Adrian Vermeule wrote a brief little article for Compact magazine, one which seems to have been occasioned by a need to defend his kin, Sohrab Ahmari, from an article I published one week prior.
What I wrote one week prior
I took issue with Ahmari’s suggestion that Christianity was spiritual kin to the Roman Empire and so is kin to our American Empire.
That Rome was assumed by Christianity, I have no doubt. That it was providentially granted its dominion precisely in order to spread Christianity—this I believe, and with many chuckles. That Rome’s desire to rule the whole world, to give all mankind a united political form, had something good about it, I’ll admit, yea, even to my mother.
But Rome is not an abstract “empire as such” any more than America is an abstract “governing authority.” Rome’s actual, concrete form was that of a war machine. It was administered through idolatry; expanded through fear, violence, and slavery; and motivated by “the lust of rule,” which Augustine said “existed among the Romans in more unmitigated intensity than among any other people.”
Ahmari is wrong: “Rome’s drive to subject all nations to its own governing rationality” was not the “Roman reality [that] structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse.” Precisely the opposite: Christianity wrenched open Rome’s self-enclosed and provincial drive for glory, exposing it to the light of the Messiah, who comes to restore and elevate the whole of creation. Christianity “lent” to Rome a universalism that it could never have anticipated.
The Church “fulfilled in a paradoxical way the Roman aspiration to gather all the peoples of the world into a harmonious whole,” says D. C. Schindler somewhere in The Politics of the Real. He does not mean that Christianity fulfilled Rome in a banal way—in the way strip malls fulfill the highway system, the one being “suited to and even prefigured by” the other.
The only way the empire could make good on its desire to rule the world, the only way it could actually stand for the unity of all men, was insofar as the Church transformed the very form of the empire from a man-made unity of fear to a God-granted unity of love. This transformation hurt; it destroyed roads, laws, armies, tax systems, gods, theaters, games, and temples, and it will be forever called “the fall of Rome” by those who hold Rome’s disordered values, “but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God” and the redemption of Rome.
Rome killed Christ by crucifixion, but Christ had his revenge: he crucified Rome. The Church fulfills Rome in a “paradoxical way” because she fulfills by the Way of the Cross. Ahmari misses this, but the pagans did not: they understood Christianity as the death of the empire, and so they killed the Christian converts, defending themselves against those who spoke of their divine emperor as a mortal, subject to the historical plan of God. Ahmari misses this, but the Fathers did not: they were not joking when they called baptism a death. If the individual Roman had to be “buried with [Christ] in baptism” to be “raised with him through faith in the power of God,” how could Rome escape the tomb? Rather, it was Rome that went down into the catacombs to rise with Christ as the Roman Catholic Church.
The empire strikes back
Vermeule knew something was lacking in Ahmari’s essay: that the Christian political form must “put a mere Rome to shame.” To turn his compadre’s dubious thesis into a winner, he imagines that it was written otherwise: “The political Catholic looks at the series of false alternatives offered.... Rome or the catacombs?—and says, ‘Yes, both/and; I will take them all.’”
Impressive, voracious even, but with the unfortunate consequence of excluding Mr. Ahmari from “political Catholicism”—the current branding of what used to be “integralists,” the group that advocates for Catholics to orient the modern State toward the attainment of Catholic ends. Ahmari’s essay is decidedly not a rugged embrace of Rome and a “yes” to its catacombs. It argues that the early Christians’ willingness to die was not the virtue that enabled Christianity to “capture an Empire for Christ.” Rather, it was Christianity’s similarity to the Roman Empire, in all its glory and ambition, that wed the Church to the Roman form. For Ahmari—in his essay if not in his life—martyrdom is a spiritual sideshow: holy, heroic, amazing, but only extrinsically related to the main event, the nitty-gritty business of taking political office and running the state for Christ.
All I do is win, win, win,
No matter what, what, what
All of this was a relatively humdrum. But in reading Vermeule’s tour de force against me and everything that “passes for the American intellectual right,” I was shocked, not so much by its arguments, as by its style; its pathos; its method; the way it went about its triumphant refutation of “the enemies of political Catholicism.”
“I have seen this sort of thing before,” said I. “But where?”
Then it struck me: There is a kind of woman, produced almost exclusively by Instagram, who is always winning. As a child, she is told that she can “do anything”; as a teenager, she begins to consume posts advising her to “speak her will into the universe”; as an adult she starts her own business—usually selling those stickers that adhere to your nails. Her business succeeds via “manifestation.” (It turns out, to quote one of several thousands of these types: “you can manifest a $100,000 day, a $100,000 month or a $100,000 year. It’s your choice”).
Her omnipotence cannot be troubled by the occasional misfortune. Admitting to a loss would be to manifest failure. Whenever her powers tremble—despite that she is “queen” and a “boss” to boot—she doubles down; calls her loss “gain”; calls bankruptcy “reinvention”; calls losing “an opportunity to get in touch with her priorities.”
Her method is Vermeule’s method. If any queen slays, he slays. If any boss babe can transform concession into victory, it is he, the jewel of Harvard Law. The failure of a fellow “political Catholic” to convincingly sell a history in which Rome was converted by the cosmopolitan ambitions of the infant Church—this does not alarm the one who can manifest. Vermeule reaches back into the recent past and wills it to contain an essay that no one ever wrote: et voila! Sohrab bravely accepts both martyrdom and empire.
Come to think of it, understanding “political Catholicism” as a species of bossbabery sheds light on the movement as a whole.
Success is an attitude
There is a rule for the Catholic wing of the New Right, being run, as it is, by lawyers: in posting one must be “AMPD.” That is, Always Maintaining Plausible Deniability. Its political wits utilize a cagey prose that always leaves open the technical possibility that they were just joking, that they weren’t really talking about you—aren’t you just a little self-obsessed for thinking they were?—and so on. Denying that one was ever really engaging the argument is a more efficient strategy of statecraft than winning it.
Thus my own essay is not named, and my identity is present only in code—Vermeule flatters me as a “patron of artisanal coffeehouses in a college town, writing overlong screeds about authentic anti-liberalism and the primacy of the local.” (Almost: I patronize an artisanal coffeehouse in what can only generously be described as a college town). This prevents me from writing anything longer than a tweet, calling Vermeule’s anti-liberalism inauthentic, or asserting the foundational importance of the local, without occupying his preemptive caricature and so inviting the mockery of that class of twitterati whose minds have been so addled by their phone-addictions as to imagine such victories worth winning.
By this method they fulfill the advice of a recent article from the slay queen genre: “How to silence the Haters when You’re trying to Manifest.” To wit, “the only way that ‘haters’ have any real power is when you give it to them. Don’t allow them to get close enough to tear down your dreams.”
The less I respond to negativity, the more peaceful my life becomes
The inhabitants of Manifestation Station all share a habit of “claiming” truths and “affirming” themselves through incantation, as if a brain pumped up on technically false affirmations were the sufficient condition for rendering them true: “I radiate beauty, charm, and grace.” “My marriage is becoming stronger, deeper, and more stable each day.” Vermeule does the same with political Catholicism: he turns it to the mirror and bids it affirm itself as already containing those elements that rival political theories claim it lacks.
Integralism has been critiqued for conflating power and authority: for either (a) identifying “authority” with whatever power is sufficiently scary to declare itself an “authority,” (b) reducing “authority” to mean “power used to enforce the good,” or (c) dodging the whole question by treating “authority” as a formal, juridical characteristic of some “legitimate” ruler, while offering no means for identifying legitimacy itself.
Michael Hanby (saying in First Things that the integralists “owe us some effort” to provide “a clearer explication of key concepts like ‘authority,’ ”), D. C. Schindler (doing the same in his Politics of the Real), and Andrew Willard Jones (in critiques of Carl Schmitt and in his essay “The Priority of the Peace”) have all begged, each in their own way, for the integralists to contend with a notion of authority that extends beyond force or the right to use force, one that cannot be “produced” or “verified” by someone having capacity to coerce uncontested.
For all this, the integralists have given them—crickets. But the critique, while not alarming enough to merit any response of thought, has apparently worried the “postliberal order” into a response of rhetoric. They are not clear on what authority is, but they can tell that they are missing out on the power of the word “authority”—a word that seems to give some mileage to other Catholic thinkers. So, without giving any evidence of knowing what it is, they colonize it, plant their flags in the word “authority” and claim its resources—whatever they may be—for the sovereign nation of integralism: “What is at stake is, indeed,” Vermeule assures us, “far more elevated than power. What is at stake is no less than authority, the full authority of a reasoned political order, composed of both temporal and spiritual powers in right relation to the natural and divine law.”
Thus the word “authority” is forcefully attached to the political Catholics, and anyone who imagined that they did not think it something distinct is repudiated, left to weep—as they puzzle over whether Rome did not have authority because it was not in right relation to divine law; or whether it did, but lacked “full” authority; and whether one can ever have “partial” authority; and if one can, whether authority has anything to do with the common good which is only ever whole; and if it does not, whether there is any difference between authority and power after all; and if there is, how would one judge between them ... all manner of puzzles! But whatever conclusion the reader comes to, this much is certain: the political Catholics have this “authority” thing on lock; they have successfully manifested it; look, there it is.
I forgive myself for the mistakes which have hurt me
Ideas and words are extrinsically attached to the edifice of “political Catholicism” without being digested into its substance: it has them without being them, a fact which goes a long way in explaining how its adherents have the fullness of the Catholic faith while being intolerable buttheads.
Now even the term “localism” is (extrinsically) theirs—as well as, more broadly, the turn toward small localities, and the friendships of which they are composed, as the efficacious centers and foundations of Christian politics. Facing the lingering (if baffling) power that “localism” still exerts on a good many people, Vermeule begins the incantation which will manifest “political Catholicism” as the best localism, the real localism, and the only localism worth getting hot under the collar over: “The political Catholic wants to order the nation and its state to the natural and divine law, precisely because doing so is the best way to protect and shelter the localities in which genuinely human community, imbued with grace, can flourish.” More than this, those localities “are the best way to generate well-formed persons, who can rightly order the nation and the world towards goodness, truth, and beauty.”
Didn’t we see that all the bristling, integralist rage against “hobbits,” martyrs, and localists was just a matter of emphasis? That, all along, it was the “political Catholic” who best understood that the modern nation and its State was incapable, motu proprio, of generating well-formed persons, and thus incapable of achieving the end of politics—that is, virtue? Ah, how wrong we all were: these “based furries” love their furry-footed friends so much they justify the existence of the Catholic administrative State by way of Hobbiton’s flourishing.
But the effort to suck power from words without reading the books and essays that contain them puts one in the position of a child first learning to curse: he hears a powerful phrase; he tries it out in public and—it doesn’t go over well.
If it is true that “the political Catholic wants to order the nation ... because doing so is the best way to protect and shelter the localities in which genuinely human community ... can flourish,” then the political Catholic has an impoverished and incorrect view of the “nation,” considered as the res publica. In effect, Vermeule has expanded political Catholicism to contain not just the values of localism but the chief error of localism as well, which is to imagine the res publica as having no reason to exist but a remedial one. He joins that sundry chorus of liberals and libertarians for whom the only rationale for a “higher authority” is ratione peccati, the sinfulness that produces the need for protecting and sheltering.
How strange, that in an essay that would lump the New Polity crowd under a “localist” and “quietist” umbrella, it is the lumping one who argues that large-scale political rule is a necessity born of sin; the rudely lumped who spend their time writing things such as: “the institutionalizing of rule is not merely an extrinsic regulation of particular actors to the extent that they inevitably encroach on each other or need coordination or practical help, but is an exposition of the truth of the good each pursues beyond what each can see”; and that political authority is never “negative and remedial,” rather “the ruler represents, in the basic sense of making actually manifest again, the transcendence of the end that all human individuals most basically—naturally—desire.” (All this from D. C. Schindler’s Politics of the Real, hot off of New Polity Press!)
I will make huge gains this day
For all his ill-conceived assimilation of the language of the localists into the bosom of integralism (the bosom of “political Catholicism,” sorry, old habits and all), in this Vermeule remains pure: he still really likes the modern State. In fact, he seems to have outdone himself in its praise. I was under the vague impression that these fellows took something of a pragmatic posture; that they simply thought the State was a hard, historical fact; a contingent reality they weren’t afraid to deal with. Not so: according to Vermeule, the State, alongside “the market,” comes forth from the hand of God, and is thus an object of his grace, which perfects and elevates it. It is no work of human hands, but a “particle of creation” and a “part of nature.”
Perhaps Vermeule is merely indulging the tactic described in my artisanal coffeehouse essay—call it Being an Ass—in which a man deliberately confuses an abstract idea with its concrete, historical form in order to accuse those who demur at praising the latter of having an obscene hatred of the former, e.g., “You don’t like the State? What, do you hate, like, authority and governance and order?”
Perhaps, by “the state,” Vermeule simply refers to the reality of governance that comes concomitant with the human condition—that comes with the differences, inequality, and hierarchy that obtain between people. But that we should order this general capacity for governance according to the natural law is a claim so blasé it would be a wonder for Vermeule to make it the motto of that macho identity, “political Catholicism.” He says that “the political Catholic wants to order the nation and its state to the natural and divine law, the tranquility of order.” But if “the nation” and “its state” are nothing more than Aristotelian categories, then no Christian thinks otherwise. Localist, statist, socialist—none of them. Asserting it amounts to shouting, “we should govern according to the good!” and then sitting back, with arms folded, amazed at how based and redpilled one man can be.
In fact, “even the pagans do as much.” Sure, he might not use the term “natural law,” but the most tedious of Democrats, schlepping away for the LGBT thing, is as busy with the work of “integralism” as any Catholic; busy ordering the nation and its state towards the common good—as he perceives it.
Merely asserting that we should tend the government toward the common good is meaningless, for, as Vermeule has said, “it is always a matter of whose conception of the common good is enforced.” The real controversy is a controversy over reality, not ideas; over what is good; over what the divine law actually dictates; over what the ordering of this state to this natural law means; over whether, when we “rightly order the nation and the world toward truth,” we get to keep our armies, police forces, drag queens, daytraders, highways, Wal-Marts, billionaires, and the rest. To stage the argument as one held between those who want to “rightly order the nation” and those who do not (which is what Vermeule’s essay does) is simply to reduce the actual opponents of “political Catholicism” to a handful of stoners who, like, just want to do their own thing, man. An effective strategy, to be sure, especially for those worried about their capacity for intellectually triumphing over anyone but a handful of stoners, but it comes at the price of being very, very silly.
I release the need to prove myself to anyone, as I am my own self and I love it that way
But if by “state” Vermeule means this State; the United States of America; this body that the integralists keep telling Catholics to “run” and to “lead”; this concrete and historical form of governance—call it a modern, bureaucratic, sovereign nation-state—then he should be applauded for the novelty of his suggestion.
For truly, every thinker in modern political philosophy has identified the rise of the modern State with the weakening and the destruction of those same smaller localities and authorities that preceded it. Some like it, some lump it, but a working list of thinkers who have linked the rise of our morally empowered executive States with the atomization of the populace would have to include (in no particular order) Burke, Weber, Leo XIII, Pius XI, St. John Paul II, Marx, Proudhon, Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Dewey, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Mill, Nietzsche, Bentham, von Mises, Hayek, Habermas, Tocqueville, Jouvenel, Arendt, Taylor, MacIntyre, and of course, that wise and penetrating thinker who once summarized Robert Nisbet by saying that “[s]tatism arose as a violent reaction against [the] feeling of atomization”; that “shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region ... humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization available to them: the state”; that “the ascent of the state as object of allegiance was a necessary consequence of liberalism’s practical effects.” I speak, of course, of Patrick Deneen (RIP).
How, precisely, can it be that localities are best sheltered and protected by a centralized bureaucracy that only exists on the condition of the loss of local authority? How, precisely, do we restore Catholic politics through the State—the very mechanism of the homogenization, rationalization, and centralization of law, over and against every effort of Catholic Europe to produce, as Voltaire once bemoaned, countries in which a man “changes his law as often as he changes his horses”? From France, to Germany, to Russia, every country that became what we now recognize as a modern State did so by weeding out local languages and dialects; by banning local militias and curtailing local police forces; by taking authority away from monasteries, fraternities, guilds, and extended families; by disciplining the population into conformity—unto a theoretical limit point at which only the individual and the sovereign State form the political whole. All instituted national policies of education over and against local learning. All disemboweled local customs of their traditional authoritative force. All enclosed common land and so reduced ownership to direct state ownership or private ownership (allowed and enforced by the State). All peddled, and still peddle, a notion of sovereignty that reduced any diversity in authority to a war in which only one could prove victor: and thereby become the State.
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this historical phenomenon, the formation of mass society, with all the disfunction, angst, alienation, and immense power that it produced, simply is what modern philosophers, theologians, novelists, playwrights and poets have been talking about for the past 250 or so years. I understand that it belongs to the integralist oeuvre to exhaust the reading world with ahistorical solutions to genuinely historical problems (see Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy for a nearly perfect exercise in the genre) but my goodness—the reaction of literally anyone to the suggestion that the federal bureaucratic apparatus is the best way to protect and shelter local communities ought to be sufficient to put a hitch in integralism’s online giddyup.
Of course, the fact that the tradition of political thought is virtually unanimous in declaring the modern State inimical to strong, local communities doesn’t mean that the tradition is correct. It sure sounds as though Vermeule is advocating curing the gunshot victim with the gun that shot him: but hey, doctors have prescribed stranger things. Vermeule may be right, everyone else may be wrong, and the modern State may prove to be made of better stuff than the unnatural suppression of local authority: but Vermeule rather bears the burden of showing this. He can’t just manifest it. The assertion that this concrete, historical thing we call “the state” is the “best way of sheltering and protecting” localities of virtue is not self-evident, does not accord with ordinary experience, and none of the “political Catholics” have so much as argued for it. It is becoming a little embarrassing.
But perhaps Vermeule is just a good old-fashioned Hobbesian. Perhaps when, in his book Common Good Constitutionalism, he refers to structures of power smaller than the State as “subsidiaries” of the State—he means it. From this perspective, there is no authority except that of the State, defined as the entity powerful enough to defeat all rivals in the contest for sovereignty. So of course, the State is the best way to protect and shelter subsidiaries of the State. No man hates his own flesh—not even the Leviathan.
The Catholic New Right laughs at the localists for wanting to do politics in and through the local community, but the Catholic New Right means by “local community” either a subsidiary of the State or a political irrelevance: the denuded, alienated, neutered, unauthoritative, and privatized form that the modern State has forced local communities to take. In this they are correct: to use the violently constructed “private sphere” for the restoration of Christian civilization would be futile. The trouble is—and this is a bit of a theme with these guys—no one thinks we should do that. The call for a politics that operates without the liberal notion of sovereignty is a call for the restoration and recognition of genuine authority at smaller levels and in different bodies than that of the State. Political Catholicism, as far as I can tell, calls for a sniveling assent to the liberal idea that the “local” means the inert and powerless nuclear family, asserting its positive rights, constantly calling the cops, and with a lawyer on retainer. Having acquiesced to a libertarian description of the local, they proceed to rake in points for disagreeing with the libertarians—but it is a disagreement over policy. Libertarians say the State should protect our rights and otherwise leave us alone; political Catholics say that the State should protect our rights and not leave us alone. Both imagine the natural form of politics as one in which life is and ought to be ordered by the policy decisions of a sovereign State. Between Cool Mom Libertarians and Helicopter Mom Libertarians, neither can imagine any political authority other than that of the sovereign State.
I am gentle, yet fierce
In his essay “Apostolic Empire,” Ahmari avoided the painful task of distinguishing between true and false by turning to the more aesthetic consideration of the way Big Things are better than Small Things. Vermeule likewise avoids the painful task by judiciously applying his insight that Scary Things are better than Less Scary Things. “The one who is correct” is ignored in favor of “the one who makes the enemy more afraid.” In his essay, the enemy is the liberal order, and several versions of localism and quietism are produced as so many failed attempts to set the enemy’s knees a-knocking. The liberal order can countenance a coffeehouse screeder; it remains similarly unafraid of the off-the-grid farmer. “You are welcome to be a domestic extremist,” mocks our man, “so long as your extremism remains safely domesticated.” The search for the scariest conservative concludes, of course, with Vermeule, at whose profound (and probably-tweeted) “boo” the very foundations of liberalism tremble.
But what is meant by saying, as Vermeule says, that “liberalism finds a genuinely political Catholicism intolerable?” It cannot mean that the modern State as such would find political Catholicism intolerable. For it is the very premise of political Catholicism that Catholics can and ought to run the State.
It cannot mean that the particular institutions of liberalism would shudder to see political Catholicism ascendant. It is the administrative State that they would run, and not some other State; the Constitution they would interpret, and not some other document; Mount Rushmore they would grace with their faces, and not some other mountain; a “new Marshall Plan” of government spending that they advocate for, not some novel device. Political Catholics would utilize the same structures of money, military, and police force to enforce the same law, the same sovereign will, over the same immense population. The sovereign’s will would change according to Catholicism—but it’s always changing. The administrative state was once conservative. Now, I am told, it is “woke.” It did not die in the transition; presumably it will not die if it becomes “Catholic.”
Maybe Vermeule means that the current personnel of the liberal order would fear to have him and Gladden Pappin as their bosses. True enough, but in that case liberalism’s “fear” of political Catholicism is identical with the Democrats’ fear of a Republican administration. This fear has waxed and waned within the liberal order without occasioning the “defeat” and “undoing” of liberalism that Vermeule assures us is the promise of political Catholicism.
For Vermeule, the “liberal order" seems to be nothing more than a situation in which liberals happen to be in charge of this timeless, neutral thing he calls the State. The liberals, as one State-running party, find any other party “intolerable.” But if this is all he means, then “political Catholicism” is only scary inasmuch as it is a successful party—which is to say, it is not scary at all.
One way to check on the level of fear one inspires in the liberal order is to submit a FOIA request for one’s own FBI record—which I invite all those “intolerable” political Catholics to do, and to publish immediately, so long as doing so wouldn’t cause any difficulties with Harvard. Another would be to check what sorts of things, what sorts of people, are publicly listed as a concern by those institutions devoted to the liberal order’s defense: the FBI et al. What “liberalism” as such fears is vague, but the concrete form liberalism takes within modernity—the United States—is not shy about what alarms it. Apparent in the various lists of the Most Scary is that, well, nothing like “political Catholicism” makes the cut. If you had to draw a picture of the actual fears of our concrete liberal order, it would be composed of the right-wing American militia movement; religious cults; some anarchist collectives and anti-government extremists; and, recently, anyone online who questions centralized power by questioning vaccine mandates. (This last offense, the easiest to commit, Vermeule handily avoided by coming out in support of “vaccine mandates” in principle—vaccine mandates considered, of course, only as an abstract possibility of governance.)
It turns out that nothing about the desire to run an unchanged modern State as one of its interns—or even as its executive—puts you on a watchlist. Meeting a bunch of your neighbors in the woods to run drills, though—that does the trick. “You want to order the state to the natural and divine law? Go for it, champ!” “You want to pull your ten kids out of school? Yeah, we’re going to need to check on your facilities.”
Every being fears its own death; its rot; the loss of form; the dissolution of its being into its constituent material. The Catholic fears his death by being told, “Remember, O man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The liberal order fears its own death in similar fashion: “Remember, O State, that you are the suppression of a diverse, pluralistic legal order, and to a diversity of authority you shall return.” In every militia, in every cult, in every homeschooling family and “radical” church that posits itself, rightly or wrongly, as a genuine authority within human life, the liberal order sees a prefiguration of its own dissolution. For the modern State was actually constructed as a sovereign victor over many localized participations in universal, ultimately transcendent, authority, either destroying them or reconstruing them as its subsidiaries. To posit oneself as wanting to “run” this continued victory against the local—this is no threat to the modern State as such. It’s more like submitting a résumé. To posit oneself as being under an authority, or as exerting an authority, that is other than and that exists without that of the modern State—and Catholicism holds that such authorities exist both above and below the State—this is a threat. Historically, this is why Catholicism is “intolerable” to liberalism.
why not make your ongoing use of social media make sense by maximizing it as an opportunity to monetize your brand
In the end, the only sense in which I can conceive of “political Catholicism” as being “intolerable” to the liberal order is the one in which lib-brains on Twitter get worked up when Vermeule says things like “we should order the state to the divine law.” That they do get worked up is undeniable. That the behavior is intolerable in a more than emotional sense, not so much. Liberalism relies on regular theocracy scares to confirm the necessity of its continual suppression of the Church. Vermeule and Co. provide these with good and faithful regularity—within the virtual limits of Twitter, where they remain AMPD and always potentially just joshing around.
Vermeule’s examples of quietism are instructive: a screeder, an instagramming aesthetic Mennonite, an online Nietzschean. His localists only ever “do localism” in the same way that integralists “do integralism”: by posting, offering it up for the approval of a non-local presence—informing the actual defenders of liberal order where they are and what they are up to in the process.
The one who posts his localist pursuit is more fundamentally a naked individual, without locale, wearing “community” like a garment of skin. His security comes from a larger, global, non-community that allows and validates his localist pursuit: thus his need to tell “them” about it. The posting person has been effectively co-opted by liberalism in advance. He is in fact atomized, alone on his computer, on his phone, contributing directly to both state and market, bleeding out his “identity” for the approval and benefit of both. All his efforts at “localism” are transformed, by the medium he chooses to use, into an ideological addition to a more fundamental statism: he is a statist in localist drag.
What seems to have escaped Vermeule’s notice is the manner in which the actual turn to the “local” produces contentment and satisfaction with the real world, which removes the perceived need to post—or stops the need from developing in the first place. This may seem to be a niche critique, but it is really the point: localism as a way of living under the sovereign State is just a lifestyle choice within liberalism. But not so localism understood as the establishment of those pre-modern forms of authority and belonging that are not subsidiaries of—and simply do not require for their being and flourishing the existence and approval of—a “sovereign” state that made its claim to fame only in the last three hundred years or so. The terminally online New Right looks around for effective, Big, Scary, localist posters and can’t find them, and so concludes that localists are ineffective—rather than coming to the more obvious conclusion that their political philosophy, and their very life, militates against posting. Likewise, Vermeule looks around for a localist who is busy competing within “a fundamental contest for sovereignty—which is, of course, the only outcome that the liberal order really cares about.” He can’t find one, and concludes that localism can only be “commitment to political defeat.” It has not occurred to Vermeule that one does not “defeat” liberalism by winning the “contest for sovereignty,” since the very notion of politics as a “contest for sovereignty” is the chief victory of liberalism over every other political form.
I AM REINVENTING MYSELF EVERY DAY
As the neocons once advocated that the Christian CEO should steer the economy toward Christian ends, so these, our neo-neo-cons, advocate that a Christian prince should steer the modern State toward the protection of the local community. As the neocons were blind to the manner in which the concrete form of political economy we call “capitalism” simply is the continual suppression of Christian forms of economy, so our neo-neo-cons are blind to the manner in which the modern State simply is the suppression of both the authoritative local communities and the more universal powers that flourished within Christendom.
You can use manifestation to make a better world
Whether the Catholic enemies of “political Catholicism” would stand up to the test of martyrdom is a question I cannot answer without the careful use of a gun. But they do embrace martyrdom theoretically, as something necessary to the realization of the Christian political form. This is not because of any morbid love of defeat, as both Ahmari and Vermeule suggest. Any change of form requires death, and the concrete form of our political order must be changed.
But the resultant Christian social order is not a finished product, some “civilizational Christianity” manifested once by the Early Christian martyrs and enjoyed ever after by their (more realistic) children. This would make the Church a fossil; a Constitution; a dead “tradition” carved out of a living body and ceremoniously displayed in a jar. No, the Christian political form is made up of persons (and social structures which constantly flow from persons). Persons only ever become something solid by repeated action—so too social orders. We either constantly die to ourselves, constantly “bear good fruit,” or we are “cut down and thrown into the fire,” burning up whatever social form the faith of our fathers once grew. This is why, where no Diocletian hurries them into catacombs, the Christian faithful go there themselves: into the monastery and the cloister, the crusade and the mission field, burrowing themselves into the seedbed of suffering with every moral act, every act of dying to self and living for God. This is why the modern State, which offers a “peace” cheaper than the price of virtue, is such an odd paramour of integralist passions.
The political Catholics imagine the modern State to be a neutral tool, indifferent toward ends, a machine that can be as Catholic tomorrow as it is woke (or whatever) today—no death required. They would defeat liberalism by refusing to change the concrete form of governance by which liberalism, historically speaking, took over the world: a losing strategy if there ever was one. Political Catholics want to win liberalism’s game: best of luck to them. Catholics want to kill it. And this desire to kill liberalism must include a willingness to die, for who has ever won a war without courage? Rather, “is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too.”
An end to the overlong screed
Now, this essay has gone on for so long that the brightest of the political Catholics have already stopped reading and begun posting various dismissals, to prove all of its most withering points. It will end not with an address to those razor-sharp wits but to the one who has been following them for a while.
You have probably been “following” them since school. You are thankful—rightly—for Vermeule’s hand guiding you up and out of originalism and even liberalism. You are exhausted with the old-guard Republican commitment to producing no results, to defending only the “high ground” that no one is fighting over. You are sincerely searching for how to be Catholic in a world that seems hellbent on the destruction of the Church, the family, and your own immortal soul. Still, you don’t have to follow these guys.
Maybe you have already felt it—the way the teaching of your mother and father doesn’t fit with “political Catholicism.” Maybe it has saddened you to find no essential place for holiness in what is supposed to be the only reasonable and realistic strategy for Catholics in the modern world: no essential place for it either in your own life, or in the movement of integralism as such.
For this is one of the chief spiritual obstacles both liberalism and “political Catholicism” place in front of those who would “run after Thee in the fragrance of Thy ointments”: they both (reasonably, reasonably) describe holiness as something extrinsic and unnecessary to life. The rote liberal does this by calling holiness a “private choice” you may or may not make. The “political Catholic” does it by redescribing holiness as submission to the moral law and to the Church, a submission most efficiently achieved by one’s being ordered to holiness by the highest temporal authority—which authority the political Catholics misidentify with the modern State, and which State, day after day, remains unchanged. Nothing bids us become saints today: we wait for the propitious moment when we can most effectively seize the power of the State and so produce the necessary conditions for “civilizational Christianity.” Until then, we tweet.
Or rather, within the logic of “political Catholicism” we may become saints, but our sanctity is not necessary for the conversion of the nations: that can be done quite without martyrdom. Conversely, the conversion of the nations may be brought about by saints, but it need not be: nothing would prevent a pagan from steering the sovereign State toward the common good, toward the “good, true, and beautiful,” toward God Himself—without faith. Within political Catholicism, Catholicism is not necessary, but politics is.
Within Catholicism, sanctity is necessary. There is no waiting. Every action and every moment is one in which your works build up the concrete political form of Christianity or your sins and omissions build up the concrete form of paganism, which is tyranny and the city of man. Virtue, as it is developed through acts and infused by grace, necessarily transforms you into an authority; into one with a care for the souls of others. This authority is not a subsidiary of an imagined sovereign—it is yours, and justice is demanded of you right now, not simply when you take up some official post within a pagan government.
And your willingness to die for the Faith is not some kind of “heroic” virtue, unnecessary to politics, sitting like a supernatural cherry on top of a Christian civilization which is made up of natural stuff. Rather, your willingness to die, today and in every moment of the struggle against sin, the flesh, and the devil, all the way up to and including your physical and final death—this is the evidence necessary “that the world might believe”; the evidence that man can be ordered according to love, and not fear, all the way down; can be unmoved by death, and so be the living stone with which the new social order, the Church, can be built.
Christ said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” It is the effort of the integralists to razor out God’s “unless,” with all its fiery necessity, and to paste in its absence man’s “maybe”: “maybe a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, and if it does, gee, what an amazing testimony. But, of course, it naturally bears much fruit by taking up the power of the State.”
But without the witness of martyrdom, Christianity cannot convince people interiorly, prompting them to live differently not merely in externals but in freedom, from “within,” where the Kingdom of God is. For until others see that you are willing to die, they may see all of Christianity—yes, even in its most fervent expression, even in its highest liturgical form—and still conclude that none of it is real, none of it is true: that it simply works for these people in their pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. And if we all become political Catholics, and (someday, some propitious day) manifest the conditions by which being Catholic is rewarded by the modern State and not being Catholic is punished by the same, then we will have “won” the world only because we have really lost every single soul, for whom “Catholicism” will be a mask that hides a completed paganism: every man pursuing his sinful self-interest under a sovereign State whose ubiquitous, tyrannical power is ordered toward making Catholicism the “interest” of every “self.”
You don’t have to follow these guys, because all they do is win, and the rhetorical strategy of brashly manifesting success over and against any appearance of failure is not just a manner of speaking. Rather, “from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” Political Catholicism speaks its slay-queenery out of hearts with no room in the inn for the baby king, no room for weakness, no room for a Catholicism that loses. Having reduced politics to a contest for sovereignty, and authority to power, it sees a Church that does not win this contest, and does not hold this power, as a failure. To such a pagan politics, Christianity is a stumbling block, and so Christianity must be redefined, must be manifested as a winning religion; an ambitious, cosmopolitan religion; a religion for boss babes; the fullness of its success hampered only by those who nurse a sick passion for defeat; the fullness of its success either cast back into the past perfect (circa the 18th century, when the Church was “based”) or projected into a future imperative (post a picture of America’s future confessional state!) but never relished now.
But Christ is the propitious moment, now is the acceptable time, God is God of the living, not of the dead, and the Son of God uses the present perfect when he says, “I have overcome the world.” He overcomes by being overcome. This paradox was as unacceptable to the unconverted Peter, who drew his sword to save Christ from the cross, as it is to the unconverted Catholic New Right, who would wield the State to save Christ’s followers from the cross. Against both, Christ says: “put your sword back in its sheath.” Christianity does lose. It is the very art of losing. Its loss is victory. And this is a victory not within paganism, but over paganism. Christianity bids us to follow the example of the crucified Lord and lose at politics wherever politics is considered a contest for sovereignty—“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you.” Rather, lose: “If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.” And this loss really does make one “first,” not in the fragile, violent way that Rome was “first,” but in the way a good father is “first.” For who is more powerful, who can rally others, who can best rule, govern, issue laws and see them obeyed—the one who wins, or the one who loves? The one who has won the contest for sovereignty, putting down all other bids for power, or the one who has proven his love by laying down his life, abandoning self-interest, and so becoming a “servant of all”?
Christ recommends death to self as his form of politics, not because he is a quietist, but because he is a king. The presence of the one willing to lose, willing to “lay down his life for his friends,” raises to life a politics in which “power is made perfect in weakness.” It is precisely in weakness, in loss, in “trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword ... in [and not despite] all these things we are more than conquerors.” Loss is the crucible and proof of love. By dying to ourselves we live visibly for God. And the man who lives visibly for God is not a power but an authority. He splendidly stands for the Highest Good, represents it, speaks for it, and commands others according to it. Authority is neither a sublimated form of power nor a name we give to power when it happens to be wielded by Christians or for Christian ends. Authority is power crucified, the irreproachable witness of love that “draws all things to itself” precisely because it confirms “to the point of shedding blood” that it “did not come to be served but to serve.”
Because of this, the modern State, as a concrete historical form, is an impossible object of Catholic integration. It is a perpetual war waged on authority, one which replaces it, wherever it is found, with the mere power of the sovereign victor and the self-interest of those under him. This alone explains why, in its concrete operations, the State motivates conformity not by any proof of love, but by money and by threat. Its armies are standing, mercenary armies because its leaders have no authority. Its inquisitors and managers are a replaceable, paid bureaucracy because they operate in lieu of authority, being moved in their work of administration, not by the confident trust that they are led by any person who stands for the good of all, but by the power of the paycheck. Its law is positive, and no one loves it as they would love the command of a father with visible, beautiful “care” for the community he leads. Everywhere, virtue is deemed impossible, or at least unnecessary, and replaced by “checks and balances.” Everywhere, systems replace persons. The modern State’s every tendency, and its actual historical effect, has been to coordinate society, not by inculcating the obedience which springs forth from “the governed” at the sight of fatherhood—the sight of power willing to be crucified for the sake of its friends—but by inculcating conformity through punishment and reward.
“But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” The blood of the martyrs does not water the seed of the Church, it is the seed of the Church. The Church is fully present in a single martyr, even as it is fully present in Mary, the Immaculate One, precisely because where one is dead to the whole order of resistance to God; where one can truly say “If we live, we live for the Lord”; there is the Church; there is the kingdom; there is the achievement of the Christian political form; there is human life lived for God. By dying you are not merely evidence that a new political form is possible, you do not merely foster and encourage it in others. You do this and still greater: you actually attain it, saying with your death and with your life (both/and, Christ will actually take them all), “thy Kingdom come”—and it does.