‘I Think the Protection of Liberty Is a Common Good’
“There is a level of panic and catastrophizing about American politics that’s way out of proportion,” says David French. “And that is dangerous to our body politic.”
It’s ironic that French, a Tennessee-based evangelical Christian, has found himself in the position of trying to persuade his fellow conservatives to cool their jets. After all, the 51-year-old writer, litigator, and activist made a name for himself lobbing attacks on laws and policies that he felt were infringing on people’s rights. As president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), he helped file suit against college speech codes that were preventing students from voicing unpopular opinions on campus. As a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review, he regularly drew attention to religious liberty violations such as the Obamacare contraception mandate.
But since about the time Donald Trump made his presidential aspirations known, French has found himself in hot water with folks on the political right who fault him for not being a team player. The brief against him was epitomized by a now-infamous May 2019 essay in the Christian journal First Things in which New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari complained that “liberalism of the kind French embodies has a great horror of the state, of traditional authority and the use of the public power to advance the common good, including in the realm of public morality.”
In October, French left his perch as a senior editor at National Review to join former colleague Jonah Goldberg and former chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard Stephen Hayes in a new media venture called The Dispatch. In December, French sat down with Reason Managing Editor Stephanie Slade to explain that while he’s “every bit as conservative” as he was before the Trump era, he’s also deeply committed to the values of classical liberalism.
Reason: In one of your recent email newsletters, you used the phrases common good conservatism and nationalist conservatism. Can you tell us what those terms signify and how they differ from each other, if at all?
French: They’re mainly synonyms in my mind. The reason why I used common good conservatism is because I’m going with phrases used, for example, in some of [Sen. Marco] Rubio’s work and in a lot of the work you’re seeing out of Claremont, out of First Things. It’s emphasizing the role of the government in fostering the common good over the role of the government in protecting liberty.
They would reject, in many ways, this formulation from the Declaration of Independence these liberties. They have much greater confidence, for example, than I do, that governments can in fact economic conditions, can social conditions that advance human welfare in a concrete and predictable way.
