For Ahmari, David French epitomised a Right-liberal thinking that conceded too much territory. By accepting the liberal idea that moral values should be kept out of the public square, the argument goes, conservatism merely becomes a strategy for losing more slowly. Instead, Ahmari states that the Right should aim for “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”.

It’s hard to see, though, how this stance can easily be made to square particularly with Ahmari’s co-panellists Dave Rubin, a noted libertarian, and Douglas Murray, the grande dame of anti-woke right-liberalism.

For me, this event encapsulated the NatCon’s quandary: what kind of alliance, if any, is possible between liberals and post-liberals? And, crucially, ordered to which values? Everyone on the panel was unenthusiastic about wokeness, at pains to stress that they weren’t rabid authoritarians, and seemingly unsure about how to resolve the question of how state power could align with moral values, without treading on at least some of their friends’ toes.