Attending today the "Restoring the Nation Conference" at Franciscan University of Steubenville, I see with heightened clarity the emergence of a new Catholic politics, the "New Right.". Amidst a variety of streams, emphases, and viewpoints there is a united, coherent form at work. It is a movement on the Right that incorporates basic concerns of the Left. Its basic structure is:
1. Firm cultural conservatism on the moral issues around life, family and sexuality in opposition to cultural liberalism and individualism.
2. Class warfare on behalf of the underclass, including an assertive state and union movement, against corporate, elite capitalism and its neoliberal economics of unregulated free markets, open borders, and libertarianism.
3. A revived patriotism as a moral engagement including a retreat from the aspirations of a global empire.
4. Restoration of foundational, traditional bonds of family, religion, locality, and nation.
5. A new, economic support of family and procreation through practical programs like: financial rewards for bearing children, economic assistance to new families in buying first home, generous maternity leave and child support.
This diverse, complex development goes by a number of different names: integralism, national conservatism, Trumpism without Trump, common good conservatism, and Democratic Interchange Capitalis. None of these words seem adequate. National Conservatism is an umbrella term and cannot define a specifically Catholic politic. The mention of the name Trump twice awakens all the disgust for the personal moral degradation associated with it. Integralism is a proper term but carries negative imagery of a return to Franco-like tyranny.
I prefer the word "integral" because the movement integrates the two streams of Catholic social practice that have been set against each other for the last half century. Solidarity with the poor and powerless has traditionally motivated the Democratic Party even as it abandoned basic Catholic moral views on life and sexuality. On the other hand, since 1970 the Republican Party has championed our ethos of life and family even as it remained in large part the party of Capital. This New Right, surprisingly and happily, is left of (American) center on economics and right of center on culture and ethos.
This binary fell apart with the triumph of Trump's populism in 2016. In theory (but not so much in practice) he waged a new class warfare (ironically, himself so wealthy), on behalf of an underclass that had emerged in recent decades in a bipartisan neoliberal order. Economically he defied (again, in theory, but his tax plan contradicted this) the mainstream, conventional Republicanism on behalf of the working class. Culturally he defended traditional, lower class Christian values against the woke elitism of cultural liberalism. In a convoluted, ersatz fashion, he molded the outline for a new, integral Catholic politics.
What is the Liberalism in Post-Liberalism?
As "post-liberal" this integral politics is essentially anti-liberal, as in Patrick Dineen's foundational Why Liberalism Failed. What Dineen and company mean by "liberalism" is the philosophical individualism that underlies both the sexual liberalism of the left and the economic, libertarian neo-liberalism of the right. Both see the isolated individual as the primary model of human life. In this they both despise all traditional bonds of family, faith, heritage, authority, locality, and nationality by which all religions structure human life. Post-liberalism or integral Catholic politics is a retrieval of traditional valuing of the bonds of family, faith, tradition, locality and nationality.
Three Previous Catholic Politics
Over my lifetime, the post-war period since 1945, Catholic in America have supported three prevailing ideologies: New Deal Liberalism of 1945-70, Democratic Cultural Liberalism of 1970-Present, and the Republican neoliberal "conservatism" that prevailed under Ronald Regan and afterwards. We can measure all three against the two Catholic concerns for the poor and for the marriage/moral life.
New Deal Liberalism of the post-war period was a vigorous integration of the two currents. Basically it waged class economic war on behalf of the worker against the capitalist. It's closest ally was the labor movement. It advocated for a strong welfare net and championed the Civil Rights movement. It shared with its adversary the Republicans the Cold War hatred of communism. Culturally it was implicitly, along with the opposition, conservative. From 1945 to 1965 a widespread Christian revival prevailed in a Protestant USA that was newly Catholic-friendly. The Democratic Party of this period was a coalition of urban, union, ethnic Catholics with more radical (often Jewish) liberals, and still-racist Southern Democrats. In the 1960s however, the party made two pivots, one (from a Catholic perspective) very good, the other, very bad. First, by embracing civil rights it lost the Southern Democrats but gained the black vote. Secondly, it embraced, passionately, the emergent cultural liberalism of the sexual revolution (contraception, abortion, militant feminism, eventually gay liberation) in contempt for Catholic teaching. Strangely, it did not lose the Catholic vote.
Cultural Liberalism, in the wake of the Roe decision on abortion, of the now-transformed Democrat Party, became the embodiment of sexual liberalism: sterile, recreational, relational sexuality was torn from its natural domicile in marriage and family. At the same time it remained the party of the labor and civil rights movements as well as a strong welfare state. At the same time, it increasingly expressed the values of the emergent new elite: professional, managerial class and the financial class who accumulated very quickly obscene quantities of wealth. It increasingly became a convoluted incoherence: the expression of a limousine liberalism that is indulgent, narcissistic, meritocratic, careerist as it assuages guilt by a pretentious indulgence of the identity politics of BLM and LBGTQ. Bizarrely, this politics in its shameless contempt for the Catholic ethos retained the allegiance of about 50% of Catholics. The ignorance of and indifference to the Catholic way is breathtaking!
Republican Conservatism, which economically is neo-liberalism, as quintessentially expressed by Ronald Regan was built upon three pillars: moral conservatism against libertinism, cold war hatred of Soviet Communism, and a mythology of the "Market" as an invisible hand that ensures personal liberty, economic efficiency and productivity. From a Catholic viewpoint, of course, the first two were fine; but neoliberal economics could never conceal its inherent indifference to the poor. It failed entirely on the principle of solidarity. About half of the Catholic population in some degree embraced this ideology for two reasons: one very good, the other not so good. Moral conservatives became Republican to defend innocent life and their traditional understanding of marriage, family, sex and gender as well as religious liberty to practice this. At the same time, many Catholics had by now ascended the social ladder of status and wealth and embraced the bourgeois values of the traditional Republicans. Eventually, with Trump this dynasty collapsed but it never passed one of the two crucial Catholic litmus tests.
A New Hope
So, this new integral (national conservative, integralist, Trumpian-without-Trump) politics is very hopeful. It integrates what the two liberalisms had separated: care for the poor and for the family. It is in many ways a revival of the wholesome liberalism into which my generation was born.
It has its problems. It can associate with white identity politics, xenophobia, and crude nationalism. I myself, as a strong Catholic internationalist, reject its isolationist tendency. For example, in my view, the retreat from "empire" voiced by Trump and implemented by Biden in Afghanistan, abandoned women in that country to the vicious misogyny of the Taliban. I am in a minority that would have retained troops in that country. I know I am an outlier.
Arguably it is unrealistic. It remains to be seen if such a wholesome, integral politics can get traction in a Republican Party that is largely a contest between the establishment of wealth and a populism of resentment and rage.
Nevertheless, it gives a serious Catholic a clear vision, a template of where we want to move. We want to protect both the traditional family and the poor. Implementing Adrian Vermulle's famous "Christian Strategy" we will know with clarity our goals and prudently work with various alliances in that direction.
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