". . . and justice for all." Henry Kissinger Dying Outside Of Prison Is Confirmation Of The Failure Of Liberal Democracy

NO ONE KNOWS if Henry Kissinger is in hell or not but, if there is a hell, he certainly earned his place in it.  Because those who knowingly bring about mass murder are rightly held to be as guilty as those who did the killing, he was one of the most accomplished mass murderers in the Post WWII period.  Though a runner up to Mao and others remembering, also that there are U.S. Presidents who outdid him by putting him into power. In a numerical body count as a measure of criminal evil, the rightly infamous and reviled Pol Pot comes somewhat after Kissinger in the millions of deaths attributable to him because Kissinger and Nixon share responsibility for the illegal expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia which brought Pol Pot to power.  The duly elected president, Richard Nixon and his appointee, Kissinger share in that alongside the millions murdered through the action and encouragement of Nixon and Ford and Kissinger in East Timor, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), the fascist takeovers in Chile and Argentina (Kissinger complained to the generals in the "Dirty War" that they weren't killing People fast enough) and in many other places.  Especially after he cashed in on his governmental climb over millions of bodies, Kissinger had a business career and among the things he and his associates did was arm many murderous regimes and movements in Africa and, of course Latin America and Asia.  

America is only one among the lands where such world-class criminals are almost never punished but prosper and are media anointed or even created heroes and celebrities.  I would put the big networks and such august organs of the media as the New York Times* on the list of those fully and knowingly complicit in that.  I don't think modern media leads to there being a distinction between the two, as can be seen in both Reagan and Trump. They certainly don't regularly call out the evil of those with wealth or in service to wealth, especially not that from NYC or other big media center celebrities.  That's not unusual, there has never been any real holding into account even the most evil of human beings except in rare instances in which their regimes are toppled from the outside.**  In the United States legal and "justice" system hasn't even held the insurrectionist Trump to account for his crimes and I'm beginning to doubt it ever will.  Our Constitution and, especially, as that has been interpreted by our "justice" system, the judges and "justices" can't even prevent Republican-fascists from using the TV created fiction of Trump to destroy our liberal democracy as they prove more than competent to prevent real democracy, one based in equality before the law.  

That such a man as Henry Kissinger can have led such a life as he did, can have a career so drenched in innocent blood and be glorified  within politics, within the media as a hero instead of punished as one of the most dangerous criminals America has produced is, in fact, as much an indictment of liberal democracy as the crimes of Mussolini, Pinochet (put into power by Kissinger and Nixon), etc. are an indictment of fascism and Stalin and Mao** and Pol Pot (I'll repeat, another one that Kissinger and Nixon helped to power) are of Marxism.  And Kissinger is hardly alone, liberal democracies here and elsewhere have examples of other extremely dangerous criminals who not only will never be brought to justice but who it is forbidden to suggest that they should be brought to justice.  Britain certainly has many, France does, Italy, etc.   No doubt there is a long list to be made of such criminals around the world.  The first place to start looking is among those with lots of money.  [As an aside, here is a story about the businessman from my state who led to America being a shooting gallery for his own profit and was buried with great praise by Maine's political system, including our nasality of evil, Susan Collins.]  Balzac's famous observation that there is crime behind all great fortunes is one of the wisest observations made in the 19th century.  Though Paul got closer to the root of the matter bout 18 centuries earlier.  

I could go into the role that Kissinger played in torpedoing the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 to ensure Nixon won the election - with the media's active complicity - and, I wouldn't be surprised, the similar effort in 1980 that brought Reagan to power.  Starting the United States down the path to Trump.   Kissinger and his president, Nixon had the blood of millions on their hands even before they expanded the war into surrounding countries.  

Henry Kissinger's death certainly should be an occasion for the "free press" to examine their consciences about how it helped him come to power to do such evil things and how it covered up for him and the various elected politicians who gave him that chance and how it treated him as a celebrity instead of the mass murderous criminal he was.  And it is as certain that won't ever happen in our media.  I could list a huge number of those at the top of American media who played the same role for Kissinger and Republican-fascists that the Nazi supporting  media played in 1920s-45 Germany.  I will be unfashionable enough to say it, the media are whores who peddle their craft and selves in service to the same gangsterism that Kissinger was so good at. and, like any gangster's whore, they do it for money and proximity to power.  Such is the legacy of our inspecific and dangerously abbreviated First Amendment as it really is instead of in scholarly and journalistic and, in order of rising danger, show-biz  mythology.  Such is the legacy of the form of democracy that is congruent with such gangsterism, the liberal democracy which, as I noted over the last two posts, is so vulnerable to even the looniest of reactionary gangster efforts to topple it.***  If liberal democracy worked, Kissinger never would have come to power because the media lies and bias that brought Nixon to power would never have happened.   And if there's one thing that's obvious from the state of liberal democracy around the world, it doesn't work, in the end.

No legal system in which a Henry Kissinger could have reached the age of 100 without being imprisoned for his crimes against humanity can be held to be a part of legitimate governance.  The same legal system will likely let Trump off, too.  Our "free press" will be thick as thieves with them on that effort just as it was in his case, it, no doubt, will continue in its praise of him as he enters hell.  

* I almost called this Ode to Kissinger, after Byron's scathing Ode to Napoleon but that would risk misunderstanding.  I've been thinking about the Ode to Napoleon a lot and how holding him to something a little like justice didn't keep France from its catastrophic history in his wake.  If there is an example of how dangerous trying to make reform through revolution is, France is a good one as is Russia, as is China as is, . . .   America's romance for revolution is an anti-historical absurdity.  

**  Nixon and Kissinger had no problem doing business with Mao who may well have been responsible for the deaths of more innocent victims than Hitler was.  Most of them being Asians is supposed to, somehow, make that not matter in the great game of assigning value to human lives.

** Athens' oligarchic, slavery-supported, male supremacist democracy was the original example of how such inegalitarian democracy can, itself, be a gangster ridden governmental system.  As in our democracy for most of our history for American People of Color, for all Women, all slaves, all foreigners, and many non-citizens, Athens may as well have been no democracy at all.  One that is, unsurprisingly, vulnerable to internal dictatorial putsches and external threats.  A vote by elites, results in what those elites want.  I think one of the biggest reasons that those who controlled the government in the Federalist period and their rivals, starting with Jefferson found it necessary to gradually expand the franchise was because they couldn't depend on men who it didn't work for and, so had no stake in the United States, risking their lives for it during wartime.   I would bet you anything that if the Revolutionary soldiers who may have believed the egalitarian promises of the Declaration of Independence and fought for equality could have predicted what the Constitution would say, a lot of them would certainly not have been willing to die for such an aristocratic swindle.  As proof of that you have those who rebelled against the government who had fought in the Revolution, once they realized the Founders were cheating them.  The Black Revolutionary Soldiers who weighed so heavily on the conscience of Washington would never have fought if they realized they and their families and friends would be reduced by two-fifths and the three fifths of representation assigned to them would be stolen by those who held them in slavery.  Not having put their lives on the lines as Washington did, not having direct experience of Black soldiers, those like Jefferson and Madison became, if anything, more enthusiastic about slave holding as the Revolution faded in their memories.  

I think one of the worst things about America's liberal democracy is that, eventually, under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, AND ESPECIALLY THROUGH RULINGS OF THE SUPREME AND LOWER COURTS,  it has been made gradually less and less workable for those who are not rich or affluent, which leaves us vulnerable to media-promoted fascists and thugs. Is it any wonder that convincing an effective margin of voters that they have a stake in democracy is increasingly difficult when it is ever more an engine of inequality and injustice.  One in which the Harvard educated, Obama-Supreme Court nominated Garland was so slow and timid about pursuing the overt criminality of the celebrity boss, As Seen On TV "billionaire" Trump as he had no problem going after those so much lower in the scheme.  I don't have any sympathy for those lower on the scheme but that discrepancy leaves the pursuit of justice vulnerable to that observation.  I think that Jack Smith earned so much of his reputation in pursuing the criminals who were left with no protection of the kind Kissinger had has something to ponder in it.

Along with "liberalism" being made useless by calling thinks like laissez-faire capitalism, selfish libertarian notions and worse by that name, "democracy" is as damaged by it being used for anti-egalitarian systems of government.  We might just need a new word for the only legitimate form of government there is because "democracy" is about as meaningless as "socialism" is.  And it's entirely more important than even the best scheme of socialism.

Simps Never Got Over Me Making Fun Of The Mop Heads

Simps  says:

Hey Sparky -- they played John Lennon's "Imagine" at Roslyn Carter's memorial service the other day. At Roslyn's request. I await your post saying what a tasteless middle-brow atheist piece of shit she was.

Hey,  Stupy, there's no accounting for taste.  I told my family they could sing Amazing Grace at my funeral but only if they were absolutely sure I was dead and couldn't hear it.   Not that they'd choose that overdone thing. 

"Imagine" is a piece of crap but, then, so are many 19th and 20th century hymns that were, on the other hand, a sincere statement by their composers and authors of how they tried to live their lives.   John Lennon didn't mind imagining no possessions for the time it took him to dribble out that song but he obviously never intended to live it. 

 

Update:  Simps, you're so thin skinned there's no need for a cutting edge,  a cotton puff would give you a critical wound.  

"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.

This Should Chill You To The Bone - "Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime"

SINCE RIGHT-WING, even fascist Catholics dominate the Supreme Court and have been high up in Republican-fascism, I think it is important for people to have some understanding of one of the dominant intellectual sewers feeding that, the resurrected cult of neo-inegralism.   Entirely less known than "white evangelical" Protestantism, it is probably at least as dangerous among those who will actually rule a Republican-fascist state,  the Supreme Court's recent program of destroying the progress made in the 20th and even 19th century towards egalitarian democracy is a good example of how elite-prep->Ivy-League->ruling class white collar gangsters are at least as dangerous as middle-class Trumpsters and lower class fascist gangsters are.  I, however, will say that I don't think their Catholicism is very Catholic, certainly less than it is Republican-fascist. 

Michael Sean Winters has written a two-part review of a book by Kevin Vallier that sets out a lot of the danger of the neo-integralists.  I recommend reading both as an introduction to the public.  I have not read the book - I will have to wait for copies of it to show up on ABE Books - but I was familiar with it both in its original form and in its more recent and more recent retread version which is, I think, far more dangerous for the United States.  Protestant anti-Catholicism ruled in its previous heyday. 

You should especially note three things,  that Winter's article points out that integralism is pretty much entirely at odd with Catholic social teaching:

The chapter on "Transition" exemplifies this problem with the book, the precise and thoughtful analysis of what is, in the end, insanity. Vallier makes the argument that the transition from a liberal state to an integralist one would require the integralists to violate the very Catholic moral norms they claim to want to embed into the body politic.

He notes that the value of democracy, which has become central to Catholic social doctrine in the post-World-War-II era, is abandoned: "Integration from within attempts state capture," he writes. "The goal? Install integralists in powerful positions in a liberal nation-state. As liberalism falls, integralists seize the state and turn it toward religious objectives."

The second is that you have to understand that "liberalism" has so many varied meanings,  I would certainly not include my understanding of liberalism in the traditional American meaning of the word has any relevance to the integralists' rantings about it, though I'm sure they would oppose my liberalism based in Scripture and the Gospel as much as they would 18th century "enlightenment" notions of liberalism, which they more directly rail against.  My liberalism is probably even more opposed to what they want. 

The third is what's in this passage from his second article which will give you an idea of why it's so dangerous when the Ivy-league training schools for elite gangsters teach this stuff.  I ASK YOU TO KEEP IN MIND HE'S ON THE FACULTY OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, WHICH HAS PROVIDED MOST OF THE SUPREME COURT AND MANY OF THE LEADING REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN THE CONGRESS AND AMONG OTHER REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS LAWYERS AND JUDGES.

In addressing Harvard University's Adrian Vermeule's approach to transition specifically, Vallier observes:

 As Vermeule so evocatively claims, we must "sear the liberal faith with hot irons." It must not rise again. Only a strong state combined with a strong church can complete this urgent task. Vermeulean protectors must become conquerors. They must rule with an iron rod. And, so, however much Vermeule wants to avoid coercion, he is stuck with it. Integralists must exercise hard power.

Images of the Jan. 6 insurrection flood the mind, only led by the cross and nationwide. It is too horrific to contemplate, and Vallier is right to insist we must not avert our eyes. 

In this same chapter, Vallier provides a useful, concise history of the development of the "thesis-hypothesis" theological framing of church-state relations. In an effort to "soften the blow" of Pope Pius IX's condemnation of liberal regimes, the great Bishop Félix Dupanloup of Orleans, France, argued that the pope had articulated the "ideal" situation of the state supporting the Catholic Church as a "thesis," but that the "hypothesis" governed situations where Catholics were in the minority or where, for particular reasons, the ideal could not be realized. In the latter situation, such as in the United States, religious liberty could be embraced.

Vallier goes on to note, "This distinction, designed to save liberalism, later became an obstacle." This is a useful reminder that we ought not abstract issues from the times in which they were debated.

Vallier makes many other intelligent, incisive remarks about a variety of topics in his treatment of "Transition," exposing flaws in the integralist approach.

But every few pages you come across a sentence like this: "The specter of the pope authorizing crusades anew will create global controversy." And you remember that, notwithstanding all the fine distinctions being drawn, the whole topic of integralism is bonkers.

And that's just a tiny fraction of what these Ivy-league thugs and gangsters are proposing as a mere "transition" to their neo-fascism.   Harvard having such a person on its faculty.   How dangerous it is becomes apparent in what Vallier writes, himself.   For example from his own  article Railliement: Two Distinctions.

Naive vs. Strategic

The first distinction goes to the goals of ralliement. I believe there are actually two distinct ways to understand those goals, which — entirely tendentiously — I will call the naive and strategic versions. In the naive version, Catholics seek a genuine long-term rapprochement with liberal-democratic political orders, hoping to baptize them from within and even to recall liberalism to its best self, while otherwise retaining the regime’s outward character. Speaking in very broad terms, one might see the project of European Catholic Democracy after World War II in this light, although there are obviously many qualifications to be discussed here.

In the second, strategic version, Catholics deny that liberalism has any best self to which it might somehow be recalled. They work within a liberal order towards the long-term goal, not of reaching a stable accommodation with liberalism, even in a baptized form, but rather with a view to eventually superseding it altogether. Pater Edmund Waldstein sees this strategic version as the one Leo XIII himself favored: “For Leo the ralliement was meant as a stage towards an integral restoration of Christendom. That is, Catholics were to work for the common good in the current un-ideal framework of a state that did not recognize the superiority of spiritual over temporal authority, but the hope was that this would lead eventually to a restoration of an integrally Catholic state.“

"In the short run, there are superficial similarities between the two approaches. After all, both reject visions in which Catholics retreat from politics into thick local communities. But in their long-run aims, the two versions of ralliement are entirely different, indeed diametrically opposed. Here let me quote with approval an analysis of the difference between Ross Douthat’s backward-looking version of ralliement and my own: Neither Douthat nor Vermeule retreats into gated communities or enclaves … in the bayou. Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime. Some will go into government, some will go into the institutions the government serves, like finance, and others will go back into elite schools to prepare the next wave. In time, perhaps not a very long time, you will see the regime get better. But this is where Vermeule and Douthat’s visions diverge sharply. At a certain point, Douthat and those who agree with [him] will [say that] “Liberalism is itself again.” Vermeule will say, simply, that we are well on our way to our goal."

Parliamentary Democracy vs. Bureaucracy

The second distinction goes not to the goals of ralliement, but to the institutional context in which it occurs. An important objection to ralliement holds that participation in liberal institutions tends to suborn those who do the rallying, in part by forcing them to participate in public practices and discourses that can only ever be cast in liberal terms, and that will bind the ralliés to liberal presuppositions. On this view, “the procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed.” . . . 

This is only an introduction to what is, truly, among the most dangerous of the Republican-fascist sewers that are well advanced in their plans to destroy egalitarian democracy in favor of a very fascist form of gangster governance.  And, as you will certainly understand, now, is by plan inserting those "intelligent Christians educated at elite schools," into the highest positions of power, especially in the Senate and on the Supreme Court.  I will note that Notre Dame, where Coney-Barrett comes from, is another strong hold of integralism.   This is the Ivy-league acceptable, clean, fingered, well dressed front of American fascism.    They will take advantage of the rag-tag January 6 style thugs or, as I suspect, fully end up in concert with them as their lunatic ideas for a Catholic-fascist government fail to materialize.