When Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism was published a few months ago I eagerly read it. I was intrigued by the conservative Catholic Harvard law prof's appeal to the Catholic social doctrine, and having read his collaboration with Cass Sunstein in a defense of the administrative state in Law & Leviathan. His was a challenge to both liberals and conservatives I wrote.
In an elegantly written book, Vermeule soft-pedaled or skipped the cultural hot button issues that infuriate liberals and drive conservatives.
I moderated a panel discussion with professors Eric Segall, Michael Baur, and James Fleming. We found his work interesting for my part.
But by you friends you shall know them.
- GWC
New York Post Editor Sohrab Ahmari’s Strange Journey From Communist to ‘Theocrat’By Lloyd Grove
There are very few character critiques of Sohrab Ahmari, the Iranian-born op-ed editor of the New York Post, that he hasn’t already leveled at himself.“My moral opinions were as interchangeable as my clothing styles and musical tastes,” the 36-year-old Ahmari, a secular Shiite Muslim-turned-conservative Roman Catholic, writes in his latest book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. “I could pick up and drop this ideology or that. I could be a high-school ‘goth,’ a college socialist, a law-school neoconservative. I could dabble in drugs and build an identity around my dabbling. I could get a girlfriend, cheat on her, dump her willy-nilly, and build a pseudo-identity around that, too.”
Since he joined the New York Post in November 2018 from the neoconservative journal Commentary, Ahmari, a clever and gifted writer in his second language (after Farsi), has displayed a dazzling flair for individual self-definition as well as a knack for stoking outrage. The latter has lately been focused on his recently adopted conviction that U.S. government officials at the local, state, and even federal level must act and act now, the First Amendment be damned, to impose a regime of Judeo-Christian and Catholic Church-guided morality on a woke, libertine, money-obsessed American society that is going to hell in a hand-basket.
“That’s the voice of a would-be theocrat speaking, even if he hasn’t yet mustered the courage to acknowledge the conviction,” wrote right-leaning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a mentor and friend of Ahmari’s who nonetheless scorched his former protégé’s apparent metamorphosis from “urbane, intelligent and unfailingly good-humored” mainstream conservatism to “the kind of personal nastiness that is supposed to be a virtue in the right’s death struggle against progressive orthodoxies.”
Indeed, Ahmari once tweeted, “To hell with liberal order. Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.”
"Then there is the illiberal fever gripping American conservatives... The whole beauty of American order lies in keeping in tension these rival forces that are nevertheless fundamentally at peace." - SA, Oct 2017 pic.twitter.com/yFFAtcYKrL
— Shannon Last (@shannon_last) May 5, 2021
Ahmari these days seems to be recommending “a bullying form of politics,” Stephens told The Daily Beast. Nearly a decade ago, as a deputy editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal, Stephens hired the then-twentysomething Ahmari, awarding him a fellowship that eventually morphed into a full-time job. “We’re not going to destroy one another. We shouldn’t want to destroy one another,” Stephens said.
On the other hand, Stephens added, “If I had to trust my kids’ lives with someone, he would be a good bet.”
Earlier this month, Ahmari—whose wife, Ting, an architect and the mother of their two young children, was born in the Peoples’ Republic of China—prompted a collective aneurysm among his fellow conservatives by tweeting, “I’m at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century. Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue.”
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