So it is with Sohrab Ahmari's fusillade in the religious journal First Things against my National Review colleague David French that has occasioned a cataract of conservative commentary.
Ahmari's piece is part of the "post-liberal" ferment among a coterie of mostly Catholic writers on the right. A Catholic convert who has written a widely praised memoir, "From Fire, By Water," he argues that conservatives should give up on defending a neutral public square and instead "impose our order and our orthodoxy."
This would seem a fierce rallying cry in the culture war, but really — like the denunciations of the American political order from a smattering of Catholic writers — comes from a place of despair that, if acted on, would promise only futility.