagree strongly, of course, about exactly where and how the status quo should shift to conform to the ideal. French sees pornography, for instance, as clearly beyond the bounds of first amendment protections, and he takes it as unquestionably true that abortion is a grave violation of a constitutional right to life. He operates from an originalist viewpoint (Would the founders agree with X interpretation of the First Amendment?) that Mouffe would especially reject.

Yet ultimately French and Mouffe maneuver on something like the same playing field, endorsing the same basic set of rules. Ahmari, like many more radically leftist critics of Mouffe, does not.

That isn't to say I'm comfortable with David French's America, though. Even in their disagreement, it was clear that both men operated in a worldview inimical to my own.

More tomorrow,

JF