The conservative intelligentsia has been buzzing for months now about the ongoing debate between New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari and National Review senior writer David French. The saga began in May, when Ahmari published an essay in First Things, painting French as the poster boy for what’s wrong with the American Right today. In short, Ahmari blasted French’s fidelity to classical liberalism.
As Ahmari summarized:
In the months hence, dozens of voices on the Right have added their two cents to the debate. Most recently, in response to a tense showdown the two writers had at Catholic University.
In Reason, Peter Suderman argued that Ahmari’s moralism is ultimately empty, as he came up short at the Catholic event in offering specific policy proposals aside from a congressional hearing. In The American Conservative, my colleague Emma Ayers pointed out that Ahmari’s desire to blend church and state radically ignores the Protestant tradition. Also in The American Conservative, Matt Purple exposed how implausible Ahmari’s whole venture is, considering the democratic political preferences of most Americans.
While all of these points are well taken, what I think must be added to the classical liberal critique of Ahmari’s position is a moral case for American conservatism.
Whereas the Right in most of the world is ideologically rooted in much of the same tribalist and socialist traditions that we despise on the Left, American conservatism has historically offered a rare exception. For centuries, the American Right has stood up for the right of individuals and communities to foster their own moral order, rather than hand over unchecked authority to distant kings, be them London royals in 1776 or Washington bureaucrats in 2019.
This beautiful tradition is exactly what has made so many Americans prosperous and happy, and to abandon it would be a tragedy of historical proportions.
Indeed, it’s disturbing how eager Ahmari and his fellow Catholic traditionalists are to eliminate the so-called neutral public commons, considering that Catholicism owes its prevalence in America today to the religious freedom that a neutral public common guaranteed. Catholic immigrants faced deep discrimination throughout most of American history, so much so that an entire political party, the Know Nothings, were formed primarily to oppose them.
Editorial cartoons depicted Catholics as failing to assimilate because of their supposed foreign allegiance to Rome. If Protestant populists with Ahmari’s zeal for eliminating the neutral commons had taken power in early American history, Catholics like he and I would be second-class citizens, as religious minorities in much of the world are today.
Rather, it is precisely the individual liberties and neutrality of the commons enshrined in the Constitution that has allowed Americans of all colors and creeds to flourish.
Too often, we forget the fact that despite the political divisions that the nation faces today, we still live in one of the most diverse, wealthy, and peaceful societies the world has ever seen, thanks to the combination of capitalism and classical liberalism. This is the exception, not the norm, of human history. In Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg called it “the miracle.”
We should think hard before radically re-adjusting the formula as Ahmari proposes.
Certainly, there are other ways to order society, as seen around the world. However, a recurring theme throughout most of them is political tribalism and economic socialism.
Much of the European Right, for example, is defined by big-government policies and ethnic hostility. The Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pens of the world are not exactly Reaganites. As a result of this absence of a free-market alternative, much of Europe is defined by high unemployment, great barriers to entry for immigrants, and an increasingly irreligious culture.
What’s great about America, on the other hand, is precisely that we’ve preserved a society where safety and social mobility is available to anyone fortunate enough to see our shores. Abandoning individual liberty in the name of enforcing Christian values would destroy an exceptional society the world may never see again.
In this sense, Ahmari and his ilk are not offering any new and exciting ideas; they are only rehashing old and dangerous ones. Let’s not let them succeed.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
