Lashing out against a world in which they are unhappy, [JD Vance, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule] seek the sources of their discontent in an amorphous and carelessly defined liberalism.
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Hungary under raving illiberal V. Orban is really the only place acid haters of liberalism can thrive.
I mean, they can analyze the sources of their gnawing misery forever; but at some point, shouldn’t they stop whining and act? Shouldn’t they want to model for their children a happy parent, who lives in alignment with his deepest values?
If you had a choice between moping about in a free liberal democracy or frolicking in fascism, wouldn’t you frolic?
The problem throughout this book, and I suspect most books about integralism suffer from the same problem, is that it is a sane analysis of madness. You make the same kind of marginal notes you do in other books — “strong argument,” “good point,” and “is this true?” — but then you put it down and wonder if you are still on planet Earth.
… The integralists … are unhinged.
The fact that they command a following is frightening …
It’s not really frightening, since jesus jackoffs are just, as the name has it, jacking off. They’re not doing anything.
But it’s certainly shocking that a masturbatory fantasist holds a responsible job at Harvard. Harvard even lets the guy loose in classrooms — though students are beginning to rebel against their lord and masturbator.
Gratified as UD is to see others finally pay attention to the Insane Integralists, and esp. their Harvard law prof spokesperson, Adrian Vermeule — cuz see UD’s been caterwauling about Vermeule for a number of years — she is less delighted to see looooong essays take serious historical, theological, and philosophical issue with him and his All Catholic All The Time movement.
Vermeule and his buds basically represent a Dungeons and Dragons circle jerk with Xian elements. To quote their rival World Takeover By Jesus sect, they are … SPOOKYTUS…….
Which sort of behavior among adults who hold respectable jobs is astonishing, and funny, and I write about it on this blog on that basis. Taking the lads with any real seriousness just makes them tug the slug more energetically.
But! I’ll go ahead and quote from a couple of recent articles anyway, in case you need reminding what this is all about.
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What the integralists call the social reign of Christ will be achieved by integrating the temporal power (the state) with the spiritual power (the Catholic Church). The military, the economy, the arts, and religious life will be directed toward human flourishing as defined by one severe reading of Catholic tradition. Which doesn’t mean bishops would command armies or set tax rates — civil authorities in an integralist regime would retain broad spheres of competence within which to forward the ends prescribed by the Catholic Church, but the Church would define those ends…
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[I]n the … words of an American integralist, “the state should recognize Catholicism as true and unite with the Church as body to her soul.”
[T]hey are another group in our society that judges governments and regimes and political orders by how good they are for them. This selfishness, which is a common feature of identity, is as tiresome in its religious versions as it is in its secular ones; it is a … form of contempt…
[The bizarre] Vermeule is talking about the American government. Who does he expect to persuade with this sectarian rapture?
… This is, well, nuts. Vermeule has no reason to fear the jackboot of Nancy Pelosi in the middle of the night. But his extreme view of his position in contemporary America enables him to cast himself grandiosely. He is the lonely knight of the faith who has taken up the Cross to do battle with the Jeffersonian infidels.
… When rationalists seem to be acting imperialistically, they can be challenged rationally, on their own grounds, and a rational argument for humility or restraint can be made; but no argument can be made with anybody who dissociates reason from truth, who repudiates “intrinsic grounds,” who demands of authority that it be “external.”
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And of course it’s valuable to visit and revisit the enemies of liberalism, the revilers of freedom. But taking AV and Co. with great seriousness is like taking the CEO of MyPillow seriously. UD doesn’t deny that people of this sort ought to be monitored occasionally; but leaving them alone to stroke themselves to sleepytime is by far the best move.
UD has somewhat sputteringly tried, over the years of this blog, to summarize the sicko fantasies of Adrian Vermeule. She’s always on the lookout for calmer, clearer, accounts. Levitz’s is good.
Whether common good constitutionalism supplants originalism remains to be seen. But the idea that it can impose the society it wants through its own interpretation of “the common good” is a sign of just how far the right has moved toward authoritarianism.
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has formally launched his campaign to reclaim the presidency with a ferocious broadside against his rival, Jair Bolsonaro, who he claimed was “possessed by the devil”.
Catholic Integralist Vermeule has taken a leave of absence from Harvard to run Lula’s campaign. Should be interesting.
Vermeule (scroll down) is a standard-issue Trumpian who continues gassing on about election fraud. He is a theocrat – I mean, a real one, as in he wants the United States ruled by Jesus, and, if Jesus doesn’t want the job, by His designated ayatollahs. We can anticipate that these would include the much-laureled Josh Hawley, plus, well, Adrian Vermeule.
Vermeule’s one peculiar distinction is that he’s a Harvard law professor; and it turns out that more than a few of his students are now officially really really creeped out to be in the same room with the dude in various required classes. UD is all for these students complaining about him; indeed, intellectual self-respect rather demands that his students make a public statement of some sort about the odd fact of their being taught, at the nation’s greatest university, by an off-the-charts anti-democratic fanatic.
No punishment allowed, of course; Vermeule finds himself a tenured Harvard professor and fine. But squawking about the obscenity of having to endure the presence of a freak who wants to destroy your country – excellent.
[Sen. Josh] Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.
“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”
Subjects [writes Vermeule] will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.’
I like the pessimism of this, and in particular the “eagerness for political violence” thing, though it should be amended to eagerness for violence tout court. Watch any interview with a Trumpist; survey the brainless at play on Jan 6 footage; for that matter, listen to their leader try to form a thought. The power of the movement is that it’s now way past impediments like ideology. Take megaMAGA donor Leonard Leo. As Katherine Stewart points out, “Leo and his cronies have never really cared about ideas, because the one idea they keep repeating is that they care about America’s constitutional government. And yet, they have put their weight and money behind a man, Donald Trump, who attempted a coup, and they are filling our courts with judges who seem keen to enable the MAGA project of destroying the Constitution.”
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Trump has always been little more than a sadist, and he has succeeded in molding the movement entirely into his image. It’s basically just sadism now.
Trump himself has no political convictions, and though various fanatics, like Vance, Vermeule, Deneen, and the rest of the Cathophate Party, attach themselves to him, they will always find their cynicism misplaced — as, for instance, when Trump backtracks on abortion (their paramount issue) because he’s never given a shit about it one way or another and only cares about winning an election.
As with his having most recently set the hounds loose on Springfield, Ohio, Trump represents little more than a goad to violence, most famously on display on Jan 6, but abundantly obvious in other venues. Yet while his followers cleave to their sadism, Trump himself lately displays low-energy sadism/inspiration toward crowd-sadism. It is perhaps a bad sign for his current presidential campaign that the bloody shrieks of lock her up from his first campaign are much less evident in this one, and that his sickening on-stage stalking of Hillary Clinton has been reduced, against Kamala Harris, to surly, staring straight ahead, nihilism.
All of which is to say that even world historical sadists get old. To be sure, second generation Trumpian sadism thrives in his sons, and most notably in La Pasionaria Lara Trump, but Trump himself looks more like Humbert Humbert at the conclusion of Lolita: a washed-up roué who has trouble getting it up even for the debauching of a nation.
… Harvard’s own Rector of the Upcoming Cathophate, Adrian Vermeule. Here’s his latest press appearance:
[JD Vance] spoke in 2022 at a New Right academic conference alongside Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, who believes conservatives should legislate morality by allowing judges to rule against marriage equality and abortion laws for the “Common Good.”
Watch for Vermeule’s stock to rise as his brother in theocracy strides like a colossus across the length and breadth of this our land.
