>Recently, I attended an event in Washington DC that gave me a fascinating window into the role that faith may play in the rising populist politics of America. It was an evening sponsored by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose 1.4mn membership includes freight drivers, railroad workers and nurses. The event was held at the union’s massive marble headquarters to celebrate the shared work of the Catholic Church and organised labour: in particular, Rerum Novarum, the 1891 papal encyclical that addressed the hardships faced by workers during the Industrial Revolution.
>The crowd was conservative, mostly white and male, with lots of young Capitol Hill politicos in blue blazers and khakis, a few beefy guys with buzz cuts and work jackets, and a handful of priests, scholars and political leaders such as the populist Republican senator Josh Hawley, whom some labour advocates look to as a key ally in the Trump administration. Jonathan Berry, who has recently been confirmed as the Department of Labor’s chief attorney, was there too, as an organiser of the event.
>A Catholic convert who went to Yale then Columbia Law School and clerked for the conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, he wrote a piece last year advocating for more employee stock ownership plans, German-style work councils and Sabbath laws to allow labour to rest on Sunday. He was wearing a small amount of what he calls “Catholic bling”, including a tie featuring St Michael the Archangel triumphing over the devil.
>There were also a few Catholic Democrats, such as Congresswoman Val Hoyle from Oregon. As the Teamsters’ leader Sean O’Brien told the crowd, “We left organisations off the name tags, and we invited people from both sides of the aisle.”
>The fact that this event was so well attended speaks to the importance not only of labour in American politics today, but also to Catholics as both an intellectual force and a crucial swing vote. It is a vote that Democrats and Republicans will be courting assiduously in advance of the midterm and presidential elections.
>Working-class Catholic voters used to be solidly Democrat. But the passing of Roe vs Wade in the 1970s, as well as growing prosperity among those formerly working-class Catholics, led some to become “Reagan Democrats”. From the 1980s onwards, wealthy Catholic conservatives became a more prominent force in American political life, culminating in the influence of people such as Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society judicial activist who helped put three pro-life judges on the Supreme Court.
>The overturning of Roe in 2022 was a huge political victory for conservatives. But the ruling is also at odds with the views of many younger Catholic parishioners, who support the more progressive stances taken by the late Pope Francis around issues such as LGBT+ rights, immigration, climate change and even abortion (while Francis decried abortion, he also stressed that the Church shouldn’t focus on this as a singular issue). A 2023 Pew survey found that 59 per cent of Catholics in the US thought that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
>While Trump pulled many white and Hispanic Catholics to his side in both his presidential victories, the margin of support was only a little over 50 per cent — far less than the 80 per cent of evangelical voters that in 2024 favoured Trump. Because Catholics are the largest single religious voting block — they represent a fifth of all Americans — even a small swing can make a big difference. Catholic influence is about intellectual leadership as well as voting power. As Aaron Renn, an American writer on faith and politics, puts it: “Evangelicals may be the biggest, most important voting block in the Republican coalition, but they are not the proverbial deciders.”
>In this sense, it is no accident that power-oriented people in and around the Trump administration, from vice-president JD Vance to secretary of state Marco Rubio and supporters including Steve Bannon, are part of a new Catholic right that blends church language with a wrapper of nationalism and even nativism.
>The intellectual North Star of this new right is Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at Notre Dame. His 2018 book *Why Liberalism Failed* argued that a liberal democratic focus on “borderlessness” resulted not only in the divisive and unsustainable enforcement of “woke” politics by the state, but also in a too-porous global economy in which neoliberalism crushed the interests of American workers and voters. Deneen’s “common good conservatism”, born out of his own small-town Catholic upbringing in Connecticut, is very different to the conservative politics of old. It is pro-union, anti-monopoly and anti-identity politics, or at least the sort of identities that progressives endorse (to him, the liberal abhorrence of “forms” and “boundaries” is seen in both the rise of transgender bathrooms and the European Union).
1 Comment
>Recently, I attended an event in Washington DC that gave me a fascinating window into the role that faith may play in the rising populist politics of America. It was an evening sponsored by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose 1.4mn membership includes freight drivers, railroad workers and nurses. The event was held at the union’s massive marble headquarters to celebrate the shared work of the Catholic Church and organised labour: in particular, Rerum Novarum, the 1891 papal encyclical that addressed the hardships faced by workers during the Industrial Revolution.
>The crowd was conservative, mostly white and male, with lots of young Capitol Hill politicos in blue blazers and khakis, a few beefy guys with buzz cuts and work jackets, and a handful of priests, scholars and political leaders such as the populist Republican senator Josh Hawley, whom some labour advocates look to as a key ally in the Trump administration. Jonathan Berry, who has recently been confirmed as the Department of Labor’s chief attorney, was there too, as an organiser of the event.
>A Catholic convert who went to Yale then Columbia Law School and clerked for the conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, he wrote a piece last year advocating for more employee stock ownership plans, German-style work councils and Sabbath laws to allow labour to rest on Sunday. He was wearing a small amount of what he calls “Catholic bling”, including a tie featuring St Michael the Archangel triumphing over the devil.
>There were also a few Catholic Democrats, such as Congresswoman Val Hoyle from Oregon. As the Teamsters’ leader Sean O’Brien told the crowd, “We left organisations off the name tags, and we invited people from both sides of the aisle.”
>The fact that this event was so well attended speaks to the importance not only of labour in American politics today, but also to Catholics as both an intellectual force and a crucial swing vote. It is a vote that Democrats and Republicans will be courting assiduously in advance of the midterm and presidential elections.
>Working-class Catholic voters used to be solidly Democrat. But the passing of Roe vs Wade in the 1970s, as well as growing prosperity among those formerly working-class Catholics, led some to become “Reagan Democrats”. From the 1980s onwards, wealthy Catholic conservatives became a more prominent force in American political life, culminating in the influence of people such as Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society judicial activist who helped put three pro-life judges on the Supreme Court.
>The overturning of Roe in 2022 was a huge political victory for conservatives. But the ruling is also at odds with the views of many younger Catholic parishioners, who support the more progressive stances taken by the late Pope Francis around issues such as LGBT+ rights, immigration, climate change and even abortion (while Francis decried abortion, he also stressed that the Church shouldn’t focus on this as a singular issue). A 2023 Pew survey found that 59 per cent of Catholics in the US thought that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
>While Trump pulled many white and Hispanic Catholics to his side in both his presidential victories, the margin of support was only a little over 50 per cent — far less than the 80 per cent of evangelical voters that in 2024 favoured Trump. Because Catholics are the largest single religious voting block — they represent a fifth of all Americans — even a small swing can make a big difference. Catholic influence is about intellectual leadership as well as voting power. As Aaron Renn, an American writer on faith and politics, puts it: “Evangelicals may be the biggest, most important voting block in the Republican coalition, but they are not the proverbial deciders.”
>In this sense, it is no accident that power-oriented people in and around the Trump administration, from vice-president JD Vance to secretary of state Marco Rubio and supporters including Steve Bannon, are part of a new Catholic right that blends church language with a wrapper of nationalism and even nativism.
>The intellectual North Star of this new right is Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at Notre Dame. His 2018 book *Why Liberalism Failed* argued that a liberal democratic focus on “borderlessness” resulted not only in the divisive and unsustainable enforcement of “woke” politics by the state, but also in a too-porous global economy in which neoliberalism crushed the interests of American workers and voters. Deneen’s “common good conservatism”, born out of his own small-town Catholic upbringing in Connecticut, is very different to the conservative politics of old. It is pro-union, anti-monopoly and anti-identity politics, or at least the sort of identities that progressives endorse (to him, the liberal abhorrence of “forms” and “boundaries” is seen in both the rise of transgender bathrooms and the European Union).