One evening in early September, the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., hosted a debate between Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, and David French, a constitutional lawyer and a staff writer for National Review—two writers who represent different possible futures for American conservatism, and who, to add an additional dash of energy, plainly seemed to dislike each other. Via a live stream, representatives of every ideological faction, from the dirtbag left to the chaste Catholic right, followed the conversation intently; in the overflowing auditorium, the moderator, the even-keeled Times columnist Ross Douthat, often looked pained. The fight between Ahmari and French had begun early this summer, when Ahmari published an essay called, with a belligerent tabloid flair, “Against David French-ism,” which swelled into a conflict that Douthat wrote was “a full-employment bill for conservative pundits.” French, an evangelical Christian who blends the language of civil liberties with scriptural admonitions, has an “earnest and insistently polite quality,” Ahmari wrote. “He believes that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side.” But to Ahmari, a recent convert to Catholicism, conservative Christian values were under existential threat—and he wanted his side to dispense with the niceties of liberalism. Cultural conservatives, he wrote, should embrace Donald Trump’s scorched-earth approach to politics and “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy.”
I had spent time with both Ahmari and French earlier in the summer, and still it was compelling to see them positioned opposite each other, because of how perfectly each embodied his cause. Ahmari, who is thirty-four, wore a sharp gray suit, a white shirt, and a skinny black tie; he had a serene expression and the puckish manner of the disruptor. French, who is fifty and keeps his head shaved and his beard thick, was wearing a blue blazer and khakis and had an angry, troubled look. Ahmari kept returning to the extremist complaint that Drag Queen Story Hours are being staged for children in public libraries. To him, these were a sign of “a five-alarm cultural fire.” French, who spent years as a litigator, replied that he had never understood what Ahmari wanted the government to do about Drag Queen Story Hour—which tenets of local control or free speech he would have the Trump Administration set aside. The same First Amendment principle that allows drag queens to read to children in public libraries had also allowed Christian groups to flourish, French said, by permitting them to organize in universities and other public spaces. “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!”
Afterward, the American Conservative reported a “near-universal consensus that French mopped the floor with Ahmari.” But even as that became apparent in the course of the ninety-minute debate, the basic emotional dynamic between the two did not change. French was sometimes worried, sometimes angry; Ahmari was impish and kept making it personal. What provided the event with its ambient uncertainty and anxiety was the possibility that Ahmari, because he was broadly allied with Trump, might have some purchase on the future of conservatism that French did not—that French could wipe the floor with Ahmari and it might not matter much at all. Jon Askonas, a professor at the Catholic University of America, wrote for the American Conservative that “all of the Millennials and Gen Zers I talked to instinctually agreed with Ahmari (even if they didn’t think he acquitted himself well).” Watching, I remembered something that Ahmari had said to me earlier in the summer: “What sparked all of this is a generation of young conservatives—and I’m not the only one; I’m part of an ecosystem—that is trying to kill off some of the older generation’s ideas.”
Donald Trump’s political ascent upended the convictions of many American conservatives, but perhaps few so profoundly as David French. For decades, his life had been intertwined with the progress of religious conservatism toward the center of American politics. French graduated from Harvard Law School, in 1994, taught at Cornell, and spent most of his career working as a religious-liberty attorney, representing small evangelical congregations and religious professors at secular colleges. He took a break from this work to serve as an Army officer in Iraq, and over time became a prominent conservative writer; in 2015, he began writing full time for National Review, producing often daily columns about religious liberty or foreign policy, which were unified by the considered affability of his approach as much as by his preoccupations. His wife, Nancy, works as a ghostwriter. One of her clients was Sarah Palin, with whom she wrote two books in the past decade. In their home, just outside of Nashville, the Frenches display a large mounted photograph of themselves, at the 2012 Republican Convention, carrying a sign that reads “Evangelicals for Romney/Ryan.” It was a losing campaign, one whose ethos the Republican Party has now turned sharply against. In the photo, they look expectant and happy.
For much of 2015 and 2016, French tried to persuade his fellow-evangelicals that there was nothing virtuous in Trump, who, he wrote, “combines old-school Democratic ideology, a bizarre form of hyper-violent isolationism, fringe conspiracy theories, and serial lies with an enthusiastic flock of online racists to create perhaps the most toxic electoral coalition since George Wallace.” This persuasion campaign didn’t work, but it did draw antagonists from the far right, some of whom found out that French had an adopted daughter from Ethiopia and sent him doctored images of his daughter in a gas chamber. As the Republican Convention approached in 2016, the Frenches moved to New York for the summer, renting a small Manhattan apartment. One evening in late May, French had dinner with the conservative impresario Bill Kristol, whom he had never met. Kristol was trying to recruit a last-ditch challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination. Mitt Romney and Jim Mattis had turned him down. Kristol’s eye settled on the earnest evangelical across the table. “David was obviously brilliant, and obviously decent, and a lot of things Trump wasn’t,” Kristol told me recently. A few days later, he asked French to consider running for President. The next morning, when he was about to leave on a trip to Israel, Kristol tweeted that Republican voters would soon have “a real alternative.” He meant David French.
To the Frenches, this development was unexpected in the extreme. “We were only in New York because I wanted my kids to see ‘Hamilton,’ ” Nancy French said. Quite quickly, the press found out that French was Kristol’s mystery candidate, and he had to decide whether he was in it for real. He took a call from Mitt Romney, who offered advice, while in the laundry room of the apartment building. He travelled to the Vermont home of an evangelical friend from law school, John Kingston, and a retinue of prominent Never Trump conservatives followed, so that, when French held a planning session, he was seated next to the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, who had helped lead the Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. The obvious talent surrounding French made the project seem suddenly plausible, not just a Bill Kristol fantasy. (Kristol himself, inconveniently, was still in Israel.) French told me, “We went from a room of five people to a room of fifteen people, people who had contacts in the evangelical world, or the Romney campaign—super impressive people.” French, who had never contemplated running for office, had to explain to the volunteers around him, to whom he had been pitched as the savior of a morally intact conservative movement, that there were photos on his Facebook page in which he was dressed as a Sith lord from “Star Wars.”
First, French had watched the moral movement, which he had spent much of his life helping to build, slip away, into the grasp of a debased and hate-filled billionaire, and now he was being asked to try to save that movement, and the Republican Party, from itself. Was he up for it? The question concentrated all of the sublime and desperate upheaval of 2016 into a single career decision. French found himself pitching back and forth, depending upon whom he had last talked to. “There was so much discontent that you felt, if you got up on the debate stage, or if you really nailed the ‘60 Minutes’ interview, anything could happen,” he told me. But he knew that he was far less likely to win the Presidency than he was to play what he called “the Nader role,” that of a spoiler, who would draw enough conservative support away from Trump to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t sure that he was comfortable with that. “At the time, if you had put me under a polygraph and said, ‘What is worse for the country, Bill and Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?,’ I would have said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” French told me.
As word of his rumination spread, French received a flood of messages from young evangelicals offering to work for his campaign. “That was the whole idea of the campaign—that it would be built on the backbone of idealistic young evangelicals who had a vision for racial reconciliation, for pluralism, and for partisan reconciliation,” French said. But those messages also punctured the bubble that had settled around John Kingston’s farm, and made him feel the weight of the enterprise. French said, “The line came to me from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ the Tennyson poem, you know—‘Cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them, cannons in front of them.’ And then there’s this line in there: ‘Someone had blundered.’ Someone was in charge of these idealistic, courageous young men, and had squandered their courage into this doomed mission. And I remember sitting there, and I recited the relevant portions of the poem, and I said, ‘I feel like the someone who would blunder is me.’ ” It was two weeks after the dinner with Kristol, and six weeks before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. French pulled himself out of the running.
On Election Day, French said to Nancy that at least one candidate they could not abide would lose—that was the silver lining. In truth, he expected it to be Trump. The result, when it came, upended the Frenches’ lives as completely as it did politics. Before 2016, the Frenches had just been part of the background hum of evangelical conservatism, because most everyone in the movement seemed to hold the same beliefs that they did. After the election, French’s criticisms of the President grew sharper. “We face a darkening political future, potentially greater loss of life, and a degree of polarization that makes 2016 look like a time of unity,” he wrote after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He came to represent the stubborn part of conservatism, the remnant that refused to fall into line behind Trump. After all, he was the one they’d tried to run for President. It made him a kind of target. “I feel like we said exactly the same things we’d always been saying,” Nancy French said, “and eighty million people around us changed.”
In late May, Sohrab Ahmari’s “Against David French-ism” appeared on the Web site of First Things, a conservative religious journal. What set him off, over Memorial Day weekend—dramatically altering his public profile and subtly reframing the way that many conservatives saw the choices facing their movement—was the news that a Drag Queen Story Hour would be held at a public library in Sacramento. “This is demonic,” Ahmari wrote on Twitter. “To hell with liberal order. Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.” Then he began to theorize the distance between his response and that of other conservatives: “There is no polite, David French-ian third way through the cultural civil war.” The full essay, which appeared forty-eight hours later, was more generous and interesting than the tweets, while retaining the same bristling spirit. Ahmari argued that the conservative movement needed to break with what he took as French’s politics, a conservatism arranged around individual liberty, pluralism, and “politeness.” “The overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us,” Ahmari wrote, “and I think that French-ian model bears some of the blame.”
For several weeks, it seemed that every major figure within the conservative movement, and also many outside of it, weighed in on the debate. Most established intellectuals were alarmed by Ahmari’s arguments, and took French’s side. The Times columnist Bret Stephens, who had worked with Ahmari at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, took note of Ahmari’s call for “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” “That’s the voice of a would-be theocrat speaking,” Stephens wrote, “even if he hasn’t yet mustered the courage to acknowledge the conviction.” But there were plenty who defended Ahmari, beyond his own clique of Catholic conservatives, including Ben Domenech, the editor of the Federalist and Meghan McCain’s husband, and Albert Mohler, the worldly president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Ahmari was right to speak of a moral emergency, Mohler said, on his podcast. “The catastrophe is the massive restructuring of the entire moral universe of modern America that makes drag-queen story time plausible and then actual and then celebrated.” If the public libraries in Sacramento did not alarm you as a conservative, he went on, “What would it take for you to recognize a cultural crisis?”
On a Thursday evening in August, I went to visit Ahmari for dinner and drinks. One of the surprises of meeting him is that his experience does not match his arguments; until recently, he was a familiar enough figure, a cosmopolitan conservative. Born to a liberal family in the Tehran of the mullahs, Ahmari immigrated to Logan, Utah, with his mother when he was thirteen. He earned a law degree from Northeastern and then spent nearly three years living in London, where he worked as an editorial writer, and later a columnist, for the Wall Street Journal, making his mark, in part, by advocating a hawkish approach to Iranian theocrats. As the populist swell of 2016 took shape, Ahmari worried over it, opposing Brexit, amplifying the concern that “a distinct Putinophilia marks the wider Trumpian orbit,” and penning an essay for Commentary titled “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.”
After Trump’s election, Ahmari told me, his views were changing in two dimensions. First, he began to see the liberal reaction to the populist surge as fundamentally anti-democratic. The progressive activism to keep Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court to him seemed like clear evidence that Trump’s opponents were trying to cancel the effects of the 2016 election. The second change, more foundational, stemmed from his conversion to Catholicism, in December, 2016, which Ahmari documented in a memoir published this January, “From Fire, by Water,” and which sharpened his sense that the individual autonomy of a liberal free-market society was only worth it to the extent that it contributed to a collective social good. “In many ways, I am the perfect liberal subject,” Ahmari told me. “I make my way from Iran to a trailer court in Utah to having senior roles in American opinion writing. I’m bilingual. I did this stint in London. And yet even for me the liberal order entails far too much uncertainty.” Catholicism wasn’t the source of his conversion to populism, but it helped supply a language for it. “For me, the economic questions were also moralized,” he said.
Today, Ahmari and his wife, Ting, a Chinese-American architect, have a two-year-old son and a newborn daughter; they live in a white brick apartment building in the East Fifties—upstairs, a little ironically, from a drag bar called Lips. We had Persian takeout with his wife and son, and headed downstairs for a drink at an Italian restaurant. Ahmari smokes (“my old Middle Eastern vice”); when he asked the bartender for “my usual,” she knew precisely the bourbon drink to bring him. Ahmari settled into a seat at the L-shaped bar and began to talk about the President. “There’s so much that still makes my skin crawl—any given tweet on any given day,” he said. “I’m an immigrant, my wife’s an immigrant—I would never want the U.S. to absolutely pull up the drawbridge.” At the same time, Ahmari said, “Maybe it took a Queens vulgarian to clear some of the deadwood of the past away.” He pointed out that, even before his conversion, a theme of his writing had been an exasperation with the baby boomers—with the politics of personal entitlement and individual fulfillment on the left and the right, with Clinton and with Trump. “You can draw some connections to my own family,” Ahmari told me. “My parents were almost to-the-letter bohemians living in Iran. They thought we had inherited a reformist technocratic world, and they were going to rebel against it by taking an axe to tradition. That was the great miscalculation of the boomers.”
When it came to the G.O.P., he said, conservatives simply could not tolerate a party that was so narrowly devoted to the free market. Trump had proved that voters did not want that, and as a social conservative Ahmari thought that efficient markets often tended to pry people away from their families and communities. He seemed to see Trump as having made a halfway break with the conservatism of the recent past, which Ahmari wanted to complete. Ahmari is nimble in conversation; I also thought I could recognize some phrases that he’d worked on over time and enjoyed repeating. He said, “It’s, like, this Romney-ism 3.0, that says that half of the country are worthless takers? Enough of it. It has no purchase. Our voters are socially conservative but economically liberal.” A considered pause. “I don’t mean classically liberals. I mean they want more social protection against capital, against transnational forces. Why are we going back to Bill Kristol again?”
Nobody yet has a great name for the branch of conservatism to which Ahmari belongs, but the leading candidate is “post-fusionist,” which refers to the long “fusion” that has defined conservatism since the Reagan era, between social traditionalists and economic free-marketers. A version of Ahmari’s argument has found a more nativist expression in the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Another version has been staked out by the brilliant young Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who is working to turn the Republican Party against both the tech industry and the “cosmopolitanism”—he uses Martha Nussbaum’s definition—of contemporary liberals. But the post-fusionists first consolidated around an open letter signed by fifteen mostly Catholic intellectuals, in March, titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” (A few, such as the Notre Dame philosopher Patrick Deneen, whose book Barack Obama praised in 2018 for offering “cogent insights into the loss of meaning that many in the West feel,” are modestly well known.) In the letter, the group offered a critique of the whole modern history of conservatism. The movement had paid “lip service” to traditional values, they wrote, but it had “failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”
Ahmari had convened that group—the post-fusionist caucus—with his friend Matthew Schmitz, a young editor at First Things and another Catholic convert, who had grown up in Nebraska. Schmitz told me, “It’s not just that a certain consensus is dead. The social, economic, and cultural realities that sustained that consensus are dead. It’s no longer the case that America is made up of white, rural, smallholder farmers and small-businessmen. Those constituencies have never been smaller. If you look at the politics of conservative voters I’m not sure how closely they line up with that. I suspect they wouldn’t put a big stress on laissez-faire. They would share patriotism, the importance of family, the importance of faith, not the very specific bourgeois individual ethic.” Like Ahmari, Schmitz often spoke about the conservatism that he was against as if it were best represented by French, or by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, or by the gauzy, comparatively pluralistic evangelicalism of George W. Bush. But it seemed to me that might even undersell the depth of the historical break the group was suggesting. Fusionism wasn’t originally Romney’s project, or Bush’s. It was Reagan’s, and it had defined the Party ever since. Reagan’s country was gone, Schmitz was saying, even if he hadn’t quite brought himself to name it that way. Perhaps his politics ought to be, too.
Ahmari and Schmitz’s faction has been preoccupied by what a working-class conservative politics might look like if it set aside the lodestar of individualism. Ahmari told me that he has warmed to the government having a more expansive role in providing health care, and he recently appeared on Fox News to argue in favor of an assault-weapons ban. But his own interest is rooted much more in moral grievances than economic ones. His critique of French was grounded in his certainty that Drag Queen Story Hour was a real crime, and that traditional morality would soon no longer be tolerated in the public square. This image of conservatism on the verge of existential defeat seemed a bit overheated to me, in a country where Donald Trump is the President and John Roberts is the swing vote on the Supreme Court. Over drinks, I asked Ahmari whether conservatives were really losing, or whether it just seemed that way on Twitter and in universities. “Twitter and universities are no small beer,” Ahmari said quickly. When I asked what he wanted conservatives to do about Drag Queen Story Hour, he said he’d like to see Senators Hawley, Rubio, and Cruz hold a hearing about the politicization of libraries and “ask a librarian from Sacramento to trek up to Washington, just like the left does. Then maybe in that clash you would have won for yourself the neutral space in which libraries aren’t a place in which children interact with drag queens.” When social conservatives say they want the government to restrict the influence of tech companies, Ahmari told me, the David Frenches of the world say, “ ‘Well, that tramples on free-market principles.’ If you want to protect children in local libraries, they say, ‘How will you protect local controls?’ ” To decline to project political power into these realms was to yield everything to the vagaries of culture. And how, he asked, are evangelical conservatives going to change the culture? “They’re going to make third-rate evangelical movies to compete with HBO.”
If conservatives disregarded individual liberties in order to press a momentary political advantage, I asked, weren’t they worried that liberals would soon do the same thing? “They say you’re opening Pandora’s box, but the box is open,” Ahmari said. “You wield a little power and maybe there’s a sense that the balance of forces is different than the libertine left thinks it is.” Earlier that evening, Ahmari had told a story about a dinner party he attended in London, in 2015, at the home of a prominent American journalist. Poland had just elected a far-right Catholic government, and several Polish liberals were at the table. Brexit was in the air, Trump’s campaign was gathering momentum, and the talk was of how much was turning, of how something needed to be done. Ahmari told me that he didn’t say much then, just raised a mild objection that didn’t disrupt the evening’s tone. But he found it hard to ignore the clarity of the choice that these elections were presenting voters, or the equal clarity of their verdict. Were they for liberalism? No, they were against it. Ahmari said, “I thought, Shouldn’t people get what they vote for?”
A few days after meeting Ahmari, I went to see David and Nancy French at their home, in a quiet development in Franklin, Tennessee. It was evening by the time I arrived, cool for midsummer, and I could hear some crickets. We had a Southern dinner (barbecue, cornbread) and then drinks. As we spoke, two of the Frenches’ three children drifted in and out of the room: a son who was headed to the University of Tennessee and a daughter who had just returned from summer camp. “It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as David French,” Ahmari had written. I found it hard to shake the feeling that, in their planned surgery on the conservative movement, the post-fusionists risked excising the human part.
“What makes our politics so toxic is both sides think they’re losing,” French said, once we’d eaten dinner and his son and his son’s girlfriend had come through to report on the “Bachelor” finale. In French’s written reply to Ahmari’s essay, he had pointed out that, in his long career as a religious-liberty lawyer, he had won most of his cases. “Pastor French,” Ahmari called him, suggesting that French was too pious to recognize that politics, as Ahmari put it, was about “war and enmity.” French’s position was that the pro-Trump faction refused to see how often the structures of a liberal society wound up favoring them. “They talk about Kavanaugh as if it was this terrible defeat, but we won that one!” French told me. “Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court.” If Trump won a second term, then the efforts in red states to ban abortion, either in effect or outright, would be realized. French said, “There’s this idea that victory is the natural state of affairs and defeat is the intolerable intrusion. What I’ve been trying to tell people is that none of this stuff is fixed. There is not necessarily an arc to history, and you don’t have to surrender first principles to fight over stuff that you care about. The day is not lost in any way, shape, or form. And, oh, by the way, you can’t define victory as the exclusion of your enemies from the public square. There are going to be Drag Queen Story Hours. They’re going to happen. And, by the way, the fact that a person can get a room in a library and hold a Drag Queen Story Hour and get people to come? That’s one of the blessings of liberty.”
To French, the post-fusionist ideology had a distinctly post-hoc quality: it seemed less persuasive as a new vision of conservatism than as an effort to reconcile conservatism with Trump. “People want to feel as if they’re part of a virtuous movement,” he said. “That was one of the fallacies of the Trump vote—the idea that, well, I can totally vote for the lesser of two evils. But, once you vote for him, you sort of start to feel tied to him, and you don’t want to feel part of something that isn’t great. What Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson and Sohrab and the First Things crew are saying is, ‘Here is a virtuous version of the thing.’ ” He went on, “Some of the policies I actually agree with—expanded family leave, more family-friendly tax policies. But all that is small stuff. They want to have a movement-shifting, culture-shifting conversation, but it’s not a culture-shifting kind of policy.” The exception French saw—the policy he thought could begin to reorder American society—was Hawley’s bill to restrict the ability of tech giants to censor social media. “Hawley’s actually swinging for the fences,” he said. “Hawley is actually putting together something to say ‘We shall use the power of government, to the maximum extent possible, to blunt the power of this malignant force in our culture.’ And that’s pretty consequential. Not just because of the legislative interference in a private corporation but because it’s incompatible with bedrock First Amendment precedents.” French said that, when he opposed it, “The blowback I got from the right was ‘It’s just a different time. Don’t bother me with this constitutional stuff. We’ve got the future of the Republic at stake, in the hands of these tech companies.’ ”
We were out on the front porch by now, drinking bourbon. The Frenches’ house is set on a rise above the street; we watched a police car pass below, like a gondola down a canal. French was quiet for a moment. “That’s another one of the side effects of all this—these stepped-up patrols,” he said. French’s name had been on the target list of Cesar Sayoc, the South Floridian who had mailed pipe bombs to prominent critics of the President. Since the dustup with Ahmari, the local police department had kept watch on his house. The threat of violence was fairly new, but French’s experience of being an evangelical Christian had long been that it put you in a minority position. He had been one of three members of his class at Harvard Law School who started a pro-life club; the churches he represented were seeking protection from local zoning boards and city governments.
The evangelical affinity for the President has been depressing to French, but it isn’t mysterious. Trump views religious conservatives as his base, and he tries to deliver what he imagines they want, from reliable Supreme Court Justices to bans on transgender soldiers. But French thought there was another element to the relationship between Trump and evangelicals, a consequence of the ways that Christian conservatives have separated their worship from their politics. “I’ve been going to evangelical churches my whole life, often several times a week, and do you know how many times I’ve heard any kind of political issue mentioned from the pulpit? It’s less than ten,” he told me. The work of organizing evangelicals has been done by national organizations—by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, by the Falwells—who had fallen in behind Trump, and whom the pastors now felt powerless to challenge. “If you went to a suburban Southern Baptist congregation, many of the congregants would be surprised at what their pastor says about Donald Trump in private,” French said. He was speaking as a person to whom pastors said frank things about Donald Trump in private. “Like, genuinely surprised.”
The story he was telling was of the fraying of the infrastructure of Reagan’s coalition—all of those voters, in all of those churches, who, it seemed to French, had followed a few charlatans to Trump’s side. Ahmari looked across the American political landscape and saw strength everywhere: a rising millennial left that was rapidly transforming the public sphere; conservative élites whose convictions about liberty had what seemed to him a stranglehold on their party; a blunt force in Trumpism that could be turned to better use. Shouldn’t the people get what they want? Ahmari had asked. But for French the populist preference seemed far more contingent—more dependent upon political weakness—everywhere, most of all in the Republican establishment that he was supposed to personify. There had been no evangelical charge of the light brigade in 2016, no meaningful Christian-conservative opposition to Trump. The background consensus to conservatism—the evangelical bulwark—was gone. The argument over the future of the movement after Trump belonged less to organized factions than to individuals. There was no David French-ism. There was just David French.
French told me that, when he decided against running for President, he made the decision with the clarity of a religious experience. “It was almost like somebody grabbing you by the collar and shaking your shoulders and saying, ‘What are you thinking? You have no money. You have no name or recognition. This is the Presidency of the United States.’ ” For a long time, that clarity held. But lately, “as polarization increases, as the viciousness of the moment has taken hold”—perhaps, though he didn’t say it, as fewer and fewer Republicans had seemed willing to defend his brand of conservatism—he’d been feeling less sure that he had made the right decision. If Sohrab Ahmari-ism represented some part of the Republican Party’s future, the background hum to come, then it was easier to see his own decision not to run, to not make the case for his politics more publicly, as a pivot. “Part of me thinks, If it was a one-in-a-million shot, was that worth it? Was that what I should have done?” He thought about it a little bit more. “It’s a very small part of me,” French said, and grinned. “Up until recently I had no regrets.”
A previous version of the story misattributed Jon Askonas’s remarks.
