- Hoosier on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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.” Dec 14, 21:52
- on Snorkeling in Scripture: Joshua Sears on Why Latter-day Saints Need Study Bibles: “RL, the New Oxford Annotated Bible would have made the list except that I was trying to be concise. That one and the SBL one (which is a rebranding of what in previous editions was called the HarperCollins study Bible) are similar in what they do and who their audience is. In addition, the sixth edition of the Oxford Bible is coming out in May 2026, so I would advise people to hold off a few more months and get that one.” Dec 14, 21:21
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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.” Dec 14, 21:01
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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.” Dec 14, 18:10
- on Delighting in bloodshed: “Hoosier, if you would like to see credit where it’s due, then there’s this: The administration’s approach to Syria has been exactly correct. It’s dropped sanctions and steered all sides towards national unity and built partnerships with the new government in just the right way. The problem with the higher-profile, non-fictive attempts at peacemaking is that they have been amoral, comically incompetent and transparently corrupt. The U.S. negotiators have little idea what they’re doing, little understanding of the opposing parties, and a focus on financial benefit, not even for the U.S. as a whole but for friends and family members. Even if the peacemaking was competent, it wouldn’t balance out the legally unsanctioned killing, 1000 miles from the border, of 80 people (and counting) whose boats were not physically capable of reaching the U.S. and were not headed our direction. Obama’s drone strikes are a decade in the past. Trump didn’t end them as president, but Biden did. Now Trump has brought them back, today, right now, and the people who complained about Obama’s drone strikes are still droning on about Obama. But since you mention it: Attacks on shipping have been a cause for military action for centuries! It’s what sent the marines to the shores of Tripoli. Responding against the Houthis is 100% legitimate. The distinction between controlling crime domestically and stopping terrorists intent on attacking the U.S. abroad with military force is not “precious” or “arbitrary.” It’s fundamental! The Constitution is very clear about war-making powers, and freedom from search and quartering soldiers. We really, truly, absolutely do not want the Commander in Chief to decide to unilaterally stop drug dealers in San Francisco with drone strikes! We don’t want the Army to feel like they can search any house they feel like for information about potential drug dealers. We don’t want that to happen even for domestic terrorists! In any case: I don’t know how bloodthirsty Trump himself is, although he has been eager to try out some of the military levers under his control in the past, including a desire to have protestors shot. More significantly, some key figures in the Trump administration do take obvious delight in the suffering and degradation of immigrants and the death of Venezuelan boat operators. And most importantly for us, the propaganda videos they put out wants us to share in their delight, and that’s a giant moral problem that can’t be ignored.” Dec 14, 18:06
- on Snorkeling in Scripture: Joshua Sears on Why Latter-day Saints Need Study Bibles: “When I was a freshman at BYU, the Oxford study edition of the New English Translation was on the syllabus, and I wondered why I needed another Bible; wasn’t the KJV enough? But then I discovered how much there was to learn in all those footnotes and from a modern translation, and it went on to be the Bible I read through completely as a missionary.” Dec 14, 17:34
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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.” Dec 14, 14:41
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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” Dec 14, 13:55
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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” Dec 14, 13:43
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “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” Dec 14, 13:40
