Does the Right Dare Fight?

Putting the question to David French about moral reasoning in action.

Hadley Arkes 09.10.2019

There’s an old joke about two Jewish women in an apartment building in Brooklyn in the 1950s. One was vexed over Israel and the rumblings of war in the Middle East. “Did you see what that lousy Nasser did?” she asked. To which the other replied, “I didn’t see a thing—I live in the back!”

So I felt on hearing from friends, who read things closely and often between the lines, that I was very much in the background of the recent clash between Sohrab Ahmari and David French.

They saw reflections of my own writings in First Things when Ahmari wrote in the same journal “Against David Frenchism,” the article that launched the debate between the two over conservatism. My most recent essay from June/July, “Backing into Relativism,” dealt with similar themes.

My concern in that essay was with the way that two other friends, Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, were projecting into the domain of religion the same moral relativism they were settling on (as a tactical move) in the regulation of “speech.”

Part of my complaint was that so many of our friends among the judges and lawyers were willing to settle on the test of “sincerity” in judging religious claims because they didn’t want to cast moral judgments on the things different groups professed—and the privileges they claimed—in the name of religion.

This approach brings us to a state of affairs in which conservatives are willing to cast the protections of religion even over Satanists, as though the affirmation of radical evil could be reconciled with anything we take seriously as “religion.”

And so our friends find themselves in full pragmatic mode, seeking to protect religious freedom by emptying religion of any substance, most notably the G-word:.........To Read More.....

My Take -  The article goes on to demonstrate how "conservatives" are more than willing to find a middle ground with anti-Judaic/Christian values and adopt the Neville Chamberlain policy of appeasement with the very values that made this nation great, and the people who wish to destroy it.
But after you've spent a lot of time going over the convoluted, so-called, conservative reasoning you find this whole piece can be summed up in this sentence. 

"But for Ahmari this stance looks like a recipe for the peace after surrender—the acceptance of a state of dhimmitude".   

And I agree. 

Definition leads to clarity, and we need to define these people as enemies of the American culture, the American identity, the American economy, and are enemies of the United States and the Constituion.

Once we're willing to grasp that reality everything else falls into place.