First, French had watched the moral movement, which he had spent much of his life helping to build, slip away, into the grasp of a debased and hate-filled billionaire, and now he was being asked to try to save that movement, and the Republican Party, from itself. Was he up for it? The question concentrated all of the sublime and desperate upheaval of 2016 into a single career decision. French found himself pitching back and forth, depending upon whom he had last talked to. “There was so much discontent that you felt, if you got up on the debate stage, or if you really nailed the ‘60 Minutes’ interview, anything could happen,” he told me. But he knew that he was far less likely to win the Presidency than he was to play what he called “the Nader role,” that of a spoiler, who would draw enough conservative support away from Trump to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t sure that he was comfortable with that. “At the time, if you had put me under a polygraph and said, ‘What is worse for the country, Bill and Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?,’ I would have said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” French told me.

As word of his rumination spread, French received a flood of messages from young evangelicals offering to work for his campaign. “That was the whole idea of the campaign—that it would be built on the backbone of idealistic young evangelicals who had a vision for racial reconciliation, for pluralism, and for partisan reconciliation,” French said. But those messages also punctured the bubble that had settled around John Kingston’s farm, and made him feel the weight of the enterprise. French said, “The line came to me from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ the Tennyson poem, you know—‘Cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them, cannons in front of them.’ And then there’s this line in there: ‘Someone had blundered.’ Someone was in charge of these idealistic, courageous young men, and had squandered their courage into this doomed mission. And I remember sitting there, and I recited the relevant portions of the poem, and I said, ‘I feel like the someone who would blunder is me.’ ” It was two weeks after the dinner with Kristol, and six weeks before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. French pulled himself out of the running.

On Election Day, French said to Nancy that at least one candidate they could not abide would lose—that was the silver lining. In truth, he expected it to be Trump. The result, when it came, upended the Frenches’ lives as completely as it did politics. Before 2016, the Frenches had just been part of the background hum of evangelical conservatism, because most everyone in the movement seemed to hold the same beliefs that they did. After the election, French’s criticisms of the President grew sharper. “We face a darkening political future, potentially greater loss of life, and a degree of polarization that makes 2016 look like a time of unity,” he wrote after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He came to represent the stubborn part of conservatism, the remnant that refused to fall into line behind Trump. After all, he was the one they’d tried to run for President. It made him a kind of target. “I feel like we said exactly the same things we’d always been saying,” Nancy French said, “and eighty million people around us changed.”

In late May, Sohrab Ahmari’s “Against David French-ism” appeared on the Web site of First Things, a conservative religious journal. What set him off, over Memorial Day weekend—dramatically altering his public profile and subtly reframing the way that many conservatives saw the choices facing their movement—was the news that a Drag Queen Story Hour would be held at a public library in Sacramento. “This is demonic,” Ahmari wrote on Twitter. “To hell with liberal order. Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.” Then he began to theorize the distance between his response and that of other conservatives: “There is no polite, David French-ian third way through the cultural civil war.” The full essay, which appeared forty-eight hours later, was more generous and interesting than the tweets, while retaining the same bristling spirit. Ahmari argued that the conservative movement needed to break with what he took as French’s politics, a conservatism arranged around individual liberty, pluralism, and “politeness.” “The overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us,” Ahmari wrote, “and I think that French-ian model bears some of the blame.”

For several weeks, it seemed that every major figure within the conservative movement, and also many outside of it, weighed in on the debate. Most established intellectuals were alarmed by Ahmari’s arguments, and took French’s side. The Times columnist Bret Stephens, who had worked with Ahmari at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, took note of Ahmari’s call for “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” “That’s the voice of a would-be theocrat speaking,” Stephens wrote, “even if he hasn’t yet mustered the courage to acknowledge the conviction.” But there were plenty who defended Ahmari, beyond his own clique of Catholic conservatives, including Ben Domenech, the editor of the Federalist and Meghan McCain’s husband, and Albert Mohler, the worldly president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Ahmari was right to speak of a moral emergency, Mohler said, on his podcast. “The catastrophe is the massive restructuring of the entire moral universe of modern America that makes drag-queen story time plausible and then actual and then celebrated.” If the public libraries in Sacramento did not alarm you as a conservative, he went on, “What would it take for you to recognize a cultural crisis?”

On a Thursday evening in August, I went to visit Ahmari for dinner and drinks. One of the surprises of meeting him is that his experience does not match his arguments; until recently, he was a familiar enough figure, a cosmopolitan conservative. Born to a liberal family in the Tehran of the mullahs, Ahmari immigrated to Logan, Utah, with his mother when he was thirteen. He earned a law degree from Northeastern and then spent nearly three years living in London, where he worked as an editorial writer, and later a columnist, for the Wall Street Journal, making his mark, in part, by advocating a hawkish approach to Iranian theocrats. As the populist swell of 2016 took shape, Ahmari worried over it, opposing Brexit, amplifying the concern that “a distinct Putinophilia marks the wider Trumpian orbit,” and penning an essay for Commentary titled “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.”

After Trump’s election, Ahmari told me, his views were changing in two dimensions. First, he began to see the liberal reaction to the populist surge as fundamentally anti-democratic. The progressive activism to keep Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court to him seemed like clear evidence that Trump’s opponents were trying to cancel the effects of the 2016 election. The second change, more foundational, stemmed from his conversion to Catholicism, in December, 2016, which Ahmari documented in a memoir published this January, “From Fire, by Water,” and which sharpened his sense that the individual autonomy of a liberal free-market society was only worth it to the extent that it contributed to a collective social good. “In many ways, I am the perfect liberal subject,” Ahmari told me. “I make my way from Iran to a trailer court in Utah to having senior roles in American opinion writing. I’m bilingual. I did this stint in London. And yet even for me the liberal order entails far too much uncertainty.” Catholicism wasn’t the source of his conversion to populism, but it helped supply a language for it. “For me, the economic questions were also moralized,” he said.

Today, Ahmari and his wife, Ting, a Chinese-American architect, have a two-year-old son and a newborn daughter; they live in a white brick apartment building in the East Fifties—upstairs, a little ironically, from a drag bar called Lips. We had Persian takeout with his wife and son, and headed downstairs for a drink at an Italian restaurant. Ahmari smokes (“my old Middle Eastern vice”); when he asked the bartender for “my usual,” she knew precisely the bourbon drink to bring him. Ahmari settled into a seat at the L-shaped bar and began to talk about the President. “There’s so much that still makes my skin crawl—any given tweet on any given day,” he said. “I’m an immigrant, my wife’s an immigrant—I would never want the U.S. to absolutely pull up the drawbridge.” At the same time, Ahmari said, “Maybe it took a Queens vulgarian to clear some of the deadwood of the past away.” He pointed out that, even before his conversion, a theme of his writing had been an exasperation with the baby boomers—with the politics of personal entitlement and individual fulfillment on the left and the right, with Clinton and with Trump. “You can draw some connections to my own family,” Ahmari told me. “My parents were almost to-the-letter bohemians living in Iran. They thought we had inherited a reformist technocratic world, and they were going to rebel against it by taking an axe to tradition. That was the great miscalculation of the boomers.”