Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party
About this episode
Guest host Ross Douthat interviews conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari about the post-liberal right. Ahmari argues the old fusionist conservatism — free markets, limited government, moral neutrality — failed ordinary people and ceded the culture, and that conservatives should wield state power for the common good: industrial policy, pro-family economics, and restraints on Big Tech and pornography. Drawing on his book 'The Unbroken Thread,' he defends a politics rooted in Catholic social teaching and pre-liberal ideas of virtue. Douthat presses him on the religious right's legacy, Trump's role as both symptom and accelerant, the movement's sometimes illiberal temptations, and whether this more radical, populist conservatism can actually win power within — and transform — the Republican Party.