Are you being purposely obtuse?

Your reading list proves my point. This was inside baseball,
* * *
Art Deco outlines the list, and Neo is correct: I read the initial two posts by Ahmari and French, and dismissed the fracas as inconsequential. That the NeverTrump cotillion and others ran with it is indicative only of one thing: their need to defend French’s position, because it is their position.

FWIW, PowerLines Picks today included a report on the first debate between Ahmari & French.

https://americanmind.org/discourse/debates-are-no-substitute-for-politics/

Last week, the first Ahmari-French debate about the relationship between Christianity and American politics in the coming generation took place at the Catholic University of America, moderated by the softest-spoken conservative intellectual, Ross Douthat. This is the most important debate among social conservatives in recent years and yet it is strangely marginal, reflecting the marginalization of Christianity in public discourse and the culture.

That the author calls it “the most important debate among social conservatives in recent years,” and that another debate is scheduled, speaks only to the wasteland of today’s establishment conservative thought (see the List of Articles).

The analysis in this article basically concludes that neither Ahmari nor French will specify any particular course of action that would actually lead to their joint preferred outcome (resurgence of social conservatism in culture & government), but insist on arguing about their differences over the proper abstract means to that elusive end.

It’s “marginal” and “insider baseball” because the social conservatives among the public are busy dealing daily with the impact of social-leftistist government regulations on their personal lives, and aren’t even reading about the sparring of pundits in a very small ring.

FWIW, I think the debate is intellectually worth having, and that the best action plan will be somewhere between Ahmari’s aggressiveness and French’s reticence, but I doubt that what actually occurs politically will be the result of reasoned debate.

You listed 22 articles, 3 by Ahmari and French, 2 by writers for liberal outlets, and 1 by someone from the Reason Foundation.

America’s Ruling Class And the perils of revolution.
by ANGELO CODEVILLA, July 16, 2010, 4:20 PM

…
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
…

RTWT

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/09/are-blacks-moving-towards-the-center-as-their-party-lurches-to-the-left.php

He cites polling by Public Opinion Research, which conducts surveys for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. It found that the percentage of white voters describing themselves as very liberal or liberal is roughly twice as large as the percentage of black voters who do so. Conversely, the percentage of African-Americans describing themselves as moderate or conservative is almost twice as large as the percentage of white Democratic primary voters who describe themselves that way.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/09/voters-dont-like-democrats-either.php

It is no shock that most Americans, most of the time, disapprove of politicians and political parties. Thus, the task of a party is not to be universally beloved, but rather, not to be disproportionately disliked. Pew Research has some interesting numbers in this regard:

According to the poll, 45 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Democrats, compared with 52 percent who hold an unfavorable view. Those numbers mirror the Republican party exactly. The GOP also stands at 45-52 in those metrics.

So the current poll is in balance: both parties have plenty of supporters, but, consistent with our political culture, the supporters are outnumbered by the skeptics.
…
It is remarkable that voters can have identical views of the two parties, in terms of approval/disapproval, when all of the organs of our culture are devoted, every hour of every day, to tearing down Republicans and building up Democrats. You might almost think that no one cares what newspaper reporters, TV anchormen, Hollywood actresses, tech executives, Instagram stars, college professors and late night “comedians” think about politics.

huxley on September 12, 2019 at 7:56 pm said:

…That show and those characters meant a lot to Democrats in the 2000s.
I would note that the Republican candidate for President in the show was played somewhat sympathetically by Alan Alda. He was a strong conservative, but a respectable opponent — hard, but fair.

I don’t think Democrats and Hollywood are going to find their way back to that level of collegiality for a generation. And they see that as our fault.

* * *
That was what I was thinking as well.
We all know the drill about communist infiltration and Wilson the Rabid Progressive, but the Dems maintained a veneer of civility for a long time, which they finally jettisoned, as I understand the history: It’s that Overton Window thing.

(1) Despite taking turns in office with GOP presidents and/or congresses, no really serious set-back to the leftist agenda took place after Wilson, even if there were occasional retrograde motions: FDR made up 20 years of “lost” ground and then some, and Eisenhower was just a speed-bump AFAIK without more research.
(2) JFK and LBJ, even though they might be considered centrist-conservatives these days, still pushed the leftist agenda forward, but Nixon was unraveling their tapestry and had to be stopped, which he was; because of the hype around Watergate, it became acceptable to talk about at least some Republicans as at least “very bad” if not quite “evil.” I might be wrong about that, but even at the height of Watergate, when I was in college, I think the invective was limited to Nixon & Crew, not extended to the entire party.
(3) Carter’s forward movement, such as it was, came to a screeching halt with Reagan and started rolling backwards, not only domestically but including the fall of the USSR; however, the end of Soviet Russia was “small” when compared to the inroads the left had made in US & European institutions; in fact, it may have been a positive development for the Gramscian March by lulling the West in complacency — why be scared of Red Commies when there no longer were any?
The negative verbiage that was “acceptable” when used in discourse about the GOP and conservatives seems to me to have ratcheted up in direct proportion to the number of leftists policies RR dismantled or slowed (and he didn’t do enough even so).
(4) Clinton just flat didn’t do enough to satisfy the left, and he ruined their hold on government with his impeachment and scandals they couldn’t get totally covered up (unlike Teddy Kennedy’s).
West Wing aired HERE, with 7 seasons between September 22, 1999
and May 14, 2006, beginning in the next-to-last year of Clinton’s tenure.
(5) Then they lost to GWB — twice! — and we all remember the foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric that started being seen even in premier mainstream publications, even if only as part of their “reporting,” as our so-called-journalists still maintained the appearance of impartiality in the news, although editorials barred no holds when excoriating Bushitler, who was not just misguided and stupid, but now actually called evil, and so were his supporters IIRC (guilty by association).
West Wing, I think, had to remain more civil than its writers and actors would have liked, because of the constraints on broadcast TV, and because lots of Republicans actually liked the show as much as the Democrats, although possibly for different reasons, hence the Republicans in general and the character played by Alda were never shown as irredeemably evil, just not enlightened.
(6) Obama the Light-Bringer finally got the leftist train back on the track, by pen and by phone since he didn’t have the support of most of the people, and Hillary Clinton was supposed to put everything in concrete.
(7) And suddenly, there was Trump.

Really, the hard-left & the Dem leadership have always thought conservatives were evil, but they gradually gave themselves permission to say it out loud, and accustomed the public to hearing their invective in venues that were further and further removed from politics, until now it is ubiquitous.

I don’t know how they can go back from that without a complete reset of the Democratic Party and the ouster of the Left from all positions of power, and a couple of generations spent purging Academia and News Media.

Are you being purposely obtuse?

Your reading list proves my point. This was inside baseball, mostly confined to the following: (1) people really really into disputes about Christianity (2) NeverTrumpers (“The Bulwark,” for example) and House Conservatives in liberal outlets (3) National Review, the periodical for which Williamson writes.

This was NOT a dispute among most conservatives or discussed among them. Neither Ahmari nor the vast majority of the others at this point is a leading conservative thinker unless that person is a NeverTrumper or closely associated with NeverTrumpers and simpatico with them. This is some dispute within Christianity, if anything, far more than it’s a dispute within actual conservatism except for the NeverTrumper vs. the-rest-of-them segment. NeverTrumpers are a small and marginalized group at present, and mostly in league with the left at present, which loves to blow this story up as though Ahmari is some major conservative voice.

https://www.amazon.com/40-More-Years-Democrats-Generation/dp/1416596283

These types I suspect tore their hair out when the Democrats had their ass handed to them in 2010.