The Context.
- There is a widespread sense that we have moved into a new post-liberal society. The two classic post-War expressions of liberalism, the Democratic Party of FDR/JFK and the Republican Party of Ronald Regan, have both expired: the first in a steady decline over the last 50 years into a nihilist Cultural Liberalism and the second unseated by the Trump movement. Liberalism, of the right and of the left, in priviliging the individual...isolated, competent, agential...is corrosive of the bonds (of faith, family, community) that define us and so victimizes all of us but especially the weak and incompetent, quintessentially the most helpless, the unborn. Furthermore, Adrian Vermulle has shown that the liberalism we face today, unbalanced by a wholesome conservatism, pushes relentlessly towards a better future by renouncing the past, by destroying custom, tradition, ancient habits of family and faith. In this it is self-destructive, annihilating the very basis for a good society and eventually provoking the kind of populist revolts we are witnessing across the globe. Clearly we are moving into a post-liberal world.
- The globe has moved from the bipolar Cold War through a temporary Liberal Euphoria after the fall of Soviet Communism into a dystopic apocalypse of the four monstrous kingdoms (see prior blog essay.)
- Catholic social teaching, after being deepened, strengthened and clarified by the dual pontificate of John Paul and Benedict has been confounded and polarized by Francis. He presents as a populist, defensive of the maginalized; but he has become a shameless partisan of the causes dearest to affluent, western liberals: global warming, open borders, death penalty. He has been entirely congenial to the three worst totalitarianisms (Chinese Communism, Cultural Liberalism, and aggressive Islam) while he vehemently opposes the actual populist movements that are surging across the globe. He is undisguished in his contempt for the American Catholic-Evangelical alliance that resists Cultural Liberalism. In a recent speech, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, one of his lieutenants, cast him as a kind of a messianic protagonist against the rising dictatorships. His self-identification as a moralizing global ideologue is deeply discouraging and polarizing even as it delights the liberals who side with him on these issues. Even those of us who might agree with his policies must bemoan the clericalism that elevates him into an diplomatic-political expert and the loss of moral stature due to his partisanship.
- The American Catholic with conservative tendencies finds himself homeless in his nation and his Church.
- The (hopefully permanent) marginalization of The Donald allows us some fresh air and a chance to collect our thoughts.
- Meanwhile the downward spiral of Democratic liberalism has hit a new bottom with the Biden Administration. Beneath his congenial, working man, pious Catholic, glad-handing demeanour lies a sickening moral decay and a breathtaking intellectual vacuity. He simply does not see or reverence the Real, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. He does not see the Form of things: regarding the precious, helpless fetus he sees waste matter and is rallying the full force of the federal government to destroy her; regarding our friends in Afghanastan who risked life to fight for us, he cavalierly abandons them in the most shameful foreign affair decision of my lifetime; regarding the border integrity of our nation he is careless and reckless in luring hopeful immigrants into the perilous journey and further arousing the anxiety of our own under class; regarding spending he is like a drunken sailor, indifferent to what this debt will do to following generations. As a Catholic Biden is a scandal and a sacrilige; and his moral rot contaminates the bishops, our pontiff and all who indulge him. If nothing else, the moral-intellectual abomination that he represents is enough to drive us Catholics to rethink our politics.
NEW CATHOLIC POLITICS
Returning to the renaissance in Catholic politics, we might identify three promising developments: the Benedict Option, Populism, and several marginal aspirations to a thorough, comprehesive political philosophy rooted in Catholic belief (Tradanistas, Integralists, and the New Polity community.)
1. The Benedict Option of Rod Dreher remains for me the defining Catholic politics in the USA 2021: protective, defensive retreat from the overwhelmingly hostile elite institutions to smaller arenas of family, faith and community to strengthen our common life of faith in all its elements. This is not, of course, an absolute, monopolistic approach but demands to be complemented by other approaches including the following.
2. Populism might be understood as "Trumpism without Trump": purged of its toxicities and idiocy, the Trump agenda suggested an outline of a promising Catholic-friendly polity: conservative culturally but economically protective of the working class. He delivered beautifully on the first platform, not at all on the second as his tax plan favored the rich. He shows little concern for the poor and remains shamelessly a rich, powerful guy challenged in his conscience. But moral conservatives like Douthat, Reno, Ahmari, Vance and others advocate for a new post-Trump Republican Party defensive of Catholic concerns for the unborn and the family as well as the working and poor classes. The success of this would need a charismatic figure capable of rallying the Trump base, maintaining some support from traditional Republicans while displacing their economic agenda, and appealing to swing voters as well as minorities and workers. This would be a miracle! Lets pray for it!
3. Deeper Catholic philosophizing has taken three directions of late: Tradanistas, Integralists, and the New Polity school. Each is very small, apparently insignificant, unknown except to Catholic nerds like myself. They look deeply into Catholic philosophy to create an ideal vision: intellectual, abstract, erudite. Most would dismiss them as impractical and utopian. Yet I value their efforts for two reasons: First, we always need an image of the good, even the ideal, as we struggle towards it accepting imperfection. Secondly, in our troubled times with the breakdown of traditional liberalisms we need new options to consider.
The Tradanista group is the most marginal and probably least promising. It seems to be a group of young Catholic intellectuals, without any prominent publication or heavy weight thinker (although it was befriended by Larry Chapp whom I like). Its name is explanatory: traditional (in morals) but Sandanista-like in concern for the poor. Theoretically it combines both poles of Catholic social teaching not entirely unlike a Catholic-friendly configuration of populism. They like Dorothy Day, Chesterton, the distributists, McIntyre as well as John Paul's catechesis on the human body. All that is to the good. But they also seem to favor the economics of Bernie Sanders. Here we find a double incoherence: first, Sanders probably would not know what "distributionism" is; secondly, the expansive state favored by Sanders is also biggest enemy of traditional morality. It remains to be seen if this good attempt develops into something significant.
Integralism is a retrieval of the classic Catholic conception that human life involves the temporal and the eternal and therefore is ruled by the state and church. It argues that every government in fact embodies religion as a set of values: liberalism obviously idolizes the surpremacy of the imperial, isolated individual. Any state that is not countervailed by a true, good spiritual principle degenerates into tyranny and idolatry. The best path is a revived Catholic community which opens itself to God in the Church and in secular affairs and grants final authority to the Church over the state. This proposal seems at first to be entirely implausible give the diminished status of the Church and the diversity of our society. But it has in its favor the advocacy of two first rate thinkers: Hardvard Law's Adrian Vermulle and the monk Edmund Waldstein. I must say that their writings are sophisticated, nuanced and persuavive. Nevertheless this approach is widely criticized in regard to coercion by the Church in a retrograde clericalism.
Even more sophisticated and profound is a new development: New Polity journal. Like integralism, this is a retrieval of deep Catholic, largely Thomistic thought. It is close to integralism but addresses the concerns around coercion and dualism. It has greal intellectual gravitas behind it: metaphysician D.C. Schindler of the John Paul Institute in D.C.; historian Andrew Williard Jones; and precocious teen philosopher genius Marc Barnes (who blogs as "badcatholic" with delightful lightness and humour). This school sees that human society is always oriented to or away from God; that there is no neutral, liberal zone. They advocate a theocracy even as they are sensitive to human freedom. They speak a metaphysical language that is entirely foreign to most of us. But they are developing a promising, profound new Catholic politics of the "real" (title of Schindler's recent book.)
These new forms of conservatism are deep-Catholic, unlike what we are used to in the USA. They clearly renounce the "mysticism of markets" and the elevation of individual choice. Noticeably they neglect the foundation of much American conservatism: reverence for the Constitution and the "founding" as sacrosanct. They see enlightenment liberalism as a defect in our founders, notwithstanding a countervailing Christian (although pronouncedly anti-Catholic) piety. For example, Vermule has recently argued for the need to go beyond "originalism" into a "common good constitutionalism" which implies a philosophy of natural law, a deeply Catholic thought, entirely unintelligible to our contemporary legal community.
Perhaps a decade ago David L. Schindler (D.C. Schindler's father) delibered a lecture in NYC in which he presented what Pope Benedict suggested as the three founding principles of a just social order: reverence for EVERY human life; respect for the family and all that supports it; and openness to the Transcendent and the free practice of religion. In this, I suggest, we have the beginning of a "new constitution." I suggest two additions. First, a preferential concern for the poor, suffering, powerless and marginalized. Secondly, a valuing of personal freedom and a reluctance for coercion as a tension-keeping balance to the strong sense of Truth.
There is no single "Catholic Politics" in the partisan, party or ideological sense. This is the realm of prudential judgment involving a universe of values, beliefs, facts, interpretations, contingencies, uncertainties, hopes and risks. Catholic do and should disagree...often passionately...about political options. (Unlike the moral and theologial in which we enjoy a substantial unity and peace.) Our faith and our societal reality is so dense, complex, and uncertain that no specific polity can be definitive as "Catholic."
It is thrilling that we can enjoy the conversation between these five movements, as well as what remains of value from the legacies of FDR and Ronald Regan. It is an interesting time to be Catholic...in a world falling into chaos...as we "stand erect and lift our heads and wait for the coming of the Lord."
Come Lord Jesus!
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