Part 1: J.D. Vance, Heritage, and Vermeule’s Integralism
It’s not surprising that, in a country where Catholics are a minority, Vermeule does not expect his integralist regime to take power democratically; instead, it will have to be imposed from above—or rather, from within. In “Integration from Within,” he argues that Catholic integralists should endeavor to become the “elite administrators” who occupy “the commanding heights of the administrative state.” Once in such positions, they will deploy the lessons learned from “behavioral economics that agents with administrative control...may nudge whole populations in desirable directions.”
As a Harvard law professor, Vermeule is well placed to train such an elite cadre and help them find positions in key American institutions. He tidily summarized this plan for regime change in a 2018 essay, “Ralliement,” as the “integral restoration of Christendom” via “executive-type bureaucracies.” As in the early Soviet Union, a vanguard assumes the burden of reeducating ordinary citizens. What this will look like in detail (for example, what happens to gay people or other nonconformists in such a regime) remains unsettlingly vague. This is most likely by design: Vermeule’s disciples can thus project their fantasies onto the blank canvas of a post-liberal utopia without him being on the hook for their cruel and wild imaginings. His integralism thus fuses sober, quasi-scientific analysis with the most extravagant wish-fulfillment.
Jason Blakely in “The Integralism of Adrian Vermeule”, Commonweal, 2020
I don’t think Vance is the flip-flopping, ambition-driven hypocrite that everyone in the Liberal media is making him out to be. I think he’s something worse—an Integralist. How fanatic an Integralist, I don’t know, but clearly he’s bought into the Integralist Program, and he is playing a critical role in implementing its agenda as laid out in Project 2025. To understand Integralism, you need to understand Adrian Vermeule. Vermeule didn’t invent Integralism, but he’s a Harvard Legal scholar who’s trying to adapt it to the American situation. (In Part 2 Bonus Material below, I provide more detail about Vermeule.)
As I have written previously, the Integralists, whatever they say publicly about him, are moral purists who have nothing but contempt for Donald Trump the person. He’s the embodiment of everything they loathe about Liberal Materialist society, and I feel quite confident that J.D. Vance, despite is his public disavowal of his viciously negative comments about Trump in 2016, still believes what he said then. The difference now is that he’s been convinced that Trump presents an opportunity, and that the Integralists must be bold enough to exploit it. He’s been persuaded that Trump, horrible man though he may be, is heaven-sent to prepare the way for their revolutionary program, a revolution that Kevin Roberts, reactionary Catholic and President of Heritage, has said will be bloodless if the the Left does not violently resist.
I think that Bannon’s strategic vision is more Integralist than it is MAGA. He’s where the two meet. Bannon and the Integralists want to take things much farther in a more organized way than MAGA envisions. Bannon said as much in his interview with David Brooks. The Integralists are the brains—or at least for now they seem to be the most influential faction among the far-right intellectuals—and MAGA is the brawn. MAGA provides the raw populist energy that might win the election for the radical Right, and if they lose it, MAGA will provide the thugs who will try to steal it as they did last time.
MAGA and the Integralists overlap in their hatred for Liberal elites, but what is the MAGA program except to hate liberals and deport brown people? Does MAGA have a plan? No. Does the plutocrat faction within the GOP care about anything except to lower taxes and eliminate regulations? No. Do they have a plan? No, but the Heritage Integralists do.
Whether they’ll succeed is another question. Once again, Republicans are expecting a big red wave in November. But why should they get it this time? Have the fundamentals really changed so much from the previous three cycles in ‘18, ‘20, & ‘22? If anything the factors that led most Americans to reject MAGA before are more alarming now. Anybody who thinks that they know what is going to happen in November is a fool. None of us do. The situation is very fluid, and however things appear now, they are likely to look very different in the Fall.
So in case you were wondering, I’m with Bernie, AOC, the Black Caucus, and almost everyone other than the liberal elite establishment, that is, I’m for sticking with Joe. Here’s an idea: stop wasting time and energy doing the GOP’s job for them. Stop attacking Biden and focus on how much worse Trump/Vance/Integralism is.
There is no alternative to Biden that I see as less risky that just sticking with him. But the pearl-clutchers always think the have to do something when really there is nothing to do except play the hand that they are dealt. They may succeed in ousting Biden, but who replaces him? Kamala Harris? Great. Just what swing voters in rust-belt states are looking for—an elite Neoliberal from California.
Joe is old, but he’s a known quantity; most people voted for him before; he’s had a successful presidency by almost every standard; the economy is mostly positive; and he’s far more relatable to swing voters than almost any other candidate that coastal elites like Pelosi and Schumer might want to put up. And so, despite all this, people are going to vote for Trump because Biden is too old? Really? Liberals—get a grip.
Listen, as I said above, nobody, including me, knows what’s going to happen. We’re in crazy town, and everybody is coping to some degree or another with a case of Ontological Dizziness—perhaps most especially Liberal elites—but there’s a sober way to assess things and there’s a hysterical way. And there’s too much fear and hysteria among establishment elites right now, and their fear-driven groupthink is not worthy of our trust. I don’t trust the polls. But I do trust Biden’s judgment any time, any day, before I trust the the judgment of the editorial board of The NY Times. The Liberal establishment is behaving now in the cringey, anxiety-driven way that makes so many detest it. If Biden is pushed out, it will not be because he had a bad debate performance but because the hyenas will not give up until they bring the wounded elephant down. Hang in there, Joe.
In the final analysis, this is not a contest between two individuals. This election is about two different ways of imagining America, and I simply cannot believe that no matter how annoying many middle Americans find woke Democrats, when push comes to shove, they will choose what has become a crackpot GOP and its Project 2025. If they vote Trump/Vance, it will not be because of Joe Biden’s bad debate performance, but because the Democrats have not made the case to Middle America that what Trump/Vance stands for is an America that nobody wants to live in, not even most of those who think they do.
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Part 2: Bonus Material—Vermeule’s Integralism
So since Vermeule is not well known, I thought it might be useful to summarize the Blakely's article that lays out what his Integralism comprises. People should be more familiar with it:
Vermeule’s work has especially resonated in recent years because he has compellingly articulated a number of important truths about our current situation. He is critical of unrestrained capitalism and shallow materialism, and appeals instead to a politics of the common good. He’s an active—and frequently provocative—participant in the debates about the fate of “liberalism” that have followed the victories of right-wing populist movements both here and abroad.
…If civilization was to be rescued from moral decline and collapse, the Church would lead the way. As he explained in a 2017 essay, the Catholic Church “serves as a kind of ark,” saving society from “the universal deluge of economic-technical decadence, and the eventual self-undermining of the regime.”
I don’t know what Church he’s talking about. Blakely makes the case elsewhere in the article that much of what he’s talking about is pretty un-Catholic these days, even if it had been true in the past. He is a recent (2016) convert to a reactionary form Catholicism, and there’s a theocratic impulse that is driving his thinking. But for him, because he’s a legal scholar, it starts with the courts. In a manifesto he published in the Atlantic in March 2020—
he recommended that conservatives abandon their longstanding originalist jurisprudence in favor of “common good constitutionalism.” His brief sketch of this legal theory mentioned tenets of Catholic social teaching such as subsidiarity and solidarity, but it also argued for the return of “hierarchies,” “rulers,” and “political domination.” When interpreting the common good, Vermeule later suggested, judges should defer to the executive branch and the “administrative state, within reasonable boundaries.” It all amounted to a case for vastly expanded presidential power, written against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies—and provided a glimpse of the formidable intellectual and political project Vermeule has undertaken since becoming Catholic.
Hm. Where have we seen those ideas presented recently?
He sees the Liberal Order collapsing from its own dead weight and internal contradictions. He claims that—
…liberalism is destined to fail because it follows a deterministic process of decline. This is the view expounded in Vermeule’s 2018 essay “Integration from Within,” that “the progression...from one form of liberalism to another unfolds by logical dynamic, an inner necessity.” Vermeule often presents liberalism as being propelled by an “internal mechanism” of “relentless aggression,” a kind of moral avant-gardism that can never be satisfied, let alone reversed. For liberalism, he argues, “yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest, or who knows what.” He chastises conservatives like Ross Douthat for failing to acknowledge that liberal regimes always move in this direction.
… in his later writings, the emergency created by the supposed crisis of liberalism is more or less permanent because the enemy is within: American liberals and their allies. That crisis can be resolved only by a supreme executive and administrative state that inculcates Catholic morality [by way of the Heritage Foundation], replacing liberalism’s disordered worship with genuine religion. Regime change now begins at home.
We Americans need to be saved from the the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, not Liberalism, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, too many Liberals are too complacently comfortable with life in the TCM—especially liberal elites in the Beltway and media.
Integralism doesn’t always fit easily into the prevailing categories of American politics, and can’t be reduced to the ethno-nationalism and Prosperity Gospel hucksterism so prevalent on the Right. Integralists do not usually fear-monger about immigrants the way many nationalist conservatives do, for example, because they portray themselves as loyal to the Church, especially the pope, not the flag. But as demonstrated in Vermeule’s Atlantic essay, integralism exists in a complex relationship with darker elements on the Right, and they overlap in two key ways: a fixation with reinstating “Christian values” via executive rule and a visceral disgust for the liberal tradition.
In other words Integralists are everything every anti-Papist Protestant feared about Catholics being in power! The Protestant White Nationalists are going to stand for this usurpation of power by this reactionary Catholic cabal?! Yikes. If Trump wins, the infighting is going to be vicious.
…Vermeule began to elaborate his view of executive power in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Terror in the Balance, published in 2007, Vermeule and his coauthor Eric Posner made a case for deferring to the president on policies that include “coercive interrogation” (i.e. torture), ethnic profiling, surveillance, military trials, and the indefinite detainment of enemy combatants. Vermeule and Posner stated their neutrality on practices like torture—at the time, Bush-administration policy—while insisting on the supposedly descriptive, social-scientific finding that the executive alone had “the resources, power, and flexibility to respond to threats to national security” in the age of terror. In their view, the consolidation of executive power was simply “natural” and “inevitable.” This was an excellent example of how intellectuals can provide a rationale for terrible abuses while avoiding any straightforward endorsement of them.
But not to worry. No authoritarianism to see here. If you think so, you’re just hysterically overreacting. Just ask John Roberts:
Part of Vermeule and Posner’s case for a supreme executive is their assurance that it will not devolve into bald-faced tyranny. That sanguine view also rests on a methodological assumption: that as rational actors, executives will be checked by a strategic assessment of the game scenarios and “institutional mechanisms” facing them, such as popular opinion and elections. Vermeule and Posner claimed that a president, even if unchecked by other branches of government, is unlikely to veer into wanton falsehood or cruelty because he needs “credibility in order to persuade others that his factual and causal assertions are true and his intentions are benevolent.” For them, rational-choice theory justifies the astonishing assertion that an executive who is above the law will not abuse such power.
And here we are with their willingness to test their “rational actor theory” by supporting an ignorant crackpot like Donald J. Trump? I can only guess how they justify this risk, probably by thinking that Trump is too senile and mentally diminished to do any real harm, and if they get a guy like J.D. Vance and one of their own placed as Trump's chief of staff, they will prevent Trump from doing truly insane, destructive things. It's worth the risk, they think, if Vance and his Integralist allies at Heritage and in the Supreme Court can do their extremist theocratic things. But does anybody with a lick of sense believe that’s how this will play out? I don't, but you have to admire the boldness of these Integralists while being at the same time horrified by it.