# David French Evangelical lawyer and columnist who became the personification of the older fusionist right ([[Fusionism]]) that the post-liberal [[New Right]] set out to bury. A religious-liberty litigator and Never-Trump conservative, French argued that classical-liberal proceduralism — [[Free Speech]], pluralism, neutral institutions — remained the right framework for defending Christian and conservative interests. His career arc traces the fault line between the [[Conservative Movement]]'s pre-Trump consensus and the post-2016 realignment. ## Legal Career After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1994, French built a career as a constitutional litigator specializing in [[Religious Liberty]] and [[First Amendment]] cases. He worked at the [[American Center for Law and Justice]] — the legal arm founded by Pat Robertson — and later at the [[Alliance Defending Freedom]], litigating campus free-speech disputes and religious-exercise claims across multiple states. He also served as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending student and faculty speech rights at universities — a cause that united left-libertarians and social conservatives before the culture-war realignment scrambled those alliances. This cross-ideological coalition work is characteristic of French's classical-liberal commitments: the same procedural protections that defended evangelical campus groups also protected secular and progressive speech. ## Military Service In 2007 French deployed to Iraq as a U.S. Army Reserve officer, serving in Diyala Province as squadron judge advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment during the [[Iraq War]]. He was awarded the Bronze Star. The deployment shaped his later writing on veterans' issues, military justice, and the human costs of the [[War on Terror]]. ## Media Career French wrote for [[National Review]] from roughly 2014 to 2019, becoming one of its most visible voices on religious liberty and constitutional law. In 2016 he briefly explored an independent presidential candidacy at the urging of Never-Trump conservatives including Bill Kristol, though the effort never launched. In 2019 he co-founded The Dispatch with [[Jonah Goldberg]] and Stephen Hayes as a center-right outlet explicitly critical of the Trump-era [[Republican Party]]. The Dispatch positioned itself as an heir to the pre-Trump [[National Review]] tradition: hawkish on foreign policy, skeptical of populism, committed to institutional norms. In early 2023 French moved to the *New York Times* as an opinion columnist — a transition that delighted the paper's readers and infuriated the right, which treated the hire as proof that French had always been a useful conservative for liberal institutions. From the NYT perch he writes on [[Religious Liberty]], constitutional law, [[Christian Nationalism]], and the internal dynamics of the evangelical world. ## The French-Ahmari Debate [[Sohrab Ahmari]]'s 2019 polemic [[Against David French-ism]], published in [[First Things]], made French's name a shorthand for the procedural-liberal position that Ahmari and the post-liberals wanted to discard. Ahmari argued that French's commitment to neutral rules and institutional pluralism was inadequate to fight a hostile secular culture — that conservatives needed to wield state power affirmatively for the common good, not merely defend their right to be left alone. The ensuing debate was the public surface of the rupture formalized in [[Against the Dead Consensus]], the manifesto that announced the [[Post-Liberalism]] and [[Integralism]] currents within the intellectual right. French became the negative pole against which [[National Conservatism]], [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]], and the broader [[New Right]] defined themselves. The debate's significance extends beyond the two principals. It mapped a fault line that runs through the [[Claremont Institute]], the [[Heritage Foundation]], and virtually every conservative institution forced to choose between procedural liberalism and common-good conservatism. The [[Fusionism]] that had held the right together since the Cold War was, by the time of the French-Ahmari exchange, already fracturing under the weight of the Trump realignment. ## Post-Dobbs and the 2024 Election After [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] overturned [[Roe v. Wade]], French supported state-level abortion restrictions but criticized the maximalist wing of the pro-life movement and warned that [[Post-Dobbs Ballot Measures]] showed public backlash against absolute bans. His willingness to acknowledge tactical and moral complexity within the pro-life cause further alienated movement conservatives. In the [[2024 Presidential Election]] French endorsed Kamala Harris in a *New York Times* column, framing the choice as a defense of constitutional democracy against authoritarian risk. The endorsement cemented his status as the most prominent evangelical Never-Trump voice — and, for the [[New Right]], as proof that [[Fusionism]]'s classical-liberal wing had effectively exited the right altogether. ## Vault Significance French functions in the vault as a through-line character: his trajectory from [[Alliance Defending Freedom]] litigator to *New York Times* columnist maps the [[Conservative Movement]]'s internal fracture with unusual clarity. The French-Ahmari debate connects to [[Christian Nationalism]], the [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]], and the [[The New Right Ecosystem]] pages. His career also illustrates the vault's recurring theme that procedural liberalism and substantive power politics are in permanent tension within the American right. ## See Also - [[Fusionism]] · [[Conservative Movement]] · [[New Right]] - [[Sohrab Ahmari]] · [[Against David French-ism]] · [[Against the Dead Consensus]] - [[Post-Liberalism]] · [[National Conservatism]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Alliance Defending Freedom]] · [[Religious Liberty]] · [[Free Speech]]