Ezra Klein is on paternity leave, so the last episode of his show featured Ross Douthat interviewing another one of my extreme right-wing idols: Sohreb Ahmari. If you get a chance to listen to it, and you need something to increase your blood pressure, by all means, do it. Otherwise, I will fill you in.
Ahmari sounds almost sane in the first part of the interview, in which he talks about his early life in Iran (irony alert here!) and expresses admiration for Christian Democratic parties and ideas. His particular interest seems to be in reinstating blue laws, for the benefit of workers and society as a whole. There’s nothing particularly obnoxious about that.
In the second half, he goes off the rails and makes it clear that he is every bit the illiberal democrat/fascist that I thought he was. In a nutshell, his position is that we live in a left-wing totalitarian state that is effectively governed by woke corporations-most notably, of course, the big social media companies. Since these corporations, and therefore the left as a whole, stifle dissent and refuse to expose the truth, liberal democratic norms do not actually exist here. As a result, the right is entitled to engage in any tactics it likes in order to bring justice to America. There are no limits, other than those implied by Christian ethics. Oh, and if his ideal society sounds a lot like a Christian version of the Islamic Republic that his family fled in his youth, if it happens, it will be the fault of the left, just as the Shah is responsible for what happened in Iran.
This is, of course, completely absurd. Mark Zuckerberg is a ruthless businessman who wants desperately to get out of the censorship business, not a left-wing fanatic. The left dislikes him at least as much as the right does. The right has its own expansive media space that is not being censored by anyone. The “left” voted for Joe Biden, not some woke fanatic, much less Zuckerberg. The right has gained far more from social media than the left since Obama was elected in 2008. And it is the right that has all of the guns, and certainly appears to be willing to use them.
As to the limits imposed by Christianity, that shouldn’t reassure you very much. Franco was a devout Catholic. It certainly didn’t stop him from engaging in extermination tactics. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Ahmari and his friends, given power, would do exactly the same thing.