Back in November 2020—after Biden’s victory but before J6, and before French was a columnist for the NYT— I wrote a piece reflecting on David French’s book released that year entitled Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. It didn’t get much attention at the time. After all Biden won, right? Normalcy had been restored, right? Well, as we learned last week, it depends on whose normal we’re talking about.
So perhaps his book needs another look.
Here’s the first part of the essay, if you want to read the full text, click the title below or the link that follows this excerpt.
David French’s America
In the end, the souls animating both the red hats and the honking cars want a restoration—they want things to go back to normal. In the end, they will all be disappointed. There’s no saving America’s soul. There's no restoring the soul. There's no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls of America. There is only fighting off the other soul of America.
Ibram Kendi, "America's Two Souls"
In the last week or so I've mentioned that I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. French is a thoughtful religious conservative and a Never Trumper.
So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. I have always believed that the Southern Order isn’t primarily about racism, but that it’s a caste system, i.e., a premodern imagination of social order: everyone has his or her place, and nobody should get any uppity ideas about movin’ up—not just Blacks , but the White Redneck class, too. Nobody in the lower orders should ever think they could ever be gentry. And women and children, whether in the upper orders or lower, know that the patriarch has absolute power. That's how God wants it.
I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. But I don't want this post to be about why I think French is wrong about Red America, but rather to take seriously his proposal for restoration, because otherwise we are headed for secession--either Blue leaving the Red U.S. or the Red leaving the Blue.
To read on, go to “David French’s America”.