"an admittedly difficult and abstruse topic" Too Complex For The Media, And Far Too Hot To Treat Honestly

Maybe Maddow could handle it in a podcast but I doubt she'd dare to, she'd probably lose her job if she tried.

IN THE LAST POST I did on the second part of Michael Sean Winters' articles about Kevin Vallier's new book, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism I gave you some reasons Vallier and Winters give for why, especially in the context of Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, in Congress and in other high offices, we should be taking the threat of neo-integralist Catholic cults very seriously.  

I have to, though, more than half disagree with their explanation of how this latest retread of integralism came about.  They say that it arose from a crisis in "liberalism" but in saying that I think they mix two different things that are both called "liberalism".  Something I've been critical of since I started writing these posts so many years ago, now. Talking about the book this passage in Winters' first article starts:

It is not an easy read, fluctuating between academic verbiage and a chatty, conversational style, and tackling an admittedly difficult and abstruse topic. It is nonetheless an important read because none of us yet knows how influential these integralists will become and because Vallier takes the movement seriously.

Integralism did not just happen. It grows out of a crisis in liberalism. "The integralists have given a voice to young Christians, many of whom have grown up alienated from their institutions," Vallier, who teaches at Bowling Green State University, writes. "These young people, often on the political Right, are not traditional small-government conservatives. They are not especially enamored of the Constitution, and they do not care about reading it according to original public meaning."

No doubt those who read my posts will know I'm extremely critical of the United States Constitution due to the still firmly in place and still very consequential slave-power articles and passages and the truncated, minor poetical slogans of the Bill of Rights. Especially the latter which were put there in place of specific and seriously considered rights and distinguishing those from the privileges that can be made to fall under "rights" if you're not careful.  Most seriously of those is the Constitutional oversight that while there is a right to tell the truth, there is no such thing as a right to lie and while there is a right to have a well ordered and democratic police force, there is no private right to own and carry weapons of mass destruction or even a hunting rifle without that potentially very dangerous privilege being subject to regulation by a democratically elected and staffed government.  

Not that I would agree with an assertion that the secular "originalists" or the "textualists" or the other would-be Constitutional fundamentalists care about how its read so long as it can be made to read according to what they want it to mean.  As Walter Brueggemann once pointed out, Atonin Scalia never seemed to find an "original textualist" meaning in the Constitution that went against what he wanted to start with.  The same is certainly true of many of the most reputedly august members of that body.  I doubt there is a Harvard Law professor who actually doesn't read into the document what they want it to mean, "originalist-textualist" or not.  And I'm certain there is no journalist or lawyer or even many a Constitutional Scholar who doesn't do the same thing, despite what slogan they repeat to claim their neutrality and impartiality in judgement on the matter.  

Vallier does not use the word, but it popped into my head reading those sentences: sophomoric. In our time, alas, sophomoric thought does not keep one from the highest positions of political power nor from prestigious posts in academic life.

Vallier's analysis of liberalism rings true, even if it is depressing. He writes:

"Today liberalism has become associated with abstract academic theorizing. Liberals obsess over esoteric debates about sex and gender that make no sense to most humans. The authoritarian leaders of the world have noticed, eagerly pointing out liberal insularity. Consider the bizarre spectacle of Russian president Vladimir Putin complaining that transgender activists have mistreated famed children's book author J.K. Rowling. Why does Putin care? He doesn't. He wants to delegitimize liberal order by drawing attention to its flaws."[*]

Vallier's next sentence — "In most places, liberalism was a practical program of reform" — put me in mind of philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum's brilliantly savage takedown of Berkeley professor Judith Butler for leading liberalism — and feminism — astray. When liberalism became performative rather than practical, it began the long process of alienating itself from the working class, paving the way for integralism — and for Donald Trump!

The integralist response to liberalism's flaws is, like Trumpianism, brutish. But while Trump's vision has a certain cultishness to it, it lacks any rootedness in religious theories and beliefs. Trump is too solipsistic to engage theology; he is the only god permitted into his tent.

I don't think the analysis of this is right, at all, especially in the general activities of the integralists, announced as such or merely alligned with that lunatic idea.  Certainly not in the American context.  

It may be easy for straight men to attribute the rise of a movement in Catholic intellectual circles to the very recent debates about sex and gender as, for them, those debates are as relevant as the debates about equality for Black People and other People of Color were to the Northern white Ripon Society Republicans I remember from my youth.  Those who just knew that while there was something to the claim that there was something wrong with segregation, Martin Luther King jr. was going too far in his demands for equality.  

That Catholic integralist fascists have latched onto that as the motivation of their cult is no different from Republican-fascists latching onto the Lou Dobbs-CNN whipped up hysteria about Latino immigrants so as to improve their chances of gulling the gullible into voting fascists into office.  Fascists who would permit their bosses to treat them like dirt and rob them of their earnings.

If there is any excess in LTGTQ+ People and our allies in regard to things like J. K. Rowling's controversial statements about TransWomen, that's the only way it figures in the use of the issue by fascists from Putin to those in Harvard Law School.  Considering the exposure of the private lives of some of them and, especially their allies in the Catholic clergy, they couldn't really give a damn about it.  That Putin's puppet, Trump appeared in a televised skit with Rudy Giuliani in drag and that never being brought up by those who are supposedly so morally against drag acts shows how important that really is to them.  About as important as the legislative record of the drafting and adoption of the 14th Amendment is to the Supreme Court "justices" and the judges who use that at clear cross purpose to what that the amendment says said and what the legislative record shows.

I have written endlessly about the crisis in liberalism which certainly predates this phenomenon by not only decades but centuries, it is the crisis between notions of freedom without moral responsibility, more correctly called "privileges" and notions of freedom that are all about moral responsibility.  It is the difference between libertarianism and the license to amorality embedded in "enlightenment" notions of freedom of "property" free from moral restraints and the abolitionist movement and Women's rights movement that sought to free those held as "property" under the law and subject to subjugation by those the law already granted privileged status.  That is the recurring crisis in liberalism which may well continue UNTIL GENUINE MORALLY RESPONSIBLE LIBERALS JUNK THE OLD WORD AND ADOPT A NEW ONE THAT MAKES IT CLEAR WHAT THEY REJECT.  Such a neologism will have to start from the idea contained in Scripture and, as I so recently noted those arch-conservative Popes who Catholic reactionaries and conservatives adored so much, JPII and Benedict XVI that People are never to be considered, talked of or ESPECIALLY TREATED AS MEANS TO ENDS BUT AS POSSESSING THEIR OWN PROPER DIGNITY and that that is true of them simply because they are alive.  Would that their papacies practiced what they preached.  That is certainly something that the inegralists reject in practice.  Not in their lunatic dreams of setting up a Catholic fascist gangster rule, the wet-dream fantasies of a wimpy Harvard Law prof about Popes calling new crusades, or, as they really pose a danger here and elsewhere, making common cause with other fascists, lunatic or not, cutting whatever corners of morality that they need to to stay within the circle of power.  They will never live up to those words of John Paul II or Benedict XVI.  The opposite is exactly what those on the Supreme Court have done in so many instances, exactly what those Republican-fascist, Harvard and Yale, etc. trained lawyer Senators and Congressmen who fled from the January 6th insurrectionists did, exactly as the formerly mainstream servants and possessors of great wealth in the Republican-fascist party did when they harnessed the force of white racism and its development in neo-fascist, segregationism originating "Christianity" (white evangelicals) and later the cabloid cults.  

Conservatism is and always has been about treating People as means to ends, workers, serfs, peasants, slaves, Women, etc. it has been an intrinsic aspect of conservatism since the concept was first formalized.  That treatment of People as objects for use or disposal is thoroughly embedded into legal codes and legal systems and the professional habits of judges and "justices," none of which have those of any alleged striped away, not any from totalitarian fascist to liberal democratic has expunged the legal basis for doing that or the law treating them as such.  The key to wiping that out is equality, making the law apply equally to everyone without privileges and without judicial evasion, and no conservative has ever really wanted that to happen.  No more than they made Nixon or, now Trump pay for their crimes.

If there is a crisis in conservatism it couldn't be so easily solved as to come up with a word that distinguished a genuine conservatism from the morally corrupt kind because there is nothing called "conservatism" around today which is not all-in on moral corruption because, in the end, it is about getting as much unearned wealth as possible in as few hands as possible and those who profit from serving that end.   In that it is really not different from the 18th century style of "enlightenment" liberalism which is not really much different from it.  The integralists are dangerous but not because there is much of a prospect of setting up that old Chick Publications style Protestant fundamentalist fever dream of a pipeline between JKF's White House and the Vatican so the Pope could give him orders.  It's remarkable that no one has accused the second and, I'd say, far more faithful Catholic, Joe Biden of that.  Such is the clear absurdity of such an idea that even Biden's political and financial enemies (they're really one in the same) have sought to market the idea.  No, the integralists are so Catholic that Pope Francis is probably seen as the enemy.  They'd never want a Pope Francis ruling, too egalitarian for them. I suspect the next Pope may be even more rejected by them.  As someone said about the deposed Bishop Strickland of Tyler Texas, now he's free to join the heretical cult of Society of Pius X.  I think there will probably be a major schism in the United States and, especially, among English language Catholics in the near future.

While I disagree somewhat with Vallier and Winters as to the motivation of the integralist fascists, most of what they say about its dangers is important and too little discussed in the American media.  Maybe that's because it's more complex than will fit into a TV or even radio news story but really getting into what's wrong is not in the medias financial self-interest.  The failure of education in its struggle against electronic media is another universal crisis that, as well, is important in this.  People kept in ignorance and believing lies cannot maintain a democracy.   As Winters started his first article on this:

Integralism is the latest iteration of right-wing zaniness in Catholic circles. It is different from the other more populist expressions of reactionary Catholicism in part because it is proposed by brilliant scholars such as Harvard University's Adrian Vermeule and University of Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. Political philosopher Steve Schneck recently reviewed Deneen's latest book for NCR and NCR staff reporter Brian Fraga wrote about a conference at which Vermeule spoke.  The Schneck article is especially worth reading because I think that version of it is actually more dangerous. 

The billionaire-financed, EWTN spread cult of "traditional Catholicism" appealing to the ignorant and gullible is probably as dangerous on a  vulgar, popular and electoral level but, as noted, the elite Catholic identifying fascists are already in seats of power, many of them Ivy League credentialed lawyers and judges and "justices."  I don't know how much Jeffery Clark identifies with integralism or still considers himself a Catholic but I'd consider him as at least in league with them.  

I, for my part, would distrust anyone who participates in that modern innovation of such impiety, the lawyers' Red Mass generally, I believe, staged on the feast day of Thomas Moore (no doubt another example of another friggin' movie that uses an historical figure badly).  If I were Pope I'd ban those show-biz uses of the liturgy and sacraments by some of our more corrupt political figures.  

* Far more dangerous than Putin's attempt to weaponize the criticism of J. K. Rowling by LGBTQ+ supporters is his exploitation of American free-speech-press absolutism based in the inadequacy of the slogan ridden First Amendment as read by "liberal" justices on the Supreme Court.  THAT is a real "crisis in libealism" the one which has been weaponized by the fascists, especially America's indigenous form of that, white supremacists, to destroy democracy.  Putin and his billionaire colleagues in destroying American democracy have benefited greatly from that line of liberal Supreme Court and lower court doctrine and, especially, the vulgar, popularized habits of thought that comes from the simple failure to distinguish the right to tell the truth from there being no right to lie.  

The insane notion that anyone has violated Trumps' or his cronies and lackeys, "freedom of speech."  He wasn't the first to exploit that, though, Republicans and then Republican-facists on the Supreme Court and other courts used it to attack the political system by freeing the media to spread lies (the Sullivan Decision), making money "speech" and endowing billionaires with billions of times more "speech" and the fascist millionaire who brought the suit with millions more (Buckley v. Valeo) and onward to the ones with which the Berger and Renquist and Roberts Courts struck down legislative attempts to protect elections from billionaire and millionaire ratfucking on the basis of "free speech."  I remember first appreciating the irony of that old-line liberal whine of "free speech violation" when I heard the ubiquitous DC area journalist and husband of NPR's Cokie Roberts, Steve Roberts whining about his freedom of speech being violated from the nationally broadcast Diane Rehm Show, probably on one of his other routine appearances on TV shows as he whined piteously about being deprived of his "free speech."  You have to hand it to Putin, he has studied and weaponized the popular understanding of "freedom," and as dictated from the Supreme Court bench even as it's something he has wiped out under his regime.  Of course he'd study that and how he could use one of our self-imposed and iconized follies against us.  He's smarter than most of the American media figures, pundits, the legal profession and judicial system, in that.  They're friggin' clueless even as they moan about its effects in endangering democracy while propping up the ultimate origin of those.  

That use of "freedom" and "rights," entirely more than those who want TransPeople to have the freedom to live as they feel they need or simply choose to, violating no one's rights in that, is the crucial issue.  Putin appealing to bigots among American and other voters in the West to get them to junk democracy has certainly not led to a critique of a right to lie and bear false witness and to exploit hatred, especially in the billionaire-millionaire owned media.  It's the same "right" that Lou Dobbs used to gin up the freakout about "illegal immigrants" something which has become endemic to fascist movements around the world.  I'd be surprised if Putin didn't notice that nightly spectacle.  It's the same one that Trump used as he used New York's racism in his publicity campaigns before he got the TV gig that made him a real danger to democracy.  Trump, Putin's puppet who he leads by the balls, holding out real-estate prospects, the one who controls the Republican-fascist party, the party that was the traditional home of Russo-phobia, the one which used to be the home of nativist anti-Catholic paranoia.  

I would like to ask Winters and Vallier to consider that their critique of liberalism on the basis of trans-rights plays right into the Catho-fascist use of it.  If, at times, some of the rhetoric of the LGBTQ+ movement gets out of hand, that's the nature of all human discourse.  I've often criticized that excess among some of my fellow LGBTQ+ People myself but most of my criticism is based in its counter-productive effect, hindering the achievement of equality.  As mentioned in the passage about the Ripon Society (Does that thing still exist, you may well ask.  Yes it is still doing it's two-step with American fascism.) even those without a stake in the matter but who claim to support equality will think something far short of equality is already going too far.

As I said, this discussion is far more complex than you're ever going to see it treated in the media.