The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man | As vice president, J. D. Vance would elevate their disdain for American liberalism to the highest levels of government

> Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate puts a spotlight on a different faction of the religious right: the so-called post-liberal Catholics, who have been Vance’s friends, allies, and interlocutors since his 2019 conversion to Catholicism (he was raised Protestant) and transformation into a MAGA Republican shortly after.

> This group of Catholic intellectuals—which includes Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and an editor of the eclectically populist magazine Compact—is known for its sweeping attack on classical liberalism. It claims that a long list of contemporary problems (rising rates of economic inequality, drug addiction, suicide, homelessness, childlessness) can be traced back to moral-philosophical errors made centuries ago by the American Founders and their ideological progenitors. In place of our polity’s commitment to individual rights, autonomy, and pluralism, the post-liberals aim to create a society unified around the common good, which is itself fixed on a theological vision of the Highest Good.

> Hence the need for what Deneen calls “regime change” in the title of his most recent book. In concrete terms, this means replacing the people and institutions that dominate America’s cultural, economic, and political life with a new elite willing to eschew liberal norms in service of supposedly higher ideals. In this respect, Vance is the man the post-liberals have been waiting for—a self-identified member of the “post-liberal right,” and now a contender for one of the country’s highest political offices.

> Setbacks at home and at the Vatican—including the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama, Pope Francis’s efforts to push back against the conservative legacies of his predecessors, and the Obergefell decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right—discredited the idea that liberalism and traditional Catholicism could go together. One radical response to these developments can be found on the furthest extreme of the Catholic right, among a group called the integralists. Despite their name, they aim to subordinate the state to the Church, not integrate them.

!ping CHRISTIAN

Ehh no, not really. Though I suppose I am probably an outlier, I am a Catholic who has pretty much always had some skepticism of the entire “liberal project”. I get the feeling that Catholicism in the US has made a pact with evangelicals over abortion issue that has led to some Evangelical type of thinking to seep in a bit. The good thing about Catholicism, however, is that those types will never be able to either entirely hijack the church or do a successful split off like they might in another denomination. The Vatican still sets the ultimate agenda and the communities in the US have to accept diverse congregations from around the world who, whilst still receptive to the culture war BS, don’t let that completely dominate their other political concerns.