The current mini-fracas fracturing the Right has little to do with President Trump or even tone, as Sohrab Ahmari insists, but rather which trade-offs each coalition of the Right has made. No one can doubt that David French, a devout Evangelical Christian who opposes same-sex marriage as a matter of policy and principle, has maintained a more libertarian demeanor to homosexuality on a personal level. This attitude can be summarized with a comment made by Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew who also believes homosexuality is a sin, when asked if he would bake a cake for the hypothetical wedding of Dave Rubin, who is gay.
“As a religious Jew, I do not participate in activities I believe are sinful, but again, we live in a free country,” Shapiro said in a sit-down with Rubin in 2018. “Does Dave have a husband? Yeah. Are we friends? Yeah. And are we going to go out to dinner some time in the near future? Yeah. But there’s a difference between me just being friends with Dave and me actively participating in an event that I feel is religiously sinful.”
Obviously this is a trade-off of sorts, one that makes Shapiro and French’s messaging on legal and economic policies all the more potent in persuading the public. And that’s necessary, because we cannot win cultural wars without winning economic ones.
Let’s just take a look at how millennials are doing today. Their grandparents built an entitlement leviathan that plunged the federal government into tens of trillions of dollars in debt, their parents took out home loans they could never pay back, thus tanking the economy as we approached adulthood, and then they told our generation to do the same with loans for college degrees that have become increasingly worthless.
Maybe millennials are increasingly delaying or forgoing the forging of families because they were dumb enough to buy whatever Hannah Horvath and Carrie Bradshaw were selling them, but is it not far more likely that we’ve been taxed and indebted into a state of social despondency? Besides, if the progressive bastions of higher education and their intersectional associated forces were the ones slashing our fertility rates, why are educated women still having kids as less-educated women are having fewer? Roughly nine out of 10 married women between the ages of 40 to 44 have had kids, but just half of adults who completed high school or less are married, whereas 65% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher are.
Our longest bull market in American history and Republican tax cuts and deregulation have led to the first significant period of real wage growth in decades and our lowest unemployment rate in half a century. But what does that matter, so long as the Obamacare-empowered health insurance cartel holds us hostage and the federal government is about to rack up $40.6 trillion in debt for entitlement spending alone in the next 30 years?
Of course Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would acquire a cult-like following. She’s not wrong that our healthcare market is broken and that our generation is drowning in debt. But her solutions will inevitably but quietly sneak out their tyrannical tentacles into our culture, your church, and then your home.
You think “Medicare for all” will let you object to your eight-year-old taking potentially castrating puberty-blocking hormones because they think they’re transgender? Not with Ocasio-Cortez at the helm. When doctors are employed by President Kamala Harris, do you think they will be allowed to refuse to perform abortions, much less those surely legalized up until the point of birth? I doubt it.
Once upon a time, communist Albania was a very culturally conservative place. Abortion wasn’t just banned. Contraception, which First Things editor Matthew Schmitz apparently objects to, was banned as well. As a result, half of all pregnancies ended in abortions.
But I must assume Schmitz, a Princeton graduate, surely knows this. All of which gives the true lie to First Things’ assault on the “dead consensus” and now on David French: a paleoconservative attempt to hijack post-Trump conservatism.
I will fight tooth and nail to keep a tyrannical court or Congress from forcing people to act against their faiths. I will defend the rights of the most vitriolically homophobic bakers to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding, and I will stand between the social wars of the state and the family it threatens to tear apart.
But I have not one iota of interest in what your god believes as a matter of how other people live their lives, which makes how Schmitz responded to Tim Miller, who wrote the Bulwark piece cited above, rather telling.
Along with Pope Francis, every Catholic saint, and countless Americans I believe that sodomy is a sin. I make no apologies for it.
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) May 30, 2019
A truly conservative movement cannot wish to supplant the authoritarian religion of progressive rule with a theocracy. We must use decency and compromise to win over a generation sold the lie that nihilistic utilitarianism that spits in the face of family and faith will not fulfill you or sustain you. But it must come by winning our economic wars first.
