There are multiple threads from some things Chris posted recently, but this caught my eye

From Jonah Goldberg:
I get it. Thanks for the response. Just a few points:
1) I watched as many on the right went from demonizing Saul Alinsky to respecting, to outright envying and wanting to emulate him. Many of those people stopped being conservative or classically liberal in the process. Steve Bannon, Dinesh, etc.
2) Your argument feels very similar and I think poses similar risks. Adopting illiberal means to achieve liberal or even just "good" ends is not a remotely new idea. It is in fact one of the oldest ideas in politics. And it doesn't have a very good track record.
3) One reason for that is that illiberal means tend to become illiberal ends in the hearts of the people employing them.
4) This is a real danger from where I sit because an American conservatism that doesn't seek to conserve "classical liberalism" isn't meaningfully conservative anymore. American conservatism is about more than classical liberalism, but classical liberalism is essential to it. Any understanding of conservatism as a political project that rejects classical liberalism is one that I will reject as will many -- hopefully most -- Americans.
5) Imposing your ideas through raw power is already pretty illiberal and leftist sounding. But if these reformed institutions aren't teaching the values of classical liberalism, wtf was the point in retaking them in the first place?
6) If our "team" gains power but turns its back on free speech, freedom of association, free markets, due process, individual rights etc. there's nothing to celebrate there.
7) I am not accusing you of having that in mind. I am saying sometimes the ends justify the means argument has a way of making the means refedine what the ends should be. And that's what worries me about these and similar projects.
https://x.com/JonahDispatch/status/1913211844338069504

From Chris:
Good questions, appreciate it. I would like to reply to them substantively:

1) I've read Alinsky/Gramsci and a lot of history of the American Founding and discovered that, if you strip out the Marxist ideologies and look at the concepts as a set of tools, the founders employed virtually all of the Alinsky/Gramsci tactics. Samuel Adams, whom Jefferson believed to be the father of the Revolution, developed a playbook that mobilized a counter-elite, produced propaganda, sieged institutions, changed the system of values, and established a new cultural hegemony, or "common sense." The ideas of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were only possible because of the tactics of Samuel Adams. Gramsci is useful to the extent that he provides an analysis not at the human scale of the founding—Boston, pop. 15,000—but at the industrial scale of modernity.

2/3) On the question of means and ends, I'm comfortable with the precedent of the American founders, who approached politics not with a deontological ethic, but a pragmatic, even Machiavellian, ethic. In the 1760s, Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson frequently accused one another of being "Machiavellian," but the truth is that they were both practitioners of hard politics, within the framework of English customs and virtues. My own political work is much less "illiberal" than that of the founders, so I can check my conscience without much trouble.

4) I think the frame of liberal-illiberal is not the best way to look at it. I'm persuaded by James Burnham's argument about the managerial regime, which has only expanded since the 1940s, and the question is what to do about it, from within an existing postliberal system. These are difficult problems and the self-described "classical liberals"—David French is a decent avatar for this—are unequipped. Moreover, they are inventing a "classical liberalism" that's actually postwar libertarianism; the founding fathers were much more "illiberal" on the question of the state, education, religion, and public values. Samuel Adams, for instance, dreamed of founding a "Christian Sparta"—i.e., the "classical liberals" would call him a "Christian nationalist" or a "fascist" or whatever.

5) I am not talking about "imposing [my] ideas through raw power." Everything I do is geared towards winning public opinion and working through democratic institutions. And for that matter, Gramsci's whole point is that you can't impose your ideas through raw power.

6) I would dramatically increase "free speech, freedom of association, free markets, due process, individual rights"—all of which have been severely limited by the Left over the past 100 years. But this is still a limited vision of America. Our country was not only founded on the Bill of Rights, but on a vision of statecraft, virtue, faith, genius, frontiers, and independence. I want an America that makes the way of life described in "Letters from an American Farmer" still possible. I also want to remember that the procedural values you list are not ultimate values—that is, they have to point toward something, which is precisely what many "classical liberals have forgotten.

7) I am confident that you know, or used to know, much of this. You wrote a book called "Liberal Fascism" and another one called "Suicide of the West," borrowing the title of James Burnham's book, which described liberalism as the ideology of civilizational suicide. And you are steeped in the tradition of National Review and well aware that Burnham—the most successful anti-communist intellectual of the twentieth century—studied directly under Trotsky, learned from his enemies on the Left, and believed that Machiavellian politics was an essential tradition. In his practical work, he collaborated with Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and mapped the "web of subversion" within the United States, all of which was justified. But by your new standard, you would have to dismiss him as an "illiberal" threat. My argument is that this is unwise.
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1913236387429597659

There is more to chew on in the threads but a lot here, too.