The God That Failed First

On Friday, I sent out an overview of Sohrab Ahmari's attack on conservative "liberalism"--a word he is using in its correct sense, unfortunately. That piece is now up at The Bulwark.

But there is another aspect of that story that I wanted to delve into a little more deeply, which is the brief but dramatic intellectual journey that brought Ahmari to his advocacy of Trumpism and religious "authority."

Another writer at The Bulwark points out the gap between Ahmari's writings a few years ago versus today, and by way of Jonah Goldberg's generally good comments on this controversy, I found an article Ahmari wrote exactly two years ago, in the June 2016 issue of Commentary, in which he sounds the alarm about the "worldwide crisis" of rising "illiberalism" and the decline of "Enlightenment liberalism," thanks in part to the influence of Donald Trump. So two years ago, he was against Trump and in favor of freedom, and now he's for Trump and against freedom. That's a pretty quick trip down the road to Damascus.

So what happened?

The rest of this article is available only by e-mail to paid subscribers.