[981] French's Delight

Holy fuck did this article piss me off.

This is not how I thought I’d be spending my morning. I happened to listen to Sam Harris’s podcast where he and conservative David French have a compelling discussion about American division. I began to look up more information on French, and read and article called “Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready.” Tagline: A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love. In it, French describes his history as a pro-life advocate; the groups he started, the people he has defended, and the ethos of protecting the unborn.

French is a type of intellectual I recognize for the perniciousness of the knot at the heart of “otherwise good people.” He’s incredibly articulate. He’s done more laudable and walks-the-talk things as far as indicating the kind of person he is and what he believes in, than most public intellectuals who crack codes of influence circuits and publications. You don’t represent pro-life groups for 30 years, put your life on the line in ill-conceived war, nor raise tens of millions of dollars for things you don’t “believe” in.

At the top of the article, this is precisely the word French speaks with when relaying the advice he receives from two colleagues. They counseled, it’s French’s job to “write what I believe to be true.”

This, that it sits atop the following article which proceeds to discuss French’s conflicting feelings about a movement that seems driven by more malignant forces than innocent “pro-life” sentiments I think speaks louder than French intended. This taken-for-granted myopic presumption that “What I believe to be true” is the “most-valuable” or “most-useful” thing permeates corrupted conservative thought at a fundamental level.

I don’t claim that what I write is what I “believe.” It’s how I process. It’s the series of ideas, rationalizations, or facts-to-the-degree-we-can-discern-them-as-facts that I offer. That’s literally why we have the nit-picking and minutia of law. A murder isn’t a second-degree murder isn’t a manslaughter. In the same opening sentiment, French recalls his advisors saying his job was, “not to please a crowd or build a coalition.” You might miss it if you don’t know to look for it, but the next paragraph starts, “Their advice was good and true…”

Did you catch it? It’s a circle.

They told French to write what he believes is true. He, incidentally, writes his friend’ advice is both good and true. What he writes, is good and true, in a hidden circle not-quite-sinisterly snuck underneath him saying, “it’s not to please a crowd or build a coalition." It’s just how we think. I don’t blame French for doing this. I probably have done it a thousand times in everything I’ve written. We bleed our sentimentality onto things so we don’t have to cut the base from which we house our idea-making.

French continues, after Roe being repealed, “I described my attitude as joy in my heart tempered by disquiet in my spirit.” Flowery, but descriptive of something very human. Can’t we all empathize with the idea of your “spirit” perhaps opening like a pit in your stomach after you think you’ve won or got something you were after? Maybe at the highest it’s an Olympian getting their last gold medal, or you land a “perfect” someone that you won’t entertain criticism about.

After French describes his bona-fides, he discusses the shaky legal ground Roe rested upon, recalling Ginsburg’s criticisms of how it was decided. He describes the Civil Amendments as an attempt to correct for the in-built disenfranchisement of minority and historically oppressed communities. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. He phrased it as “deep flaws in the original Constitution that permitted states to systematically deprive individuals of their most basic human rights.” Wide birth, no? You can fit a lot of what the Constitution is “supposed” to do when you shy away from delineating what those “basic human rights” are, and who was being deprived and why.

In this loose language, French drops the hammer on the nail of his contention. The courts, now emboldened to, “begin the process of extending the blessings of liberty to every American” could do so, “Well, to everyone but the unborn.”

I find this a staggering sentiment offered by any Republican of any era or claimed “moderation.” This is the launching point of self-satisfied indignation that every, “I’m right, this is true, my friends think I’m right and true” ideologue thus steps into pretending there’s anything more “intellectual” about their position. Now it’s a faith claim. An “unborn” person, at whatever undefined stage fits their position, is, in fact-they-refuse-to-discern-to-any-shared-degree, a person. Proceed with bigger circling of reason that more resembles defense wagons.

Consider French’s own statement just 2 sentences later. “The ruling wasn’t just constitutionally unsound it was morally perverse.” Exactly. You have a “moral” issue, not an intellectual one. The problem, to any appreciable liberal observation, is that your “camp” has a tenuous grasp of “moral” considerations as it pertains to how we conduct and respect each other’s lives. Your camp “believe” they are writing and thinking and practicing true and correct things because their friends think they’re true and correct or their ideologues present true and correct enabling and validating feelings.

I’m considering the “camp” in this scenario, literally anyone who practices a propensity to write, read back what they write, and stubbornly and not-coincidentally continue to find themselves saying, “You know, this is true and correct” and despite their growing following and positive feelings generated from the association and spread of their ideas, will politely remind you, so humbly, their job isn’t to “please a crowd or build a coalition.”

Save it.

French claims to recognize the “animating moral essence” of the 14th Amendment. Well, now we can get into, you know, facts like the 14th Amendment existing to establish citizenship rights and equal protection to former slaves. For French’s position to hold true, you need to conceive of a fetus, in any stage of development, tantamount to a slave. Now, the extended “sympathy” you may hold to the “out of their control” nature of the vastly different scenarios starts to come into focus. Is a 12-week fetus a slave? Its circumstance the operant and mitigating condition? Do you really care to split-hairs regarding a zygote, embryo, and fetus when all you need is a vague slave-baby concept to feel ignited and righteous?

French continues to wonder what the “two-sides” will say to each other now that Roe is dead. He says, as all apologists tend to do, what their side “should” do, by committing to life, thus love, “to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.”

Excuse me? WHEN, THE FUCK, HAS THAT EVER BEEN WHAT THE “RIGHT” HAS DONE!?

This is the ongoing fascination I have with “conservative” thought broadly. Whatever credible dissatisfaction and criticism you can offer of the Left or an extremist wing of any party, I can’t readily conceive of a more discernable difference in the tenor and type of differentiation between the animating vitriol of those who wish to control and suppress, codified in religious laws and folklore, and those driven by desperate naivety to lash out and exert control in-turn because they’re the target of the vastly outsized and controlling religious structure!

A ”radical leftist” is the target of religious legislation and “think tanks” and crimes and disproportionate attacks and statistics. This doesn’t excuse their lapses in reasoning, but it does account for it more than the honor-bound deliberate ignorance and laziness of the entitled powers that be.

French continues to say, “In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is seeping the land.” He discusses the bounty-laws, lawsuit incentives, and attacks on women. He shies away from denoting the sheer ambivalence to women dying as a result of failed pregnancies by calling those birthing circumstances “physically perilous,” while describing the “abolitionist” wing that would criminalize saving your own life.

In what strikes me as perilously and painfully unconstructive, French notes, “The culture of political engagement centers around animosity.” No, religious fascists drive their animosity through even a semblance of reason and civility. They have for as long as the country has existed. The “cultural” conditions have been in motion and were instantiated well-before you narrow your scope to exclude the dramatic and damning impact of the underlying norm your camp championed and iterated on to absurdist degrees.

French states, “The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.” Just the “pro-life” right, huh?

Remember, we’re deep into the broader circle of reasoning, but in case you think I’m lying, French returns to form with more specifics. He states, “At this point I want to add a huge caveat. At the center of the grassroots pro-life movement are some of the finest people I’ve ever met in my life. Crisis pregnancy centers, for example, are staffed by people who have hearts full of love, and when the radical left firebombs those clinics, they’re firebombing the buildings and institutions that are giving an immense amount of hope to young women in distress.”

Holy shit.

Let’s leave aside that his point is predicated on anecdotal impressions of so many indiscriminate actors. “Finest people he’s ever met” suffices to him because, his friends are right and true. Again, he gets the opportunity to be right and true about writing the rightness and trueness of his friends. How many women negatively affected by crisis pregnancy centers do you think French is interested in speaking with? How detailed do you think he understands the nature of their shame imposition and psychological manipulation? He spends most of this article articulating his own lack of awareness to how he employs it, why would you expect him to recognize or consider how they use it?

It's when French manages to say the following, you wonder what precludes otherwise “intellectual” and decent people from using their capacity the whole way through:

“In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?”

In moments like this I feel compelled to almost cry out, “You can see it too!?” What “moderate” republican or conservative position isn’t maga-adjacent or defaulting in its disregard and ambivalence for how things actually operate or how they play out in the lives of the actually oppressed? They, unironically, are so situated that way they deny the nature of their own oppression! You’re poor? VOTE FOR THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS! You’re dumb? CELEBRATE AND ENABLE CONTINUED IGNORANCE! Your camp is filled with actual pedophiles? INVENT THE CONSPIRACY THAT CALLS LIBERALS PEDOPHILES! A priest's first instinct is to shuffle the pedophile around the world, not acknowledge their complicated sexuality. So it goes for all oppression-oriented types.

It has always been about “the other” or “you” making the sacrifice in order for the dominant tribe to succeed and survive. French, again in staggering irony and confusion to me, pulls out a chart denoting the ignorance and literal death that befell those defiant of the science on covid. Yes, finally, once on the cosmic scorecard, the backwards and indignant got to viscerally experience what they’ve tacitly and explicitly built into their behavior regarding others since the dawn of time. Doesn’t French know his crowd isn’t interested in charts and numbers, though? Ah ha! He doesn’t have a crowd. He’s the maverick “pro-life intellectual” who doesn’t need a crowd or to build a coalition. Check out his “Good Faith” and “Advisory Opinions” podcasts though.

We’re getting close to the end, where the instinct to two-sides or falsely equivocate and “reconcile” takes hold. French states, “To criticize the anti-vaxx movement isn’t to hate or look down on its members any more than criticizing the pro-choice movement means hating or looking down on its members. Strong disagreement isn’t hatred, even when you believe the contrary position contains grave moral flaws.” Don’t you see? We’re all just subject to this hazy moral gray, and we can liken the nature of our disagreements to the in-built circumstances of this crazy and confusing life…right? Isn’t that great? We can get along now! We’re all making the same error, I just happen to have the moral high-ground.

French claims to not be able to get the “staggering death toll” out of his head. As though the history of ideological possession and the death it brings is foreign. As though you need look any further than any group of people captured by a vague set of ideals and dissatisfaction who move to content themselves with increasingly justified violence and intellectual isolation.

French: “In the face of that wave of death, a wave of death created by a staggering amount of Christian fear, disinformation, and defiance—millions of the same people who created that culture now loudly demand that other people sacrifice for life.”

Yeah, Jesus.

And as the comforting psychological underpinning of that lie unfolds with modernity, so it goes they look for the new sacrifice to get that visceral satisfaction from denying their own death and complicity in the death of others.

But, you know, as French drifts into more equivocation space, “There is a cost to this combat, and that cost is born in our ability to reach out to people outside our tribe and to have people believe us when we say that we care for them, that we want to see them flourish, and that we love their families—both red and blue.”

Remind me, which side “cares” by denying you bodily autonomy, the right to vote, the money for your time and labor, the chance to adopt, the right to marry, or pick-your-ongoing-sin now most-characterized by conspiracy and outright platformed election denial?