A patriot’s perspective

David French is a patriot and a decent guy. Marvin Olasky recently published an interview with him in World Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

We’re also geographically sorting. The number of landslide counties that one side wins by 20 percent or more is the highest it’s been. The more we geographically sort ourselves, the more extreme we become, and the less we even have a language that’s a common language and a common worldview to reach some sort of reconciliation. The extreme centralization of our federal government is incompatible with extreme polarization. In the absence of an external factor that we cannot anticipate, America will either have to decentralize or divide. We can be together if we decentralize and de-escalate the stakes of national politics so California can be California, Tennessee can be Tennessee.

That would reverse the 20th-century trend. We have a 20th-century government designed to combat three of the century’s great challenges: the Great Depression, imperial Japan/Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. There’s an 18th-century solution called federalism for our 21st-century problem—but to embrace federalism, people have to give up the will to dominate and the will to power. That’s the real challenge.

California wants Washington not to interfere with marijuana sales or sanctuary cities. California is becoming more California-ish all the time because it has a net out-migration of California-born citizens and a net in-migration of foreign-born citizens, which means it’s churning its population. That leads to California becoming more California-ish. Some of the red states also have a self-reinforcing cycle in play.

Some issues are on the table but some are off? We should allow an enormous amount of latitude, but federalism does not put basic civil liberties up for negotiation. Since we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, California can’t take them away. The right to life should be up to states: Roe v. Wade should be overturned and that would return it to states just as a matter of default, but in my ideal world you would have a Human Life Amendment. In my conception, California could go as far in sanctuary as it wants, and it could articulate its own carbon emissions standards or become single-payer on health. It would still need to protect free speech and free exercise of religion because those also are rights endowed by our Creator. But matters of economic policy, of social welfare, should be up to the states.

The one caveat I would offer about French is that he is much too captured by the establishment, as seen in this recent quote about Mueller:

This indictment makes it even more troubling that Trump mocks, denigrates, and undermines the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” We now know that there was real wrongdoing; we just don’t yet know its extent.

The wrongdoing that needs investigating was that which took place in the Obama Justice Department and FBI, not in the Trump campaign–or presidency.

Nonetheless, French does offer some good insight in the Olaksy interview. You can read the rest of it here.