I don't know if gambling's so big, but drugs, petty crime, illiteracy/poor education, more kids than you can care for, on up to gangs and murders are all equalizers. Call this "moral failures" or just fucking up and not rising up. I don't even know what the point is. Many of the Trump voters are doing great. People just like complaining and feeling wronged. It's a poison for the soul.

A short trip in the go-back machine...

The continuing saga and fallout of "David French-ism"?

The Christian traditionalists just love to get at each others throats.

In March, First Things published a manifesto of sorts signed by several mostly youngish, mostly Roman Catholic writers, who argued that “there is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” that “any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”

Against whom, concretely speaking, was this declaration directed?

I don’t claim to speak for the other signatories. But as one of the principal drafters, I have given the question a great deal of thought, both before and since the document’s publication. And I can now say that for me, “Against the Dead Consensus” drew a line of demarcation with what I call David French-ism, after the National Review writer and Never-Trump stalwart.   

What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. And that sensibility is, in turn, bound up with the persona of one particular writer, though it reaches beyond him to pervade a wider sphere of conservative Christian thinking and activism.

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.”

It gets warmer as you read on-->>

~OGD~