The ushering in of the Trump presidency has caused many conservatives to pause and soberly reflect upon both the future of American conservatism and what it even means to be a conservative, in the first instance. The intramural conservative dialogue reached a crescendo earlier this year when New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari declared his opposition to pluralistic/values-neutral “David French-ism” and his preference, instead, to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
The recent hullabaloo on the Right over pornography regulation/banning, a dialogue that owes its elevation in no small part to those of us here at The Daily Wire, is a proxy fight that represents an apotheosis of the ongoing Ahmari/French dialectic. And that intellectual divide, which is multifaceted but might be simplified as pitting the centrality of classical liberal procedural norms (French) versus the centrality of a morally assertive vision of justice and the common good (Ahmari), is of course itself a proxy fight for the future of conservatism.
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