The Future of Catholic Intellectualism

Sohrab Ahmari is probably not the name at forefront of most of our minds when we consider the phrase “Catholicism intellectualism”, but these days, he probably isn’t far from it. Iranian born and American trained, he’s a rather famous convert to the Faith from Americanized Islam—the sort of convert whose zeal tends not to fade. And by all outward appearances, it hasn’t; if anything, it’s gotten stronger. His now-famous dispute with David French two years ago introduced into to the vision of public armchair intelligentsia the deep rift on the right that’s been there all along. And to Ahmari’s credit, he didn’t shy away from his consistency to the Faith in the process.

“Against David Frenchism” is worth considering a bit more here, lest we need our memory jogged. 2019, after all, took place before the Regime decided to destroy the country with hysterical presumptions of superflus, race riots, extremely questionable election decisions, and now, threats of mandatory vaccinations on the eve of an economic disaster that’s expected to make 2008 look like a joke. The normalization of anarcho-tyranny, the flagrantly uneven dispensation of justice according to political affiliations and ethnic backgrounds, and the fact that there is seemingly no one at the federal level that wants to change any of this has left many of us without a lot of hope for the country.

More than this, 2020’s events made the arguments against “Frenchist” style conservatism sound quaint in retrospect. Admittedly, conservatism is itself a term whose definition has lapsed into the absurd, in part due to neocons like French himself, whose self-branding is such an obvious attempt to stick out from his liberal peers that it would come off as comical, if it wasn’t such a psyop. The efforts of French, and people like him, who cling to the term conservatism while espousing a form of libertarian hyper-liberalism—inheritors of the Buckleyite mantle—are almost singularly responsible for the utter hamstringing and hollowing-out of the respectable right in this country.

It’s thanks to them, as Ahmari’s infamous 2019 polemic more or less points out, that open and firm condemnation of the sexual revolution is impossible for intellectuals that want to remain in public. In 2019, he was referring to drag queen story hour and French’s tacit admittance that such behavior is socially acceptable. In 2021, now that we’re through the looking glass, we have Caitlyn Jenner running for Governor of California as a republican, proclaiming American values. A man in a dress is calling himself American—and the conservative establishment, albeit with some mild difficulty, has found itself embracing him. Perhaps our European friends, so accustomed to pointing out American vulgarity, will find this fitting. No American should.

Whether he wins or not is almost secondary to the message being pushed: for all political purposes, transgenderism is no fringe ideology to which the mentally ill and sex depraved adhere; it’s the revolutionary vanguard legitimized by the Regime. And whether they’re actually mentally ill or not doesn’t matter here, either. If you don’t play along, you’re not part of polite society. “Frenchism” is about preserving polite society at all costs, even if it comes at the expense of what is true, good, or beautiful. The fact that polite society crumbles when these transcendentals are dispensed with may not occur to the highfalutin coastal elites embodied by the likes of the good Mister French, but it most certainly occurs to anyone who’s had to spend an hour in the company of the mentally deranged.

Nothing being said here is terribly new, of course. “Conservatism is liberalism in slow motion” was a meme half a decade ago, when the 2016 election seemed like an entertaining roller coaster and when Donald Trump seemed capable of wrecking this sort of rhetoric. How times changed.

But this is all worth dwelling on once more because, ultimately, times haven’t changed—not that much, and not yet, at least. Not when it comes to conservatism. Trump’s election prompted a few intellectuals to shuffle their positions, and his bid for reelection, although a failure, prompted former-Never Trumpers to tap into the grift by embracing his platform. The most notable change on the right has been more or less unrelated to the now-disgraced orange man: the rising consciousness of Catholic thought. This has been happening both in fringe e-reactionary circles populated by larpers, zoomers, and jaded armchair enthusiasts, but it’s also been happening to the respectable conservative movement at large.

The looming shadow of common good constitutionalism, a general organizing principle of jurisprudence brought to the forefront of e-debate last year by Adrian Vermeule, has gone from prompting counter-signals in journals to causing conservative intellectuals to spend millions of dollars on a free market think tank. The fact they’d react so drastically, particularly after this past year of debate over the common good, tells you all you need to know about what they believe to be Catholic integralism given a legal face. Scary! Anti-American! Against the Constitution! It tips their hand.

There would seem to be, then, a lot of reason to be optimistic. The boulder of Catholic intellectualism, somewhat crippled in the wake of the last world war, is moving again and doing so quite publicly. There stands in the way, however, one very large, very difficult challenge: the sort of change they seek to implement will not go unpunished by either the conservative establishment, nor the forces that made it this way. Certainly, they expect this. They aren’t stupid people. But whether they’re fully aware of the scope of the problem is hard to tell, as efforts to tip-toe around the various elephants in the room can come across either as a man eager to avoid stepping on landmines just as easily as it can come across as a man eager not to break what appear to be fragile and precious objects.

Perhaps these seem to be two sides of the same coin, but consider this: the understanding of ethnicity and religion, with respect to their relationship to the True Faith, is different now than it was a century ago. Words from within the Church, such as ecumenism, as well as words from outside of it, such as bigotry or racism, have changed the average Catholic’s relationship with those of other creeds or faiths around him. The man who recognizes the hostilities of the world against the Church, but seeks nonetheless to make use of reason for the purposes of evangelization, will understandably come across as a man inching around landmines. Some he triggers intentionally, others he tries to avoid.

The man who sees the differences of different creeds, and seeks a vague sense of unending dialogue rather than the finality of a decision, will inch around in the same manner. Rather than out of self-preservation, however, his care is the sakes of these objects: the very things the first man sought not to get blown up by. Where one sees immediate danger, the other sees a means of making friends with the people who laid the room out the first place.

Catholic Doctrine and the Elephant in the Room

Let’s return to Ahmari for a minute. A few weeks ago, on the release of The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari published a Saturday essay to the Wall Street Journal entitled “What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath.” It’s a worthwhile read, and at least on a fundamental level, it’s not something that any Catholic should necessarily disagree with. He begins the piece, after all, disapprovingly noting the steady dismantling of American prohibitions on certain work-related business functions on Sundays—the lift of the trading ban in North Dakota in 2019 being a useful example. “The Sabbath doesn’t fit into the rhythm of our lives,” he writes, having mentioned that the trend toward gig economies and the pandemic hysteria last year “have further blurred the line” between work and rest.

Defense of the Lord’s Day is something woefully under represented in practical Catholic thought. Like the subjects of Hell and eternal damnation, contraception, and the uniqueness of the Church, general trends in homilies outside of openly traditionalist churches have shied away from exhortations to rest on Sundays. Most lukewarm Catholics are at least dimly aware of a Sunday obligation—although how much this awareness has survived since it was institutionally lifted last year is hard to say—but few admit awareness of Sunday’s inheritance as the day of rest commanded to us for safekeeping in the Decalogue. How often have you heard Catholics, even ones who by all outward appearances are great Catholics in perfect standing, proclaim their love of hitting up a restaurant after Mass, or mention the convenience of getting grocery shopping done on the way home? If the mere suggestion is drafted that perhaps Sunday isn’t the best day to do these things, they recoil as if struck. Who are you to tell me what my Sundays are for?

It is against this impulse that Ahmari’s piece is positioned, and as I mentioned, it’s a noble endeavor. But lest we forget, it is not specifically to Catholics that he makes this appeal—this was published in the Wall Street Journal, after all, rather than, say, The Lamp or First Things. Broader spread, more general audience—already we could assume that his angle isn’t really about identifying the spiritual rot at the heart of Americanist ideology (usually called, rather blandly, “capitalism” or, more vaguely, “work ethic”), so much as critiquing elements of American life causally proceeding from it. Overwork, stress, materialism, etc.: these, arguably, can trace their proliferation back to ignoring the day of rest.

It is with all this in mind, presumably, that he launches into his third paragraph, and indeed, the rest the piece: a short detail of the life and thought of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel. It is more fitting than at first appearances that it requires Jewishness to communicate the errors of American modernity.

Ahmari, a Catholic convert from Islam, is no doubt aware of the defenses of the Third Commandment to be found in the libraries of Catholic doctrine. In an age of computer literacy, simple search results can nab hundreds of pages with a few flicks of fingers. And if we permit ourselves to relax our purity spiral a bit, the protestants—and even American protestants—of the last few centuries have offered up plenty of defenses, themselves. He did cite a few in passing. But that he chose to use a Jew as the centerpiece, and in the process, mention the Sabbath rather than the Lord’s Day, can only be taken as an explicit choice. It is fortunate, although not without awkwardness, that the points he sought to make are communicated despite the theological differences. The Sabbath, after all, is not synonymous with the Lord’s Day. They don’t even fall on the same day of the week. But that need not be dwelt on when the point of the piece is about an ambiguous need for a day of rest, divorced from the transcendental commands of God or the fulfillment of any covenants.

Ahmari’s not stupid. You use the best means of communication for the audience you’re looking to speak to. St. Paul teaches us this. But are the Jews Ahmari’s primary audience here, or more generally, is it simply Americans? If it’s to Jews that he writes, why publish this in the Wall Street Journal and make such unspecific appeals to Jewish thought, despite using one of their guys to make his point? But if it’s to Americans more generally, why use a member of the 2%—and a devoutly religious one, at that—to communicate what should already be found in their own Christian teachings? If we admit that it’s the second, then we can also admit the dire status of Christian belief in America.

This is probably the main takeaway from Ahmari’s piece. The day of rest is important, certainly, but its disappearance from the public sphere did not simply coincide with a decline in religious belief; rather, it was fueled by it and subsequently helped to fuel it. But the nebulous decline in religious belief, a reversion to a vague, anti-mystical materialism, is not something that necessarily came out of nowhere. There’s truth to be found in the studies of the breakdown in Western thought since the end of the Middle Ages, but there’s something more practical of concern here, as well—and it’s marked, as an example, by Ahmari’s choice in trying to communicate the need for the day of rest.

If we lived in a Protestant culture, we could use Protestant signaling. A Shia culture, Shia signaling. A Catholic one, Catholic. But we’ve been led to believe we live in a secular culture, and what experience tells us it that secular signaling doesn’t work. Secularism is not an ethnicity; it does not speak to a way of life, a shared set of values, or general sense of looking at the world. Secularism denotes, rather, an absence of something, a rejection of past traditions or values or understandings of God and reality. This makes it innately revolutionary, and yet, taken as the status quo, those who consider themselves members of some nebulous secular tribe—perhaps calling themselves “individualists”, or some such other meaningless word—do not have to be exteriorly revolutionary in their actions or mannerisms. Instead, their interior dispositions become aligned against certain kinds of notions; “secularism” is an ideology that programs its self-identified adherents into rejecting the past. Go ahead an extrapolate that further, and take into consideration what the traditions of Western Europe actually are, what they’re founded on, what ethnicity means to those various peoples of Western history. What is secularism really rejecting?

Ahmari’s piece is a good illustration of accidentally—or perhaps not—saying out loud what many have been chased out of the public eye for admitting. America’s secular culture, the secularism of the white liberal elite, bares an ethnic stamp even when the majority of its adherents lack the markings of that ethnic group. It’s not without irony that he mentions how the good Rabbi Herschel’s piety,

nurtured in Hasidic soil and cultivated by German philosophy, clashed with the spirit of American Judaism. With few exceptions, his new students struck him as ill-read, shallow, inattentive to interior things. They, in turn, seem to have found him irascible and hard to understand, a figure straight out of central casting for Eccentric Old World Academic. The students’ shortcomings mirrored the spiritual state of the U.S. as a whole: its relentlessly practical sensibility, its impatience with the contemplative life.¹

The piety he speaks of, remember, is the rabbinical piety of Talmudic Judaism, an ethnicity whose intellectual rigor is marked by complex legalisms, one formed almost entirely around millennia of self-defense, and which came into existence rather uniquely in the first century, AD. Ahmari depicts the conflict between Herschel and his American students as representative of a greater conflict between the faithful and the secularized moderns, but there’s more to it than that. Remember that Ahmari’s primary audience here isn’t per se Jews, and yet he used a Jewish struggle as a stand-in for the greater American consensus.

Secularism and Judaism share a common rejection of the Church at their foundations. But where secularism developed, at least ostensibly, as a pragmatic reaction to the fracturing of Europe across religious lines in the fifteenth century, and the subsequent rise of the modern state, Judaism developed around an ethnic core of blood, language, and belief. Secularism is a revolt against what is true, a collapse of public professions of Faith and virtue, and an inversion of public life into the subjectivism of hyper-privatized opinion. It’s a general framework founded on revolution. Judaism, with its foundation in the rejection of its predecessor’s theology, can be said to have more than a few similarities—but where secularism has no substance to keep it going, and nothing to bring together the people who consider themselves its adherents, Judaism has rich traditions of religious rituals, two thousand years of history, and the study of a holy book and its extensive commentary.

With this in mind, consider that America’s contemporary secularism is rather fittingly understood the best by its elite. Quickly perusing statistics about the most Jewish-concentrated cities in the world, by population, and recognizing the sort of sway various lobbies have over Congress, or what sort of sectors of public life happen to be very happily dominated by the self-professed tribe, orthodox or otherwise, should help make this statement sound less controversial. Culture follows its elites, and although America’s culture has traditionally been fragmented and varied, even it cannot escape this rule.

Ahmari could have called his essay “What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Lord’s Day,” or, if he chose more Protestant angles, kept the title and positioned an American preacher at the center of his story. He chose not to, and we can all presume why. Unlike Judaism, these things don’t elicit an exotic flair. But it’s more than exoticism; there’s a de facto recognition, at least among the coastal elite, that Jewishness is a mark of superior cultural standing. Different arguments can be made as to why this is the case, but it’s nonetheless self-evident to even casual observers in New York, LA, or DC. To belong to the tribe is considered a distinguishing mark of social standing in your favor, to say nothing of the doors you find suddenly much easier to open. To marry into it is the next best thing. By choosing this as his subject, Ahmari participated in the elite’s culture, paid it a certain necessary acknowledgment, and managed still to make a point that applied to America in general. He didn’t have to do that, but it certainly made things easier.

Conservative Purges

Self-styled conservatism comes with quite a bit of baggage, and most of it’s filled with dirty laundry. Coastal elite types tend to be only dimly aware of the extent of the baggage, shaped as they usually are in bubbles of secular humanist ideology that bend toward liberalism. Those that break into the bubble with their religious backgrounds in tact, if they had any, are far more the exception than the rule—and those who find the Faith after spending their whole lives inside are rarer still.

It’s a safe bet to consider this tide of Catholic thought to run against the grain of the conservative establishment. Those beltway-types who have embraced the Faith and began writing in defense of things like the common good have already drawn the ire of the remaining Reagan-Buckleyite holdouts that run the conservative establishment. That establishment, of course, is not merely a political one; Paul Gottfried put it best when he wrote that

It belongs to a larger media empire and plays by its rules and pursues the same interests as its slightly more leftist dialogue-partners. The conservative movement works to be “inclusive,” but not by including those on its right in its televised discussion but by hosting the Left. Conservative groupies never seem to notice this tilt.²

There has not been a legitimate right-leaning press outlet in the country for decades, and as has been laid out by others in extensive detail, this was quite intentional. The conservative media is a hostile media, despite what the presence of people like Tucker Carlson imply. Even in the cases where legacy conservative media hosts and promotes ideas you’re sympathetic to, you cannot afford to presume then that they’re your friends or that they’re even fighting on the same side that you are. This is important to consider the next time someone outside of legacy media—a podcaster, a blogger, an independent journalist—expresses admiration or congeniality toward those hooked into establishment outlets.

It would be nice to consider establishment conservatism as a collection of well-meaning if delusional trendsetters who happen to be sporadically populated by bad actors. But this isn’t what experience tells us it is. Establishment conservatism consists of the people who fall in line. If you don’t fall in line, you get your name dragged through the mud and smeared as racist, anti-Semitic, and probably sexist and bigoted, too. More recently has the conservative movement been eager to embrace buzzwords like homo- and transphobic. Of all these, however, anti-Semitic is, of course, the worst; establishment conservatism gets defined as liberalism in slow motion, but it’s far better understood by its intimacy with the Israel lobby. Any meaningful distinctions to be found at the highest levels of the movement gradually disappeared over the decades until this element of neoconservatism remained.

The common good types and the integralist types have been courting this same establishment now even as they prod it with critique. Perhaps it’s understandable; they’re looking to spread a dialogue that’s directly challenging the established order, and it’s more sensible to approach those ostensibly friendly to your worldview—in this case, conservatives—than people whose worldviews are so twisted as to openly advocate for infanticide. Some involved in these circles probably don’t know about the old conservative purges. Many probably do, but tacitly agree with them—not all purges are necessarily bad. As Gottfried writes, later in the same essay,

Not all purges are necessarily disastrous; and one can think of some, like driving quacks out of the medical profession or Communist agents out of government security posts after the Second World War, which some of us would applaud. But the purges discussed have been less constructive. For decades the movement’s power brokers have been blacklisting original and independent minds; and what has been lost from the public debate is a generation of serious critical thinkers on what is now the non-aligned Right.³

There’s no arguing that conversations over the place of the common good in law and politics are, at least as contemporary discourse goes, original and coming from independent minds. That the debate has continued for more than a year shows that there’s a growing undercurrent of interest in these matters; old responses couched in false notions of liberty or individualism no longer carry the conversation-ending weight that they did last decade.

But Catholic intellectuals, no matter where they are positioned, must be prepared for this to happen to them. They must be prepared either for an attempted purge by their ostensible allies in the conservative movement, or they must be prepared to hamstring the sort of integralism they endorse in order to stay within the presumed relevancy of polite conservative dialogue.

Hopefully they’ve gotten a feel for what’s coming for them, already. Last weekend, a completely unreported story involved an alleged book glitch in Amazon’s software that resulted in about a dozen books or so to be impossible to find with the search function—Ahmari’s new The Unbroken Thread among them. They weren’t even to be found on their author’s pages. The books hadn’t been taken down from Amazon, of course; you just couldn’t find them if you wanted to—at least, not without a direct link. This has, of course, since been rectified, but the fact it happened at all should be remembered.

As was hopefully made clear above, Ahmari’s not a particularly spicy thinker. You’d be hard pressed to find anything in his work that could even be disingenuously contorted into sounding racist or xenophobic, much less anti-Semitic. Like some on the right, his position on so-called trans rights could be construed as controversial, but that’s about it—and that has yet to become the sort of intellectual contraband on the same level as critically attacking the Civil Rights Act. Just ask Christopher Caldwell.

On the topic of anti-Semitism, consider our earlier musings about the presence of a Jewish elite in America. You won’t find such a comment made by a Conservative, Inc. publication, though amusingly, it might slip through in the pages of Haaretz. The concerted effort on the right to paint all anti-Semitism as fundamentally leftist, despite the absurdity of the claim, is simply a mirror of the phenomenon that has existed on the left since the era of open revolution a hundred or more years ago. And this is worth noting despite the fact that nothing written here is anti-Jewish in the first place, much less hateful. So tight is the stranglehold on American thought that merely putting the word “Jewish” and “elite” in the same sentence means that the writer must be peddling in conspiracy theories. And conspiracy theories, we’re told often enough, get people killed.

In political discourse today, this is one of the primary shibboleths: those willing to recognize this prohibition on honest discourse over ethnicity, theology, and sovereignty, and those who aren’t. Liberalism has been used as a cover for those who aren’t willing to do so, as it equips them with the language necessary to erase differences in ideologies, pretend group preferences aren’t significant guiding factors in individual behavior, and provides them with a complete toolbox of insults to wield against everyone else.

Rejecting liberalism means rejecting the theories of modern thought that sustain it, true, but it must also mean rejecting these categories as well. For a Catholic, once the comfortable, sterilized veneer liberalism’s face is removed, you’re left with the rock of the Church standing alone in an ocean of storms. The Church has long recognized that theology drives politics just as much as it drives, like the engine of a car, every other aspect of social life. Fundamental differences in theology, such as what exactly is being worshiped, will produce radically different societies ordered according to incompatible ends.

Certain members of the opposition recognize this, but many conservatives do not. And consider, just for a minute, that the differences in theology at the heart of the common good debate manifest over the mere willingness to recognize that the common good has any definition at all, much less what that definition is. This is not to be considered the clueless stammering of delusional libertarians, either. They’re just useful idiots in a fight like this. They’re guarding a greater problem, which is that the opposition recognizes that their conception of the common good runs directly against that which the likes of our beltway Catholics ostensibly seek to defend.

Since the dawn of the modern period some four centuries ago, the Church has witnessed its diminishing relevancy in secular life. Competing theology has grown from merely infiltrating to openly dominating public life, so much so that congruent beliefs about man’s ultimate ends can find quarter even within the walls of the Church. But up until about seventy years ago, the Church had at its disposal the rhetoric and resources with which to both understand the problem and address it, even if it received the ire of certain public authorities. Whether it has them still seems to depend a lot on who you’re willing to talk to.

But those more popular integralist and common good types presently do not have at their disposal that rhetoric or those intellectual resources. I speak here not of the Austrian monks doing the heavy intellectual lifting in the monasteries, of course, but of the people who have given a public face to this movement for the last two years. For so long as there remain elephants in the room—be it anything to do with the Jews, or ethnic demographics and immigration, or the status of the Church and the fifth column therein—this movement will be met with certain failure. They will eventually find that the problems they have to address will be unaddressable, either because they’ve refused to recognize their causes, or because they’ve become too interested in preserving a career predicated on obscuring them.

Praxis

Perhaps it’s old hat to comment on now, but the future of the right exists, firstly, on independent platforms. This cannot be repeated enough. So long as the current trends in tech censorship and big media continue, anyone with an even remotely good idea will eventually find themselves without a platform—be it as glamorous as a mainstream press outlet, or, should they be popular enough, as mundane as a YouTube channel.

The future of the right’s ideas will depend on several factors. First, the willingness of ISPs and hosting providers to remain more or less apolitical; this seems likely at least for the short term, as ISPs have traditionally been reluctant to comply with any intrusive government mandates despite being in a position to do so. Why this is the case, I’m not sure. Maybe they just can’t be bothered.

Second, the astuteness of people with significant amounts of burnable income (rich dudes) to invest in right-aligned startups to get alternative hosting platforms functioning. This is already important, but it will get more important as the arc of this drama continues. Most of the startups so far have been more libertarian-oriented, and while they’ll host the dissident right for now, the same problem will arise. Remember that libertarians are not friends of dissident right beliefs; it’s only due to the left’s incompetence and the right’s subversion that we presently find ourselves as fellow travelers.

And third, the willingness of those of us further down the totem pole to do the extra legwork to get our own sites running. It’s going to take more than a YouTube channel or a Substack; getting your own website going, where you can at least have a home base for people to find you and that won’t get easily taken down, is getting more obviously necessary. Can the mob still target your hosting provider? Your servers? Yes, but that’s a lot more trouble than simply complaining to site moderation on another platform, and hosting providers, as mentioned above, don’t usually feel like playing ball. Already, we’ve seen a lot of new kids on the block, though with greater ideological splintering. For the time being, let’s hope the overall trend continues.

The future of internet discourse is going to be complicated. It’s already taken on increasingly radical tones, at least in comparison to the discourse even just five years ago. Ahmari himself, for instance, was publishing the same sort of anti-snowflake right-pop jargon back in 2016 that most of the rest of us were. Now he’s writing common good polemics—despite belonging to a class whose books get reviewed, even if negatively, by the New York Times. Edmund Fawcett, in his review, noted that

As for political liberals, Ahmari relies on parody to represent what they believe. Liberals do not set liberty against authority but against submission to arbitrary, unchecked authority. They do not set a person’s sense of themselves against community roots but against unchosen, often subordinate membership in a clan or social group. Liberal reluctance to police morals by law does not rob morals of their authority.⁴

The veracity of his take on The Unbroken Thread is, obviously, uncertain, as I haven’t read the book. But Fawcett’s point about liberals, and his brief definition of them, is worth a mention. The right is frequently characterized as not even knowing what liberals believe, despite having at their disposal the rich volumes of illiberal critique—both those of the last forty years, and those of the last two centuries. The right’s impatience with the entire liberal framework, by now, has led to many of us dismissing it entirely and painting those of its adherents who aren’t openly bad actors as simple, delusional idiots. At the very least, we can admit that such intellectual behavior is uncharitable, even if it’s understandable.

The left, meanwhile, has more or less degenerated into calling anything they don’t like or don’t understand “fascist”. Minutiae about the political system of Gentile and Mussolini aside, there is value to be found in framing a general umbrella term with the fascist moniker; the left however, does not use words for their definitions but rather for their impact. Fascism, when it’s on their lips, simply means “bad” or “enemy”, it has no real definition beyond that.

Ahmari, like the rest of the beltway Catholics, almost certainly knows this. But, like all beltway types, he also almost certainly disdains the term fascism with as much rigor as he disdains the terms racist or anti-Semite. Perhaps I’ve read his work wrong, or simply not enough of it, but in this regard, he has a lot in common with his more establishment Conservative peers. Eventually, it leads to the sort of tired, ineffective rhetoric we’ve heard since 2014—Democrats are the real racists!, etc. Moreover, because these terms are effective weapons against certain kinds of conservatives, they’re the same ones that his own establishment allies will use when the common good finds itself on the chopping block.

On the other hand, Fawcett also sees in Ahmari

a telling specimen of significant opinion on the American right. To steal a phrase of Newman’s, it is a “tract for the times.” After so much high-level acrobatics, it is worth returning to earth with Ahmari’s party-political vision and who he sees as his allies.⁵

This strain of common good or popular integralism, or whatever it’s actually called, seems to have two directions it can go. Although, really, as with many genuinely threatening ideological movements of the last generation or so, it has only one. You can almost see the pieces moving in real time. Consider Gottfried one more time; the conservative movement is not a movement of conservation but of control:

Its victims became “wing nuts” by virtue of having been purged or slandered. The purges were not a passing or merely ancillary aspect of conservatism; they were a defining characteristic of a movement whose function was to stake out ground where the Left had been a moment before.⁶

The conservative movement is very certainly fighting amongst itself. It has been, rather publicly even, since Trump ran for election in 2015. The beltway Catholics are putting up a legitimate effort the best way they probably know how. But there is a purge coming, and when that purge comes, some of those Catholics will suddenly find themselves persona non gratae, while others will be subsumed into the conservative establishment—absorbed into the evil blob and digested, remade so as to present the common good with a Regime-friendly message. To some extent, it’s already happening. Beware!

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1Ahmari, Sohrab, “What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath,” The Wall Street Journal, last modified May 7, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-weve-lost-in-rejecting-the-sabbath-11620399624?mod=e2tw

2Gottfried, Paul E., “The Logic of Conservative Purges,” from The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, Eds. Gottfried & Spencer (Arlington: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015), 26.

3Ibid, 30.

4Fawcett, Edmund, “A Complaint Against Liberal Modenrity, and a Solution: Faith,” The New York Times, last modified May 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/books/review/the-unbroken-thread-sohrab-ahmari.html?referringSource=articleShare

5Ibid.

6Gottfried, 29-30.