ARTICLE AD BOX
"Vice President ... JD Vance ... [and his advisers] belong to an elite coterie of illiberal Christian conservatives animated by an attitude reminiscent of what historian Fritz Stern once called the 'politics of cultural despair' ... [harking back to] a movement of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectuals who shared a loathing of liberalism rooted in personal frustration. 'They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it. . . . their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts.' ...
"The worldview many of Vance’s muses hold up as the alternative to liberalism is self-avowedly Roman Catholic. Catholicism offers anti-liberal intellectuals a way to anchor their dislike of the modern world in something bigger, a tradition that promises timeless truths and solutions to every social problem. Yet their Catholicism is much smaller than the tradition it rests on because of the way they have politicised it: Their use of the Catholic tradition is motivated by their animus against liberalism and therefore selective.
"One sees this in the barely disguised admiration some of them have for twentieth-century Catholic 'corporatism,' what others call clerical fascism. ...
"The high-water mark for Catholic corporatism came in the wake of the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno. Speaking to the social question, Pope Pius XI explicitly embraced the idea of 'corporations' [a system drawing inspiration from mediaeval guilds in which the whole of society would be organised into distinct corporations arising from common interests]. "In a controversial set of paragraphs, he even appeared to approve of Italian fascism. Years later, the primary ghostwriter of Quadragesimo anno insisted the encyclical had been misread. Be that as it may, the encyclical was widely understood in its time as endorsing clerical fascism. In the words of one historian, 'Virtually every Fascist revolution of the next decade was to fly the flag of Quadragesimo anno and its corporative State.' ..."[C]orporatist regimes were not merely experimenting with policy proposals that others might copy; they were engaged in a radical project of social transformation. The corporatist organisation they envisioned aimed to embrace every aspect of society and define life’s meaning. “In the corporation,” Messner wrote, “the individual discovers himself placed in a community whose reality he experiences, which embraces him in the day to day life of his vocation, but which also shapes the entire surroundings of his life, because it determines an area of life and cultural values of a special kind.”
"One needn’t engage in endless debates about the nature of fascism to recognise [this] as a political vision that treated individuals as parts of a societal collective, assigned the state responsibility for directing the pursuit of happiness, and had the audacity to equate its repressive regulation of people’s lives with human flourishing. That such a vision is deeply inimical to America’s Constitutional tradition should be self-evident to every honest legal scholar.
"Which brings us back to JD Vance. One cannot tell the extent to which he is an unprincipled opportunist, a true believer, or just a very online guy. What we do know, however, is that he moves among a small circle of intellectuals who toy with dangerous, deeply un-American ideas. Vance’s remark that the United States is currently in a 'late republican period' in need of a Caesar may be an indication that he’s studied De bello civili—but it’s much more likely he’s reading figures from the conservative revolution like Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler who talked about how Germany needed a Caesar to deliver it from parliamentary democracy. Or, likelier still, he’s reading others who have imbibed their ideas.
"That ideas like these, and the people who promote them, have influence with a man who might be placed a heartbeat from the presidency is one more piece of evidence, if more were needed, of the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America."
~ H.David Baer from his article 'The Influence of Austrofascism on JD Vance'
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