As the Knights Who Say Ni's demands are shifting from mere shrubberies to more substantial targets, they are practically begging for a challenge. In Monty Python, when the Knights escalate the heroes eventually tire of their demands and refuse them. Their modern equivalent have yet to hit such a barrier, however. No matter how shrill and unhinged the puppet-masters of the woke Big Business become, they find a contingent of conservatives willing to bend the knee on matter of principle. Thus the Knights Who Say Ni have come to enjoy the support of a nominally antagonistic order. We shall call them the Knights Who Say Oui.
Their figurehead is (the appropriately named) David French, a National Review writer who enjoyed a few days of notoriety as Bill Kristol's presidential nominee for the NeverTrump contingent of the conservative media. French is a Sir Robin like figure, his stature the product not so much of his own gallant efforts than the crows of his traveling minstrels, both pro and con. Kristol and his other friends in the neoconservative wing are all too happy to prop him up as a role model and then defend his honor when he is attacked on their behalf. From the other side, populist-leaning conservatives like to use French as a punching bag for wimpy conservatism. The most recent and explicit jab thus far came from Sohrab Ahmari with his "Against David French-ism," laying the blame for the litany of conservative culture war surrenders at the feet of his philosophy.
Though I'm sympathetic to the spirit of their argument, when Ahmari and the contingent he represents attack French for being too nice, I think they are misunderstanding the core creed of the Knights Who Say Oui. Nor do I take French's entertaining rebuttal - highlights including a tortured Game of Thrones analogy and his boast that he "literally placed his body" in between Christian students and protesters - at face value.
Conservatives angered and frustrated by unchecked progressive cultural assaults tend to see naivete or weakness in French's failure-to-stands (French doesn't help when he crows about pro-life culture war victories that are directly downstream of Trump's election, which he vociferously fought against). They saw the same in the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. They are just too darn nice to fight back! The constant tendency among friendly critics is to classify "French-ism" as a sort of unnecessary martyrdom. They see Neville Chamberlain - a man on the right side but using the wrong tactics for a threat as grave as Hitler.
Missing from this tragic picture, however, is any actual tragedy for the actors involved. To be sure, French, Romney and the NeverTrump host came out of 2016 with egg on their face, but what else? Romney actually increased his stature, waltzing into a shoo-in Senate seat in Utah. French's position in conservatism is unchanged. Though associated with surrender, these chivalrous knights haven't actually surrendered anything.
Consider French's dorkily expressed central point in his response to Ahmari: "the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism, not Christian statism." In English, he's saying that upholding the political philosophies embodied in the Constitution is the only way to stop the left, not reverting to a medieval Crusader mentality of holy culture war. He would later summarize his position on Twitter, his points being that politics is not war, that decency is not optional and that personal liberty doesn't get in the way of the "Highest Good."
None of these points match the situation on the ground of culture war - deplatforming, personal abuse and restrictions on speech are the battlefields du jour. So what is French actually getting at? He is nominally speaking aspirationally of the way things could or ought to be, but there is a real place that fits his description. It is the noble center of American politics and culture war.
In the noble center, where Ni and Oui coexist, outright war is forbidden (though greatly encouraged overseas). In the noble center, disagreements can occasionally get heated, but they rarely descend to outright indecency. Thus Romney, though savaged by the far left and then by the far right, can shrug his way right back into power. French, though loathed by the far left and disdained by the far right, retains his pulpit to preach at his fellow pundits - the intelligentry to coin another phrase.
Finally, they are able to preserve their sense of chivalry by continuing to fight for the Highest Good, which is ultimately defined as membership in the noble center. Jousting in formal tournaments where the rules are in place to prevent any accidental career fatalities provides chivalric thrills without requiring any actual dragon or ogre slaying. Leave the actual cultural sacrifices to the revolting peasants or bourgeois interlopers (along with the very occasional rogue knight) who don't understand or refuse to abide by the rules.
It is fitting that French should be fascinated by HBO's Game of Thrones (though hardly in keeping with French's stern reprimands of the President's supremely vulgar tastes). It envisions a world where knightly pageantry has dissolved into constant barbaric war, with every shred of decency beaten out of even the noblest of knights, and the Higher Good entirely dependent on the whims of a carousel of tyrants. This is the ultimate risk-free escape for a Peer of the Intelligentry, where peaceful decency reigns and knight errantry is limited to shouts of "Ni! and "Oui!"
