… Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule invokes his triune Godhead: Giuliani, Eastman, and Clark. Where, he asks, was the rule of law (which his colleagues worry about in their letter) when those great and good men were trying to make the world safe for Donald Trump?
And as to what Vermeule means by the rule of law – listen as he lays out his law-ruled ideal state:
Subjects 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.
Yup. Right outta 1984. ‘He loved Big Brother.’ This is the rule of rulers, not the rule of law.
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.
Trump’s opening statement at his recent news conference announced the likely imminence of a 1920’s style depression and also World War III. This was his howdeedo, his little world review before he took questions. From his earlier speeches and tweets we can add mass slaughter on our city streets. Mass slaughter from the border. Your child’s forced transgendering. Babies killed moments after birth. Sick filthy books lining the walls of the local library. Subsidized tampons.
UD likes the phrase dystopian hype very much (see this post’s title). Boiled down, you could just say that authoritarian strongmen always try to scare us into voting for them — Only I can fix it, but first my campaign must convince Americans that existence as such is desperately, terrifyingly, in need of fixing. Trumpian authoritarians like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and JD Vance feature, in their books and rhetoric, a religiously inflected dystopian hype, in which the always-fallen world has REALLY let itself go lately, with America an unbearable hellscape of suicide, loneliness, alienation, and late-night snacking. Only Jesus – as interpreted by Pater Edmund Waldstein – can fix it.
Into this thorny tangle of statecraft and soulcraft now bursts Tim Walz, skipping through Rappaccini’s Garden, hanging a left by the House of Usher, and finally pausing to pick a lovely bouquet of Queen of the Night tulips. It’s Cold Comfort Farm with Trump as Ada Doom and Walz as Flora Poste and it’s pretty fucking funny.
But the author doesn’t consider the Vance/Vermeule solution: Criminalize divorce, contraception, abortion, and pornography. Ban children’s books that acknowledge a world of non-straight, non-married, non-reproductive people. Ultimately, perhaps, impose a Catholic government that reserves the right to burn reproductive heretics at the stake.
It’s all a bit dark, to be sure. But unlike the wide range of incentives countries have so far tried, it’s highly likely to work.
It was only a matter of time before Harvard Law’s double hater (liberalism and democracy) emerged from the scholarly shadows to join his soulmate JV “Junior Varsity” Vance in the Trumpian spotlight. Damon Linker puts Adrian Vermeule at the heart of an emergent “politics of reactionary negation,” in which not even the fanatic Catholicism people like AV sashay around with has any real meaning to them. Rather, disgust at modernity altogether – a disgust as deep as the Mariana Trench – seems to propel world-loathers into Trumpworld.
Specifically, the double haters hate the “personal existential emptiness … the meaninglessness and inertia” with which contemporary secular American life oppresses us all. Only a Catholic theocracy (UD calls it a Cathophate) will smash a country where “liberalism is the great enemy that must be fought and defeated so that something more wholesome and spiritually invigorating can take its place.” The American government will be run by priests and their acolytes, and will graciously rid us of our personal existential emptiness.
There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things… Accordingly, [radical rightwing Catholics] view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.
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So here’s a modest policy suggestion from UD: Before fully committing themselves to the overthrow of American democracy, Vance and his army of reactionary negationists should ask themselves whether their sensation of personal emptiness and inertia has more to do with excess ejaculation than modernity.
It’s quite possible, in other words, that they are mainly reacting to the post orgasmic, post coital tristesse that tells you you’ve gone and emptied yourself of sperm yet again.
These men after all are America’s most prominent pronatalists, led ultimately by the hyper-childed, always depleted-looking, Elon Musk. Wouldn’t they all feel silly if the miserable hollowed out feeling they ascribe to the rest of us is an epiphenomenon of their excruciating coital self-coercion?
It’s important to remind ourselves that semen retention has a distinguished spiritual history:
karezza (Italian)
maithuna (Hindu Tantra)
sahaja (Hindu Yoga)
tantra (Hinduism and Buddhism)
cai Yin pu Yang and cai Yang pu Yin (Taoist)
Every one of these traditions recognizes coitus reservatus as providing benefits in terms of focus, a greater sense of purpose, and overall harmony. I would urge Vance and his followers to give this a try before extending their own sense of emptiness to everyone else.
Remember: Our side is known as The Happy Warriors.
With each passing day it becomes ever more plausible that we should silence the law professoriate for the good of the nation. Yes I will accept my fate along with the rest. — Adrian Vermeule
[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.
The logic of integralism is straightforward. There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things, integralists argue. Accordingly, they view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.
UD so wishes her hero Richard Rorty were still around to do a number on these lost souls.
(For background, search Vermeule and Deneen on UD‘s search engine.)
Patrick Deneen is the revolution’s Menshevik to Adrian Vermeule‘s Bolshevik; but he’s a prominent enough theocrat to score a scathing review in today’s NYT.
Me, I’ve got some sympathy for Deneen: He’s deeply invested in top-down Bang ‘Er Mandates, as in Viktor Orban’s spectacularly failed mission to get drunksuicidal Hungarians to do the missus and seed the world with Hungarians. Orban’s more than done his bit, focusing relentlessly on getting women out of college and splayed panting ‘pon the ágy; but so reluctant are the men that the state has confiscated the fertility clinics, and – in a blow to Natural Law and all that stuff – been engineering the little buggers. Sad.
Two days before [a] symposium [about Adrian Vermeule’s ideas] was set to begin, my phone pinged with a message from [Mario] Fiandeiro informing me that my credentials had been revoked and the symposium closed to all press. (As far as I could tell, I was the only member of the media who was actually planning to attend, and Fiandeiro wouldn’t tell me who didn’t want me there.) My frustrated appeals to Fiandeiro and the higher-ups at the Federalist Society — which touts an open press policy on its website — failed…
… [Vermeule’s] arguments read an awful lot like a defense of a pseudo-constitutional dictatorship, or at the very least as a plausible legal justification for a right-wing coup. Vermeule doesn’t go to great lengths to obscure this conclusion. At the end of the section on subsidiary, he cites the Catholic theologian Johannes Messner to argue that in some cases, a limited form of dictatorship may “be compatible with the principle of subsidiary.”
Maybe there’s a more charitable way to read these passages so that they don’t lead to such a startling conclusion. But if there is, I certainly didn’t hear it in Cambridge.
Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule and his Xian Morality Brigade fully expect that, when we spiritually parched people taste the blessings of the strict – but loving – Xian state, we will be blissed out, flooded with gratitude, and utterly obedient:
Subjects 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’m thinking their Mullah-Doubles over in Iran must have felt just as confident when they decreed deadly divine dicta for everyone (but specially for breasty hairy femmes); yet a glance at the current situation in that glorious theocracy tells you you got trouble right here in Isfahan City.
See, when a small group of woman-reviling fanatics who think they have a pipeline to God take over a government and start imposing their twisted morality on everybody, things might not turn out all that well. Iran’s on fire, sparked by the Morality Police’s inevitable murder of a young woman whose body swaddling was insufficiently tight to excite the squad. Bad girl and now we will beat you and kill you wow did that feel good.
Not sure how much longer the fun can last. The orgasmic release of harlot-homicide may be less and less available to the pious men of Iran as the country’s population torches the cities.
Kansans protect abortion access in the first public vote on reproductive freedom since #SCOTUS overturned Roe.
Voters are putting MAGA Republicans on notice: When you come for our rights, we’ll show up at the ballot box.
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“Staggering” turnout, and No to ending abortion rights wins by more than 60%. In some counties, the vote against ending the right to abortion was 95%.
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Oh, but authoritarian common good freaks know what’s best for America. You can’t just allow these… referendums to take place all over the country, since most (all?) of them will simply reveal that Americans don’t understand God’s will. As soon as Ginni Thomas and Adrian Vermeule take over, we’ll happily bow to their divinely-inspired wisdom.
1 Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise our Viktor! He shall win the victory! Freedom dead, old Europe finished, Full redemption now we see! Vanquished all the evil powers Through the Cross triumphantly!
2 Praise Him! Hitler resurrected! God hath raised him from the dead! Liberty and reason swallowed, We from life to death are led! Shattered is the light of wisdom And His pow’r exhibited!
3 Praise Him! Orban’s now ascended! God hath raised Him to the throne! Far above all rule and power, He the highest Name doth own! All authority receiving Till democracy is done!
4 Hallelujah, praise our Viktor Triumphed on Mt. Budapest! Hallelujah, resurrected, Rayed in fascist holiness. Hallelujah, now ascended, He shall reign eternally!
Amy Wax is one big pain in the ass. A bombastic white supremacist, she likes to spoon with Tucker Carlson and pantabout the beautiful paleskin future.
She is also a walking advertisement for the perils of tenure, because U Penn can’t think of any way to get rid of this every day/every way embarrassment. She’s eminent, see, with spectacular credentials (Yale College! Harvard med! Columbia Law!) and impressive research. As with her Harvard doppelganger, Adrian Vermeule, you can’t just toss berserk brahmins out on their behinds; but you do need to find some way to sorta neutralize them until they die or leave (Wax is almost seventy, and getting nuttier by the minute; Vermeule, at 54, has many years of Harvard-havoc-wreaking ahead of him). What to do? Free speech being what it is, what to do?
Well, Penn has lately pulled together a faculty committee to review her years of vile banter, with an eye toward rigging up some sort of official justification for booting her. She’s so out of touch with their institutional ethos that she is actually a force of destruction, especially in regard to students. Something like that.
I say don’t go there. I say stuff like that imperils free speech for everyone. I say do two other things:
Get really serious about students boycotting her classes. Publicize her horribility among entering students as openly as you can, short of encouraging a boycott. That the university cannot do. But organizations of law students certainly can talk boycotts, and should.
Denounce her aggressively, and often. She is indeed a grotesque blot upon the school, and the school should not hide from this, but on the contrary should dramatize it every chance it gets. On its website, for instance, under faculty news:
ANOTHER BLACK EYE FOR U PENN LAW
Professor Amy Wax once again brought shame on the school when she sat down recently with Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and spewed disgraceful racist rhetoric.
Etc. Don’t look Ivy Leaguily away. Get down and dirty.
