The Ahmari-French Fry Debate Continued

Rod Dreher:

“Yes, it’s as if they would only accept a diagnosis that led them to a particular set of go-and-do conclusions. I was talking yesterday with a Christian friend, who observed that the Christian world is full of people who have given no substantive moral and spiritual foundation to their children because they don’t have any themselves. They have been part of feelgood churches, however conservative (and yes, conservatives can have feelgood churches too), and perhaps have trusted in the fact that in their family, they hold correct opinions, therefore all will be well. Then their kids drift away from faith, caught in the inexorable currents of liquid modernity. They can’t figure out why.”

Speaking for myself, I rejected these feelgood Southern evangelical churches which produce men like David French and Russell Moore. In my youth, I became a Nietzschean atheist like Richard Spencer. Eventually though, my historicism which I had absorbed from Nietzsche led me to study the history of European Christianity and it quickly became apparent to me that what I had rejected had almost nothing in common with the faith as it has been historically practiced in Europe.

“I completely share Ahmari’s rage at the sheer destructiveness of left-progressive culture, but I don’t believe there is a political solution for it. Some on the Christian Right call me a “defeatist” for holding this view. I think they are at best naive idealists, and at worst grifters.”

Unlike Rod Dreher, I now believe there is a political solution. I would say the answer can be seen in two charts:

There mantra that “there is no political solution” is often heard in our circles. What if the problem all along though has been generational change? The old 1980s Ronald Reagan era conservatism fizzled in 2016 simply because so many of the older folks from the Greatest Generation, Silent Generation and the Baby Boomer generation have been dying off.

As of 2016, the truth is that the American Right has moved on from Reaganism and is now almost entirely socially conservative and authoritarian except for the 4 percent of voters who are Right-Libertarians. If that is the case, then the GOP’s real problem is that its stale policies, rhetoric and institutions are misaligned with its base and the solution is simply reversing the power relationship in the “conservative coalition” to make it more populist on economics since both conservatives and politics agree on the social issues. The other two legs of the traditional “three-legged conservative stool” – the neocon foreign policy and libertarian economics – ought to then be discarded as antiquated.