Last week, in the wake of the tweetstorms that launched a thousand thinkpieces, social-conservative interlocutors David French and Sohrab Ahmari squared off at Notre Dame—the second of two live conversations. The “debate”—or, more accurately, the discussion—was an extension of their ongoing argument over the future of the American cultural right. To distill the argument down to its essence: against French’s embrace of constitutionalism, limited government, and liberal-democratic proceduralism. Ahmari advocates a more “muscular” conservative politics unafraid to advance a substantive... Read more

Though I don’t know if I’ve used the term before, a frequent subject of this column is Christian postliberalism—in the simplest terms, theological and philosophical efforts by Christians to challenge the premises of the current sociopolitical order. According to its critics, that current order—often labeled “liberalism”—prioritizes individual equality and autonomy, generally rejects the legitimacy of arguments that directly appeal to tradition as a justification, and broadly seeks to eradicate barriers to individuals’ full self-actualization. Postliberalism, then, is an attempt to... Read more

In recent months, much of the intellectual energy among conservative thinkers has been oriented toward a reexamination of first principles—whether, for instance, the American social order was always destined to abandon tradition and collapse into a tribalistic struggle for power. As I’ve written about here and elsewhere, that reexamination has played out across multiple online publications and in the pages of numerous recent books. Mark T. Mitchell’s new volume, The Limits of Liberalism, is a fruitful extension of that conversation.... Read more

Last week, one of the more long-simmering disputes in contemporary conservative thought flared up pretty dramatically. Sohrab Ahmari—erstwhile Wall Street Journal contributor, current New York Post writer, and prominent conservative Catholic—fired off a sharp polemic in the pages of First Things against a certain strain of conservatism epitomized by National Review writer David French. (French issued a rejoinder shortly thereafter.) I don’t want to paint over too many nuances, but much of the online chatter surrounding this dust-up has framed the debate as... Read more

As I’ve written about before, many conservative thinkers are not fond of expansive arguments from “human rights.” For one thing, the ongoing proliferation of the claims that count as appeals to “human rights” undermines the principle that human rights are grounded in (created) human nature: how, after all, can a “right to high-speed internet” possibly be deemed a “universal right”? (Was everyone prior to 2005 simply suffering in benighted oppression?) Some press the argument further: a few of today’s sharper conservative... Read more