THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Compact is the political project of two religious traditionalists and a left-wing populist. Matthew Schmitz is a Catholic convert who was, until recently, senior editor at the conservative religious magazine, First Things. Edwin Aponte was previously the founder and editor of the Bellows, a Marxist webzine that stands for "working-class populism for the future." Sohrab Ahmari is perhaps the most prominent of the three, having worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, then senior writer at Commentary, and finally as opinion editor at the New York Post from 2018.

During his short career as a writer and journalist, Ahmari has already undergone more political transformations than most intellectuals manage in a lifetime. Born in Tehran and raised in Utah after his parents divorced and his mother fled theocratic Iran for the US, Ahmari began his ideological journey by renouncing Shia Islam, devouring Nietzsche and the existentialists, and then embracing Trotskyism. This, he later wrote, "assuaged my own class anxieties," but it did not provide spiritual satisfaction. Nor did "Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, queer theory or any of the other fashionable philosophies I tried on, each in turn." So, for a while, Ahmari became a liberal Reaganite foreign policy hawk. As a passionate and eloquent supporter of those struggling for democratic freedoms in the Middle East and beyond, he co-edited (with Nasser Weddady) a stirring collection of essays entitled Arab Spring Dreams: The Next Generation Speaks Out for Freedom and Justice from North Africa to Iran.

The convulsions catalyzed by Donald Trump's election to the US presidency in 2016 produced another unexpected shift. Ahmari had converted to Catholicism the same year (a move he documented in his 2019 religious memoir From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith) and quickly ditched his NeverTrumpism in favor of the GOP's new populism. "To hell with liberal order," he tweeted when he discovered that drag queens were allowed to read stories to children in America's public libraries. "Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path." Today he is a Catholic social conservative preoccupied with the decline of religious piety, social cohesion, moral standards, and traditionalist codes of dress and conduct. He takes particular exception to the sexual deviance and "degeneracy" that he now believes is the logical outcome of Western liberalism, and has developed a corresponding sympathy for the authoritarian systems he once despised. "I'm at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century," he declared in 2021. "Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue."

Whether this is merely the latest passing phase of a dilettante or the final destination of a person temperamentally suited to political extremism and religious fanaticism remains an open question. Either way, Compact looks likely to reflect Ahmari's present obsessions. The magazine's masthead currently lists eight regular columnists including Christopher Caldwell, a contributor to the Trumpist Claremont Review of Books, and Tablet columnist Lee Smith. Once a fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Smith is now warning readers of Compact that "Ukraine is the Ruling Class's Latest Propaganda Ploy," and that America's oligarchy "is at war with the American people." Caldwell's essay, meanwhile, offers a defense of the new far-Right populist governments and parties in Europe, including the illiberal Orbán regime in Hungary.

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