IDEOLOGUES AREN'T WRONG TO BE TERRIFIED OF MEN OF PRINCIPLE:

What came at French from the left, however, pales before what he's gotten from the right. When he and his wife adopted a Black girl, for example, they were, as Esther O'Reilly put it a couple of years ago in an essay on the Patheos Evangelical channel, "deluged with verbal abuse, vile memes, and even death threats." In O'Reilly's view, this helps explain French's evolution from conservative culture warrior to critic of conservative orthodoxy in the Trump era.

The latter role was epitomized in an exchange French had with current culture warrior Sohrab Ahmari in a debate at Catholic University in 2019. French, the lawyer, defended "drag queen story hours" at public libraries on constitutional grounds. Ahmari would have none of it. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells reported in The New Yorker: 

"So you would undermine viewpoint neutrality in First Amendment jurisprudence?" French asked. "Yeah, I would," Ahmari said. French raised his arms in exasperation. "That's a disaster, y'all!"

It's precisely French's steadfast commitment to the classical liberal ideal of government as neutral guarantor of free expression and association that the new conservative intellectuals have abandoned. In the words of the illiberal Rod Dreher, "The problem is that the principles he stands on often -- not always, but often -- were formed during a time when classical liberalism was still defensible, because the center in American politics was more or less holding."

I'm old enough to remember the days when student radicals used Herbert Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance" as an excuse for opposing the free expression of views they didn't like. 

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