Damon Linker has a piece yesterday in the Atlantic about the Catholic Integralists entitled "The Post Liberal Catholics Get Their Man." It syncs with most of what I had to say in my post a few weeks ago about the Integralists. The threat they posed then seemed urgent because of the confluence of the SCOTUS decisions, the emergence of Project 2025 into the public eye, and Trump's pick of J.D. Vance as his running mate. Despite all the attention these events were getting, nobody was talking about the reactionary Catholics who are playing such a central role in the shaping of all these developments. I thought that was worth a post, and I still do, even if now with the Trump campaign in a tailspin, the whole project seems to be just another bit of far-right, delusion-driven hubris. But should it be so blithely dismissed?
Reactionary Catholics have been flying under the radar for quite some time now, and when the media focuses on right-wing Christians, they mainly look at MAGA Evangelicals who have no coherent intellectual justification for their support of Trump. It's all based in a naive and rather bizarre pre- or post-millennialist cargo-cult theology. Mike Johnson is no intellectual heavyweight, and is a little crackpot. I believe he's a naive, sincere crackpot, but in the end that's all he is. It doesn’t make him less dangerous, but there is nothing in his worldview that has any kind of respectable intellectual coherence and that will ever be appealing to the college educated, especially those that come out of the elite universities.
Secular Liberals tend to bunch right wing Evangelicals and Catholics in the same whackadoodle category, but they’re wrong to do so. The Catholic Integralists are extremists, but I wouldn't call them crackpots. They think of themselves as a revolutionary vanguard, and they've been maneuvering for decades now to occupy positions of power within the political infrastructure. Whatever happens this November, they will continue their maneuvering, and I for one, will be closely attending to what they're up to so far as I'm able.
Why should I bother? Because intelligence + big money + quasi-fanatic levels of commitment need to be taken seriously. I see them as right-wing Jacobins or Bolsheviks, i.e., revolutionary idealists who are all in when it comes to transforming American politics and culture. Indeed, I think that's how they see themselves, hence their continued use of the world 'revolution', which means for them, a la Julius Evola, a 'turning back' to the origins.1 I'm sure their idea of the 'origins' is not what the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers have in mind, but they can hash all that out after they take the White House and, unimpeded by the Chevron decision, get their people in place throughout the government.
But whatever might happen in the future, the infiltration by these reactionary Catholics in the Supreme Court and the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and their getting J.D. Vance on the ticket is pretty impressive so far. The critique of the Liberal Establishment by some of its leading intellectuals is compelling, sophisticated, and, imo, often quite right,2 and they are making arguments that many smart young people in elite institutions find persuasive.
This is a theme I addressed in a post earlier this year in "It's the Nihilism, Stupid", where I wrote --
... I’m inclined to think that the real threat in the long run from the Right does not come from yahoos at a MAGA rally, but from young people looking for meaning and purpose outside the TCM [Techno-Capitalist Matrix]. Many of them have looked to find that meaning on the Left, but find only emptiness and nonsense there.
And I quote Graeme Wood in the Atlantic talking about Yale Professor Bryan Garsten--
But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions [away from Liberalism]. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.
It's not hard to image J.D. Vance being one of those students. That's how I see him. He's a seeker, and for now at least, he thinks he's found a home with these intellectual reactionaries. He might be weird, but he's not a fraud and he’s not stupid, and as I said before, he's in way over his head. I hope, when he loses, that he learns the right lessons from this little misadventure in hubris.
I'm feeling pretty good about the energy that Harris/Walz is generating. It's likely to save us from Trump/Vance. But in the long run the inspiring, compassionate, humanistic Left (as opposed to the moralistic, alienating Woke Left) in this country has to awaken a moral center that generates the kind of multi-racial, pro-family, pro-labor solidarity that will give Democrats a ruling majority for decades to come. That means finding a way to harness populist energies now owned by MAGA.
As I wrote earlier in the week, a guy like Walz exemplifies that in a way that I find very encouraging, but is a Walz/Sanders/AOC populism something that the Democratic establishment, chock full of Aspen Institute Liberals, can tolerate? We'll find out. It's not impossible that they could be persuaded. I think a guy like Biden was persuaded; Pelosi and Schumer, not so much. Harris? So far so good.
Note 1. The reconnecting with the ‘origins’ is not necessarily reactionary. It’s an idea very similar to the argument Iain McGilchrist is making in The Master and the Emissary. My post in May entitled "Originality vs Novelty" lays out the case for retrieving the origins, and Charles Taylor's new book Cosmic Connections makes much the same argument. And his argument is very much aligned with the argument I was making in the Cathedral lectures using Rousseau, Schiller, and the Romantics as models for reconnecting with a transcendent dimension.
McGilchrist and Taylor, like these reactionary intellectuals, are concerned about the meaningless, alienation, disenchantment, and the hollowing out of culture. The Right blames it on Liberals, but it’s more accurate, imo, to blame it on the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. If Liberals are to blame, it’s that they are too complacently well adapted to life in the TCM and too willingly accept it as the only possible reality.
I’m aligned with McGilchrist and Taylor who, while quite aware of how soul impoverishing life in the TCM is, do not reject Liberalism but seek a way to absorb what’s best in it and transcend it. A guy like Julius Evola—Steve Bannon is a devotee—is not interested in absorbing Liberalism. He sees it as a cancer, and wants to restore the world before the Renaissance, and if you think that’s just stupid, try reading him and see why the case he makes is so attractive to these kids that Garsten is talking about.
Note 2. Read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Even Barack Obama thought it was an important book.