Sohrab Ahmari
Iranian-American journalist and editor; converted to Catholicism; founding editor of Compact magazine; known for “Against David French-ism” essay (2019); associated with Postliberalism and Catholic postliberalism
Who He Is
Sohrab Ahmari is one of the most prominent voices of the postliberal turn in American conservatism. Born in Iran, he came to the US as a teenager, converted to Catholicism as an adult, and moved steadily rightward from neoconservatism toward a position that is neither traditionally conservative nor straightforwardly MAGA — more a postliberal Catholic integralism inflected by his immigrant experience of American materialism.
He has served as op-ed editor at the New York Post and co-founded Compact magazine (with Matthew Schmitz and Edwin Aponte) as a journal for a left-right postliberal coalition.
”Against David French-ism” (2019)
Ahmari’s 2019 essay in First Things — “Against David French-ism” — crystallized the postliberal turn in American conservatism. “David French-ism” named the approach of National Review writer David French: defending conservative positions through appeals to neutral liberal procedures, free speech, religious liberty rights, and individual conscience.
Ahmari argued this approach had failed. The Right needed to use state power to advance conservative cultural and moral goods — to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good.” Liberal proceduralism was not a neutral framework; it was the Left’s home turf.
The essay sparked a major debate within conservatism and established Ahmari as the leading polemicist of the postliberal camp.
Compact Magazine (March 2022)
In March 2022, Ahmari left his job at the New York Post to co-found Compact magazine with Matthew Schmitz (a First Things editor) and Edwin Aponte (a leftist). The magazine was launched as a platform for unorthodox thinking from left and right — genuine cross-ideological postliberalism.
The founding coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Compact published a piece early in the war in which Ahmari noted: “A calamity for the Ukrainian people… the war also offered a gleaming opportunity for elite ideological reconciliation in the West. As stunning as scenes of tanks rolling across Europe’s borders were, something still more astonishing took place in the halls of Western power, and on Twitter, where elites talk to each other: Liberalism and nationalism embraced for the first time since their estrangement in 1945.”
Compact also published “Away from the Abyss” — a letter cautioning against US involvement in new wars. Signatories spanned left and right: the core Postliberal group (Ahmari, Deneen, Pappin, Vermeule), New Right figures (Anton, Rufo, Ryan Williams), and voices from the left (Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Samuel Moyn).
The Ukraine Schism and Postliberal Departure
The postliberal turn away from the broader New Right became explicit with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The core Postliberal cadre — Ahmari, Deneen, Pappin, Vermeule — were not on the roster at NatCon 3 in Miami (September 2022). And when National Conservatism published its “Statement of Principles” (summer 2022), the American Postliberal group did not sign on. The Statement’s sixth principle, “Free Enterprise,” was a slight shift back toward the free-market orientation that distinguished NatCons from Postliberals; and the isolationist/economic-populist legs of New Right politics had grown wobbly.
Field: The schism between Postliberals and the rest of the New Right appeared real — but it was a schism on tactics and the Ukraine question, not on the fundamental commitment to anti-left culture war.
Breaking with the New Right (2023)
By 2023, Ahmari had become estranged from the culture-war wing of the New Right and increasingly from his integralist colleagues on the question of liberal democracy itself.
“I was wrong” — In August 2023, Ahmari published a Newsweek op-ed declaring: “The GOP will never be the party of the working class.” He acknowledged having peddled GOP populism hoping Trump could deliver. Then: “Now I’m faced with the realization that I couldn’t — no one could, because the Republican Party remains, incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy.” He drew toward Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on economics: “I increasingly despair of the whole Right, now almost completely lost to a mindless politics that reduces every problem to ‘wokeness.’”
Field calls Ahmari the “Where’s Waldo” of the New Right — at this point he was showing up in unexpected places and no longer reliably part of the coalition.
Tyranny, Inc. (August 2023) — Ahmari’s book focused entirely on working-class economics: unions, corporate power, the New Deal, the “private tyranny” of employers over workers. It avoided the culture wars and was generally well-received on the left. He dedicated it to “Adrian, Chad, Gladden, and Patrick” (Vermeule, Pecknold, Pappin, Deneen) — but on the first page he spoke of freedom in affirming liberal terms, describing those who “willingly thrown in their lots with elected despots, from Poland to the Philippines, Hungary to Turkey” as suffering under coercion. By calling Orbán an “elected despot,” Ahmari broke with his integralist colleagues.
“Unabomber Right” — In 2023 Ahmari became the only prominent New Right commentator to attack the Hard Right in writing. In The New Statesman, he dubbed figures like Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, and L0m3z the “Unabomber Right.” He was also a consistent critic of Elon Musk’s antiworker policies and Twitter/X (calling it a “cesspool”).
He wrote that DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign failed because it was “too online, too rigid, and too weird” — DeSantis was “too much the darling of the intellectual right.” He continued attacking the “barbarian right” through 2024. Field: “It was lonely work.”
Spring 2024 Liberties essay — Ahmari concluded that “American democracy is itself a most precious common good” — a direct repudiation of the Postliberal project of replacing liberal democracy with integralist administration.
Significance
Ahmari provides the most readable and journalistically accessible version of postliberal politics — or rather, its most interesting defection. Where Adrian Vermeule writes for lawyers and Patrick Deneen for political theorists, Ahmari writes for a general educated audience. His trajectory from “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy” (2019) to “American democracy is itself a most precious common good” (2024) tracks the internal contradictions of the postliberal project more honestly than any of his colleagues.
Field: Perhaps Ahmari’s background as a journalist and immigrant kept him “more bound to the real world.” “Sometimes, not having a PhD can be a boon to clear thinking.”
Cross-References
- Postliberalism — the movement Ahmari joined and then partially left
- Catholic Integralism — the theological tradition he drew on and then broke with on the question of coercion
- First Things — where he published “Against David French-ism”
- Compact — magazine he co-founded with Schmitz and Aponte
- Tyranny, Inc. — his 2023 book; working-class economics; break with integralist colleagues on freedom
- Patrick Deneen — fellow postliberal moving in the opposite direction (toward Regime Change)
- Adrian Vermeule — fellow postliberal; co-dedicatee of Tyranny, Inc.
- JD Vance — fellow postliberal; different trajectory (political vs. intellectual)
- Viktor Orbán — whom Ahmari named “elected despot,” unlike Deneen and Pappin