
The conservative intelligentsia keeps returning to authoritarianism.
Back in June of last year, I wrote a column about how the intellectual right was talking itself into tearing down American democracy. The occasion was a debate between David French, a social-conservative defender of the right to religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment, and Sohrab Ahmari, a more stridently right-wing opinion journalist and editor who favors a politics actively devoted to re-ordering American life “to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” even in the absence of popular support for such a religiously informed project.
Ahmari’s side of the debate received a considerable boost this April when Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule published an essay in The Atlantic in ...