Catholic Integralism and the Constitution

Stephen Fleming

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So lately I’ve been noticing some rhetoric on the right that seems at odds with what had been more standard claims to a great devotion to the constitution. I’m probably not as linked into these networks as many others, so I’m curious what additional information T&S readers may know.

I’d heard some rhetoric like the “Flight 93” concept and others, but was particularly struck by the popular clip of Medhi Hassan debating young conservatives and the statements made by a young white Catholic man. He said he didn’t mind being called a Fascist, that he loved Francisco Franco as the ideal ruler, and wanted to get American law aligned with Catholic standards including imposing blasphemy laws.

This came across as an odd combination to me.

Steve Bannon’s continual insistence on Trump serving a third term seemed equally adrift from the constitution and I was interested to learn that Bannon is a conservative Catholic. To be clear, me noting this trend isn’t a critique of Catholicism as a whole for which I have a lot of admiration. Clearly Catholics Integralists only form a portion of American Catholics (I have no idea what portion).

In this context, I was particularly struck by a claim from Mike Cosper on the Dispatch. Cosper, a former Protestant minister, was speaking with a Protestant son a friend who attends Columbia University, and Cosper expressed to the kid his condolences over the difficulties a conservative religious kid would going to school there (around minute 16).

“It is but not for the reason that you think,” the student responded. “When I go to the young conservative gatherings on this campus, it’s full of hardcore monarchists, Catholic Integralists; these people who are essentially saying that democracy was a mistake.”

I first heard the term “Catholic Integralism” from my dad as we were talking about these issues. Wikipedia defines it as “the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society.”

Put another way, the sense I’m getting from some of these Integral Catholics is the belief that how they interpret Catholic policy should the a highest political and legal rule, higher than the constitution. I wonder if such thinking motivates Bannon’s insistence on Trump’s third term.

Right after that statement from Cosper, he notes that such thinking “draws people into the influence of Nick Fuentes,” and Fuentes seems to make abundant references to his Catholic devotion and to also thinking in terms of Catholic Integralism. I know Fuentes is a hot topic recently, and again, I’m not an expert, but Cosper and the Dispatch host calling Fuentes a Neo-Nazi seems accurate.

Fuentes is his own topic, but the focus of this post is the interest and concern of a rise of a form of political thought among Americans who seem to want to subordinate the constitution to their own religious-political ideology. Again I’m thinking of Bannon’s insistence of Trump’s third term.

Such ideas becoming more popular seems particularly concerning and make me think of our white horse prophecy of the constitution hanging by a thread. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but in the volatile times we seem to be in, such a trend isn’t encouraging.

Just to make a more explicit Mormon connection, I’ll note Jonathan Rouch’s recent Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Promises with Democracy who highlights President Oaks’s statements (minute 12) on the importance of political compromise in a pluralistic society. Our constitution may indeed need saving and President Oaks is in a remarkable position.

Comments

16 responses to “Catholic Integralism and the Constitution”

  1. Stephen C.

    For what it’s worth, I know two Catholic integrationalists, but in both cases it’s not that they believe we should be a Catholic theocracy where political power is out in the hands of the bishops, but rather that the state should have Catholicism as the official church like the Church of England is in the UK. I’m obviously against both forms, but the latter version isn’t limited to people with crusader tattoos. Also, Bannon, IIRC, is a Straussian, so my bet would be that his Catholicism stems from him seeing Catholicism as a necessary myth for the masses more than any actual spiritual beliefs.

  2. Stephen Fleming

    Thanks for the input, Stephen. I guess my particular interest is what looks to me like increasing rhetoric on the right of at least giving lip service to getting around law and the constitution for a greater religious good.

    And having “Catholicism as the official church like the Church of England is in the UK” is, of course, a total violation of the constitution, bringing up the question of is that simply a pie-in-the-sky fantasy or a political objective some are working toward? I get the sense that Bannon and Fuentes wouldn’t mind pushing that objective, and Cosper claiming to see a rise a such thinking among young Christian conservatives seems alarming.

  3. Hoosier

    I tried to write a comment, and it turned into an essay, so I will post it in three parts.

    I guess I’ll tip my hand with how much I know about these largely online subcultures that are entering the “real” world through the youth. (“Real” world vs. the Internet seems like a false dichotomy these days.) I wouldn’t call myself a youth necessarily but I am a conservative under 30 and thus am part of the demographic being discussed here, with exposure to lots of similar pressures. Catholic integralism is by no means a majority of conservative youth, but it is best analyzed as an expression of a broader movement which frankly is, and will not go away any time soon. As they say, if you want to understand a man’s views, look at the world when he was 20. I’ll discuss the broader movement then how Catholic integralism fits into it. You’ll be able to tell, but I’ll say it straight out – I’m sympathetic to the diagnoses and descriptions of this school of thought though I don’t completely agree. Don’t ask me for a solution, I haven’t figured out my prescriptions yet.

    Catholic integralism rises out of general Gen-Z malaise. I’m on the older edge of Gen Z and I don’t remember a world before 9/11. I don’t think you need me to re-narrate the Gen Z malaise, you’ve probably heard it a lot. Right or wrong, it is a sociological reality. Trust in the U.S. government is at a low all around, and the mood is generally pessimistic. The precise nature of the failures is often different depending on which side of the political aisle the Gen Z’er comes from, but the dissatisfaction is pretty general. Faith in progress, as it were, has broken down. As a rule we think the current system – whether you call it capitalism, democracy, managerialism, whatever – gets in its own way when it comes to fixing a lot of problems, and we doubt it ever will. I have not met a single Zoomer who, when asked, thinks that he or she will ever see a cent of Social Security money. The deficit will never shrink. The price of apartments or college will never go down in any durable way. The factories will not come back. The strain of optimism that characterized the Kennedys, Reagan, and a lot of the Cold War is pretty much gone. You can see how this would open people up to ideas previously beyond the pale.

    Among the nerdy, wonky, and government-oriented (plus those inclined to deterministic thinking), there has been a resurgence – often implicit but also often stated up front – of a cyclical view of history vs. the progressive view. The progressive view is the ideology of Aaron Sorkin screenplays – society lurches towards refinement, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice – these are crude restatements of a more deserving tradition of political thought, but they capture at least the way the integralists think about it. The end of politics (“end” as both “goal” and “final state”) is to build and refine a state that increasingly approximates and instantiates a deontologically good set of values. The cyclical view, in contrast, holds that there can be no permanent political regime so long as the raw material of politics is humanity; every type of governing system will have flaws, blind spots, transcription errors which will eventually overwhelm it and lead to its collapse into something mechanically different. The death of regimes is as unavoidable as that of people, and a core element of politics is succession planning. You can see why this belief would really break from the postwar political dialogue in America, which was in many ways captured by the eschatological competition between the United States and Soviet Union. Progress was presumed, it was just a question of direction – this basic schema underlay the rhetoric of communism, the civil rights movement, and Reaganism alike. Doing away with that presumption – thinking of states in terms of evolution and adaptation as opposed to progress – will introduce a lot of weirdness into American politics.

    1/3

  4. Hoosier

    If the death of the state is assumed, though, what does that do to the goals of politics? This leads us to classical political theorizing. The conception of the “cycle of regimes” find its fullest classical expression in Polybius, who famously illustrated the cycle of regimes with reference to the Greek city states that cycled between periods of more-or-less popular rule, oligarchy, and dictatorship. However, throughout it all it remained the same city, the same physical place and the same ethnos. Another classic example is the the Roman Republic -> Principate –> post-Crisis of the Third Century empire –> Byzantines. The government of Justinian I was different from the government of the Julio-Claudians which was closer-to-but-still-different-from the government of the Scipiones, but there was a degree of symbolic continuity. There was a Roman state-meme that survived from the 700s BC to 1453 AD.

    The continuity of these state-memes through the cycle of regimes is enabled by a symbolic order beyond the mere function of the government – in the Greek city-states it was the community of the polis, in Rome it was the historic imagery and traditions of the Roman Republic. These symbolic orders survived wars beyond number, plagues, mass religious conversions, and changes in both the identity and function of the rulers. By providing an element of continuity, they even smoothed the inevitable transition of regimes, which becomes a core concern of politics under a cyclical view of history.

    This leads us to the real power behind the movement, of which Catholic integralism is only an aspect: postliberalism.

    The problem with modern liberal states, in the postliberal telling, is that they are explicitly against the sort of symbolic order that survives the decay and fall of a specific regime. The state will not establish such an order and anti-discrimination law prevents a non-governmental symbolic order from emerging. There is, and can be, no common religion or metaphysics enforced among the people. There is, and can be, no ideology that underwrites being a member of the “res publica” – even the conventional American civic religion is actively undermined by contemporary trends in journalism and education. The closest thing to it is the rainbow-colored internationalist ideology of the upper class, which is often referred to by the name “globohomo.” This name is partially a jape at LGBTQ+ (the liberation of whom is fundamental to the ideology) and partially an etymological reference to “homo” meaning “same” – a flattened world of sameness, nondistinction, perfect fluidity, fungibility, and homogeneity. Postliberals will point to the phenomena of supply-chain globalization and mass immigration powered by liberal egalitarianism and capitalist penny-pinching – liberal government has taken away any sense of being a people unified by common descent, language, or experience and replaced it with mere subjection to the same sovereign government. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people…but which people and what does it even mean to be that people? The formal egalitarianism and neutrality of the government allows for no overarching metaphysics, creed, or set of traditions. The only unifying factor is the institution of government itself. What was once government for the people has become people of the government. You can’t “become an American” by, like, revering the Founding Fathers or the Greatest Generation or something – we’d have to denaturalize most sociology and history departments. To be American these days is to be subject to Washington D.C. and no more.

    2/3

  5. Hoosier

    Under such circumstances, American constitutionalism loses its appeal. Postliberals despair of being able to solve the Social Security crisis, the birthrate crisis (but I repeat myself), the debt crisis, our manufacturing (and therefore military) deficits wrt China, the possible AI employment crisis, and a host of others, by democratic means. In any case, they say, the tendency of modern America is to abandon democratic governance anyway. It can generally be agreed that Congress doesn’t do anything and the president rules by executive order, whether Obama or Trump. Beyond that, though, there’s not really a feeling of identification with the government – even though we can vote for it, it is still an “other.” It’s just too big, it covers too many people, it takes on a logic of its own that doesn’t connect with your concerns. To the young postliberal the liberal arrangement of society is failing and as a final middle-finger it has destroyed the symbolic orders that might have allowed us to materially change the construction of our government while retaining a sense of being something other than a faceless subject. If you’re going to be a faceless subject of an elective monarchy, you’re two-thirds of the way to the Holy Roman Empire anyway.

    For postliberals seeking a replacement, then, Catholic integralism is probably the best-articulated alternative to liberal modernity without repeating the midcentury horrors of communism. The contemporary revival of Catholic integralism finds its scholarly expression in the works of legal and political scholars Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, respectively of the Notre Dame University Department of Political Science and Harvard University School of Law. Their works will give a good introduction to the motivation and theory behind Catholic integralism. The movement is not driven by any particular grace or charism of the Catholic Church. It’s not that Catholicism is winning the youth over, it’s rather that the throne-and-altar political theology of traditionalist Catholicism offers the best alternative symbolic structure to ground the authority of the state. If you have it as a central pole, a central symbolic structure that makes affirmative statements about what it means to belong to the polis, then maybe you can use that to reconstruct a democracy that solves some of these problems. Hillsdale College, famously a school for wonkish evangelical conservatives in southern Michigan, is more or less a Catholic baptistry at this point.

    Integralism is not a majority even among young conservatives, I would say, but it is prominent and ascendant, and most of the opposition to it is not out of love for liberalism but rather an unwillingness to go to that extreme.

    3/3

  6. I comment once a year

    I have to say that this description of the case for Catholic integralism scares me more than anything I’ve read on this blog for a long time. I thought MAGA was bad. This sounds so much worse to me.

    I am sure that you mean well, Hoosier, but what you just described sounds like a con job for unscrupulous young turks to burn everything in the name of symbolic [literally anything] so they can rule over the ashes. It also sounds like a great way to justify all manner of -ites. Like the people behind this want to move directly to 3 Ne 7:14 without bothering with the in-between steps.

    Liberal democracy is the best we’re going to get until we love each other enough to build Zion. It may eventually fail, but a Christian dictatorship, no matter how well meaning, will be awful and terrifying. But the very worst part is that it will push people away from actually following Christ more than anything else.

  7. Jonathan Green

    Hoosier: Thanks for the extensive description of what you are observing. I have some areas of sympathy and other areas of strong disagreement, but it helps to hear where people are coming from.

  8. Kent Larsen

    Wow.

    I can’t help observing that Mormonism was originally based on a cyclical view —— the idea of “restoration” assumes a cyclical understanding of the world. But while that’s embedded in our culture, I’m not sure we really believe that anymore.

    OTOH, it seems to me that the Catholic Integrationist viewpoint is an extreme, and a viewpoint that is contrary to the gospel (or at least my understanding of it)—specifically the idea that society must be grounded on some kind of racial or ethnic commonality, or some other kind of us vs. them dichotomy. Don’t the Book of Acts and much of the letters that make up the New Testament make it clear that the gospel is for everyone, not just the Jews or whatever ethnic or other group?

    Of course, I’m still not sure where this leaves my understanding of LDS views. I’m caught between a cyclical view and a progressive view. And I think its generally good to subordinate my political views to the gospel. Its just that I have a VERY different understanding of the gospel.

  9. Hoosier

    Jonathan: pleased to be of service. I travel in the parts of the Internet where this stuff is discussed and I figured I might as well report on what I’ve seen. I’ll state that, among the politically active Gen Zers that I know personally, I don’t know of any integralists. However, the circle of “who I know” is not that big (I live in a mid-size Midwestern city and am not the most sociable besides) and Online Integralism (TM) has been seen coming from a lot of people on the first rung of the D.C. ladder – junior congressonial staffers, social media handlers, etc. The journalist Rod Dreher had a piece out the other week arguing that up to half of Republican staffers in D.C. were some variety of integralist or other postliberal (most other varieties of postliberal are worse, as you might imagine), but a bunch of rebuttals were written and Discourse Ensued and estimates seemed to settle somewhere around 20-30%. Alarming, but not necessarily apocalyptic in my view.

    ICOAY: I’m only your friendly neighborhood eyewitness. Like I said, I don’t have my prescriptions figured out. I’m sympathetic to a lot of the descriptive conclusions of the postliberals but I think they do miss pretty important things here and there. There’s way too much determinism, specifically that this state of political affairs was baked into liberalism from the start. I don’t think that’s a defensible conclusion.

    But I am sympathetic to the idea that America’s national identity is precarious. The national mythos is being ruthlessly deconstructed more or less everywhere and has been for the better part of a decade. Meanwhile, we’ve had a lot of immigration. Our history as the much-memed “nation of immigrants” has been facilitated by nation-making traumas that fuse each wave of immigrants into the national body with a new and agglomerative mythos – the Civil War with the north Atlantic Irish and midwestern Germans and the World Wars with the Ellis Island cohorts. Those two wars also featured substantial expansions of the federal government. At this point I don’t know if we have another national bonding-trauma in us, there isn’t any more room for the federal government to grow, and the rising left-counterpart to postliberalism (decolonial theory) is all about actively undermining each stage of that national mythos. So I don’t really know how to handle, frankly, the question of what we are now. “Subjects of Washington D.C.” seems about right, and I doubt people will be willing to sacrifice for that at the necessary scale in times of war or austerity. Nations that don’t earn sacrifice will wither.

  10. Stephen Fleming

    Yes, thanks for your explanations, Hoosier, and my apologies if I don’t adequately respond to all of what you said. I do understand that people your age are facing a lot of worries, and you make a good point about our national disconnection. And even though the nation and our church makes a big deal of the constitution, I’m certainly open to debating its merits (if that is what you are saying). My understanding is that Integralists can be quite critical of the constitution.

    There’s the quote attributed to Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” So yes, I open to discussing concerns about the constitution, and am well aware of concerns about disintegration of our social connections. But having studied a lot of history, I think it’s quite clear that claims to fixing all our problems through Catholicism as the national church is pretty absurd (not sure if that’s what you’re saying or not, but my understanding is that integralists are). Very few Americans want that so it could only be imposed by a coup which sounds pretty bad. More Protestants than Catholics here, so that would truly be tyranny, and we’ve got plenty of history of awful Catholic/Protestant wars and violence that don’t look at all appealing to return to.

    That said, I do very much appreciate the concerns you expressed. We do have legit problems and as bishop I would quote DC 45:68-69 to my ward a lot when discussing our national and world troubles. I DO believe we have a wonderful church and community (https://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php/2024/03/a-secular-case-for-the-church/) and I do believe it is wise to take refuge among the saints and in Zion, even if only metaphorically, as we face these difficulties.

    I DO NOT think the answer is to chuck the constitution and to impose Catholic integralism.

  11. Curtis Pew

    My initial reaction was to say “don’t worry, this is very much a minority position,” but as Hoosier has accurately pointed out it’s much stronger among young people than among old people like me.

    My take is that younger people today have correctly noted that our current system isn’t really working for them the way they were promised. They also haven’t been particularly well educated about how our constitution was designed to work, so they often associate this current failing system with “democracy” or “capitalism”. As a result, we see young people embracing socialism on the “left” or things like this Catholic Integralism on the right.

  12. Stephen Fleming

    In terms of your last comment, Hoosier, I did see a lot of chatter a couple of weeks ago of an article claiming that a high percentage of young GOP inters and staffers (40%?) were “Groipers.” I know you know this, but for those less familiar, Groipers are those with similar ideologies to Fuentes. Is that that article you’re referring to?

    Again, my understanding is that while Fuentes does promote a form of integralism, he has a special brand of while supremacist and chauvinism that I’m guessing isn’t the view of all integralists (but I don’t know all that much). One way or another, the claims about highish numbers of Groiper attitudes among GOP inters and staffers IS concerning. The commentary I watched that discussed those claims asserted the numbers were really under 10%, but what do I know? It’s a concerning ideology for many reasons and it’s spread is definitely worrying.

  13. ji

    I know the OP is about Catholic Integralism, but I want to add a word about Mormon Integralism. I’m the not-so-recent past, I heard talk among Latter-day Saints about how wonderful a theocracy would be, but I always disagreed. The idea of an unelected Mormon mayor and governor and so forth is scary to me. Mormons, generally speaking, and using a church model, absolutely do not know how to govern a community — running a town like a ward and a state like a stake would be a dictatorship of the “elite” and would not be in the public interest.

  14. Josh

    To build off of Hoosier’s excellent description, another piece of the puzzle is that a lot of younger conservative people think that the Constitution has already been subordinated to a religious-political ideology for a while.

    Christopher Caldwell argues in his book “Age of Entitlement” that the 1964 Civil Rights Act basically created a second Constitution with a mandate to liberate every last racial or sexual minority from any and all oppression. His analysis has some bite – since the 60s, the Supreme Court has used the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to conjure up constitutionally protected rights out of whole cloth (abortion, contraceptives, same sex marriage etc.)

    You can argue about whether those are good or bad – but having them imposed via judicial fiat under the aegis of “the Constitution” made a lot of people think they were being conned. If “the Constitution” just means advancing whatever the bleeding edge of progressivism is at any given time then conservative people are going to wonder what the point of it is.

    There’s also kind of a prisoners dilemma problem here. Both major political parties in America seem fine with violating constitutional and governmental norms when they have something to gain from it, but turning around and waving the constitution like a bloody shirt when it’s done to them. I think seeing “the Constitution” deployed that cynically is going to make a lot of people view it as just another tool that’s subordinate to their actual religious or political aims.

  15. Hoosier

    Stephen,

    Thank you for your kind words. I do want to clarify that, though I move in similar currents, I do not speak as a postliberal and definitely not as a Catholic integralist. I agree with a lot of their descriptions of our current condition, but a very common postliberal belief is that this state of affairs was always inevitable, that the logic and incentives of liberalism would lead us inexorably here one way or another. I don’t think that’s true, my acquaintance with the historical record leads me to believe that there was a lot more contingency involved than pop-postliberal theory would acknowledge. I’m acknowledge that mass democracy imposes an incentive structure that inhibits solutions to a lot of our problems, but I’ve not thrown in the towel. I admire the Founders and don’t want to toss their achievements aside, and I have no plans to provoke the wrath of God by setting up a king here. Those motivations, though, are themselves not very “liberal” – they come from a love of historical tradition and religion. The more liberalism deconstructs those sources of value, the more it saws off its own branch.

    Postliberals can be critical of the Constitution but not universally so – like every ideology, there are mild and extreme strains. Vermeule, for instance, is not really critical of the Constitution as a whole, though he’s criticized this-or-that clause. Rather, he’s critical of the common-law juridical tradition that controls our Constitution’s interpretation. We inherited that from the English. Roman law (also called “civil law”), in contrast, dominates the jurisprudence of the European continent. The difference boils down to precedent. In Anglo-American common-law, precedent is entitled to deference from the Court. In Roman law, the text of the law is what matters, and precedent is only an indicator of where the Court might go – they are free to judge each case based on the law, the merits, and their conception of the common good without the interpretive strictures of precedent. Vermeule prefers this, since it allows the government to flex a little with the times and makes the Constitution more of a “living document” (there’s some horseshoe theory for ya). Of course, Vermeule’s ideas about how we should flex are more “the Due Process Clause only guarantees whatever process the legislature says is due” and less “the Privileges and Immunities Clause guarantees the ERA.” If you’ve ever encountered the term “common-good constitutionalism,” that’s Vermeule’s term for what he advocates. That’s about as postliberal as you can get at Harvard Law.

    This strain of postliberalism is the strongest, I think. Even a lot of Catholic integralists want Catholicism to be the religion of the state governments – which the federal Constitution does permit, or at least did at the beginning, though most state constitutions do not. A state religion of all fifty states will become functionally the religion of the feds, after all. I don’t see a whole lot of appetite for tossing out the Founding Charter even among the integralists – the Venn Diagram of integralists and monarchists is far from a perfect circle. However, there is a LOT of Supreme Court revisionism, so to speak. Basically the Constitution is valuable as a Schelling point, a central organizing point to keep the country together, as long as we reinterpret it pretty aggressively in some ways.

    However, I would be very remiss if I did not address the monarchists in the room – I don’t want to sanewash. These guys are overwhelmingly extremely online and young, the archetype we’ve been discussing here. They’re mostly acolytes of Curtis Yarvin, an Internet-famous political theorist who was recently profiled by the New Yorker. There’s also a host of online influencer-philosophers who emphasize vitalism, physical-fitness-as-moral-signifier, hereditarianism about IQ, and a few other positions that also tend towards the same principle: hierarchy as a conferral of moral validity. If you’ve ever heard the names Bronze Age Pervert or Raw Egg Nationalist – this is what we’re talking about. Their general idea is that the United States and other liberal societies has coasted on cultural capital from the Before Times – cultural intuitions about social organization from a pre-liberal age that had not yet been deconstructed by egalitarianism – but the nature of egalitarianism eventually interrogates and deconstructs all value judgments and social hierarchies no matter their function, collapsing all into the “oppressed v. oppressor” dynamic of critical theory. Egalitarianism in their thought has all the function of an autoimmune disorder. Therefore the end of liberalism can be seen from the beginning and “globohomo” was written into the DNA. As part of that DNA the Constitution is an obstacle for the most part, though I’ve never seen a coherent plan for what would come next from this group – they don’t think they can predict what comes next and are therefore satisfied with ushering it into being and vanquishing the devil they know. When asked they mostly quote their midcentury luminary Julius Evola: “ride the tiger.”

    Groyperism, the personal following of Nick J. Fuentes, is a thing all its own. It is a cult of personality and a collection of behavioral tics, not an ideology with substance (I rather dislike them and that will come through here.) A lot of the more intellectual postliberals make fun of them, especially after Charlie Kirk was murdered and Nick Fuentes telegraphed that he was going to try to fill Kirk’s vacated niche. Fuentes is a troll, a talented streamer and entertainer to be sure, but a troll. He and Kirk had a sort of civil war for the soul of the youth which Kirk was winning handily before his assassination. Fuentes is all about provocation for its own sake, and that is his ideology: the modern world sucks and is upheld by a set of moral codes, therefore break those codes to break the spell. To be quite honest, Fuentes and the groypers are spiritual heirs of punk. Whereas the punk scene violated taboos against emo presentation and Satanism, the continuing liberalization of society removed all the taboos for them to violate…except for the taboos against Nazism and ethnic bigotry, the windmills against which they joust. However, provocateurs generally aren’t good at voter outreach, executive staffing, or getting favors done. Kirk was always much better at that, which is why the President of the United States got a football stadium for his funeral and Fuentes streams from a basement. The whole thing is gross, but I’m not as worried about it as I am the monarchists – Fuentes’ actions after Kirk’s murder seem to have burned his bridges with the gatekeepers of the actual Republican Party. Kirk was a generational talent at organizing, communicating, recruitment, and building bridges within the coalition, and he was deeply beloved by mostly everybody with any connection to the party structure. Fuentes is not, and his presumption has earned him great ire. Without him, there’s really nothing to groyperism.

  16. RLD

    J.D. Vance is a fan of Deneen, Yarvin, and other post-liberals. If he is Trump’s heir, we can expect the Republican party to continue in that direction.

    That probably doesn’t mean a coup that explicitly replaces the Constitution. The role model is Orban in Hungary, who successfully converted a liberal democracy into an illiberal sham democracy by taking over the institutions of society and making them functionally organs of his party. Trump’s attempts to make the media, universities, law firms, tech, and big business in general bow the knee to him are not just ego; they are an attempt to do the same thing in the United States. (Putin’s Russia is also a role model for the end goal, in particular its ethnonationalism and use of Russian Orthodoxy.)

    Now, as far as I know Vance hasn’t talked Catholic Integralism about specifically, which would alienate the evangelicals that are so critical to Trump’s coalition. I can easily imagine Catholic Integralists thinking of evangelicals as useful temporary allies, to be led along with promises of Christian supremacy and who will realize only too late that the people they’ve put in charge don’t consider them proper Christians. So, basically how evangelical Christian Nationalists think about Latter-day Saints.

    To be clear: religious freedom is part and parcel of classical liberalism. Post-liberals generally do not believe in it. The founding fathers were classical liberals, and the Constitution is based on it. Even if President Oaks never gives another political talk, Love Your Enemies (October 2020), Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution (April 2021), and his University of Virginia speech in November 2021 are strong endorsements of both classical liberalism and the Constitution, and rejections of post-liberalism in all its forms. We know where he stands and where he thinks we should stand.

    But we older folks need to realize that all the rising generation has seen in Washington DC is hyper-partisanship, gridlock, and dysfunction. We may think that fixing it is mostly about replacing people, or tinkering on the margins, and then we can get back to the more-or-less functional government we had in our younger days. It should not be a surprise that the rising generation thinks more fundamental change is needed. But it is my sense that on the left, all ages have gained a greater appreciation for classical liberalism and the idea that the government should not be telling you how to live your life, even if the younger generation is very willing to replace the Constitution with something “more democratic.”

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