The whole tempest in a teapot reminds me of an anecdote from the 1970s about the long time Texas liberal news magazine, The Texas Observer. For the longest time TO had been edited by Kaye Northcutt and co-edited by Molly Ivins, but they went on to bigger and better things. The Publisher Ronnie Dugger looked high and low to find someone to fill those shoes, and lo and behold he hired some guy who turned out to be some sort of closet Marxist or whatever. He finally confronted the guy after he left clues of what he was, and asked, “Do you favor the overthrow of the government by force or violence?” Keep in mind this was the 1970s when what terrorism there was was left-wing, primarily college radicals and such. Well, the guy said, “Violence” and Dugger gave him the heave-ho.
That’s kind of what’s going on right now in the far-right circles where an extremist like French is deemed as being too nice.
Here’s where it all got started, in the Catholic Fascist journal First Things, no less:
Sohrab Ahmari, “AGAINST DAVID FRENCHISM (05/29/2019) Ahmari,, an Iranian by birth, is a convert to the extreme Catholic Fascism as that of Francisco Franco of Spain and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, both of which kept their nation in the dark ages for an excess of thirty years of dictatorship and secret police running amuck long in excess of the defeat of the Axis Powers at the end of World War II. Following the dragged-out demises of both strongmen, their nations emerged as if from the shadows into a modern world like the nationwide Rip Van Winkles as it was. The victorious Allied Powers found the murderous dictatorships useful in the geopolitical games of the Cold War. President Eisenhower or somebody was said to remark about either of them or other Latin totalitarian regimes, “He may be a S.O.B. but he’s our S.O.B.” So it goes.
In the lore of publishing of small interest journals, FIRST THINGS is to Catholic right-wing thought as COMMENTARY is to right-wing Jewish thought, except the latter is a little less concerned about oppressing women although they provide lip service to it in playing the “Ain’t It Awful?” game about sexual immorality as they see it with its readers, although typically COMMENTARY’s head honcho Norman Podhoretz is generally more freaked out by gay males than by sexually active women like the denizens of FIRST THINGS. FIRST THINGS was founded by Richard John Neuhaus, a right-wing Lutheran divine who switched to Catholic with, as the oft-used phrase says, “the zeal of the convert.” Ahmari appears to be made of the same stock as his publication’s late founder and would probably find the comparison flattering.
Ahmari begins his broadside against French and his fellow travelers with this ominous reference to a previous FIRST THINGS editorial:
In March, First Things published a manifesto of sorts signed by several mostly youngish, mostly Roman Catholic writers, who argued that “there is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” that “any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”
Ominous words, indeed, those. It appears to recall anything like the idea a post-Trump Republican legislature serving alongside a Democratic President, would be, well, pretty much like Mitch McConnell was to Barack Obama, and more so. Any assertion a Democratic President can “work with Republicans” as if they were like the late, courtly Republicans like Hugh Scott and Howard Baker, and even the still-living Bob Dole, is thereby refuted for eternity.
French, for his part, appears bemused by the whole mess. He commented from his see at National Review, the mainstream right-wing news mag founded by the late William F. Buckley Jr. as the precursor to the Goldwater Movement:
You can read the whole shebang at the link.
French for his part buttresses his right-wing bona fides by mentioning his litigation on behalf of antigay jackasses and such, but he does state his clear preference for “civility,” for lack of a better term.
A Veteran, French eschews politics as war. But he is no less a fighter for his viewpoint as those who do like Ahmari.
What, one wonders, set off such sturm und drang on the rightward shore of American Politics?
Well, some of you will be please to know, it’s a cultural movement/performance art piece running at various times in public libraries called "Drag Queen Story Hour" in which various local drag performers serve as the storytime reader of children's books to an audience generally age 8 and below. These events have proven very popular and some libraries have reported while normally they get 15 to 20 preschoolers, sometimes it’s standing room only. Children, by nature, are curious about gender roles and tend to enjoy these events immensely.
French describes the conflict thus:
“The triggering event for Ahmari’s first attack on me was a tweet announcing a “drag queen storytime.” It was the existence of this event that led him to launch an attack on my politeness. But what is Ahmari’s proposed solution to the menace of drag-queen book readings for children? Does re-ordering the common good mean using the power of the state to prohibit that form of freedom of association? And if the state assumes for itself the power to stop the meeting and perhaps fire the librarian who organized it, why does anyone think that the forces of Christian statism will continue to prevail? What would prevent, say, President Kamala Harris from wielding the same power against a public reading of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters?”
First Things of course has actively encouraged terrorists who target abortion clinics. While French makes light of Ahmari’s hostility to French's seeming live-and-let-live response to Drag Queen Story Hour, one wonders what our angry young man prefers as a appropriate response. For what it's worth extremist groups like Mass Resistance have picketed Drag Queen Story Hour events. One wonders what response Ahmari would prefer? Citizens Arrests of the drag queens, the librarians, and the parents of the kids there? Or something even more violent? He doesn’t say. The right-wing apparatus gives more than a nudge and a wink to terrorists. Scott Roeder, Dr. George Tiller’s assassin, was actively groomed by Wichita Right-to-Lifer Cheryl Sullenberger, herself a convicted clinic bomber.
The takeaway from all this is the following: Trumpism, as Ahmari acknowledges, has replaced the genteel conservatism of men like French, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. They are now, in effect, like the impotent Liberal Democrats Party of Great Britain, which never regained its formidable power of yore when it was displaced by the Labor Party and prime left-center party there: nice people, but essentially dinosaurs.
Ahmari is right: Trumpism is going to continue without Trump. The speed of that evolving will be directly affected by whether or not Trump gets a second term.
Bill Mahar famously remarked that so many things the right-wing wants — no gays, no teen pregnancies, no porn, no wardrobe malfunctions at Superbowl halftime shows, and no drag queen story hours, are generally things which cannot be achieved through legislation. As Ahmari showed, their is fire in their bellies to obtain such through whatever means necessary.
There is much more on Nationalreviewonline.com and First Things’ website I encourage all to educate yourselves for the coming conflicits, as Abigail Adams urged America’s Founders.
