Our Existential Struggle

It's the culture war, and it's gotten so bad there's no room for compromise. Some conservatives want to take it to the enemy --- leftists --- and reverse the gun-sights, using the exact same destroying tactics they use on conservatives and the traditional culture.

I can dig it.

If you've been reading anything by David Horowitz the last decade or two, you'll know that the left gives no quarter, and if you want to beat them, you need to be just as ruthless and then some.

Sohrab Ahmari had a piece attacking the NeverTrump wussies at National Review (and elsewhere, really), with specific mention to David French (whom I usually ignore).

Boy, Mr. Sohrab sent all kinds of folks into conniptions of apoplexy.

See, "AGAINST DAVID FRENCH-ISM."

And here's the Google link to the responses.

And don't miss Roger Kimball, especially the second half of the essay, at American Greatness, "Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle":

Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle | @rogerkimball brings his peerless erudition to bear https://t.co/o1ozphUdW7

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 2, 2019

Again, more could be said about all of this, but let me move on briefly to what I think is the other key passage of Sohrab’s essay. It comes at the end. “Progressives,” he writes,

understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

This passage was Exhibit A for Sohrab’s critics. Imagine, consigning civility and decency to the status of “second values”! Praising “enmity,” endorsing our own values and (dread word) “orthodoxy.”

Some of Sohrab’s critics seem to think that such passages indicated that he was advocating a new theocracy. I think he is advocating realism when it comes to our opponents in the culture war. What they want is not tolerance but full-throated approbation, whether the issue is bringing children to public libraries to be indoctrinated by sexual freaks, unlimited abortion, radical environmentalism, or the smorgasbord of toxins populating the ideology of identity politics. What they offer is not tolerance, not debate, but an invitation to submit to their view of the world.

In such situations, dissent cannot succeed if it proceeds piecemeal. It must recognize that what is at stake is, in the deepest sense, an anthropology, a view of what man is. We are living among the fragments of a shattered inheritance, morally and socially as well as politically. The so-called liberals (so-called because no one is more illiberal) are bent on scattering those fragments and trampling underfoot the values they represent.

Sohrab Ahmari’s essay is certainly not the last word in how to respond to this onslaught. But it has the inestimable virtue of understanding that this battle is not fodder for a debating club but an existential struggle.