I came here from ACX, and I was with you for a lot of this and gave you a lot of leeway given the recommendation, but you seriously think 'let's ban abortion but decriminalise the aborting mother' is a liberal left framing? You even outright say that decriminalised is the same as legal, which is astounding. I'm confused as to how I was directed here from a rationalist website, even.
A couple of different things. I'm pretty clear in terms of separating out the partisan, religious and abortion related parts of my article, as here:
"David French, I am often told, is a conservative. And then I go examine his conservatism, and he’s functionally not that at all - he wants huge social safety nets and increased government spending and he wants you to accept every framing the left would put forth on any particular issue of note that day.
I am then also told he’s a principled religious Christian, and I go check on that, and I find he’s willing to use scripture in ways it doesn’t apply while again circling back to getting more welfare, government spending, making sure presidents he doesn’t like stay out of office, etc.
But after all the smoke clears on those, I’m always told that above all else he’s a principled voice on abortion; that he’s always been against it, and that he’s always been absolutely clear it’s a national blight and a horrible sin. On this, I’m told, he will never waver."
Note the three clear paragraphs separating the three things. I can't reasonably be expected to do better than that. These are three often related things, yes. But I make absurdly clear I'm talking about three separate things. Gently, it isn't my fault if you aren't reading that close.
Abortion is not necessarily a partisan issue, although it sometimes shakes out that way. The only thing that really brings it back to being a partisan thing here is that in terms of what French clearly supports re: abortion, it circles back to something that is: a larger, more expensive welfare state.
On the abortion thing, you mention criminalization only, but French does not limit his argument to decriminalization only. Reading his full article (or just all the quotes I provided to illustrate the point) show he doesn't support any penalties for aborting mothers *at all*. Here's what he does support:
"So if you recognize the child as a human life, yet you also recognize the mother’s lack of knowledge and intent, what’s the just approach? It’s to target the procedure itself, place legal penalties on the practitioners of the procedure, and to exhibit compassion and support for mothers and their babies."
That's it, full stop. Yes, he starts out by talking about criminalization, and that's bad. But that's a ceiling, not a floor. When we go to see what he actually recommends, it's full demand-side legality, increased welfare programs, with all punishments mentioned limited to nebulous "legal penalties" for practitioners.
This is what he calls the "just approach" for this situation - it's what he's telling you he thinks is right and what he supports. It's not just that section, either:
"We know that financial pressure plays a role in abortion decisions. We also know that Romney’s plan would dramatically ease child poverty. Isn’t that a far better and more just use of the state’s resources than pursuing and prosecuting desperate, grieving young moms?"
Again, a clear framing of any prosecution of mothers as wrong, and a push for an enlarged welfare state (which he wanted anyway).
I'm NOT trying to do the whole "learn to read" Twitter burn here, but I have to defend myself on accusations like this. From what we can see of French's post-Roe positioning, he's for full demand-side legality on abortion, has left himself more than enough room to be for decriminalization on supply-side if it comes to that, and uses the entire issue as a wedge for a partisan ask he wanted anyway. He's not unclear on this, except to the extent he works from more-accepted to less-accepted in sequence hoping the strength of the earlier parts helps sell the later.
This article is not necessarily about those issues in general. They can be argued about individually. But French is considered and promotes himself as a Conservative Christian Anti-Abortion guy. In some superficial sense he might be all three, but clearly showing how all three of those actually pan out once we move past the bare semantics is important.
I'll admit, French's abortion article was worse than I expected. I'm not fully sure how I should judge my prediction given that he does claim to be in favor of the ruling and of making abortion illegal from the supply side (though, as you note, he doesn't say what penalties he would be okay with—I now predict 70% that he would favor jail time for abortionists conditional on him making his views on the matter public). In any case, his current position is not what I had in mind when I said he would be "strongly" in favor of the ruling, and I think I was too confident.
I do want to say, your prediction could totally end up being true here still. My lack of confidence does not determine the future and all that. And I'm sort of morally obligated here to hope I'm wrong - like I want it to turn out that he wasn't just against abortion in a sophist sort of way.
If it turns out that your 70% hits, I think it will actually make me "more wrong/less right" on a lot of this stuff. Any time he adheres to a principle of some kind in a way that's consistent to the "label" in a way a normal person would read it, it should make people more uncertain about what I say here.
I'd really, really love to see him precommit to something here.
Nice write up. I hadn't been entirely aware of who David French was, other than vague name recognition, but I recognize the type. The past 3-4 years seem to have been particularly bad for that sort of thing, although the notion of "RINO" and the like goes way back. I wonder how much folks like David French actually talk to a conservative, right wing audience as opposed to simply performing for the left, like a more serious "Colbert Report." I can't think of any examples on the left, but then I am not really looking from a leftist perspective so I probably wouldn't notice them if I saw them.
Huh, I get you disagree with him, but why the animosity? I use to subscribe to David French's letter. (I'm the ~centrist ~liberal that you say he appeals to.) I want to say that reading your piece, I was reminded of David Brooks, who I use to listen to on npr (back in the pre-Trump era.) He was like the perfect 'conservative/ republican' for npr. Brooks had a conservative view on things, but he never strayed too far from the liberal 'ideal', and so he was liked as a commentator. Now French is filling a similar role. (At least that's my reading.) So what? Both David's struck me with a certain level of honest/ integrity. That is/ was their appeal.
So the animosity comes from a couple places. Again, if it was simple disagreement (say, such as you and me might have if we got in an argument) none of this would come up, I'd just say "here's an argument from the left and why I disagree with it".
The problem for me here is that French will look at a Christian and say "Here is what your God commands - be a liberal on every important issue, or else shut up and just let them dow what they want". Or he will say "Here is what a REAL conservative would do - and it's losing, or else accepting that the liberals are right in almost all ways."
The latter is disingenuous - the only reason he wouldn't say "listen, I'm basically a democrat now" is to scoop up the benefits of being a conservative who hates conservatives, which is admittedly much in demand. The former is weirder.
French is not shy, AT ALL, about pretending that the bible points out a clear, definite way you should vote, or abstain from voting. So where there's Trump, he says things that boil down to "It's very clear you should not vote for Trump, the bible commands it, and it doesn't matter what actually happens in a practical sense after that". But the bible is far from clear on that, he's stretching an enormous amount. And a Christian should be very, very worried about that at all times.
I once wrote a thing where I said (sorry, this is long) the following:
****** The first thing we have to look at is actually extra-Biblical; it’s the historical context in which the book itself was written. You don’t have to know a lot of history to know that voting wasn’t actually a thing for the common man in the time of Christ, just as it wasn’t for the vast majority recorded history. The New Testament reflects this by mostly assuming the government is something forced upon you as opposed to anything you had any choice in.
Consistent with this, most of the focus in the Bible has to do with your individual reaction *to* governments. You can see that in the Paul quote from Romans above, or this one from Titus:
Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people.
There’s a definite push towards something like “obey the authorities” throughout the text - it’s out of the scope of this article to get into why, but there’s predictably complex limits to that contextual obedience, as well. There’s nothing on voting or choosing leaders - there’s just no Biblical concept of it. Even if you drill down past the voting issue you mostly get stuff like this:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, or kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
In other words, to the extent you as a Christian are praying for your leaders, you are mostly praying that they leave you alone and give you room to be a nice, quiet Christian type. Jesus himself seems to back this up:
And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to trap him in his talk. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But, knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at him.
To paraphrase: Jesus is indicating at the least that what’s due a government and what’s due to God enjoy some level of separation - how much falls into the “Caesar’s” and the “God’s” bucket isn’t definite, but we know they at least don’t overlap 1-to-1. With that kind of radio silence on voting, it’s tempting to call it a day and move on, but then you have stuff like this:
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.
This is a consistent through-line throughout the Bible - that our lives aren’t our own, and that the actions we take are supposed to be aimed at mostly getting along with people to the extent we can and behaving in such a way as would reflect well on God. So we don’t get to just ignore the faith entirely in terms of the decisions we make.
There’s no “Democrats as they exist in 2021 will be bad” prophecies in the Bible, just as there aren’t any especially condemning Republicans. Christians are thus left with two parties that both fail to map especially well to Christian morality. What little we have about interacting with governments tells us to be generally obedient to at least the extent it doesn’t conflict with matters of faith and in terms of leader selection criteria only hints that we should maximize freedom of religion in terms of what we should want, while not exactly telling us to go out and get them, so to speak.
What that leaves a Christian with is a general direction of trying to choose what they think will do the most good, overall. This sounds easy enough, until you realize that’s what pretty much everyone is doing all the time - the part where we disagree about what’s best being why we have more than one party anyway. The “Christians would vote a certain way if the little cretins could only read” shortcut doesn’t work for that reason - they are in pretty much the same boat with everyone else. *****
And I think that's defensible. French *probably* would have said something similar at some point, but in the post Trump world there just hasn't been much of a limit to his confidence that Jesus agrees with him politically in most ways. Which is fine if he can back it up, but he's sloppy; he pulls out barely applicable verses and says they prove much more than they do.
To put it another way: I think he's just sort of of a sell-out on one side, and on the other side I think he's misleading Christians, which is a big deal to me.
OK, First I haven't read David French in a year or more. Second (and this could be a mistake on my part.) It seems you're upset, because you thought he was 'on your side' or you liked him in the past, but now you think he's defected to the other side. (Is that right?) We live in such tribal times, and defecting from your tribe is way more costly in terms of the hate you get from the tribe you are defecting from, compared to any love you get from the new tribe. It's part of why things stay so tribal... positive feedback. (I was an EE in a previous life.) As far as listening to people and trying to communicate across 'sides'. I try to just take everyone at their word. Live at level one of Zvi's Simulacra levels.
Is it mostly abortion that bothers you? Aren't there churches with a more liberal bent? I'm a previous UU, but what about the Presbyterians?
Oh, I wanted to add (include): We all make up stories (to ourselves) of why we believe/ think the way we do. There is nothing 'wrong' with this, and you also have to take people at their word when they tell you about their underlying stories/ myths/ religion. (Well 'have' is too strong there. but I don't have a better word.)
So on the topic of "take everyone at their word"; I think this would be fine if their word didn't have practical applications. But say someone tells me, listen, I'm going to be incredibly, lifeshatteringly upset, my life will be broken and never recover, if you don't give me your car. I could tell you that now, and my bet is that you'd have questions about what those words I just said *really* mean, what they mean in real, concrete terms before you'd give me the pink slip.
But in this case, the implication is a little different. Like I said before, David is saying something like "Here's my story. But remember, that's YOUR story too". He's claiming we have a *shared reality*, that our stories are both part of a bigger, true story. Or else he can't say "listen, here's what you should do if you are REALLY a conservative, and here's what the Bible tells you to do if you are REALLY a Christian". But he says both things, and says them often; it's most of his career at this point.
Within that context, I can't just say "well, his personal story and journey are very personal things" because his personal story and journey both explicitely say they aren't just that, but that they can compell me to do things or else *my* story is untrue.
To put it another way, he can have a vague "well, it's just impressions, and if I get a different impression, can't we all still be brothers?" take and a "My impression says if you don't do this, you are in the wrong" take at the same time. They aren't compatible.
Taking people at their word is only important if you want to talk with them. I don't have any problem with French voting against Trump and you voting for him. And I'd be happy to talk about the reasons.
So not particularly upset, but it's a complex topic so it's going to get real long on some of the replies which I find sort of simulates being upset to the reader. Definitely not upset at you in any case.
So it's not that he defected to the other side, at least in the political sense. He's "allowed" to do that in terms of what would bother me. If someone says "listen, I've concluded the left is better than the right, so I'm on the left now" that's not morally wrong in any way - I'd disagree with them, but it's not like they've broken a rule.
Ditto for a Christian who votes a straight democrat ticket. They might say "hey, I think this is going to do X, Y, and Z and those outweigh A, B, and C for me". That's fine too, because I can't look at the bible and find any place where it says "Jesus votes republican, or commands you to vote one way or the other". It's just not there.
So, say someone was of the opinion that abortion was necessary. In and of itself that isn't something that would make me approach on a level of talking about them. I'd argue against whatever rationale, and I might think they were wrong, and I might tell people why I thought it was wrong and they should believe something different.
On that side, on the purely political side, I'm mainly mad at him because he's not willing to accurately represent who he is. It's to his benefit to say to the left "hey, I'm a guy on the Right, and they are entirely wrong about everything", and he does very well saying that.
It's like me saying I'm the only real UU guy, and then going "but of course the definite truth is contained in a literal read of the ESV version of the bible - any good UU would know that, and anyone who denies the literal divinity of Christ has lost their way". I'd be applauded by Christians for it, but if I was an honest about it I should really just admit I'm a Christian and move on.
The religious part is harder to explain. David's framing is that the bible has the power to compel - that it's at least true enough that you should listen to what it says to do. We know this on an almost tautological level, because he says things like "the bible says this, and you should do it, and if you don't you've lost your way". I actually agree with him that the bible is true and can be read accurately in a way that gives the power to compel, and it's within this context that we disagree.
Some of this is on specifics. So in the verses I quoted above, David is saying something like "look at this verse - it means blood debts can be passed down", and in the greater context of the argument he's saying that this means that we have a national debt that needs to be paid nationally. But before we even get to the part where it's a different kind of sin committed (murder/killing) and being repaid in a different context (oathbreaking), it's not specific enough to do what he's trying to do - it's a family debt, with a government enacting a punishment on a specific family.
And it's in the context of a theocracy, where God was not only being directly represented by the government and leading it in a way distinctly different from how he approaches new testament governments, ect.
So David is actually free to disagree with me on that and say, listen, we can use really non-specific stuff in a really non-specific way, and this is informing my personal belief.
OR he can say that there's a correct, clear read that compels people to do stuff. But he can't have it both ways - if he's going to say "God has clearly said that this is clearly true and so you must do X" then he's choosing the second way, and needs to back it up by using verses that do the clear things he's saying they do.
So within this framework David has chosen, he's playing dirty. If he was outside that framework (say, saying that the bible was merely for inspiration, not something that should be literally believed or followed to the letter), that's something I'd disagree with, but I'd disagree with the concept, not accuse the man of foul play.
The weirder thing about all this is if you are a New Testament believing Christian looking for what Jesus is saying about government, he's pretty decently clear that he doesn't want to get roped into the political in the way David is doing (render to caesar).
And then the other mentions of government in the New Testament are mostly practical - telling people leaders are installed for reasons, that they should in most (or all, depending on read) be obeyed in a law-following way, and that when you pray for your leaders (the closest analog we really have for voting for secular governments in the bible, AFAIK) that the prayers are for a practical goal - "so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.”, the kind of practical goal David says we should give up in favor of making sure we enforce the morality of individual members of a secular government.
Now, it's entirely possible I'm wrong about all this, but there's enough there that it should be uncertain even if Jesus really IS a coastal democrat. So you will find that I don't really tell people to vote either way based on religion - I don't think anywhere in my writing will you find me saying "for religious reasons, you must vote republican" and I have an entire article about how the bible doesn't back that up which I wrote months and months back.
Very much TLDR: David is a democrat in most ways, but pretends he's a conservative in all ways. David makes claims that the bible is clearly compelling particular behaviors, then backs it up with sections of the bible that aren't particularly applicable to his argument. If it's clear enough that he should be able to tell people "this is what you must do" as he does, then he can't get away with using theology as fuzzy as he's using.
More on your addition/inclusion in a bit, it's an interesting thing to talk about but I have to walk the dog.
Hah, I'm in no position to judge any theological debates. (It seems there is always some claim of quoting text out of context. And then which translation.) I do envy the dog. My two dogs died last winter. Dogs on walks is the best, well at least for me.
Brooks happens to be Jewish, butI think the ‘ideal’ that you refer to tracks very closely with Christian values, at least by my reading of the New Testament. Compassion, charity and forgiveness, honesty, humility… Read: basic human decency.
The elephant in the room is how so many Christians, particularly evangelicals looked at Donald Trump and said “This is our guy.”
The guy is transparently a moral cretin who turned shamelessness into a superpower. And his people love him for it. He may be cruel, lying, SOB but he’s *winning*. This ‘ends justifies the means’ attitude tracks with the teaching of Machiavelli not Christ.
I haven’t read everything David French has written but he seems to fall into the basic human decency category.
And yeah I’ll go on thinking Trump is pretty much a noxious goon but I won’t hate him. If he didn’t have the power to do awful, immoral and illegal things the strongest feelings I could muster towards him is pity. He’s a sad broken man.
I called French on this, so I'm obligated sort of to call you on this too: There's nothing in the bible that makes a claim as strident as what you just made.
The new testament take on leaders is to pray for them, and specifically what you are praying for is stuff that allows you to continue being a christian in a practical sense:
** First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. **
And then a bunch of standards for church leaders. At some point the pharisees come for Jesus and try to get him embroiled in current-day political issues in *exactly the same way French is putting his name on now*, and he very specifically says "There's God stuff, and there's government stuff, they are very separate things, do what's right with the government towards the government and what's right with God towards God".
The only biblical references I'm aware of that contradict this come in to play in situations where *God is the government*, i.e. in the Israel direct theocracy. But as soon as we see governments that aren't explicitly headed by God, that separation is front and center and Jesus says "hey why don't you stop trying to use me as a political hobbyhorse".
I know French says different. I know he uses sloppy theology to push whatever political point he's into. I'm saying that's wrong. My mind is pretty changeable on this! If you can find me references that really truly map onto the practicality vs. morality balance for secular democracies in a way that come down really clearly in favor of "accept any practical downside, no matter how large, in favor of electing someone who also isn't particularly moral who will actively work against you" in terms of conclusions, I'm listening.
Meanwhile, the implications are pretty big. Recall that in French's preferred world, Roe is firmly entrenched for the next couple decades at least. He says it's clear that I should have very much preferred this outcome so long as I got a much more polite, still lying, and still very political and cynical leader. I just have a hard time seeing that as clearly as he does.
Nothing in the NT about charity, compassion being good and cruelty being bad? Are we reading the same book? I don’t doubt those sincerity of your faith but there is something fundamental I’m not understanding.
I get that part if you think that all abortions are murder you want to see Roe overturned. But any Republican president would have given you the Supreme Court seats.
I was hoping to find out what Christians see in 45 here but I haven’t yet. A man who mocks the disabled, punches down by reflex, mocks the appearance of hi political opponents wife… I could go on for pages. You want to pray for this guy so you may go on with a peaceful and quiet life and go on in a dignified way?
No, you have to be honest here. Your claim wasn't just that charity and compassion were good and that cruelty was bad - pretty much everyone, including me, agrees with you on this. If you had said "Hey, RC, the bible says you should be a good, charitable compassionate person who isn't cruel" we wouldn't be here.
But then you said other things, just as French does, that very much aren't supported by scripture. For instance: go get me the verse (I'm serious, go get it right now) that states that I can't vote for people to head my secular government based on practicalities and "ends" that I think promote goals more in line with my religious ends, or just my normal ends.
Go find it. Go find me all the verses that say "hey, in a new covenant environment, representative democracy - it's very important that you accept any loss whatsoever, no matter what the stakes, in order to enforce Christian morality on an apparent non-christian before hiring him out of a very limited pool of probable applicants for a job".
Meanwhile, at the same time, I'm supposed to accept that Trump was evil incarnate while specifically ignoring that, for instance, had we hired Clinton at that time she would have done her damnedest to make sure abortion was enshrined permanently.
I don't want to be crazy-harsh here, but I can't emphasize enough that both you and French are doing this thing where you claim the bible makes a demand that it just doesn't make. I'm going to be honest: Trump appears to be a horrible person. Really really bad. But my choice was between being bothered by that, or just tons of dead babies. Piles of them. So I really do need to be sold on this - where is the part in the bible that says you not liking a guy's personality much is more important than that?
I think I live in a different bubble - I know like maybe one very old lady who was into him as a person. Bubbles being what they are, it's possible there's a lot of people around who are way into the him being a shitty person part.
For what it's worth, I would have rather had basically anyone else in that primary, but after that I'm 100% picking him over Clinton (the latter). I'm hopeful for a primary defeat or some other reason he doesn't run this time.
Yes, some people voted for Trump over Rubio in the spring 2016 primaries. Some of them did that because they liked Trump; I agree they're sorely misguided. But others did that because they were convinced (rightly or wrongly) Rubio would've lost in November.
And then, by the time we get to November 2016, unfortunately Rubio wasn't running. I would've loved to have Evan McMullin, but I don't live in Utah so I couldn't vote for him either. At that point, it was a choice between Trump and Clinton, and I don't see any Biblical mandate to vote against Trump there.
Oh dear, I feel the need to defend whatever reason Trump supporters have for supporting him. Whatever the underlying story they tell themselves doesn't matter. They see Trump as the 'best answer' to 'who should be the next prez?' That's the ground truth you have to deal with.
I live in Trump country. I think the senate republicans made a mistake when they didn't impeach him. McConnell chickened out. I can't blame him, it would have cost him his political life. Of course I rarely express this opinion to my friends and neighbors.
"Every one of the arguments he makes in support of keeping abortion completely legal from a demand-side perspective also works for something like the following, which I fully predict he will say as soon as he has anecdotal ammo..."
It took me a full second to drag my eyes back up from the block quote that follows this, which I assumed to be, like the other block quotes, an actual part of French's argument. Maybe he will actually get to that point. There are a lot of former conservatives who have reneged on their ideological commitments over the last six years.
But in the meantime I think it's dishonest to put words in his mouth just because they're ostensibly compatible with his argument.
For that matter, my hunch is that *most* pro-life people in the US are much keener on making it illegal to perform an abortion (supply-side restrictions) than making it illegal to procure one (demand-side restrictions). This might not totally cohere as a matter of moral philosophy, but I don't think they're all hypocrites. Heck, that might even be my position.
I think I *have* to make a prediction here. Like if nothing else so I can be falsifiable later. He may very well turn out later to go "nope, let's do an entire supply side ban", and then when stories start popping up of botched abortions say "Nope, don't care".
But I don't see how his arguments for keeping abortion legal for demand-side don't generalize to having clean, safe, nearby abortion clinics. My prediction here is something like "He's gonna cave." But it's fully in his power not to cave and prove me wrong.
I only really have a quibble with this instead of a substantive disagreement: I think the capitulation that will actually happen, and not just on French's part, is for first-trimester chemical abortions to be effectively decriminalized even in states where abortion clinics aren't allowed to operate (i.e. full abolition won't happen even in red states), with the fig-leaf being that, e.g. searching the mail for abortifacients offends civil libertarian principles.
That's a sad prediction, but now that you've raised it, I think I agree.
There's an even stronger reason than that fig-leaf, though: States can't effectively police the US Mail, and I don't see how we'll get an anti-abortifacient bill through Congress. I expect mail-order abortion pills will be nominally illegal in some states, but the ban will be unenforced.
I don't know the details, but I know it involves the federal government, both because they're the ones with jurisdiction over the mail and because the sender is usually in a different state from the recipient.
Also: "This might seem like rules-lawyering to you, but understand again that the context is that David French is saying that this clearly commands Christians to accept a modern viewpoint on race and to take certain specific actions to repay a debt."
This seems, at least with regards to the bit about "specific actions", totally backwards. French explicitly says that he disagrees with progressive solutions to structural racism (yes, this would have more force if he named one other than public schools) and then proposes a few policies that are more conservative-flavored.
You can read whatever you want into his caveat about what should happen if "the solutions I propose are inadequate to the enormity of the task", but since he says earlier that "[p]rogressive-dominated institutions haven’t cracked the code", I don't think this is secretly his way of smuggling in wholesale capitulation to the progressive agenda.
I get it, you don't trust the guy because he's way too willing to condemn his own side and play footsie with the enemy. But you're not reading him carefully, never mind charitably.
This is 100% a feature of "Never Trump" pundits and I have no particular faith in David French to hold onto the beliefs he had in 2015, but nothing in Contrarian's essay proves it.
Really want to stress here that I sort of have to make a prediction here. Because the big question is, OK, French just completely gave up more than half of the battle here; He's for it being entirely legal on demand side. Which once you extrapolate that out, abortion is fully legal everywhere with the added price of a plane ticket.
It's a big, big question for me as to what he will accept on supply side. The only concrete proposal he makes is increased UBI, which he wanted anyway. So that's my prediction, that he will cave, but it's entirely possible he's going to make me look stupid here and be rabidly for supply-side restrictions, national bans, etc.
His phrase, "place legal penalties on the practitioners of the procedure", is unacceptably mealy-mouthed, but I don't think it's compatible with anything other than making it illegal to perform abortions.
EDIT: To be clear, I am arguing that you're misrepresenting his current position and what he actually believes, at least insofar as that's detectible from his writing. If he does "evolve" on this issue I will eat crow and recognize you as a superior practitioner of davidofrancology.
Agreed a bit, and there's a lot of room in there for him to make it illegal in ways that matter. But there's also room for it to a $1 fine per act or a bunch of other stuff that doesn't matter.
One thing that would *really, really* help here is if he'd write a sort of primer on what exactly anti-abortion means to him, besides him thinking it's unfortunate, something we could pin him down on and either applaud his consistency on or wreck him for breaking later.
I like "person of nose" while being aware that I shouldn't ever use it at all.
Fair enough on the leftist thing. I actually did it for prose reasons, oddly; there's this thing where you if say "liberal" enough people start to quantify you in units-of-shapiro, which I try to avoid. But I apologize that in trying to avoid that I was imprecise here.
I'd disagree with calling them liberals on two broad objections. First. the roots of woke thought are clearly Marxian, and the thinking pattern they employ even now is very clearly Marxian in style - oppressor-oppressed thinking, utopian revolutionarism and false consciousness are all bread and butter parts of wokeness, not so much liberalism.
Liberalism, to me, aligns more with things like a John Stuart Millian conception of freedom as a maximal lack of restraints, and the idea that we can set up a set of minimal principles as sort of borders of a picture to act as guardrails and let people have a lot of the aforementioned freedom within those bounds.
Both are French Revolution style rationalist projects - rationalist here meaning not Yudkowsky style autism but the idea that we can reason our way to a universally right kind of society, and that Millian freedom and this reason are the foundation of society (in conservatism, a large degree of personal freedom would be a *consequence* of foundational things like church and state institutions providing a baseline of human-compatible direction and stability).
The second objection would be that leftism and rightism aren't all that internally consistent. They're more like inchoate, unformed bits of moral intuition that are given concrete form by different creeds and political tribalism. Both broad camps include many philosophies whose adherents' desired worlds are completely incompatible with each other, yet there's a recognizable leftish or rightish impulse that animates them.
Yes, wokeness is ghoulish and yes, it abandons caring for the little guy in favour of fomenting racial animosity. But it is a distinctively leftist form of ghoulishness, moreso than a liberal one.
I'm not confusing methodology and motivation. The woke are certainly not econ-Marxists for the most part (though a lot of wokes say they are Marxists and a lot of Marxists preach woke talking points). But they are liberals even less. The only thing the woke are liberal about is perversion, the rest of the cocktail is Marxian thought structures, love of censorship and thought control, and as you correctly point out, a fucked up religious impulse. Absolutely none of that is liberal, a lot of that is leftist in both motivation and structure, but mutated and corrupted away from economic class concerns to serve champagne socialism.
Indeed. It is important to remember that "liberal" took a very strong turn of meaning in the US around the late 1870's, essentially taking the opposite meaning of what it had before. Anything attaching "liberal" to Marxist thought is a bizarrely American trait, coherent only to someone who didn't read the thinkers before 1870.
I want to push back on the "engineered, purpose-built" angle. I don't think we should think of social movements in general as being built and engineered, but evolved. The social justice meme is powerful just as you say, and so it gets used along with Marxism, even if they don't necessarily go well together, because someone made those arguments together and they worked better than other arguments that didn't catch on as well as a result. It just sort of worked out that way, but looking back at it it seems that the ideas were engineered to be optimal.
The reason that is important is that it helps explain why college educated white women are leading a coalition of racial minorities and a teeny tiny minority of LGBTQ[ASCII characters]. Wokeism focuses on smashing the hell out of your empathy centers for the oppressed and giving the frustrated and alienated a cause to crusade for. It is the same dynamic at work in the 1930's: find a minority group of underperformers unhappy with their lives, describe how they are oppressed by bad guy, form them into a mass movement to overthrow bad guy, assume power. That gets by the radar of the majority groups because of massaging the hell out of that empathy center, making them feel bad for not supporting or at least remaining silent as justice is extracted from the bad guy via power going to the leaders of the oppressed minority.
Of course that only works when the oppressed in question are sympathetic to the majority so that an "us vs them" narrative works to keep the majority in the us camp. I think that is where the modern progressive/woke movement is breaking down. People don't really care if you want to call yourself a different gender, or whatever. They do care when their daughters can't compete in sports. The REALLY care when teachers start secretly trying to convince their daughters that they are really boys. That's the sort of thing that turns "us vs them" into "those guys vs those other guys vs me." I hope that trend continues, as I think Wokeism is almost on a level with national socialism or communism in terms of destructive mass movements. Probably not so conducive to the mass killing, but definitely on track to destroy freedom and economic production, making everyone but the powerful a lot poorer.
As an actual liberal (but still center-left-ish), I would love to likewise distinguish us from the illiberal, woke left. But, sadly, you may be right about it being a lost cause.
I'd use 'progressive' for those pushing for radical social changes, versus liberal (generally pro democracy/freedom) or left (economic reform/redistribution).
But in practice the words are pretty much used synonymously.
Aye. I rather wish people would stop using "left", "right" or whatever for their descriptions, because the gap has gotten so wide between what they used to mean and what they currently mean that it muddies things more than clarifies them. I don't have good ideas for replacements, and maybe anything better would be super multi-dimensional, but it makes no sense as it stands.
I came here from ACX, and I was with you for a lot of this and gave you a lot of leeway given the recommendation, but you seriously think 'let's ban abortion but decriminalise the aborting mother' is a liberal left framing? You even outright say that decriminalised is the same as legal, which is astounding. I'm confused as to how I was directed here from a rationalist website, even.
A couple of different things. I'm pretty clear in terms of separating out the partisan, religious and abortion related parts of my article, as here:
"David French, I am often told, is a conservative. And then I go examine his conservatism, and he’s functionally not that at all - he wants huge social safety nets and increased government spending and he wants you to accept every framing the left would put forth on any particular issue of note that day.
I am then also told he’s a principled religious Christian, and I go check on that, and I find he’s willing to use scripture in ways it doesn’t apply while again circling back to getting more welfare, government spending, making sure presidents he doesn’t like stay out of office, etc.
But after all the smoke clears on those, I’m always told that above all else he’s a principled voice on abortion; that he’s always been against it, and that he’s always been absolutely clear it’s a national blight and a horrible sin. On this, I’m told, he will never waver."
Note the three clear paragraphs separating the three things. I can't reasonably be expected to do better than that. These are three often related things, yes. But I make absurdly clear I'm talking about three separate things. Gently, it isn't my fault if you aren't reading that close.
Abortion is not necessarily a partisan issue, although it sometimes shakes out that way. The only thing that really brings it back to being a partisan thing here is that in terms of what French clearly supports re: abortion, it circles back to something that is: a larger, more expensive welfare state.
On the abortion thing, you mention criminalization only, but French does not limit his argument to decriminalization only. Reading his full article (or just all the quotes I provided to illustrate the point) show he doesn't support any penalties for aborting mothers *at all*. Here's what he does support:
"So if you recognize the child as a human life, yet you also recognize the mother’s lack of knowledge and intent, what’s the just approach? It’s to target the procedure itself, place legal penalties on the practitioners of the procedure, and to exhibit compassion and support for mothers and their babies."
That's it, full stop. Yes, he starts out by talking about criminalization, and that's bad. But that's a ceiling, not a floor. When we go to see what he actually recommends, it's full demand-side legality, increased welfare programs, with all punishments mentioned limited to nebulous "legal penalties" for practitioners.
This is what he calls the "just approach" for this situation - it's what he's telling you he thinks is right and what he supports. It's not just that section, either:
"We know that financial pressure plays a role in abortion decisions. We also know that Romney’s plan would dramatically ease child poverty. Isn’t that a far better and more just use of the state’s resources than pursuing and prosecuting desperate, grieving young moms?"
Again, a clear framing of any prosecution of mothers as wrong, and a push for an enlarged welfare state (which he wanted anyway).
I'm NOT trying to do the whole "learn to read" Twitter burn here, but I have to defend myself on accusations like this. From what we can see of French's post-Roe positioning, he's for full demand-side legality on abortion, has left himself more than enough room to be for decriminalization on supply-side if it comes to that, and uses the entire issue as a wedge for a partisan ask he wanted anyway. He's not unclear on this, except to the extent he works from more-accepted to less-accepted in sequence hoping the strength of the earlier parts helps sell the later.
This article is not necessarily about those issues in general. They can be argued about individually. But French is considered and promotes himself as a Conservative Christian Anti-Abortion guy. In some superficial sense he might be all three, but clearly showing how all three of those actually pan out once we move past the bare semantics is important.
I'll admit, French's abortion article was worse than I expected. I'm not fully sure how I should judge my prediction given that he does claim to be in favor of the ruling and of making abortion illegal from the supply side (though, as you note, he doesn't say what penalties he would be okay with—I now predict 70% that he would favor jail time for abortionists conditional on him making his views on the matter public). In any case, his current position is not what I had in mind when I said he would be "strongly" in favor of the ruling, and I think I was too confident.
I do want to say, your prediction could totally end up being true here still. My lack of confidence does not determine the future and all that. And I'm sort of morally obligated here to hope I'm wrong - like I want it to turn out that he wasn't just against abortion in a sophist sort of way.
If it turns out that your 70% hits, I think it will actually make me "more wrong/less right" on a lot of this stuff. Any time he adheres to a principle of some kind in a way that's consistent to the "label" in a way a normal person would read it, it should make people more uncertain about what I say here.
I'd really, really love to see him precommit to something here.
Nice write up. I hadn't been entirely aware of who David French was, other than vague name recognition, but I recognize the type. The past 3-4 years seem to have been particularly bad for that sort of thing, although the notion of "RINO" and the like goes way back. I wonder how much folks like David French actually talk to a conservative, right wing audience as opposed to simply performing for the left, like a more serious "Colbert Report." I can't think of any examples on the left, but then I am not really looking from a leftist perspective so I probably wouldn't notice them if I saw them.
Huh, I get you disagree with him, but why the animosity? I use to subscribe to David French's letter. (I'm the ~centrist ~liberal that you say he appeals to.) I want to say that reading your piece, I was reminded of David Brooks, who I use to listen to on npr (back in the pre-Trump era.) He was like the perfect 'conservative/ republican' for npr. Brooks had a conservative view on things, but he never strayed too far from the liberal 'ideal', and so he was liked as a commentator. Now French is filling a similar role. (At least that's my reading.) So what? Both David's struck me with a certain level of honest/ integrity. That is/ was their appeal.
So the animosity comes from a couple places. Again, if it was simple disagreement (say, such as you and me might have if we got in an argument) none of this would come up, I'd just say "here's an argument from the left and why I disagree with it".
The problem for me here is that French will look at a Christian and say "Here is what your God commands - be a liberal on every important issue, or else shut up and just let them dow what they want". Or he will say "Here is what a REAL conservative would do - and it's losing, or else accepting that the liberals are right in almost all ways."
The latter is disingenuous - the only reason he wouldn't say "listen, I'm basically a democrat now" is to scoop up the benefits of being a conservative who hates conservatives, which is admittedly much in demand. The former is weirder.
French is not shy, AT ALL, about pretending that the bible points out a clear, definite way you should vote, or abstain from voting. So where there's Trump, he says things that boil down to "It's very clear you should not vote for Trump, the bible commands it, and it doesn't matter what actually happens in a practical sense after that". But the bible is far from clear on that, he's stretching an enormous amount. And a Christian should be very, very worried about that at all times.
I once wrote a thing where I said (sorry, this is long) the following:
****** The first thing we have to look at is actually extra-Biblical; it’s the historical context in which the book itself was written. You don’t have to know a lot of history to know that voting wasn’t actually a thing for the common man in the time of Christ, just as it wasn’t for the vast majority recorded history. The New Testament reflects this by mostly assuming the government is something forced upon you as opposed to anything you had any choice in.
Consistent with this, most of the focus in the Bible has to do with your individual reaction *to* governments. You can see that in the Paul quote from Romans above, or this one from Titus:
Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people.
There’s a definite push towards something like “obey the authorities” throughout the text - it’s out of the scope of this article to get into why, but there’s predictably complex limits to that contextual obedience, as well. There’s nothing on voting or choosing leaders - there’s just no Biblical concept of it. Even if you drill down past the voting issue you mostly get stuff like this:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, or kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
In other words, to the extent you as a Christian are praying for your leaders, you are mostly praying that they leave you alone and give you room to be a nice, quiet Christian type. Jesus himself seems to back this up:
And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to trap him in his talk. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But, knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at him.
To paraphrase: Jesus is indicating at the least that what’s due a government and what’s due to God enjoy some level of separation - how much falls into the “Caesar’s” and the “God’s” bucket isn’t definite, but we know they at least don’t overlap 1-to-1. With that kind of radio silence on voting, it’s tempting to call it a day and move on, but then you have stuff like this:
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.
This is a consistent through-line throughout the Bible - that our lives aren’t our own, and that the actions we take are supposed to be aimed at mostly getting along with people to the extent we can and behaving in such a way as would reflect well on God. So we don’t get to just ignore the faith entirely in terms of the decisions we make.
There’s no “Democrats as they exist in 2021 will be bad” prophecies in the Bible, just as there aren’t any especially condemning Republicans. Christians are thus left with two parties that both fail to map especially well to Christian morality. What little we have about interacting with governments tells us to be generally obedient to at least the extent it doesn’t conflict with matters of faith and in terms of leader selection criteria only hints that we should maximize freedom of religion in terms of what we should want, while not exactly telling us to go out and get them, so to speak.
What that leaves a Christian with is a general direction of trying to choose what they think will do the most good, overall. This sounds easy enough, until you realize that’s what pretty much everyone is doing all the time - the part where we disagree about what’s best being why we have more than one party anyway. The “Christians would vote a certain way if the little cretins could only read” shortcut doesn’t work for that reason - they are in pretty much the same boat with everyone else. *****
And I think that's defensible. French *probably* would have said something similar at some point, but in the post Trump world there just hasn't been much of a limit to his confidence that Jesus agrees with him politically in most ways. Which is fine if he can back it up, but he's sloppy; he pulls out barely applicable verses and says they prove much more than they do.
To put it another way: I think he's just sort of of a sell-out on one side, and on the other side I think he's misleading Christians, which is a big deal to me.
OK, First I haven't read David French in a year or more. Second (and this could be a mistake on my part.) It seems you're upset, because you thought he was 'on your side' or you liked him in the past, but now you think he's defected to the other side. (Is that right?) We live in such tribal times, and defecting from your tribe is way more costly in terms of the hate you get from the tribe you are defecting from, compared to any love you get from the new tribe. It's part of why things stay so tribal... positive feedback. (I was an EE in a previous life.) As far as listening to people and trying to communicate across 'sides'. I try to just take everyone at their word. Live at level one of Zvi's Simulacra levels.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/
Is it mostly abortion that bothers you? Aren't there churches with a more liberal bent? I'm a previous UU, but what about the Presbyterians?
Oh, I wanted to add (include): We all make up stories (to ourselves) of why we believe/ think the way we do. There is nothing 'wrong' with this, and you also have to take people at their word when they tell you about their underlying stories/ myths/ religion. (Well 'have' is too strong there. but I don't have a better word.)
So on the topic of "take everyone at their word"; I think this would be fine if their word didn't have practical applications. But say someone tells me, listen, I'm going to be incredibly, lifeshatteringly upset, my life will be broken and never recover, if you don't give me your car. I could tell you that now, and my bet is that you'd have questions about what those words I just said *really* mean, what they mean in real, concrete terms before you'd give me the pink slip.
But in this case, the implication is a little different. Like I said before, David is saying something like "Here's my story. But remember, that's YOUR story too". He's claiming we have a *shared reality*, that our stories are both part of a bigger, true story. Or else he can't say "listen, here's what you should do if you are REALLY a conservative, and here's what the Bible tells you to do if you are REALLY a Christian". But he says both things, and says them often; it's most of his career at this point.
Within that context, I can't just say "well, his personal story and journey are very personal things" because his personal story and journey both explicitely say they aren't just that, but that they can compell me to do things or else *my* story is untrue.
To put it another way, he can have a vague "well, it's just impressions, and if I get a different impression, can't we all still be brothers?" take and a "My impression says if you don't do this, you are in the wrong" take at the same time. They aren't compatible.
Taking people at their word is only important if you want to talk with them. I don't have any problem with French voting against Trump and you voting for him. And I'd be happy to talk about the reasons.
So not particularly upset, but it's a complex topic so it's going to get real long on some of the replies which I find sort of simulates being upset to the reader. Definitely not upset at you in any case.
So it's not that he defected to the other side, at least in the political sense. He's "allowed" to do that in terms of what would bother me. If someone says "listen, I've concluded the left is better than the right, so I'm on the left now" that's not morally wrong in any way - I'd disagree with them, but it's not like they've broken a rule.
Ditto for a Christian who votes a straight democrat ticket. They might say "hey, I think this is going to do X, Y, and Z and those outweigh A, B, and C for me". That's fine too, because I can't look at the bible and find any place where it says "Jesus votes republican, or commands you to vote one way or the other". It's just not there.
So, say someone was of the opinion that abortion was necessary. In and of itself that isn't something that would make me approach on a level of talking about them. I'd argue against whatever rationale, and I might think they were wrong, and I might tell people why I thought it was wrong and they should believe something different.
On that side, on the purely political side, I'm mainly mad at him because he's not willing to accurately represent who he is. It's to his benefit to say to the left "hey, I'm a guy on the Right, and they are entirely wrong about everything", and he does very well saying that.
It's like me saying I'm the only real UU guy, and then going "but of course the definite truth is contained in a literal read of the ESV version of the bible - any good UU would know that, and anyone who denies the literal divinity of Christ has lost their way". I'd be applauded by Christians for it, but if I was an honest about it I should really just admit I'm a Christian and move on.
The religious part is harder to explain. David's framing is that the bible has the power to compel - that it's at least true enough that you should listen to what it says to do. We know this on an almost tautological level, because he says things like "the bible says this, and you should do it, and if you don't you've lost your way". I actually agree with him that the bible is true and can be read accurately in a way that gives the power to compel, and it's within this context that we disagree.
Some of this is on specifics. So in the verses I quoted above, David is saying something like "look at this verse - it means blood debts can be passed down", and in the greater context of the argument he's saying that this means that we have a national debt that needs to be paid nationally. But before we even get to the part where it's a different kind of sin committed (murder/killing) and being repaid in a different context (oathbreaking), it's not specific enough to do what he's trying to do - it's a family debt, with a government enacting a punishment on a specific family.
And it's in the context of a theocracy, where God was not only being directly represented by the government and leading it in a way distinctly different from how he approaches new testament governments, ect.
So David is actually free to disagree with me on that and say, listen, we can use really non-specific stuff in a really non-specific way, and this is informing my personal belief.
OR he can say that there's a correct, clear read that compels people to do stuff. But he can't have it both ways - if he's going to say "God has clearly said that this is clearly true and so you must do X" then he's choosing the second way, and needs to back it up by using verses that do the clear things he's saying they do.
So within this framework David has chosen, he's playing dirty. If he was outside that framework (say, saying that the bible was merely for inspiration, not something that should be literally believed or followed to the letter), that's something I'd disagree with, but I'd disagree with the concept, not accuse the man of foul play.
The weirder thing about all this is if you are a New Testament believing Christian looking for what Jesus is saying about government, he's pretty decently clear that he doesn't want to get roped into the political in the way David is doing (render to caesar).
And then the other mentions of government in the New Testament are mostly practical - telling people leaders are installed for reasons, that they should in most (or all, depending on read) be obeyed in a law-following way, and that when you pray for your leaders (the closest analog we really have for voting for secular governments in the bible, AFAIK) that the prayers are for a practical goal - "so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.”, the kind of practical goal David says we should give up in favor of making sure we enforce the morality of individual members of a secular government.
Now, it's entirely possible I'm wrong about all this, but there's enough there that it should be uncertain even if Jesus really IS a coastal democrat. So you will find that I don't really tell people to vote either way based on religion - I don't think anywhere in my writing will you find me saying "for religious reasons, you must vote republican" and I have an entire article about how the bible doesn't back that up which I wrote months and months back.
Very much TLDR: David is a democrat in most ways, but pretends he's a conservative in all ways. David makes claims that the bible is clearly compelling particular behaviors, then backs it up with sections of the bible that aren't particularly applicable to his argument. If it's clear enough that he should be able to tell people "this is what you must do" as he does, then he can't get away with using theology as fuzzy as he's using.
More on your addition/inclusion in a bit, it's an interesting thing to talk about but I have to walk the dog.
Hah, I'm in no position to judge any theological debates. (It seems there is always some claim of quoting text out of context. And then which translation.) I do envy the dog. My two dogs died last winter. Dogs on walks is the best, well at least for me.
Brooks happens to be Jewish, butI think the ‘ideal’ that you refer to tracks very closely with Christian values, at least by my reading of the New Testament. Compassion, charity and forgiveness, honesty, humility… Read: basic human decency.
The elephant in the room is how so many Christians, particularly evangelicals looked at Donald Trump and said “This is our guy.”
The guy is transparently a moral cretin who turned shamelessness into a superpower. And his people love him for it. He may be cruel, lying, SOB but he’s *winning*. This ‘ends justifies the means’ attitude tracks with the teaching of Machiavelli not Christ.
I haven’t read everything David French has written but he seems to fall into the basic human decency category.
And yeah I’ll go on thinking Trump is pretty much a noxious goon but I won’t hate him. If he didn’t have the power to do awful, immoral and illegal things the strongest feelings I could muster towards him is pity. He’s a sad broken man.
I called French on this, so I'm obligated sort of to call you on this too: There's nothing in the bible that makes a claim as strident as what you just made.
The new testament take on leaders is to pray for them, and specifically what you are praying for is stuff that allows you to continue being a christian in a practical sense:
** First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. **
And then a bunch of standards for church leaders. At some point the pharisees come for Jesus and try to get him embroiled in current-day political issues in *exactly the same way French is putting his name on now*, and he very specifically says "There's God stuff, and there's government stuff, they are very separate things, do what's right with the government towards the government and what's right with God towards God".
The only biblical references I'm aware of that contradict this come in to play in situations where *God is the government*, i.e. in the Israel direct theocracy. But as soon as we see governments that aren't explicitly headed by God, that separation is front and center and Jesus says "hey why don't you stop trying to use me as a political hobbyhorse".
I know French says different. I know he uses sloppy theology to push whatever political point he's into. I'm saying that's wrong. My mind is pretty changeable on this! If you can find me references that really truly map onto the practicality vs. morality balance for secular democracies in a way that come down really clearly in favor of "accept any practical downside, no matter how large, in favor of electing someone who also isn't particularly moral who will actively work against you" in terms of conclusions, I'm listening.
Meanwhile, the implications are pretty big. Recall that in French's preferred world, Roe is firmly entrenched for the next couple decades at least. He says it's clear that I should have very much preferred this outcome so long as I got a much more polite, still lying, and still very political and cynical leader. I just have a hard time seeing that as clearly as he does.
Nothing in the NT about charity, compassion being good and cruelty being bad? Are we reading the same book? I don’t doubt those sincerity of your faith but there is something fundamental I’m not understanding.
I get that part if you think that all abortions are murder you want to see Roe overturned. But any Republican president would have given you the Supreme Court seats.
I was hoping to find out what Christians see in 45 here but I haven’t yet. A man who mocks the disabled, punches down by reflex, mocks the appearance of hi political opponents wife… I could go on for pages. You want to pray for this guy so you may go on with a peaceful and quiet life and go on in a dignified way?
No, you have to be honest here. Your claim wasn't just that charity and compassion were good and that cruelty was bad - pretty much everyone, including me, agrees with you on this. If you had said "Hey, RC, the bible says you should be a good, charitable compassionate person who isn't cruel" we wouldn't be here.
But then you said other things, just as French does, that very much aren't supported by scripture. For instance: go get me the verse (I'm serious, go get it right now) that states that I can't vote for people to head my secular government based on practicalities and "ends" that I think promote goals more in line with my religious ends, or just my normal ends.
Go find it. Go find me all the verses that say "hey, in a new covenant environment, representative democracy - it's very important that you accept any loss whatsoever, no matter what the stakes, in order to enforce Christian morality on an apparent non-christian before hiring him out of a very limited pool of probable applicants for a job".
Meanwhile, at the same time, I'm supposed to accept that Trump was evil incarnate while specifically ignoring that, for instance, had we hired Clinton at that time she would have done her damnedest to make sure abortion was enshrined permanently.
I don't want to be crazy-harsh here, but I can't emphasize enough that both you and French are doing this thing where you claim the bible makes a demand that it just doesn't make. I'm going to be honest: Trump appears to be a horrible person. Really really bad. But my choice was between being bothered by that, or just tons of dead babies. Piles of them. So I really do need to be sold on this - where is the part in the bible that says you not liking a guy's personality much is more important than that?
I said that I get the part about overturning Roe above. If that were the only reason people voted for him I would respect that.
Rubio would have appointed the same types of judges and we would have avoided the era of ‘alternative facts’
A lot of his fans revel in the ‘very bad person’ aspect though. The cruelty seems to be the point with a lot of supporters.
I think I live in a different bubble - I know like maybe one very old lady who was into him as a person. Bubbles being what they are, it's possible there's a lot of people around who are way into the him being a shitty person part.
For what it's worth, I would have rather had basically anyone else in that primary, but after that I'm 100% picking him over Clinton (the latter). I'm hopeful for a primary defeat or some other reason he doesn't run this time.
Yes, some people voted for Trump over Rubio in the spring 2016 primaries. Some of them did that because they liked Trump; I agree they're sorely misguided. But others did that because they were convinced (rightly or wrongly) Rubio would've lost in November.
And then, by the time we get to November 2016, unfortunately Rubio wasn't running. I would've loved to have Evan McMullin, but I don't live in Utah so I couldn't vote for him either. At that point, it was a choice between Trump and Clinton, and I don't see any Biblical mandate to vote against Trump there.
Oh dear, I feel the need to defend whatever reason Trump supporters have for supporting him. Whatever the underlying story they tell themselves doesn't matter. They see Trump as the 'best answer' to 'who should be the next prez?' That's the ground truth you have to deal with.
I live in Trump country. I think the senate republicans made a mistake when they didn't impeach him. McConnell chickened out. I can't blame him, it would have cost him his political life. Of course I rarely express this opinion to my friends and neighbors.
"Every one of the arguments he makes in support of keeping abortion completely legal from a demand-side perspective also works for something like the following, which I fully predict he will say as soon as he has anecdotal ammo..."
It took me a full second to drag my eyes back up from the block quote that follows this, which I assumed to be, like the other block quotes, an actual part of French's argument. Maybe he will actually get to that point. There are a lot of former conservatives who have reneged on their ideological commitments over the last six years.
But in the meantime I think it's dishonest to put words in his mouth just because they're ostensibly compatible with his argument.
For that matter, my hunch is that *most* pro-life people in the US are much keener on making it illegal to perform an abortion (supply-side restrictions) than making it illegal to procure one (demand-side restrictions). This might not totally cohere as a matter of moral philosophy, but I don't think they're all hypocrites. Heck, that might even be my position.
I think I *have* to make a prediction here. Like if nothing else so I can be falsifiable later. He may very well turn out later to go "nope, let's do an entire supply side ban", and then when stories start popping up of botched abortions say "Nope, don't care".
But I don't see how his arguments for keeping abortion legal for demand-side don't generalize to having clean, safe, nearby abortion clinics. My prediction here is something like "He's gonna cave." But it's fully in his power not to cave and prove me wrong.
I only really have a quibble with this instead of a substantive disagreement: I think the capitulation that will actually happen, and not just on French's part, is for first-trimester chemical abortions to be effectively decriminalized even in states where abortion clinics aren't allowed to operate (i.e. full abolition won't happen even in red states), with the fig-leaf being that, e.g. searching the mail for abortifacients offends civil libertarian principles.
That's a sad prediction, but now that you've raised it, I think I agree.
There's an even stronger reason than that fig-leaf, though: States can't effectively police the US Mail, and I don't see how we'll get an anti-abortifacient bill through Congress. I expect mail-order abortion pills will be nominally illegal in some states, but the ban will be unenforced.
Serious question: How do we enforce, say, people not sending acid tabs through the mail right now?
I don't know the details, but I know it involves the federal government, both because they're the ones with jurisdiction over the mail and because the sender is usually in a different state from the recipient.
Also: "This might seem like rules-lawyering to you, but understand again that the context is that David French is saying that this clearly commands Christians to accept a modern viewpoint on race and to take certain specific actions to repay a debt."
This seems, at least with regards to the bit about "specific actions", totally backwards. French explicitly says that he disagrees with progressive solutions to structural racism (yes, this would have more force if he named one other than public schools) and then proposes a few policies that are more conservative-flavored.
You can read whatever you want into his caveat about what should happen if "the solutions I propose are inadequate to the enormity of the task", but since he says earlier that "[p]rogressive-dominated institutions haven’t cracked the code", I don't think this is secretly his way of smuggling in wholesale capitulation to the progressive agenda.
I get it, you don't trust the guy because he's way too willing to condemn his own side and play footsie with the enemy. But you're not reading him carefully, never mind charitably.
I think this is fair. Adding a note.
This is 100% a feature of "Never Trump" pundits and I have no particular faith in David French to hold onto the beliefs he had in 2015, but nothing in Contrarian's essay proves it.
Really want to stress here that I sort of have to make a prediction here. Because the big question is, OK, French just completely gave up more than half of the battle here; He's for it being entirely legal on demand side. Which once you extrapolate that out, abortion is fully legal everywhere with the added price of a plane ticket.
It's a big, big question for me as to what he will accept on supply side. The only concrete proposal he makes is increased UBI, which he wanted anyway. So that's my prediction, that he will cave, but it's entirely possible he's going to make me look stupid here and be rabidly for supply-side restrictions, national bans, etc.
His phrase, "place legal penalties on the practitioners of the procedure", is unacceptably mealy-mouthed, but I don't think it's compatible with anything other than making it illegal to perform abortions.
EDIT: To be clear, I am arguing that you're misrepresenting his current position and what he actually believes, at least insofar as that's detectible from his writing. If he does "evolve" on this issue I will eat crow and recognize you as a superior practitioner of davidofrancology.
Agreed a bit, and there's a lot of room in there for him to make it illegal in ways that matter. But there's also room for it to a $1 fine per act or a bunch of other stuff that doesn't matter.
One thing that would *really, really* help here is if he'd write a sort of primer on what exactly anti-abortion means to him, besides him thinking it's unfortunate, something we could pin him down on and either applaud his consistency on or wreck him for breaking later.
I like "person of nose" while being aware that I shouldn't ever use it at all.
Fair enough on the leftist thing. I actually did it for prose reasons, oddly; there's this thing where you if say "liberal" enough people start to quantify you in units-of-shapiro, which I try to avoid. But I apologize that in trying to avoid that I was imprecise here.
I'd disagree with calling them liberals on two broad objections. First. the roots of woke thought are clearly Marxian, and the thinking pattern they employ even now is very clearly Marxian in style - oppressor-oppressed thinking, utopian revolutionarism and false consciousness are all bread and butter parts of wokeness, not so much liberalism.
Liberalism, to me, aligns more with things like a John Stuart Millian conception of freedom as a maximal lack of restraints, and the idea that we can set up a set of minimal principles as sort of borders of a picture to act as guardrails and let people have a lot of the aforementioned freedom within those bounds.
Both are French Revolution style rationalist projects - rationalist here meaning not Yudkowsky style autism but the idea that we can reason our way to a universally right kind of society, and that Millian freedom and this reason are the foundation of society (in conservatism, a large degree of personal freedom would be a *consequence* of foundational things like church and state institutions providing a baseline of human-compatible direction and stability).
The second objection would be that leftism and rightism aren't all that internally consistent. They're more like inchoate, unformed bits of moral intuition that are given concrete form by different creeds and political tribalism. Both broad camps include many philosophies whose adherents' desired worlds are completely incompatible with each other, yet there's a recognizable leftish or rightish impulse that animates them.
Yes, wokeness is ghoulish and yes, it abandons caring for the little guy in favour of fomenting racial animosity. But it is a distinctively leftist form of ghoulishness, moreso than a liberal one.
I'm not confusing methodology and motivation. The woke are certainly not econ-Marxists for the most part (though a lot of wokes say they are Marxists and a lot of Marxists preach woke talking points). But they are liberals even less. The only thing the woke are liberal about is perversion, the rest of the cocktail is Marxian thought structures, love of censorship and thought control, and as you correctly point out, a fucked up religious impulse. Absolutely none of that is liberal, a lot of that is leftist in both motivation and structure, but mutated and corrupted away from economic class concerns to serve champagne socialism.
Indeed. It is important to remember that "liberal" took a very strong turn of meaning in the US around the late 1870's, essentially taking the opposite meaning of what it had before. Anything attaching "liberal" to Marxist thought is a bizarrely American trait, coherent only to someone who didn't read the thinkers before 1870.
Thanks, I appreciate it :)
I want to push back on the "engineered, purpose-built" angle. I don't think we should think of social movements in general as being built and engineered, but evolved. The social justice meme is powerful just as you say, and so it gets used along with Marxism, even if they don't necessarily go well together, because someone made those arguments together and they worked better than other arguments that didn't catch on as well as a result. It just sort of worked out that way, but looking back at it it seems that the ideas were engineered to be optimal.
The reason that is important is that it helps explain why college educated white women are leading a coalition of racial minorities and a teeny tiny minority of LGBTQ[ASCII characters]. Wokeism focuses on smashing the hell out of your empathy centers for the oppressed and giving the frustrated and alienated a cause to crusade for. It is the same dynamic at work in the 1930's: find a minority group of underperformers unhappy with their lives, describe how they are oppressed by bad guy, form them into a mass movement to overthrow bad guy, assume power. That gets by the radar of the majority groups because of massaging the hell out of that empathy center, making them feel bad for not supporting or at least remaining silent as justice is extracted from the bad guy via power going to the leaders of the oppressed minority.
Of course that only works when the oppressed in question are sympathetic to the majority so that an "us vs them" narrative works to keep the majority in the us camp. I think that is where the modern progressive/woke movement is breaking down. People don't really care if you want to call yourself a different gender, or whatever. They do care when their daughters can't compete in sports. The REALLY care when teachers start secretly trying to convince their daughters that they are really boys. That's the sort of thing that turns "us vs them" into "those guys vs those other guys vs me." I hope that trend continues, as I think Wokeism is almost on a level with national socialism or communism in terms of destructive mass movements. Probably not so conducive to the mass killing, but definitely on track to destroy freedom and economic production, making everyone but the powerful a lot poorer.
As an actual liberal (but still center-left-ish), I would love to likewise distinguish us from the illiberal, woke left. But, sadly, you may be right about it being a lost cause.
I'd use 'progressive' for those pushing for radical social changes, versus liberal (generally pro democracy/freedom) or left (economic reform/redistribution).
But in practice the words are pretty much used synonymously.
Aye. I rather wish people would stop using "left", "right" or whatever for their descriptions, because the gap has gotten so wide between what they used to mean and what they currently mean that it muddies things more than clarifies them. I don't have good ideas for replacements, and maybe anything better would be super multi-dimensional, but it makes no sense as it stands.