Managing Editor Drew Griffin sits down with David French of the National Review to discuss his debate with Sohrab Ahmari, the future of American conservatism, and America’s proposed withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Rough Transcript
Drew Griffin
Welcome to the Provcast, the regular podcast at Providence, a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy. I’m managing editor, Drew Griffin. Few writers and political commentators are as prolific as David French, the columnist for National Review and Time magazine. He produces an avalanche of conservative commentary in a space that’s almost devoid of conservatism, and few commentators and conservatives have been, it seems, as controversial as David has been in recent months. In this last year, the army vet and lawyer and Iraq war vet is—and one time, a potential presidential candidate—has been the subject of much furor within the conservative Christian community and the conservative intelligentsia in New York and Washington, DC. So, we want to talk a little bit about that with him. So, David, welcome.
David French
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Drew Griffin
Yeah. I want to have you on and, you know, we’ve… There’s been no shortage of interviews that you’ve done talking about this dust up with the idea of nationalism and First Things and Sohrab Ahmari, and in five minutes, maybe, give our listeners a little primer as to what got us to this point, I guess, of your place in this discussion.
David French
Well, so, I could give you a one word answer that got us to this discussion that would be simple and very—mostly—accurate, and it could be just Trump. But the longer answer is that there’s certainly a divide emerging on the Right that is not just about Trump. It’s a larger argument about tactics. It’s a larger argument about overarching… What should be the governing philosophy of the Right? What should be the ethos on the Right as it confronts political disagreements? So, specifically to me, I’m minding my own business at home and over Memorial Day weekend, and the New York Post editorial page editor, Sohrab Ahmari, tweets about this thing called a drag queen reading hour in Sacramento, California. Apparently, there are drag queen reading hours in different parts of the country, often hosted at public libraries where a drag queen reads to kids. You don’t have to go. Parents show up; they bring their kids. Some of them are kind of small; some of them are a little bit bigger. But it’s a small… It’s a fringe phenomenon around the country. So, he tweeted that this reading hour was demonic. And then he said that—puzzlingly to me—that there’s no polite David French-ian way through this cultural struggle. First, drag queen reading hours, quite frankly, were not on my radar. There’s a lot of… This is a big country. It’s a big country; it’s a free country. There are a lot of fringe communities in this country. There always have been. I don’t bother myself worrying about them all that much. And so, I didn’t even know really what this thing was. But, all of a sudden, Twitter began to light up with this, once again, this argument that we’ve been having a lot, which is that these are not the times for civility and decency; these are the times for something else. So, I wrote a relatively short piece, which is a repetition of something that I’ve been saying for a long time, which is that there is no… There’s nothing incompatible. Or, fighting for your values is not incompatible with showing civility and decency towards other human beings. In fact, often, it can be the most effective way to fight for your values. But even if you believe tactically it’s not the most effective way, it’s still a biblical command. I mean, this is not love your enemies unless they own you on Twitter. I mean, we don’t have those kinds of caveats.
So, I wrote a short piece in National Review, basically taking aim at this notion that incivility was somehow required, and a couple of days later, Sohrab responded with a long essay that quickly went viral called “Against David French-ism.” And he sort of took a strawman version of me and made me sort of an avatar for the inad—the conservative world’s inadequate response to the emergency of the modern times. He essentially made three main arguments. One, that right now politics is war and enmity. Number two, that in such… in circumstances like that, civility and decency are second order values at best, and sometimes it may even be undesirable. And then the last is that liberalism itself—not liberalism as in conservative liberal like the way we think of politics, but liberalism as in small L, classical liberalism—is in large part responsible for the predicament the United States finds itself in.
So, I disagree on all three points. I do not think politics is war and enmity. I’ve been to war. I was in Iraq during the surge in 2007-2008. I served as a squadron judge advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Politics is not war. I mean, it’s… We have sharp disagreements; no question about it. We have an intolerant strain on Left and Right that actively seek to violate people’s rights on occasion. We have very real and profound differences, but politics in the United States is not war. Number two, back to the civility point that I just made, especially as a Christian in the public square, you do not have an option. If you’re going to be an obedient believer of Jesus Christ, you do not have an option but to treat people with kindness, but to love your enemies. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t often sharp in your disagreements, but the idea that civility and decency, decency in particular, are—because civility is often difficult to define—but decency in particular is some sort of tactic that you discard when the going gets tough, I think it’s just fundamentally wrong. And then far from believing that liberalism is the root of our problem, liberalism—classical liberalism, properly understood—is our way through this mess. And it’s not the case that Locke plus 250 years equals drag queens, or Jefferson plus 220 years equals drag queens. The classical liberalism of the American founding has facilitated and empowered the creation of not just the world’s strongest economy and military in the history of the world, but also has helped sustain one of the most vibrant religious communities anywhere on the globe, and for all of the problems that we have of increased secularization in the United States, we still have one of the most vibrant religious communities, certainly in the developed world, and anywhere. This is not an accident. This is not a happenstance. This is not in spite of the principles of our founding; it’s because of the principles of our founding. So, that’s the heart of the disagreement.
Drew Griffin
So, there seems to be a simmering discontentment amongst conservatives that’s manifesting itself in what Sohrab wrote against you of just the status quo in America being unacceptable. And they’re coming out of the Obama years, both with Obama’s policies in the foreign front, which maybe we’ll talk a little bit later […] with regards to the Iran deal, but even on the domestic front with regards to gay marriage or anything like that, there’s this massive kind of conservative discontentment, and it seems that it found its avatar in, you know, Donald Trump. It found a voice; it found a pressure release, kind of, in Donald Trump and some of the policies that he advocates. You have been a vocal “never-Trumper,” I guess, it’s a fair—
David French
It’s hard to say never when he’s here now.
Drew Griffin
Yes, right.
David French
I would say “anti-Trump.”
Drew Griffin
Yes, “anti-Trump.” Alright, “anti-Trumper.” […] One of the reasons why I think that they have kind of gone after you… You have this long history of… You’re the past president of the Foundation of Individual Rights and Education. You’ve taken any number of institutions and governments to court and sued for people’s rights and for religious liberty. I mean, you’ve been an active participant in these culture wars, but it seems to be that even despite all these efforts of your years of activism [and] the activism and writing of many… of other conservatives, this dissatisfaction seems to just be present, and seems to not want to go away. And so now they’re turning to things that it’s hard to, you know, reconcile what they’re trying to do with conservatism, right? And so, it’s like, how do you… How do you even define yourself? I have a difficult time with this, even Providence editorially. We’re constantly trying to evaluate where we stand on the spectrum of when you align yourself with illiberal and, honestly, non-conservative means and individuals to try and accomplish supposedly conservative purposes or principles. How does that seem to work?
David French
Yeah, so I’m an absolute opponent of the illiberal Right. I don’t think of the fight between the liberal—classical liberal conservative world—and the illiberal Right as a intramural conflict. I don’t think of it like that at all. I think of the illiberal Right as something else, and I’m opposed to it. And I think part of the reason why people… there’s a lot of anger is that we feel there’s a sense that we should be on the same team and I don’t consent to be on that team. That’s not my team. And so there’s a sense of what are you doing? If you’re not for us, you’re against us. Well, I am against you. Now, I’m for you on certain issues. So, for example, if you’re pro-life and you’re part of the illiberal Right, I’m still pro-life too. If you would like free speech, or defend free speech for conservatives on the illiberal Right, I’ll defend free speech for conservatives. But, if you’re trying to suppress free speech from somebody on the other side, applying double standards, I’m going to be against you.
But the fundamental issue is, you know, one of the issues that just sort of backs up and is above it all is what is the legal and political and cultural superstructure of this country? And, you know, look, we have to say—we have to acknowledge reality. This is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, continent-sized constitutional republic with all kinds of different mini-cultures and different economies and different communities that make up this really big nation of 320 million people, and the idea that you are going to win the culture war to such an extent that you just smash your enemy to bits isn’t just fundamentally wrong, it is, I would submit, could well stand the risk of ripping us to shreds, or at the very least rendering politics a permanent state of agony and misery, and leaving America divided and fractured and ineffective and weakened in multiple ways. So, one of my arguments is that we have a 21st century problem of negative polarization, of increasing religious division, of a big sort geographically where people are less likely to live around people who disagree with them than in any time in a long time, where partisan divisions—this negative polarization—means that you have active hostility towards people on the other side. You look at this situation, and I say it’s a 21st century problem, and I look at it and I say, well, we have an 18th century answer for this, and that’s the actual principles of the founding. I mean, Federalist 10, Madison was prescient in many ways about the threat of violent faction, what we would call negative partisanship, and he said that there’s a way to deal with it that’s the wrong way, and the way to deal with it that’s the right way. The way to deal with it that is the wrong way is try to use the power of the state to remove the causes of that faction. So, by suppressing civil liberties to prevent some opinions from being heard while others are heard, by trying to enforce a conformity of opinion, which is tyranny, which is oppression, and often carried out by people who have their own, you know—even if you voted for him, they’re often… Their own wisdom is lacking, and their own virtue is lacking. And then the other thing is to nurture what we now call a pluralistic society where we have many flowers bloom, and there is, because of these multiplicity of communities and these multiplicity of states and local governments and churches and civic associations, there’s this sort of inherent resilience in the enterprise, and no one faction can suppre—can truly succeed in suppressing the others. And, so, that’s one of the reasons why my legal work has been dedicated to defending freedom of association, defending the existence of religious communities, churches, institutions, student groups. It’s not all radical, individual autonomy. One of the bedrocks of American life are these networks of civic associations. It’s one of the reasons why I have fought against big government and centralized power in Washington, because I’m inherently suspicious of the notion that any set of technocrats, no matter how well meaning, have the capacity or the ability to understand and formulate the right kind of, just say for example, industrial policy that’s going to cause rural Tennessee to thrive and Detroit to thrive. These are different kinds of communities. They have different legal structures; they have different, you know… So, in that sense, I say, look, what we need… While we can argue for our core values, and I would like to see every single human being come to faith in Jesus Christ, the governmental superstructure, according to the design of the founders, should view as one of its first principle the preservation of liberty, and the preservation of liberty is not just individual autonomy, it is also self-governance at the local level. It is also the ability to form voluntary associations.
Drew Griffin
Right. So, you talk about an 18th century solution. I want to talk a little bit about kind of the beginnings and then the ends that this kind of new national conservatism movement is after. In the beginnings here, when you point back to the 18th century, there’s this argument—Patrick Deneen and others in Why Liberalism Failed make this argument—that, well, because of the current state of our culture and our society, it’s obvious that this 18th century solution is flawed from its very—at its very core, that there’s really no Christianity there, that it’s really this thing that was birthed out of a secular, humanist, Enlightenment mentality. Therefore, because the roots are bad, the rest of the whole tree is kind of rotted out. I mean, how do you… Then that’s also echoed ironically on people on the left who say, you know, all of the founders were slave owners and slavery existed, and so therefore everything that they wrote about anything is abrogated to that. And so it’s like, how do you… You know, you’ve got two sides kind of making similar arguments that the founding should be scrapped, and that the… You know, we should, I guess, start over. There should be some kind of new experiment that all of these things that have worked for a couple 100 years more successfully, like you said, than any other country in the world, you know, let’s just chuck it and do what, exactly?
David French
Well, you know, I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to keep our focus on the United States of America and the founding of the United States of America, because a lot of the argument about liberalism also is pulling in things from, say… You know, if you’re going to talk about the two great revolutions of the late 18th century, there’s the American Revolution and the French Revolution. They were very different things. They were very different things. Even though the French revolutionaries would often use the language of rights—you know, liberty, equality, fraternity—you know, that they used the language of rights, but they engaged in a deliberate, massive assault on the institutions of French culture, including the church. Goodness, they renamed months. We might be in Thermidor right now if this was revolutionary France. It feels like Thermidor. Then, in the United States, by contrast, what ended up happening was, in many ways, the American Revolution was, although it was a revolution, although it was a dramatic change in world affairs, a lot of the motivation was in an interesting way kind of conservative. I want to preserve the rights of an Englishman that I feel that I have. A lot of it was seen as preserving the autonomy of pre-existing institutions up and down the Eastern Seaboard that had been existing, you know, relatively free from interference from the crown for, by that point, more than a century. And so what you had is a bunch of pre-existing American institutions. They were not British institutions anymore. They were American institutions that were pre-existing that had a sense of their own autonomy and their ability to create their own community, and the American Revolution, in many ways, began as a preservation right movement.
Drew Griffin
So reformation, almost, of a British law system.
David French
Right, and so at the end of the day, what ends up happening is after this tumultuous Articles of the Confederation period, you’re looking at a community of people, and often we like to, in our modern eyes, we like to say, well, they weren’t diverse. You know, it’s all mostly Christian, landowning, White males. Well, but if you run down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, you had the Puritans in New England, then you had Roger Williams essentially tossed by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and his colony, and then you had the Quakers, and you have Catholics in Maryland, then you have Anglicans, down in Georgia you have criminals, where there are still criminals to this day. No, kidding. And, so you have these, but if you look at this, the religious composition of the Eastern Seaboard, a lot of those are the theological strains that fought in the wars of religion. And so you’re not only trying to knit them together as different nation states that live peacefully, you’re trying to knit them together as one nation with a multi-faith republic. You know, I don’t know if the world had seen its equal. And so, what do you do there? You know, you create… Well, you had a constitution of enumerated limited powers, but then they overlaid a safeguard on top of that with the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights, far from being some sort of morally neutral document is one of the most morally profound documents in the history of governance. I view it as almost like the golden rule operationalized in law, and grants to others the rights you would like to exercise yourself. And so that created the space, I mean, the free… The combination of the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause together—what a genius way, genius way to protect the autonomy, not just of religious individuals, but religious institutions.
Drew Griffin
And one of the things that you and I’ve talked about some is that with all of the Sturm und Drang that is kind of brought up by the critics of a current moment, and these [are] the critics of conservatism and the critics of you and the critics of all of us, I guess, who still have some kind of fostering of hope for, you know, western classical liberalism—all of these critics, they say it’s never been this bad. It’s just this… We’re in this apocalyptic kind of moment, and that because it’s tough, because it’s tense, because there is conflict within our system and there are lawsuits and people’s rights are being challenged, and you’re having to defend rights, and you’re having to go in and defend people’s right to establish or assemble, that this, you know, Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, who’s kind of the one of the architects of this national conservatism movement has said as much that, you know, the moment you have to defend in court your rights to worship or not bake a cake or do whatever, you’ve lost the battle, right?
David French
That’s so absurd.
Drew Griffin
It is absurd, and what I find that, you know, in everything that you just talked about, and the way that this system has been constructed, it’s like the founders thought ahead and built into the system its ability to contain a lot of tension. They foresaw that people’s rights would trespass on other people’s rights, and there is a system there to adjudicate those contests. It’s not as if it was meant to be this homogeneous, everything was, you know, going to be perfect, everyone’s going to be White, or everyone’s going to be whatever, and it was just going to go on in perpetuity, and we were all going to agree with one another, like, it’s… The whole system is constructed to be combative and to check branch against branch and individual against individual in order to maintain a certain amount of the greatest amount of freedom for everybody.
David French
I mean, you cannot possibly have a continent-sized, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multicultural democracy and not have almost endless points of friction in there. I mean, there’s a reason why you look around the rest of the world and most nation states are far more ethnically homogenous. They’re far more culturally homogenous. That’s sort of the natural state of human beings, is that like congregates with like, and, you know, there’s the old saying: good fences make good neighbors. We’re not that from the ground up, and we’re not… So, the notion of friction in that circumstance is inevitable.
But, part of the genius, particularly of the Bill of Rights and particularly with the separation of powers and the frequency of elections, is almost whatever community you’re a part of in the United States, even if you are seriously marginalized, you have the tools that exist within the governmental structure to change and improve your condition. You know, let’s look at even the awful, awful, evil institution of slavery. It was at such tension with the moral and constitutional logic of the founding that by 1861, the South in many ways rightly saw the handwriting on the wall for this institution that they coveted so much. The power of the free states was inexorably eclipsing their own. The power of the abolitionist argument was beginning to bear fruit. And what did they do? They chucked liberalism out the window and started a cannonade at Fort Sumter. And so, in many… Time and time after time, even the most marginalized of individuals and marginalized of communities, through this system, have had the tools at their disposal, not immediately, not instantaneously, to make an argument to the people in the United States, to make an argument in court, and to substantially improve their position.
One of the things I find fascinating is here you have conservative Christians who right now are probably—no, not probably, we are—the conservative Christians of America are the most powerful religious community in the world. It’s not close. I mean, financially, politically, I mean, look, even the Evangelical church alone—let’s just not even, you know, leaving aside Catholicism, conservative Judaism, and all of that—Evangelical church alone has a basic absolute veto on the political fortunes of one of our two great political parties. An absolute veto. If they don’t turn out for that candidate, that candidate is losing. Losing. And yet, we believe that we’re in some sort of existential crisis, some sort of unbelievable emergency that justifies us tossing overboard not just some of these traditional legal doctrines that protect liberty in the private sphere, but also chucking overboard basic values like decency and civility. And that’s just mystifying to me.
Also, you know, if you look at American history, the idea that we face a crisis unlike anything else, the crisis that we face, the challenge that we face isn’t necessarily the underlying conditions of the country. It’s the sense of crisis. It’s the alarmism that is most alarming. So, for example, people say, well, conservatism didn’t conserve anything. What are you talking about? Like, if you go back to 1986—let’s take a key constitutional liberty: Second Amendment. I think there are only about nine states in the US that were shall-issue states that allowed you to carry a gun for self—gave you a right to carry the gun for the defense of yourself and others and the whole country. Right now, I believe the number is 42 where you have an absolute right, out of 50, to carry a gun for the defense of yourself and others. From 1986 to 2016, 30 years. A rout—like that’s a[n] epic, historic rout on a key issue. Let’s talk about abortion. We… Roe v. Wade happened in 1973. The American Protestant church was in disarray over the issue. The Southern Baptist Convention supported Roe. A lot of people have no idea about that. What? The SBC supported Roe, are you kidding me? Well, there was this immense sort of internal, almost Protestant, internal, you know, Protestant renewal, where the mainline and the evangelical churches sort of sorted themselves. The evangelical churches soared in membership. By 1981, the SBC and many others were mighty engines of, you know, of religious orthodoxy.
Drew Griffin
Yeah, they would have conventions of tens of thousands of people.
David French
Yeah, huge. You know, by, what, the 1990s, the SBC used to be maybe the fifth largest Protestant denomination. By the 1990s it was the largest and it was larger than the previous four that had been above it combined. And so what happens in ’81, abortion rate peaks and starts to go down. It goes down through pro-life Reagan, pro-life Bush, pro-choice Clinton, pro-life Bush, pro-choice Obama, to where it is now lower than it was the day Roe was decided. That’s a remarkable achievement. It’s still a horrible tragedy what we deal with right now, but what a remarkable achievement. The crime rate is far lower, violent crime rate far lower, American material prosperity far greater. Our constitutional liberties are far more expansive than they were in 1986. My ability to speak freely, free of censorship in the United States of America from a government entity, is far greater right now than it was in ’86.
Drew Griffin
For instance, we’re doing a podcast right now that’s going to be released and aired out and can be downloaded by anybody across the United States with no government license, no license by the airwaves or anything like that.
David French
No equal time provision, no fairness, you know. And so, you know, we have so much greater right to speak. Now, some things have changed that Christians don’t like without question. But what we tend to do is we tend to accept all of the things that have happened that have been positive as, well, that’s just the natural state of affairs; because we’re right, that should have happened. And then everything that’s negative is an absolute emergency and a crisis because we’re right, and this is not supposed to happen to us. But what you end up seeing is that you go to a progressive conference, and they’re catastrophizing as well. The NRA rules America, you know, the entire South is passing heartbeat bills. They feel like they’re losing. You go to a right wing convention, and they feel like they’re losing. Everybody feels like they’re losing. So, you sort of have this Flight 93 mentality. And here’s what I… analogy I’ve used before. If you believe… It can be as dangerous to believe that there’s an emergency when there’s not as to believe that there’s not an emergency when there is. So, imagine if you’re to use the charge the cockpit analogy. The plane… feels like the plane’s going down. You charge the cockpit to save yourselves. You choke the pilot to death. You grab the controls, and it was just turbulence. Now you’re at the controls of a jet and you don’t know what to do. Well, you got a problem on your hands. And I think one of the things with negative polarization is that we have taken our differences which are real, which matter, contentious arguments that matter, and we’ve turned them into an existential crisis. And by turning them into an existential crisis, we’re now breaking the bonds of fellowship in this country. We are creating an environment where the… what used to be a general feeling of affection for people on the other side is now replaced by a feeling of absolute loathing where people are more likely to want their sons or daughters to marry someone of a different faith than a different political party. And for what? I mean, we’re looking at a country that won the Cold War without having to initiate a third world war. That is the most prosperous nation in the history of the planet, the most vibrant religious communities in the developed world, and we’re saying it’s an existential crisis and we have to defeat the enemy utterly and completely, and anyone who is even showing decency towards the other side is just not… They’re a peacetime conservative, and they’re not up for the challenge at the moment.
Drew Griffin
So this seems to be a myth that is kind of taken a hold, that, you know, because there’s a greater diversity within American ethnic diversity [and] a[n] ideological, maybe, diversity than there has been, or at least it’s more apparent, or we’re more aware of it because of media than maybe we used to be, there’s this myth that, you know, there was a time when that was not the case. And while there were times in American culture that there was a more kind of a homogeneous, unified, certainly, maybe, ethnic makeup to the country… A point that you made a little bit earlier […] the country was always far more diverse than Independence Hall in Philadelphia, right?
David French
Yes.
Drew Griffin
I mean, it was far more… You had women, you had African Americans, you had immigrants from all over the world, you had landowners, non-landowners, I mean, just the group of White guys that was there, and, you know, largely Protestants and some Deists, or whomever that were there in Independence Hall, the country was far more diverse than the ones who were represented there. And there is this drive or kind of push to go back to a pre-1990s, pre-80s pre-I don’t know, Cultural Revolution, 1969 moment where we’re back into the 50s. And there’s the Hays Act, and there are other forms of censorship and governmental control to, you know, so that you can’t watch Game of Thrones because it’s a big show […], a fan of that, you know, that there are these… this kind of a harkening back that Trump, President Trump, seems to tap into a little bit. When we’re making America great again, the question then is, well, when was it great? So, obviously not now. Right, I mean, that’s his argument. So when was America great? Where do they want to go back to?
David French
So, I think there’s this really interesting—especially on the Right, so there’s now this… It used to be said that the Right longed for the social mores of the 50s, and the Left longed for the economy of the 50s. And I think now, it’s the Right longs for the social mores and the economy of the 50s. The Left longs for the economy of the 50s. And there’s this sort of notion that the actual default condition and proper condition of the American economy is a[n] industrial colossus, that this economy that we had for really a generation and a half maybe, maybe, was where you had lifetime job security, you had lavish pensions, and, you know, an opportunity that you could say my kid’s going to have the same thing, was a product of—with an artificial blip on the horizon—that was a product of multiple thing… factors coming together, industrialization reaching, you know, a real technological… turning a technological culture, but also very importantly, coming out of World War Two, there was one industrial nation that had its industrial capacity and economy intact and strong. One. Great Britain was a victor, but its cities had been bombed. It was overextended with its empire. It was in the process of dramatic contraction. This enormous power of the Soviet Union, it was very powerful, but it wasn’t as much of a player in the international markets. It was creating a communist bloc. Germany was in ruins. I mean, a hugely significant industrial power. France was on its knees, Japan was a smoking rubble. And you had this immense nation—these immense nations of China and India, India about to become a nation with enormous latent economic potential, that were still largely peasant societies. And in that circumstance, yeah, we were able to create a[n] absolute enormous industrial machine. But, when we created it, we also created within it some of the seeds of its own destruction. So, the idea that, you know, lifetime tenure with very high wages and a company-funded pension that will pay out to you over the rest of maybe a 25, 30-year lifespan after you retire, that’s hard to sustain economically. And then in our sort of power and our arrogance and our monopoly position, we started to make bad products. I’m old enough to remember my parents bought a 1977 or ’78 Dodge Aspen station wagon. It broke down on the drive off the lot and never stopped breaking down the whole time we had it.
Drew Griffin
Yeah, my dad owned a Pontiac GTO which he said stood for gas, tire, and oil, because that was the thing that you know, it would you know, basically eat up—
David French
Yeah, there was a reason why in the early 1980s, Ford’s pitch was “quality is job one.” It’s like, our bad, guys. I mean, there’s stories about how when Japan rose as a power and started producing these cars that… So, what’s my responsibility if I’m a dad, and I’m not in the car industry, and what I want is reliable transportation for my wife and daughter? Am I going to get this thing that literally one of the great features of the Aspen station wagon—I don’t even know how this happened, but—antifreeze would pour out onto our feet on occasion—that’s going to happen, and every time it rains, the car’s going to stall—or this Honda Accord that’s a little weird looking or Toyota Corolla that’s a little weird looking and small, but it never stops running? Well, you know, it’s better for my family that I buy this other car, and it’s the responsibility of the American manufacturer to make a better car. So, we get into this position and people act as if the loss of industrial power was an injury inflicted upon us illegitimately, as opposed to, in many ways, the product of legitimate competition, followed also by technological development. Other technologies emerge. Other pathways to make a living emerge. And, yeah, it’s disruptive. It is, and we should think creatively about how to minimize disruption. But, man, for all of human history, living has been hard. Living has been hard.
Drew Griffin
When there are few places that, I mean, even with all of its woes that I would rather live than the United States, in fact there’s nowhere, and especially as a Christian, there’s nowhere I’d rather live than the United States, so I mean, it’s… I want to talk a little bit before we move to the international environment, kind of the… There’s a sense in this paradigmatic struggle that they’re outlining that there’s just this… It’s winner takes all, it’s a war, it’s a fight, it’s a battle, it’s a struggle of cultures, cultural conflict. There’s an eschatology here, maybe, a teleology here that is worth examining of just what ends are they trying to accomplish, because it’s like the end—what end do they want? And then the means by which they’re willing to, you know, achieve those ends are often defined by this end that they want, so, I mean, what is the… What do you think, if you can characterize their position, whether it’s Sohrab or First Things or Hazony or anybody in this kind of group, what is the end result? I mean, what do they want? What does the America look like? And then what means would it take to get there? For instance, if you’re so upset about drag queen story hour, okay, would the perfect world be there would be no drag queen story as I’m assuming, and so then, in order to make that happen, you have to do what exactly, you know, inhibit people’s ability to freely assemble in a public library?
David French
At the same time, you know, you raise those questions as the same movement scorns my answer to this, which is to make arguments in a marketplace of ideas and attempt to transform the culture from the inside out by evangelism, by persuasion, and bring more people, for example, into saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, argue more for the kinds of healthy family relationships under which people flourish. But that Sohrab side of it says, I believe one of the quotes was, a quest for revival is nothing more than like an idle wish that men be more moral. Well, tell that to the Great Awakenings. I mean, we have a tradition in this country of religious renewal. We do. And the idea that sort of says, well, that’s the past; we don’t have any hope for the future. I mean, what? Well, you know, I’m reminded of the scene in Office Space where the two Bobs, the two consultants, are looking at this employer and they go, so what would you say you do here? And that’s my point to Christians. If you’re looking at the future from this hopeless standpoint, when, consider, you know, Elijah and the few thousand that were left, like, that was it. That was it. We’re like, you know, name your megachurch pastor and the tens of millions, and we’re gloom and doom; it’s not going to get better. It blows my mind, and it’s directly contradictory to the faith and hope that we’re supposed to show as believers in Christ. God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and sound mind. I guess that Paul wrote those words before he knew of this terrifying specter of the Hillary Clinton presidency or the awful, awful, awful challenge of the Dean of Students at Yale.
Drew Griffin
All he had to deal with was Nero.
David French
Yeah, I mean, so you’re just sitting there going, oh, these are the most desperate times and they call for the most desperate measures. We know what were desperate times: third day of Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, when Pickett’s division is marching up a mile of open ground—that’s desperate times, y’all. What’s even… What about when, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when American cities were burning because of riots, and there was up to four bombings a day on average, and the American nation was being […] in the middle of a war that was 10 times more costly in lives than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? So, that’s what I’m saying. It’s not to say that the religious liberty problems right now in the US aren’t serious. There are serious problems with religious liberty. We have the tools to deal with them. That’s not to say that we don’t have economic disruptions in parts of the Midwest. But we can’t… We don’t face that with a bleak future that requires us to upend American liberalism and the free market economy to deal with what quite frankly often is a person who is… a guy who has three kids by two moms and can’t necessarily pass a drug test with regularity. Well, how do you construct the market for him? I would defy you to come up with the system that’s going to guarantee his success. You’re not.
Drew Griffin
It seems to be a level of apocalyptic egotism, just that this is the worst time it has ever been, and in the name of that, that they’re willing to go to lengths that for whatever reason they don’t seem to realize that whatever precedents they set, whatever acts that they go through, at some point can be used by their opponents, creating the environment in which they themselves are going to have to combat, and that’s one of the beauties of the system, in the American system, that it is… the contract that we have with one another is I’m going to give you some space, you give me some space, and we together are going to enjoy a measure of freedom. And, if I start encroaching upon you, you can take me to court.
David French
Well, you know, you’ve hit on something that’s really important. One of the reasons why there’s such a sense of urgency about win, win, win, win, win is people are wanting to create legal structures that they have to keep running, or they could get bit by the same thing. So, I’ll give you a great example that Holly—Josh Holly—put together. One of the few proposals that sort of the nationalist conservative world would say, this one, we like this one, was he wanted to regulate political speech in large social media companies. And so, he put together a proposal that says they’re going to be neutral, and that their neutrality is going to be determined by government commission. And it’s not just neutrality and policy; it also has to have a neutrality in effect. So, you’re introducing a disparate impact analysis, just to use legalese, into a free expression environment. And I’m looking at that, and I’m going, well, okay, one, I have no clue how this works in real life. Well, how does the government… What does the government commission do? Does it look at who are the top 10 publishers on Facebook and decide, well, five have to be Republican and five have to be Democrat or Facebook is broken? Because actually, if you look at Facebook’s top publishers right now, a lot of them skew Right. Number one by a mile any given month is Fox News. So does that mean then the Left can say you’ve got to… Facebook, you got to switch the algorithm to pare down Fox’s reach by 20 billion? No, I don’t think that’s what Josh Hawley wants. And then you say, okay, this government commission, I guess we have to keep on winning because we’ve created this government commission that’s regulating free speech on the internet, and heaven help us if we have to hand it over to Elizabeth Warren. So, the destruction of the institutions of liberty elevate the stakes of any given presidential election and create their own sense of existential… and it magnified their own sense of existential threat, because the cost of losing just keeps getting higher, in part because we made the cost of losing higher. A great example is power of the presidency, the executive authority of the presidency, because both sides have piled on to try to make the president more and more powerful, even though they complain about it when they’re out of power. What ends up happening is every single election, we’re arguably electing the most powerful person in the history of the United States in raw legal power. Obviously, Roosevelt at the height of World War Two, Lincoln at the height of the Civil War—different situation. But in a peacetime context, every election becomes the election of the most powerful person in the history of the United States. So, our own departure from liberalism enhances the stakes of our disputes and creates the fodder for the existential crisis that we’re in the middle of, that they argue we’re in the middle of.
Drew Griffin
Right, it seems to be that there’s a… When I mentioned kind of eschatology or teleology, like, when you look into the future, there’s… As a Christian, you should assume it’s going to be difficult to be Christian. You should assume, because of the fallenness of the world, that you’re never going to reach a parity or a perfection. It’s a constant work of improvement, right? Culture is a constant fight and struggle where you’re pushing back the forces of evil with—overcoming evil with good, right, I mean, that is… That never ends for a Christian in eschatological terms until Christ returns, right? And so, it is… it seems, though, that there are people who view, in maybe some kind of, you know, post-millennial ideology, that somehow this is achievable, that there’s some way we can reach a parity, some way we can reach some level of supremacy where we don’t have to contend with these […]
David French
Yeah, I mean, my pastors said, one of the earthly purposes of a Christian is to fight back against the effects of the fall. And all of, you know, earth… all of creation groans under the weight of the fall. So every time, and so dealing with injustice, in dealing with evil, dealing with incompetence, deal—all of those things, you’re playing perpetual whack-a-mole because you’ll get one thing under control, and then something else will come up. I’ll give you a great example. If you had talked to an American in late 80s, and you would have said, you know, middle of Manhattan is going to be in your lifetime one of the safest places on the entire—in the entire United States, and there will be people who walk without fear at all through Central Park at 2am, they would have looked at you as if you had lost your ever-loving mind. You know, New York was in the grips of 2,000 plus murders a year. You had muggings in broad daylight. It was dangerous at night. And then we, through a combination of many, many factors… It wasn’t just New York; it was across America. This awful crime rate where people—I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this sort of species of dystopian science fiction movie.
Drew Griffin
Sure, Escape from LA […]
David French
Escape from L.A., Escape from New York, The Running Man, The Crow. I mean, you could just go on and on. Predator 2. You would have… Those were obviously dystopian, but they had that ring of, oh, this is where we’re headed. Now, I mean, the prob… we have problems with homelessness, and that rent is so darn high because people want to live in these places desperately. But then, at the same time, what has happened? If you told people that we’d be losing more people to drug overdoses in any year than we lost in the entire Vietnam War, they would have said, what? No, how does that happen? And so, a different challenge arises, and what ends up happening, I think, often is a present generation takes for granted the benefits of the work that came previously, and looks at the presence of continued imperfection, or at a new and emerging crisis, and just says y’all failed. Y’all failed. Whereas the Christian, I think, says, we take for granted the existence of the consequences of the fall. And we celebrate as an instrument of God’s grace the prosperity, the security, the liberty that we enjoy, which is unparalleled in the annals of humankind.
Drew Griffin
Right. Well, I think it’s important, though, for Christians to make the argument too that the security, the prosperity, the liberty—all of that that we enjoy is still an approximation, right? I mean, it’s just still… It’s never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be absolute, but to celebrate it kind of when it’s… when it happens, and that, I think, is the contribution we can make and we should be making and articulating. It’s what I appreciate about your writing. Why we’re having you on and we’re having this conversation is, you know, it’s important for us to make these arguments in the public square, because if we’re losing the battle in the public square […] a public marketplace, I’m willing to concede that there are times in which we are in areas in which we are departments of the cultural marketplace or whatever that we’re losing in, but the solution cannot be to burn down the marketplace, right? We have to come up with, I think, better techniques, better arguments, and, in and of ourselves, I think be better advocates for the culture that we want to proliferate out. And to the extent to which we’re willing to embrace illiberal ideologies and methods and kind of extreme or totalitarian methods, anything that smacks of that kind of forceful or unchristianlike ethos to accomplish these kind of Christian ends, I think the more we shoot ourselves in the foot—
David French
Oh, of course.
Drew Griffin
—and […] the deeper hole that we get into, and the deeper hole that we dig, even though we’re ostensibly trying to do it for righteous purposes.
David French
How about this: the less godly we are, the less godly America is. I mean, it’s not hard to figure out, and to then say, well, I’m only going to be less godly for, you know, I don’t know, the next 18 months until I’ve sufficiently owned the Libs, I mean, what does this even mean? And so, I think one of the problems that we have is that we have forgotten that sin is persistent […] evil is omnipresent. Jesus said the poor will always be with you, and we look at the existence of poverty in a prosperous country and we say, well, that’s a complete and total failure, without necessarily saying, also then saying, well, wait a minute, are the methods that we might use to try to eradicate something that we can’t necessarily eradicate going to cause ultimately more harm than good? Is the quest for utopianism—is that going to be actually bringing us further from the utopia we seek? I mean, when we’re talking about socialism and communism, that’s received conventional wisdom on the Right. It’s the utopianism of communism and the utopianism of socialism that laid the seeds of its totalitarian… of the totalitarian nightmare. And then we go, well, man, there’s a lot of people using all this liberty we have in ways that are really not good. So, less liberty. Okay. Hmm. Let’s think about that.
Drew Griffin
Right. Yeah, right. At some point that less liberty is going to be pointed at us in our direction […]
David French
Exactly, especially if you’re saying, I feel like an embattled minority in this country. I am an embattled minority. There should be less freedom, said almost no embattled minority ever.
Drew Griffin
Right. Our guest has been David French. He is a senior writer for the National Review, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, contributor to Time magazine. When we return I want to talk a little bit about kind of the foreign policy front as we kind of conclude our conversation when we come back.
Welcome back to the ProvCast, the regular podcast of Providence, a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy. I’m managing editor, Drew Griffin. My guest today is David French, senior writer at National Review and contributor to Time magazine. David, we’ve been talking on the domestic front about nationalism and conservatism and French-ism—all the -isms, and I want to turn a little bit, as we’re a journal of foreign policy, I want to head out into the world a little bit and talk about how this new Right, this kind of new conservatism that’s embodied in Donald Trump and embodied in American first and all of this is kind of comporting itself on the world stage. And it’s interesting to me that, you know, where they feel a threatened minority that need to really flex their muscles here within the bounds of the United States, outside of the United States, there seems to be this reticence to stand for the values, either rhetorically or even practically, that America has stood for for the last, you know, 200 years, especially the last 70 years, let’s say, during the Cold War. And you had a piece recently at the National Review talking about America’s impending deal with the Taliban, and its withdrawal from Afghanistan. As an Iraq War vet yourself, recipient of the Bronze Star, I want you to talk a little bit about America’s military posture abroad and how you see this particular strand of conservatism playing itself out on the global stage to either America’s benefit, as some people argue, or to its detriment.
David French
Well, so first, let’s grant that there are some legitimate grounds for it to be… legitimate grounds for Americans to be disgruntled about the last 20 years of American foreign policy. Well, and foreign policy is such an inexact science that there’s legitimate grounds for Americans to be disgruntled about any 20-year… there’s been successes and failures in any 20-year span. So, what are the grounds to be disgruntled? It is absolutely the case we have European allies that have not carried their proper weight. The lack of… The German military, for example, is just a disgrace. It’s just a disgrace, and people say, well, you know, in defense of Germany, well, you don’t want German militarism. Well, the German army was one of the cornerstones of the land defense strategy of NATO at the height of the Cold War. And, if we could get to just a fraction of the strength that the German military had in 1986, that would be nice, to have NATO reach its two percent thresholds, uniformly. I get it. We should absolutely urge that NATO do that, because you know what, it will make NATO stronger. It will make NATO more defensible to [the] American public who often has throughout the… since the beginning of our country often been suspicious of foreign entanglements. So, that’s legitimate. It’s also legitimate to lament the inability to turn Iraq or Afghanistan into nations other than Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, you know, we have achieved an awful lot militarily in those nations and that’s too often downplayed. I was there at the height of the surge and what we were able to accomplish in the surge was remarkable. What we’ve been able to accomplish in the fight against ISIS from 2014 to 2018: remarkable. We’ve accomplished many, many good things. But at the same time, this sort of hope that you would create these countries—sort of recreate these countries—that’s been ashes; that’s sort of fallen to ashes. So, I understand that there are grounds to be disgruntled about different aspects of American foreign policy, but if you pull back a little bit, again, one of the things that we tend to do is we take for granted successes that we should not take for granted, and dwell on failures as if the failures were easily avoidable. And so, what are, in both the Middle East and the European theater, what are the successes that we take for granted? Well, here’s one we take for granted. We take for granted the fact that the world—thank God—has not faced a general great power conflict since the end of World War Two. There has not been… I mean, American and Chinese forces fought each other in a limited, very deadly, but a conflict limited to the Korean peninsula. There were skirmishes between the Russians and the Chinese but a general great power war, we have not had that. And that has allowed for an enormous amount of human flourishing around the globe, an enormous amount of human flourishing. And why is it that we have not had it? One of the reasons we’ve not had it is because we have had these network of alliances with us as the linchpin, but a network of alliances that have spanned the globe, which meant that there was an immense […] a sort of a Pax Americana, so to speak. We just take that for granted.
Drew Griffin
Well, I think, not to interrupt but to interject, it seems to be that there is a total lack of historic memory of the work it took to engender, right, that Pax Americana. It didn’t just happen. It’s not like the end of the World War, it was just like, everything just fell into place and we experienced this peace, that there was a constant maintenance that was necessary and knitting together often, you know, disparate allies, former enemies, people with whom we may… we had even just, you know, tangential association with or affinity with, but we still needed to partner with them. It was a very difficult and time consuming, oftentimes contentious, effort that didn’t just happen. It took a lot of work, and it took a lot of maintenance.
David French
And, well, and you know, it was not inevitable that it would occur. Witness what happened after World War One. There was an effort that was supposed to be the war to end all wars, that, you know, great nations actually passed, entered into a treaty outlawing war. That’s how scarred people were by that horrific, you know, the killing fields in the Western Front and the Eastern Front. I mean, just horrific. To this day, I have a hard time watching the World War—some of the better World War One movies, because it’s just… What a nightmare it was. And America, by that point, you know, had just said, we’re out. We’re done. And sort of left everything, the world to its own devices until we were pulled right back in in the middle of a killing, of a slaughter that was orders of magnitude greater than World War One. Unfortunately, we will learn the lesson after that, and we said we just can’t be out, and we have benefited immensely. Immensely.
Now, let’s look at what’s happened in the Middle East and a lot of people say failure, failure, failure, failure. Okay, if you’re… if I’m talking to a normal person on September 12, 2018, and I will say this: we’re going to engage in a multi-prong, multinational military offensive that is going to topple hostile governments. There’s going to be some considerable American casualties, but, you know, those casualties in Afghanistan will basically match what we suffered today in the United States and casualties in other parts of the Middle East, but we’re not going to have another attack like this. It won’t happen. In fact, we’ll go entire half—5, 10 years at a time without a single terrorist death in the United States. People would have said, you’re crazy. That sense of vulnerability, that sense of terror, of fear was palpable. Palpable. And so we execute a military strategy that has had its ups and downs; welcome to war. Every American military strategy in every conflict has had its ups and downs. I mean, gosh, look at the Civil War until Lincoln settled on Grant and Sherman. Look at the first six months of the Korean War. Look at the disaster of the first almost full year of World War Two. I mean, time and time again, we have gotten it wrong before we’ve gotten it right. But we have successfully defended this country from anything like 9/11, anything within a shouting distance of 9/11, and it’s not like the other side hasn’t tried.
Drew Griffin
Well, I think the argument, it’s funny, it’s been made is that there’s this… that we have gone into the Middle East, and we kind of set it aflame, I think, is a term that […] used, set it aflame with really nothing to show as a result, which, you know, begs a question, well, it wasn’t really a stable area to begin with, right? It was already on fire.
David French
Well, one of the problems I have with that is, okay, so, 1991 where we finished the Gulf War, Clinton administration takes and puts together an enormous effort to try to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Yasser Arafat is invited to the White House more than almost any leader. There’s the famous handshake. American troops are being pulled out of Saudi Arabia. America is not occupying any country in the Middle East. You know, at one point, it feels like a permanent peace, a settlement agreement between Israel and Palestine is right there, like just right there. And then boom, the Twin Towers fall. We weren’t setting the Middle East aflame then. We were trying our best to reach a peace agreement. And we get hit harder in our home country than we had been hit ever unless you’re going to want to, I think—ever except for the British, you know, invading the United States in 1812 and burning the capital to the ground, but even then, there wasn’t a death toll, anything like that, what we had on 9/11. I mean, just walloped. And then we say we set the Middle East aflame?
Drew Griffin
And often there was a… That occurred because the actors that carried that out were allowed to kind of grow and to kind of […]
David French
They were given a sanctuary.
Drew Griffin
Because there was the same argument that’s kind of being made now. Look, that’s not really our business. Let people do their thing. Afghans be Afghans. Let Saudis be Saudis. Let Iraqis be Iraqis. Let’s, you know, let’s not get too… We can’t get too involved. We don’t want to be Russia in Afghanistan, like in the ’80s. Let’s just kind of let the Taliban be and do its thing, which is… Some of the argument that’s being made now, ironically, is we’re sidestepping the Afghan government that we’ve spent countless lives and billions of dollars to install, to then negotiate with their partners that—not partners, but their adversaries—
David French
Enemies.
Drew Griffin
—yeah, the Taliban, that while they have control of, let’s say, 60 percent of Afghanistan and a large area of the country, still, we have to see as being antithetical to everything we fought for, and still have the potential to engender the same kind of danger that attacked us on 9/11. And to allow them to… to view them as viable negotiating partners, and to somehow, I guess, just hope for the best? I’m assuming like, you know, just hope that this won’t go poorly like it’s gone in the past. Let’s cross our fingers and hope not to die, like—
David French
Well, I mean, as if we don’t have multiple examples of what happens from the recent—even more recent past than 9/11 of when you give Jihadists a victory. You know, when we pulled out of Iraq in 2011 entirely when really only a minimal force would have preserved Iraq’s territorial integrity from ISIS, it was a shot in the arm for Jihad. Jihadists are not… Certainly they’re Afghan insurgents who are just like, America go home. I don’t care. I don’t want you here; go home. And then they’ll go back to doing whatever they do. Yes, there are people like that. That’s not Jihadists. It’s not Jihadist. Osama bin Laden was plotting 9/11 from the middle of nowhere Afghanistan without any American threat to Afghanistan at all. At all. And so, you know, if you give these guys sanctuary—I don’t care if it’s in Afghanistan, I don’t care if it’s in northern Syria, I don’t care if it’s in Mali, or Nigeria—if you give Jihadists time, space, and sanctuary, they grow exponentially more dangerous.
Drew Griffin
So as we kind of close out our time together, there seems, in my mind, as we look back over the course of our conversation, to be this trend on the part of these new conservatives, this new Right, whatever you want to call it, that is just seeking kind of just to be left alone and left unhindered to just do their own thing and concentrate on America. They want to be left alone by the liberals. They want to be left alone by, I guess, the drag queens or whomever they’re after, and they want to be left alone internationally. And it seems, though, that out of the base of what I would call realpolitik, and even Christian realism that conservatism once kind of was the base of, is this weird, utopian, unrealistic vision that, well, we can just let nations do what they want to do and we’ll just leave them alone, and it won’t somehow come back to haunt us. They won’t… their interests won’t at some point impinge on our interests. And that somehow, you know, idealistically, we can just exercise whatever authority we need to here at home to instigate for the common good, and it’s never going to be turned against us. I mean, it seems like the realist position that you seem to articulate and it’s something you continually write with every piece that you put out, talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, that there is a perpetual struggle here, right, that self defense is a perpetual calling, and it’s something that we cannot… We don’t have the luxury of ignoring, I think, you know, classical liberalism and our founding, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring our burden and responsibility to be a global leader either.
David French
Yeah, I mean, we want to think of war like World War Two or World War One or the Civil War, where you fight, the other side surrenders, and you go home, it turns out that none of those wars are actually quite that simple. You know, Union troops occupied the South for a while and then when the Union troops left, the South got turned into a much worse place. Jim Crow descended—awful. World War One, we fight, we went home, but we laid the seeds for World War Two. World War Two, we learned lessons, but there was world disruptions that, you know, played out for decades after World War Two. But we have this paradigm, overly simplistic this is, when you go to war, you fight, you win the war, you come home. Well, that depends on the enemy, right? I mean, if you can defeat the enemy, and the enemy agrees he’s defeated, that paradigm works. If you fight the enemy, and the enemy does not agree that he’s defeated, and the enemy still seeks to hurt you, you cannot end a war just by saying, okay, we’ve done it long enough.
Drew Griffin
We’ve declared the peace treaty and let’s sign it.
David French
Yeah, we’ve done it long enough. Now, you can do that from your standpoint in a place like Vietnam where America just sort of washed its hands of it all and left, and North Vietnam had no designs on hurting Americans in America, so you can just then watch the place burn after you leave it because the North Vietnamese were sure not done fighting. Well, you can do that, but when you’re talking about Jihadists, it’s a different thing. They’re not the North Vietnamese. They’re not the North Koreans. In theory, we could wash our hands of South Korea and then just sort of see how it all plays out without the North Koreans then wanting to strike us. But with Jihadists, it’s a different thing entirely. And to then say, well, we’re done. It’s been 18 years. 18 years is long enough, you know. There’s all kinds of Jihadists who are going, hah, I have not yet begun to fight.
Drew Griffin
Sure, and some that are… that came of age or were born in this era that are coming to adulthood, that’s… Yeah, they’re just beginning to fight. It’s a fascinating conversation. Appreciate you, David. My guest has been David French, senior writer for National Review, senior fellow for National Review Institute, contributor to Time magazine. David, thank you for joining us.
David French
Thanks for having me.
