Notes on a New American Right

Much like his recent essays and debates with National Review senior editor David French, Sohrab Ahmari’s new First Things essay “The New American Right” asks the right questions, but the constitutional direction of his answers cuts against the tide of how America has politically fractured over the past half century. He fails also to integrate into his analysis the classical arrangement of our constitutional order, which emphasizes that we are neither a consolidated modern republic nor a loosely collected set of political fragments. The problem with national conservatism, of which Ahmari is a leader, is that it actually builds on the political and constitutional pathologies of American progressivism, even while it points to socially conservative ends of restoring family, community, and what I would call relational personhood, as opposed to an autonomous individualism.

Ahmari, a Catholic convert from Marxism and the idol of progress, is all about the good and the true as the paramount political virtues. As he recently told us, we need a politics of “the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” How, the constitutionalist wonders, do you plan to bring the thing about? Ahmari was, apparently, surprised that some likened his “Highest Good” formulation to “a call to establish an American Ba’ath Party.” Really. Ahmari now means to provide a more suitable understanding of his position. We need a “politics of limits” and “not of individual autonomy and deregulation,” he says.