Sohrab Ahmari wrote a cover story for Commentary in 2016 titled “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.” In this essay, he mourned the fact that “as an ideology and as a governing philosophy, liberalism is fast losing ground.” In Hungary, Ahmari regretted, Viktor Orbán had “mused about ‘building an illiberal new national state’ on Turkish, Russian, and Chinese blueprints,” driven by a longing “for the return of national will and cohesion — as well as the territories and populations — lost to the cruel 20th century.”
In 2019, apparently having rejected classical liberalism, Ahmari lauded nationalism, properly understood, as a viable alternative. In “The Nation Is Not a Sin,” in the American Mind, he rebuked “today’s liberal technocratic ideology” that has, quoting Pope Francis, “an elite that does not know what it means to live among the people” and that lacks “any sense of belonging to a family, to a land, to our God,” that has “no need of mother, of father, of a family, of a homeland.” Ahmari added:
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