Opinion | Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party – The New York Times

ezra klein

Hi, Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

Hey, its Ezra. While Im on paternity leave, weve got an all-star team of guest hosts. This week my Times Opinion colleague Ross Douthat takes the helm for shows exploring chronic illness and the divisions within conservatism. Ive known and admired Ross since I began in journalism. So Im really looking forward to these. Enjoy.

The last 15 years have been radicalizing for many American conservatives. The collapse of George W. Bushs presidency undercut conservative faith in the wisdom and capabilities of the Republican Party and its leaders. The Great Recession and its long opioid-haunted aftermath sowed doubts about the direction of American society and American capitalism. The rise of a youthful and militant progressivism has created a sense that Americas cultural institutions, and maybe the entire American future, have been captured by the left.

My guest today is one of those on the right who has been radicalized in recent years. Just five years ago, Sohrab Ahmari was a self-described mainstream conservative working for The Wall Street Journal opinion page. But since then his views have changed dramatically. Hes become a fierce critic of the Republican Party as it existed prior to the rise of Donald Trump, a champion of right-wing populist leaders like Trump himself and Hungarys Viktor Orban, and one of the smartest minds trying to forge a coherent alternative to the late modern liberal order.

I have my points of disagreement with Ahmari. Like him, Im a social and religious conservative. Like him, I think the pre-Trump Republican Party needed to be radically overhauled. But compared to him Im much more skeptical of the political forms that populist conservatism has taken since.

But understanding his intellectual journey and his current worldview is deeply important for understanding what animates the modern right. Its a fascinating and then at times contentious discussion. So my conversation with Sohrab after the break.

Sohrab, thank you so much for being with me today.

Thanks for having me, Ross.

Before we dive into the fate of the late modern West and the future of conservatism, I want to talk a little bit about your personal background and biography, which is, in fact, the subject of an earlier book that you wrote, a spiritual memoir called From Fire By Water. So could you talk a little bit about where you grew up?

Happily. So I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran six years to the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile to herald the Islamic Republic and oust the Shah. I grew up in a very westernized and westernizing, almost bohemian milieu. My mother was an abstract expressionist painter. My father described himself as a postmodernist architect. They had supported the Iranian revolution more out of 1968 type energies than Ayatollah Khomeini type energies or inspirations, and almost instantly came to regret it.

So that was the kind of world that I grew up in a world in which at home I was the regime as we called it the regime was constantly denounced. And alcohol flowed freely. Usually kind of a horrendous moonshine that occasionally was made using isopropyl alcohol. But, nevertheless, fun was had. And a world outside in which was the Islamic Republic.

And so how long did you live in Iran?

I lived in Iran until I was about to turn 14. We knew that there was a green card on the way, because my uncle, who had settled in the United States right at the time of the revolution, like many students sent abroad did once they realized what was happening, they chose to stay where they were studying he had applied for my mother and I to join him via the family preference visa program, a.k.a. chain migration, and came to Utah, of all places.

And so before you came to Utah, what did America mean to you? 8-year-old Sohrab or 12-year-old Sohrab.

You know, America meant individualism. I have this passage that Im really fond of in my memoir where and I was into Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones as protagonist. And they are protagonists who are valued for their individuality. Theyre valued as individuals. Thats a really profound cultural difference. And I bandied about these words that I didnt understand like secularity or rationalism and logic. And those things were Western. Whereas my homeland was superstitious and backward, and backward because superstitious and religious.

You were happy to come to America.

Oh 100 percent. 100 percent. It was my promised land.

And so you came to America, and it was Utah. And what was that like?

First of all, physically, really beautiful. I mean, the natural landscape. But it was not secular. In fact, alcohol was capped at 3 percent under secular law, but it was enacted seemingly by Mormons, who dominated the state. It was communitarian in a way that I found saccharine and oppressive with like the Mormons home church. All this stuff. I mean, I found it repulsive.

And so you sort of had a double escape. You escaped from Shiite Iran and then you left Utah and basically entered the modern meritocracy and became a secular person.

Thats right. I became a college Trotskyist. Then undergrad ended. I didnt have much to do. So I did Teach for America for a couple of years in South Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. Then taught for two more years at this charter school in Massachusetts. Anyway, to speed things along, I went to law school. Never practiced. Was hired by The Wall Street Journal opinion page as a buy-then ex-leftist secular neo-con or secular mainstream conservative.

And you werent happy.

Personally, I mean, sure. I was happy. I mean, I was

You were happy.

Career-wise I was going from strength to strength. Right? I mean I was like in my mid-20s and Im an editor at The Wall Street Journal opinion pages then Im shipped off to London to help run the European edition. So from the point of view of the boy who grew up in Iran and initially when we first moved to the United States for a time we lived in a mobile home park because we had just arrived and currency exchange was brutal to then youre being flown around the world by the Journal is youre happy in that sense. But in a deeper, kind of spiritual sense, yes I was unhappy. There were questions that worldview didnt answer. I mean, all along, I should say, I had begun to read certain books. I had peeked into the Bible.

The forbidden texts.

The forbidden texts! I sat down to seriously read by this point. Id read the Torah in the beautiful translation by Robert Alter, Pope Benedicts books. Thats the intellectual side of things. Theres also a dimension of this, which is harder to talk about in a secular podcast, if you will, which is the action of the mass moved me profoundly. The idea of divine condescension. The idea that God himself would become man and descend to mans kind of lower depths and redeem him there, and to allow himself to be mocked, humiliated, whipped and then ultimately killed by his own creation. There was something so beautiful about that, just even aesthetically speaking. As C.S. Lewis says, if you set out to create a religion, it would not be Christianity. It is so odd in that sense and so romantic, frankly. I mean, Im OK using that word.

So I initially kind of flirted just very briefly with Anglicanism. Specifically evangelical Anglicanism. But then walked into a mass at the famous Brompton Oratory, which is a church thats very famous for traditional liturgy. And this particular mass, it all clicked. Both the romance and beauty of what happens on the altar of the sacrifice, but also the tradition, the continuity, the authority of the Roman church. So that by the time that mass was over I almost ran to the oratory house, which is just where the priests live and knocked on the door and told the first priest that opened the door that I want to become a Catholic.

And so in just four years after sort of swimming the Tiber, as we Roman Catholics say, entering the Catholic Church, you find yourself writing a book to your very young son that is in effect a warning against the kind of life and world that you had embraced and succeeded in in the 10 years prior to your conversion to Catholicism.

Yes. Yes. Thats a good way to describe it.

The book starts with a very arresting vision, a fearful vision that you have for your sons future as, like you, a member of the successful secular meritocracy. What haunts you about your sons potential future as a success?

Yeah, so I should briefly say the impetus for the book was the immediate impetus was there was a OkCupid campaign in 2018. And like the more recent one thats been the subject of some controversy on Twitter least, it was incredibly vulgar. It was, like, polyamory like openly advertised. And Ive lived most of my life in big cities. I really dont think Im a prude. Nevertheless, I couldnt help but imagine my son asking, you know, what is some of this stuff? Its kind of BDSM even. And I thought, why do I find myself in a civilization in which my child has to ask me what BDSM might be?

So that was kind of an initial anxiety that set me on the path to writing this book. The cheapening. The cheapening of this dimension of life that across most of human history, across most civilization, has been held as kind of sacred, somewhat hidden. And the sort of corporate vulgarization of it bothered me. Not even so much the vulgarity itself. And then I started to imagine my son growing up to be a global meritocrat, much like his parents, and I see him not necessarily I mean God forbid I dont think hes going to succumb to an opioid addiction. Chances are, the way our economy works, hell probably inherit his parents upper middle class status. Hell probably go to elite schools.

But my fear that I describe as a kind of nightmare is that hell come back and just sort of be a person of no moral purpose. He is hobnobbing with sons of senators, maybe. Or one of his friends has gotten a Davos type award for environmental engineering, but all they really care about is rising through the ranks obsessed with the idea of keeping their options open, which paradoxically means that they dont really exercise their freedom, their true freedom, because they never irrevocably bind themselves to anything. So they sort of just float through life.

The book then that comes out of this experience, this fear, this anxiety, is not really a political book. Its not a brief for a particular cultural program. Its a series of, in effect, introductions to ancient and pre-modern ideas that offer alternative ways of thinking about your obligations as a human being, how to think about your relationship to your family, how to think about your potential relationship to God and so on. And I want to ask you to talk about a couple of those examples one, an issue thats somewhat remote from the current culture wars and the other an issue thats close to the current culture wars but where you choose sort of a surprising figure as the embodiment of traditional wisdom.

So in the first case you have a chapter entitled, Why Would God Want You To Take A Day Off? And I should say that the book is structured around these questions. Each chapter offers a question that people might reasonably ask about in thinking their way towards a more traditional mind-set. So talk about that chapter, which is obviously about the Sabbath and the figure that you choose to sort of represent the idea of the Sabbath.

So Im not a theologian. Im not a philosopher. So the way I structured the book is through biography, through storytelling, through a kind of intellectual journalism, and, frankly, popularization. And the chapter of the Sabbath is reflecting on the fact that in the United States, until relatively recently, we had a tradition of what were called blue laws or Sabbatarian laws. The idea being that the law should enshrine one day as a day of rest, of contemplation, and its a very old tradition. Its loss is relatively recent, but it came so gradually that now its become imperceptible to us, or invisible.

And it comes against the backdrop of the fact that, as you know, the share of people who identify with no religion, the so-called nones is large and growing. And so in that context, what meaning does Sabbath hold for us? And of course, to answer those sets of questions, I turn to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, great Hasidic intellectual.

So he wrote a book called The Sabbath, which is just one of the most beautiful pieces of biblical commentary that Ive ever come across. And its a case for the Sabbath. And the way he argues is by dividing human life into roughly two domains. One is the domain of space or the realm of space. And thats what we do most days of the week. Its about conquest. Its about competition. Its about economic inquisitiveness and rivalry. And thats fine. I mean, its good to strive after those things.

But there is this other realm, Heschel says, thats called the realm of time. And thats really the realm of the divine. Its the realm of contemplation. It points us to infinity and kind of reminds us that those things we do the other days of the week only can find meaning in relation to this other realm of time, and should be somehow limited by them. Otherwise life is kind out of balance.

Yeah, thats more or less the Heschelian argument that I present. And then I apply it to our current conditions where the loss of the Sabbath has not meant an expansion of freedom for the ordinary worker or the ordinary family. Its really been freedom for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Amazon uses whats called algorithmic human resources scheduling. The goal is obviously be ultra efficient in the use of labor. And what that means is that a lot of his workers have no sense of regularity in their schedule. And thats on the lower end of the economic ladder.

On the upper end, people like you and I are constantly by this kind of ghostly blue glow of the smartphone. The line between work and rest has been completely erased, and were just more harried. And so this is a type of argument that in almost every chapter of The Unbroken Thread gets recapitulated one way or another. And thats that a lot of promises of liberal modernity are about freedom and about demolishing various barriers, either traditional barriers or natural ones that seem to hinder us. And its only with the loss of those barriers that we see that they were somehow guaranteeing our freedom. That a life without limits is actually paradoxically less free. The loss of limits leave us, in this case, kind of restless and harried. And it also perpetuates the exploitation of workers by large employers.

And so well pick up on the question of capitalism in a minute but now to move to the second example from your book. By the standards of traditionalist books, this book pays relatively little attention to sex and sexuality. Not that those arent obviously big issues, and as you say it starts with the OkCupid ads. But you really zero in on sexual questions in a chapter whose title question is Is Sex A Private Matter? And the figure you use is who to illuminate this question?

The famous traditionalist Andrea Dworkin.

The noted reactionary traditionalist Andrea Dworkin. Yes. So for listeners who dont know who Andrea Dworkin is, please explain the irony of that description.

Yeah, sure. So Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist prominent beginning, really, in the 1970s and into the 80s. She died in the early 2000s, but by the late 90s or by the time she had died, she was kind of a forgotten figure, and a defeated figure because her brand of feminism was anti-porn, anti-prostitution, feminism. And out of the struggles within the feminist movement in which she was a notable combatant, it was the quote unquote sex-positive feminists who, in many ways, won out. And those sex-positive feminists defined themselves, again, in many ways over against Andrea Dworkin. I mean Dworkin was their antagonist.

So, yeah. I use her for the proposition that sex is inherently public. And Dworkin is a figure obviously also broadly associated with the radical left in this country. But if you read her work closely, I think you will find in it mostly a critique of the sexual revolution, of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought that in practice meant empowering or freeing a lot of caddish men.

The Hugh Hefner, Roman Polanski era, shall we say, of male liberation.

Beautifully put. Yeah.

So dig a little deeper into that. What does it mean to say that sex is a public issue? A public matter? Beyond just the idea that men behave badly; Harvey Weinstein exists.

Yeah, I mean what Dworkin insisted on and I somewhat provocatively argue that in so doing shes an inheritor or maybe an unconscious heir to someone like Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine thought that what was wrong with Rome, with the Roman Empire, was that all of its lofty aspirations of spreading law and rationality in this kind of large imperium to the whole globe really rested on a base of domination, of lustful domination.

Fast forward to the late 20th century and Andrea Dworkin says much the same thing. That you cannot have a society that claims to, for example, value the equal dignity of men and women or put so much emphasis on equality as an ideal where at the same time 100 million men daily switched their browsers to incognito mode and look at exploitative imagery of women and young women being slapped and so forth. So that what happens in the realm of the private whether thats porn, pornography, but also I mean, for Andrea Dworkin even in just the sort of ordinary American bedroom had public ramifications. Because it undermined a lot of our claims to being a just society.

But also theres an argument here thats sort of implied or explicit, that capitalism plays some role here. That one of the provocative ways of reading the history of the last 50 years is that what gets called neoliberalism, right, the sort of triumph of a certain vision of globalized capitalism in the late 20th century, has a financial and a sexual side. That financial deregulation and sexual deregulation are seen as one is right wing and one is left wing. But in fact, in both cases, its sort of the transformation of either customary arrangements and traditions or customs of intimate life into this kind of free marketplace in which greater exploitation becomes kind of inevitable.

Unless and here Im recapitulating the neoliberal argument that well, its all undergirded by consent. We have consent. The porn actress signed 15 different forms saying that whats about to happen to her is OK. So there you go. So its very just impoverishment of men and womens moral capacities, whether you look at it from a traditional kind of Christian and Judeo-Christian point of view. Or whether you stand in that tradition of the left that saw that, for example, labor contracts that are exploitative are not made less so, or are not morally ratified just because the worker signed a piece of paper saying, yes, I contractually enter into this. Across both realms you see the sort of narrowing of a moral horizon of what you should expect of society.

But then in very contemporary feminism, right? Post #MeToo feminism theres been at least some partial rediscovery of Dworkin. A certain amount of skepticism about what you described as sex-positive feminism. And theres an attempt to sort of say essentially a version of what youre saying. Which is that consent is not enough and you need a larger and more holistic picture. And on the feminist left right now that takes the form of analysis of power dynamics, a range of things beyond just the bare reality of consent. But that attempt to sort of not just be neoliberals, I guess you could say, does exist, I think, in #MeToo feminism right now.

Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.

So as you can probably tell, Im sort of setting up this question, which is, you, Sohrab Ahmari are, rather famously for anyone who follows your career, a man of the right. And not just the right, but what is considered maybe especially by readers of The New York Times to be the extreme right. But the analysis that youre offering, its compatible in certain ways with a lot of left-wing arguments about our present discontents.

So why are you a man of the right and not a man of the left?

I dont know if Im properly called a conservative anymore. What I detest, and what Ive kind of devoted my career to, is critiquing a certain conservatism and, Ross, youre familiar with it as well, and youve criticized it in various places but a conservatism that says marriage rates are down so bad. People arent having kids, so sad. Oh, church attendance rates plummeting, terrible. But in the very same breath promotes economic arrangements that are bound to corrode things like family, things like community, things like family formation, because it makes it so much more difficult. People are as we said about the Sabbath but theres so many other examples of this. People are harried. Theres a kind of precariousness baked into American life. We are told to be an entrepreneur of the self and be a gig worker, but also health insurance only follows you through regular employment. So what if you get sick? That kind of conservatism that pays lip service to the things that we care about but pays no attention to how to live that kind of virtuous life that conservatives celebrate. It has some material substrate. Its not just about ideas. Its not just about banging a drum and saying tradition is good. Get married, have kids.

But people need a kind of a substrate of material safety from which to launch these things. Like launch into a marriage or launch into having a larger family. So Im very interested in taking down that aspect of the right. I may not be able to achieve much else, but if I can seriously critique and point out that the economic libertarian type of conservatism undermines the very goods it claims to cherish, like family and community and church and so forth. If I just show that, that suffices.

But, so, again for a liberal or left wing listener to this interview, Ive asked you why youre on the right. And youve told me everything that you think is wrong with the right. And I think their response might be, well, why are you interested in right-wing political alternatives and well talk a little bit about those specific alternatives in a minute when Bernie Sanders is right here for you, Sohrab, with concrete and tangible proposals to, for instance, spend more money to help working class families, to sort of boost that material substrate, to regulate those Amazon warehouses or encourage unionization in them. So what prevents you, then, from being on the left?

Yeah, so I do think that theres a big problem with the existing left, as well. I think a lot of its energies that appear revolutionary, if you scratch a little bit youll just find the neoliberalism there in a way that I think is not good for working-class people. And so I oppose that as well.

So Ill give you an example. I think the idea of abolishing the police. I see that as just one more type of neoliberal privatization. The processes that began in the late 1960s and 70s and have continued to this day.

So where the end game of police abolition is rich people have private police and poor people dont have protection. Thats what you mean, right?

Right. I mean, thats just one example. But I could go down the list. You look at so much of the existing left and what you see is behind the seemingly very revolutionary rhetoric and I know Im not the first to point this out you find policies that would make it easier, for example, for HR departments to fire workers for saying the slightly wrong thing. And so this kind of language policing of the left, I think is a gift to HR.

I have arguments with conservatives all the time where I say, please dont say critical race theory is the new communism. Please dont say this is Marxism under a new guise. If these kinds of ideologies presented any kind of serious threat to the material interests of the Nike corporation, of Apple, of lots and lots of elements of the American establishment, the trustees of Ivy League universities, and so on if they represented a real threat they would snap it out like that. They would sort of suffocate it so quickly.

Elaborate a little bit on that idea of a progressive establishment. Because this is an idea that is just a commonplace for conservatives like you and I that progressivism has this unprecedented dominance in American life through networks of elite institutions. And liberals tend to say this is not actual political power. Obviously political power has been in the hands of the Republican Party until recently. It may be soon again, and conservatives are just sort of paranoid in effect about the alleged power of Hollywood plus Harvard plus HR departments. Make the case that there is actually a progressive power structure in this country along the lines that you describe.

The case that I would make is its a very pinched and narrow account of power to think that power only resides in, lets say, the Congress. Thats not where real policymaking happens in our society. Power is a lot more complicated than that, and it takes place in boardrooms where decisions get made about questions of labor arbitrage and how that affects either through migration or through offshoring how that affects people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. Power takes place certainly in universities because they train and form the new generation of elites.

We have, for example, this enormous apparatus of unaccountable censorship taking place at big tech companies. The people who do that are engineers, in a broad sense. Not just tech engineers. But you know what they call kind of political or safety engineers at firms like Facebook and Twitter. These people wield power, and what Im calling for is a recognition that they wield power.

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So just to stay with this class of Google engineers, high-powered lawyers, the professional managerial class, right? I want to propose this to you as a reason why you are on the right rather than the left. I would say that from the perspective of the politics that youre envisioning, this sort of more thoroughgoing critique of where liberal society has ended up, there is more resistance to social and moral conservatism among this class than there is resistance to some kind of economic populism among conservatives.

That seems to me to be sort of maybe an organizing theory of why you think its more important to oppose elite liberalism than actual existing conservatism in certain ways. Like in the case of your own book, I can imagine a sort of secular person whos interested in religion and feels unhappy with certain aspects of our society agreeing with many things that you say in your book right up to the point when you say, and we shouldnt just respect the Sabbath; we should have blue laws. We shouldnt just think marriage is important; we should make it hard to get a divorce.

I feel like there is this just profound resistance among, in a way, our fellow elite meritocratic of anything that takes that kind of traditionalist critique and tries to turn it into policy. And Im both curious if you think that is right, and also then if you think that theres less resistance on the right to saying, the way Jeff Bezos runs his warehouses should summon up a political response.

So to answer the first half first, about the degree to which meritocratics and professional managerial classes resist, broadly speaking, cultural regulation, I mean, I think thats absolutely true. And I would increasingly say that their resistance to cultural regulation is aligned with their class interests, as well. The people who push cultural deregulation for the most part are bourgeois elites. And it somehow works out well for them. It does not work out so well for working class people.

In other words, if you look at divorce rates between low income families and those in the upper stratosphere, theres wide divergence on family structure and stability. So the elites push these kind of deregulatory measures, and its working class families and middle class families that are wracked by the consequences.

Or you can talk about drug deregulation. Now we have big weed almost as big as big tobacco. And, yes, there are upper class kids who dabble in drugs, but somehow for the most part they have these resources where if they mess up too bad, there is therapy, there is family support, and they kind of move on. But its not the case for much of the underclass where, depending on whether youre talking about an urban or a regional area, you have opioid or other drugs wracking the community.

Im not posing a conspiracy account. And I cant easily reconcile why it is that elites push deregulation and they just so happen to not suffer the consequences nearly as much as people toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Yeah. I mean I once wrote a piece for The Times called social liberalism as class warfare that made an ineffective version of this argument. But the thing to recognize, right, is that there is no conscious sense that we are culturally deregulating and we will be the beneficiaries. Instead, the assumption of elite liberalism is that cultural regulation is inherently, I think, crueler than economic regulation and more liable to abuse. And so the costs of more stringent laws regulating divorce are too many people stuck in unhappy and abusive marriages. The costs of regulations on pornography are too many restrictions on artists and a sort of punitive and censorious state.

And I mean, to be frank, whether its the Handmaids Tale scenario or your own childhood experience, the automatic fear of elite liberalism is that theres no stopping point between some kind of cultural regulation and a kind of theocratic police state.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is the liberal paradox that is sown through every chapter of The Unbroken Thread, to kind of use the books title as a secondary metaphor or whatever. That what is promised as liberation ends up working out as a kind of new and worse tyranny than the authoritative structures that it replaced. So it was possible to say maybe in the 1950s and 60s, that cultural deregulation would lead to a neutral society in which no cultural account of what it means to be human or sort of comprehensive account of the good is enshrined and occasionally coercively enforced against individuals.

I dont think you can say that now, 50, 60, 70 years later, when you see how the project of liberation itself has come to become quite coercive and censorious. So theres no escaping some account of the good being enshrined and forcibly enforced in society. You cannot say that after a kind of wave of university cancellations of the degree to which speech is regulated. Again, you have to agree with me that private regulation can be just this coercive as governmental authorities doing it. That the formal distinction between them is a tissue, and its not that thick of a tissue.

And if thats the case, then this concern about regulation just becomes liberals saying, we want our norms to be coercively enforced, to which a more traditionalist person would say, yes, and yours are new and radical and you can see how they do harm, especially to the weak people in society. So, no, I disagree. And I will politically oppose that.

OK, so what is Ahmarism? Youre making a case, basically, that some vision of the good will dominate in a society. There will be some kind of coercion, be it private or public. There will be some form of cultural and economic regulation. You, tomorrow, are graced with the opportunity to write a party platform, or otherwise sort of make your ideas embodied in a political movement. What does that movement want? What is its 10 point plan for its first 10 years in power?

The platform that would emerge would be shockingly familiar to anyone familiar, for example, with the Christian Democratic tradition in Europe. And the goal would be, look, it should be possible for a family to live an ordinary life of virtue, for cultural normality to reign once again. And, by the way, a big component, a huge component of being able to live an ordinary life of virtue means that it should be enough and possible to raise a family on one income in this country. Health care should not be so freaking precarious, that there should be a basic right to health care, some sort of kind of minimal public care. And if it sounds radical, its only because neoliberalism has drifted so far from ordinary expectations of ordinary people.

Like, the watchwords are ordinariness, normality.

Fine. Good. So I think I can see the economic agenda that youre imagining, and it is, lets say, a slightly more socially conservative and bourgeois family-centric version of Bernie Sanders-ism. And I think the question of political resistance is about whether people are actually interested in paying the higher taxes and/or accepting the disruptions in their existing programs and services that this would require.

But, again, youre on the right, not the left. So theres a cultural component of this, right, whether its laws about pornography and divorce. You are pro-life, as I am, so presumably your Ahmari party would ban or significantly restrict abortion. What is the sort of social agenda?

The one weve discussed. I think its one around which you can build a pretty broad even an elite consensus, possibly, is porn. First of all because to regulate obscenity is not at all an aberration in the American tradition. And you see it now with post sex-positive feminism or with your former colleague Nick Kristofs work on Pornhub that you can build a consensus to say that, no, this is not speech. The idea of women and often children, we now know, and underage people being exploited by traffickers, and then having the videos shared by millions of people. Thats not a proper account of freedom. Left and right can come together on that. Thats a really important one.

I think on abortion, thats the one where we will kind of radically disagree. I mean, thats a profoundly, squarely political question. And it would be part of the agenda, but there I dont expect to win over many liberals as I might on the porn question.

So, yeah, I mean it would be a socially conservative agenda. The economic component is the one where it would cause a lot of tears at the Heritage Foundation and the WSJ editorial board and so on.

But let me make the case that this is a fantasy. Because I think youre absolutely right that progressivism in power now seeks to impose its own set of rules and regulations on speech, on sex, on what gets put up and shared on Facebook, all of these things. But in response, the right, in the age of Donald Trump, this is the first time I think Ive mentioned him in this interview were getting around to him at the end in the age of Donald Trump the right is increasingly the party of, screw you Ill say what I want. The party of free speech against the progressive censors.

Our mutual friend and fellow Catholic Matthew Walther wrote a great piece about bar stool conservatives basically defined as its a reference to Barstool Sports and its sort of pugnacious founder David Portnoy. And basically its a conservatism of leave me alone. Let me be a guy hanging out with the guys and say what I want. And that, it seems to me, is where a lot of the energy on the right is right now. And Im not denying that there is a lot of discomfort with pornography in our society. There is this sort of general feeling on left and right, alike, that maybe it would be nice to turn off your phones on Sunday. But the day that you as the embodiment of a political coalition say, were going to actually have laws that enforce this, to say nothing of questions about divorce or something like that, is the day that you reap an immense political backlash, I think, in politics as I see it in my limited pundits way right now.

Like Donald Trump did not run as the candidate of restricting pornography. Im curious how you get over that hurdle in making this kind of socially conservative, economically populist fusion a reality. And if you cant, then the second question would be, well why not just do the economic stuff? Why not just do the Sanders agenda and see if that stabilizes things, and wait for the religious revival to do social policy?

So for what its worth Ive come to the conclusion that traditional kind of social conservatism as its been pursued since Roe v. Wade has failed. We got to face up to it. I think its failed in part as my friend Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School says because of a weak and ultimately incorrect judicial philosophy, but I dont want to get into that kind of intricate legal debate. But the bottom line is that its failed.

And I think that serious social conservatives should attend to the material base of society. In other words, we should take seriously the Marxist insight that the cultural phenomena that we decry have an important material component to them not to be vulgar Marxists and say that all culture is reducible to economics, but that there is an economic underlying component to culture, and to take that seriously. And so I would absolutely lead with the economic. So Im granting your point.

OK. But Im just going to push you on that without getting too deep into the weeds. Part of the argument from your friend Adrian Vermeule that you referenced is that on the cultural side conservative elites have more power to sort of direct and redirect culture than a lot of sort of free market libertarian Republicans assume. So the argument is that whether in the form of bureaucratic edicts or in the form of judicial rulings, a more conservative elite could, in effect, solve the problem Im describing. The problem that most Americans dont seem to want cultural regulation by effectively, not always dramatically, but sort of imposing that regulation from above.

Theres an expectation that you take over the government and you can use it as liberals have done with liberal policy to move the country to a place, whether its through a Supreme Court ruling not just overturning Roe but saying that actually unborn human beings have a right to life under the Constitution or whether its through administrative work that maybe brings back blue laws or something like that. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that argument?

Absolutely Adrian is right about that. And all hes drawing on, honestly, is as it just goes back to Aristotle. It goes back to the Cicero, to Saint Thomas, where they say that the law is a teacher. And you dont inculcate virtue in a population as a statesman in the classical frame is called to do. You dont do it merely by exhortations to virtue, you know, oh, please, behave better, so forth. You have to use the law because it has efficacious power to coerce and discipline. So hes right about that.

I think to try to bridge the gap between the two what I will tell you is there was a point where you said, well you get to power. And what I would suggest is that the material economic program is in part to help ordinary people live easier lives, and thats part of the program. But its also first you get the power. Well that was part of your premise, one way to do that is to address the material inequalities, the overweening power of corporations in American life. And so thats the part that Im focusing on. And I dont see that as intention with the idea that, yes, the law can change culture. Ive seen that in the Islamic Republic of my youth, but also in the United States of my adulthood where a shift in law changes peoples perceptions, almost, in such a way that they dont even remember that they formerly held the contrary position. Because the law is a teacher.

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Opinion | Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party - The New York Times