November 3, 2019
THE HATE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK:
Making Moral Mistakes Mandatory (KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON, November 3, 2019, National Review)
The leading anti-immigration voice in our country belongs to my friend Mark Krikorian of the Mayflower Krikorians. Two of the most prominent voices associated with our dotty new blood-and-soil nationalism are linked to the surnames Buchanan and Ahmari. My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty calls himself a nationalist, too -- a nationalist in the cause of at least two nations, by my count. That's two Irishmen, an Iranian, and an Armenian, three of them Catholics and all four of them gentlemen who, if earlier generations of so-called nationalists had had their way, would be admiring these United States from afar.Funny old world.On Friday, I appeared opposite Sohrab Ahmari on a panel hosted by the William F. Buckley Program at Yale. He argued that the main duty of the state is not to protect liberty but to achieve the good, biblically defined. That's what he said when he showed up, anyway -- he was a little bit late owing to the fact that the state he would entrust to do God's work here on Earth cannot quite manage to make the trains run on time, a fact that you might think would be of some interest to a bantamweight Mussolini.Mr. Ahmari, who is the op-ed editor of the New York Post (where I write about twice a month), is a Catholic convert, as am I. (I suppose I identify as "Puritan curious" these days; it must be that book on the Presidents Adams.) I have never met a Catholic convert who is not a fan of A Man for All Seasons, and Mr. Ahmari reminds me a little bit of the young idealist of whom Thomas More says: "We must just pray that when your head is finished turning, your face is to the front again." National Review is a magazine that in its early days boasted a collection of freshly reformed Trotskyites, doctrinaire libertarians, and militant Catholic anti-liberals, but to my knowledge none of them was all three at the same time, whereas Mr. Ahmari can run through that cycle in a three-day weekend. I will be happy for him when his jackboot phase has ended, but who knows where he will land?You can bet it will not be in a place close to my sometime colleague David French. If you have followed recent intramural conservative factional politics, then you will know that Mr. Ahmari has a bizarre and unseemly obsession with David French, who is a leading conservative critic of the Trump administration and its sycophants. Trump's admirers like to say, "He fights!" Trump of course is a medical marvel, having had the only case in recorded medical history of bone spurs that healed without any medical intervention whatsoever, a miracle that was witnessed right around the time the Vietnam draft was coming to a close. French served in Iraq without any compulsion and has dedicated much of his career to literally making a federal case of it when Americans' religious liberties are violated by various peckerwood city councilmen and mealy-mouthed deans. But he is almost unfailingly polite, and thus Mr. Ahmari et al. heap scorn upon what they call "David Frenchism." But when Mr. Ahmari recently was fool enough to get on the other side of David French in an actual debate, the stuttering and incoherent mess to which he was promptly reduced was evidence enough (superfluous, in fact) that David Frenchism is made of sterner stuff than our newly minted young nationalists had thought.
Jonah Goldberg has noted a haunting emptiness when he hosts Nationalists like Yoram Hazony on his podcast and confessed mystification at why that is. And when Andy Smarick was on Matt Lewis and the News he repeatedly stated that Trumpism would fade after Donald leaves because it isn't a coherent philosophy. The absence in both cases, like the incoherence of Mr. Ahmari and the First Things claque is a function of advocating what is essentially the politics of bigotry in an America where it has long gone out of whatever fashion it once had.
Donald has, of course, not managed to do anything legislatively, but he has been able to attempt a few things using Executive power and we can easily see what they have in common. He opposes trade with places like China and Mexico. He opposes Muslim, African and Latino--in particular--immigration. And he opposes honoring American military and treaty commitments irrespective of the harm to South Korea, the Kurds, the Palestinians, Iran, etc. On the other hand, he endorses things like the totalitarian regime in North Korea, the oppressive Wahhabi Sa'uds, Xi trampling Hong Kong, and so forth. Wherever possible he has tried to negatively affect non-White and non-Christian peoples. His entirely coherent philosophy is nothing more, nor less, than White Nationalism. Those defenders of his share the ideology. But they are reduced to stuttering and incoherent messes because they can't actually go on stage or on air or into print and express their hatreds forthrightly. Mr. Ahmari's obsession is with the entire tradition of Conservatism, which is so annoyingly writ large for him in the decency of a David French.
It tells us all we really need to know that even with Nationalism at its high tide, the advocates are too ashamed to discuss it openly.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 3, 2019 7:12 PM