One More Lifeless Idol

There’s a staple of conservative polemics, from criticism of the French Revolution to the complaints of the National Review, that blames nearly all the ills of modern life on unrestrained individualism—a predicament that can be addressed only by deliberately immersing ourselves in tradition and allowing ourselves to be shaped by the consensus of the past. It was not surprising, then, to find this well-worn thesis in Sohrab Ahmari’s latest book, The Unbroken Thread. A contributing editor to the American Conservative, Ahmari can be regularly found in the pages of various right-wing publications espousing strongly anti-liberal and anti-democratic views. In recent years, he’s undergone a dizzying series of ideological transformations, most recently, and infamously, offering views that often overlap with “Catholic integralism,” the belief that nation-states should be explicitly subject in both political and spiritual matters to the Roman Catholic Church.