# Against David French-ism *Published May 29, 2019 in [[First Things]] (online). Author: [[Sohrab Ahmari]]. Approximately 2,500 words. The most consequential intra-conservative essay since [[The Flight 93 Election]] (2016), and the text that made [[the New Right]]'s break with procedural conservatism explicit and irrevocable.* An essay that used one man's name — [[David French]], a conservative Christian lawyer and National Review columnist — as a metonym for everything the New Right believed was wrong with the conservative movement: civility, proceduralism, deference to liberal norms, and the belief that the culture war could be won by defending individual rights rather than using state power to impose moral order. The essay didn't just criticize French; it declared that his entire mode of conservatism — polite, legalistic, committed to viewpoint neutrality — was complicit in civilizational decline. ## The Argument Ahmari's provocation was triggered by a specific event: a public library's "Drag Queen Story Hour" for children. But the essay's argument was structural, not reactive: **The French position (as Ahmari characterized it):** Conservatives should defend viewpoint neutrality and procedural liberalism — protecting everyone's right to speak, organize, and worship, trusting that in a free marketplace of ideas, the good will prevail. If drag queens have the right to read to children at a public library, the conservative response is to organize alternative programming, not to use state power to prohibit the event. This is classical liberal conservatism: protect the process, not the outcome. **The Ahmari position:** This is surrender dressed as principle. Procedural liberalism guarantees that progressives will win every cultural battle because progressives control the institutions — universities, media, tech platforms, HR departments — that shape what is considered normal. The "neutral" marketplace of ideas is rigged. Conservatives must abandon the pretense of neutrality and instead fight to "re-order the public square to the common good" — using government power to promote virtue and suppress vice as they define it. The key sentence: "The only defensible view of politics is that it should be oriented toward the Highest Good." This is the post-liberal turn stated as plainly as possible: politics is not about protecting individual rights but about imposing a moral order. ## Why It Mattered The essay was not an original philosophical contribution — [[Patrick Deneen]]'s *[[Why Liberalism Failed]]* (2018) and [[Adrian Vermeule]]'s work had already laid the intellectual groundwork. What Ahmari provided was the **polemical event** — the public declaration of war against a named individual that forced everyone on the right to pick a side. The aftermath drew clear factional lines: **Team French (classical liberals):** National Review, The Dispatch (which French would later co-found), Reason, most libertarian-leaning conservatives. Their argument: if you abandon procedural liberalism, you abandon the very principles that protect religious conservatives from progressive state power. The sword cuts both ways. **Team Ahmari (post-liberals):** [[First Things]], the Claremont orbit, much of the Catholic intellectual right, and — critically — the emerging populist-nationalist movement that would consolidate around Trump's second term. Their argument: procedural liberalism already failed to protect religious conservatives. The institutions are captured. Playing by liberal rules means losing. The French-Ahmari debate became a proxy war for the deeper question: **Is conservatism about protecting liberalism from its excesses, or about replacing liberalism entirely?** The New Right chose replacement. ## The David French Figure David French — an [[Iraq War]] veteran, evangelical Christian, [[First Amendment]] lawyer, and longtime National Review contributor — was an unusual choice of antagonist. He was not a RINO, not a moderate, not a squish. He was a devout, culturally conservative Christian who had spent decades litigating for religious liberty. Ahmari's point was precisely that even the *most sincere* version of liberal conservatism was insufficient — that French's very virtues (civility, legal reasoning, good faith) were the problem. French would go on to leave National Review, co-found The Dispatch with [[Jonah Goldberg]] and Steve Hayes, and become one of the most prominent "Never Trump" conservative voices. His trajectory after the essay — toward explicit opposition to the MAGA movement — validated Ahmari's framing, at least in the sense that the two modes of conservatism proved genuinely incompatible. ## The First Things Context The essay appeared in *First Things*, the journal of religion and public life founded by [[Richard John Neuhaus]] in 1990. First Things had long been the flagship publication of intellectually serious religious conservatism — but by 2019, under editor R.R. Reno, it had become a platform for post-liberal provocation. Ahmari's essay, Reno's own increasingly nationalist editorials, and the journal's embrace of Deneen, Vermeule, and [[Yoram Hazony]] reflected a publication-wide turn away from liberal conservatism and toward the integralist project. ## Analytical Framework "Against David French-ism" matters in the KB as the **declaration of schism** within the American right: 1. **It named the enemy within.** The New Right's intellectual project required attacking not just progressives but the *conservative establishment* — the National Review / Federalist Society / [[Heritage Foundation]] consensus that had defined the right since Reagan. Ahmari's essay did this publicly, personally, and irrevocably. 2. **It established the stakes.** By framing the debate as civilizational — not tactical — Ahmari made compromise impossible. If the choice is between procedural liberalism and "the Highest Good," there is no middle ground. This absolutism is the New Right's defining rhetorical move. 3. **It connected Catholic theology to political strategy.** Ahmari's argument — that the state should be oriented toward moral truth, not neutral process — is a compressed version of [[Adrian Vermeule]]'s [[Common Good Constitutionalism]]. The essay translated academic post-liberalism into a culture-war manifesto accessible to any conservative who felt that "the rules" were rigged against them. 4. **It predicted the realignment.** The factional lines drawn by the essay — French vs. Ahmari, procedural vs. substantive, liberal conservatism vs. post-liberal nationalism — map almost perfectly onto the 2024 Republican primary electorate. The essay didn't cause the realignment, but it diagnosed it with remarkable precision. ## See Also - [[Sohrab Ahmari]] — The author - [[Patrick Deneen]] — The philosopher whose work underlies Ahmari's argument - [[Adrian Vermeule]] — The legal theorist whose "common good constitutionalism" is the jurisprudential version - [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] — The broader intellectual movement - [[The Flight 93 Election]] — The other defining essay of the New Right's break with conservative orthodoxy - [[Why Liberalism Failed]] — The book-length argument that Ahmari's essay condensed into polemic [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]