THERE IS A KIND of Republican-fascist convert to Catholicism who sees it as nothing but a vehicle to power by tapping into the billioniare-millioniare supported "trad-catholic" cult. J. D. Vance is only one of a number of such opportunists, the serially divorced, serially adulterous Newt Gingrich is another that right-wing priests and bishops have allowed in to a religion in which the Catholic right wing bishops and priests have barring once divorced-remarried Catholics from the sacraments, though not if they are well connected Republican-fascists. I have long been suspicious of recent Catholic converts among affluent white men and women, from the beginning of JPII's papacy, in fact. I have long been suspicious of those who became priests and bishops under him and Benedict XVI, though not all of those. I am entirely skeptical of those who went from the expensive, elite kind of Catholic preps into the Ivy League class of university, especially those who go to their law schools, especially those who are Republican-fascists, now. There is simply no possibility of someone of informed good will to remain in that party or to join it, today. It is an act exactly equivalent to remaining in an overtly fascist party in 2024.
When he was running for the Senate, two years ago, Michael Sean Winters did an expose on J. D. Vance and the right-wing Catholic nut cases he has adopted as giving him his official views on so many things. I can't do better than Winters does so here's some of what he said then:
Vance sees Catholicism in a similar fashion. The Catholic Church of his imaginings is part of a "post-liberal" America, and so it was unsurprising Vance took time off the campaign trail to speak at a conference of conservative, post-liberal nationalists at Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio. The event included people like Harvard law professor and Christian integralist Adrian Vermeule, former New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, and Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
"If the last 30 years has taught us anything, it's that the left's fascist orgy is not somehow going to abate," Bovard told the group. "No one knows what lunacy is coming next, but we all know what's eventually coming: normalized pederasty, forced euthanasia, postnatal abortion, persecuting dissident faiths, disqualifying religious traditionalists and political conservatives from banking, property rights and public benefits."
Who talks like that? These are Vance's intellectual running buddies.
Also unsurprising is the fact that one of the guests when Vance was received into the Catholic faith* was Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, the Methodist-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox writer who recently separated from his wife, left his children so he could move to Hungary and be near his hero, Viktor Orban.
Vance's fraudulence is discerned in the fact that while he celebrates Catholicism as a vehicle for his sociocultural vision, he departs from the teaching of the church on a host of issues, from immigration to labor rights to climate change.
To hear him invoke his religion, you would never think that religion assures us that the meek are blessed and the rich will be sent away empty. The ancien régime of his heart is the imagined moral landscape of the 1950s, when moms mostly stayed at home, gays stayed in the closet, and the business of America was business.
Maurras, of course, was a monarchist, which is not a viable option in 21st-century America. Still, does anyone doubt that Trump would accept a crown if it were offered to him?
We know Vance would not demur. At a campaign event, he stood by sheepishly as Trump robbed him of his dignity, saying the Senate candidate was "kissing my ass" to get his endorsement. The former president compared Vance to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in this regard. Vance, in true courtier fashion, said not a word. That was painful to watch.
The writer couldn't have known then that the Supreme Court on July 1st of this year, a ruling issued by right-wing Catholics, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, made what Winters believed was not a viable option in America just two years ago into what will become a fait accomplis if Trump or Vance becomes president next year. I strongly suspect if Biden or Harris is president, the same "justices" will immediately start back tracking on their coronation plans.
The right-wing "trad-catholic" cult might seem marginal or funny or unimportant to those who don't watch it and keep track of it but the fact that Republican-fascists have packed the Court with either its true believers or those who like Vance will play it to and use the cult to get power for themselves. I doubt J. D. Vance believes in anything except money and power, as apparently Putin's media in Russia is crowing, he's more like Trump than Trump is and he's approximately half his age.
This is no Chick Publications - Southern Baptist fever dream c. 1960 that suspected that a Catholic president would rule the country according to orders issued by Vatican City. This is more like what will happen when someone cynically uses the trad-catholic propaganda network based in Napa California in line with what billionaire tech bros like Musk and Thiel want. As Winters points out, "trad-cathoicism" has no use for Catholicism as Christianity which takes what Jesus and the writers of the New Testament say seriously. "Trad-Catholicism" is no more Christian than the hallelujah peddlers and millionaire TV hucksters who preach hatred of the poor, the dispossessed, the widow and orphan and stranger living among us so as to benefit from one of our indigenous forms of fascism, white supremacy in order to practice the other, the extraction of wealth from those lower on the economic scale so as to concentrate wealth and power in ever fewer hands.
This is what Democrats should be shouting from every available venue instead of trying to dump the most successful Democratic president since LBJ, who could outdo him if he had Johnson's advantage of a really Democratic Congress instead of one hampered by Manchin and Sinema. What he has accomplished with what he was given by circumstances and the voters has been a graduate level course in why deep political experience in DC is essential for a Democratic President's success.
But instead of me wanting to fight with Democrats, I'm more interested in exposing Trump, Vance and the stinking Republican-fascist party who are trying to put their ilk in power on a permanent basis, including the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court.
No comments:
Post a Comment