Senior Thesis

 Even back during college I was very committed to defending the liberal project. But I took a kind of grudging interest at the time in various "communitarian" and "traditionalist" critiques of liberalism and modernity. I thought they might be onto something; I thought liberalism could learn or gain something from them; and I went out of my way to vindicate them from charges of necessarily leading to authoritarian illiberalism. 

I even devoted an entire 40-page B.A. thesis, about the history of fascist ideology, to attempting to draw an overfine distinction between religious conservatives and traditionalists, on the one hand, and genuine fascists on the other. 

With the benefit of hindsight, that senior thesis now seems to me a masterpiece of overthinking. 

If we have learned anything from the Trump era, after all, it's that things in political life often turn out to be much simpler and dumber than one had imagined. 

It turns out that random "traditionalist" bros will actually be the first to sign up for fascism, as soon as it dares reveal itself openly on the political scene. There is not nearly as much of a distinction between these ideologies as I had thought. 

J.D. Vance is the one who really gives the game away. He is still out there daily penning "traditionalist" and "communitarian" critiques of modernity and materialism of the sort I would have taken very seriously a decade or so ago. 

But he is doing it in service of the most crassly violent, corrupt, venal, materialistic, and morally depraved regime this country has ever seen. 

Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals describes a number of the far-right Catholic "traditionalists" of his era who were associated with Action Française, preached French nationalism and antisemitism, and ultimately cleared the way for the rise of Vichy-style French fascism. 

They sound an awful lot like J.D. Vance does today. 

Benda cites one Catholic publication from his era defending far-right nationalism as perfectly compatible with Christianity: "are all the dead our fathers? Have they all loved us? Have they all suffered and labored for us? Some lived on the other side of the globe, and, so to speak, in another world. [...] Where is the debt? If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an inn." (Aldington trans. throughout). 

This reads as almost a verbatim transcription of a number of Vance's speeches. 

He too has perverted the Church's doctrine of an "ordo amoris" to imply that Christian "love" is somehow compatible with a regime that persecutes, excludes, and brutalizes immigrants and asylum-seekers; he too has tried to inculcate a "blood and soil" theory of American identity that explicitly rejects the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the principles of liberty and equality as in any sense important to what makes an American. 

Vance's reasoning for this latter point is that a merely "creedal" definition of American identity would exclude Confederates who fought to preserve slavery as well as contemporary white nationalists and Neo-Nazis. He apparently thinks that's a bad thing. 

One can readily imagine Vance endorsing the sentiment that "If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an inn." Here was Vance, for instance, in his RNC speech: "it is part of our tradition that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers, we allow them on our terms."

It was the previous Pope himself who countered Vance on these arguments—saying that the "true Ordo Amoris" must be "open to all, without exception."

We can "thank whatever gods may be," then, that it is no longer true today what Benda wrote in 1928: "It appears that we must look among those who have left the Church, to find Christian ministers who proclaim the true teaching of the Master, and who declare with no beating around the bush: 'The Gospel of Jesus does not imply any country, but obliterates the fatherland.'" 

Thankfully, indeed, those true Christian ministers are now leading the Vatican once again. Our previous two Popes have plainly recognized, as Vance does not, that the Gospel message is a straight-up contradiction of the ideology of blood-and-soil nationalism. 

But Vance, of course, is perfectly happy to reject the advice of the Popes when it contradicts his political interests. And in this, he is once again following in the footsteps of the proto-fascists of the early twentieth century. 

As Benda quotes some of the German Christian nationalists of his time, they were apparently willing to assert outright: "wherever political matters are concerned we shall not allow ourselves to be influenced by the authority of the Pope or that of the Bishops." 

This too is practically a transcript of what J.D. Vance said of Pope Leo, after he criticized Trump's war of aggression in Iran. "It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what's going on in the Catholic church," Vance said, "and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy."

Given the Pope's noble role in these debates—in which both he and his predecessor have fully lived up to the spiritual mission of the "clerks," as Benda defines it—and have defended truth and justice—far be it from me to say that Catholicism leads to fascism, or anything of that sort. That is not what I am trying to assert. 

But it does seem increasingly to me that illiberal and "post-liberal" arguments, even in their most seemingly benign form, do seem to morph all too easily and readily into fascism as soon as they are given the opportunity. 

The "traditionalists" whom I thought fairly admirable a decade or two ago now seem to me to be no better than the "traditionalists" of Benda's era, who defended the antisemitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus and proclaimed the rights of the "nation" over those of humanity, truth, and justice. 

The "rad trad" bros of today are really and truly in the tradition of those of yesteryear like the 1930s epic poet Roy Campbell who defended Francisco Franco. (On whom Hugh MacDiarmid's verdict should be the last and only word we need: "Franco has made no worse a shambles / Than this poem of Campbell's.")

My senior thesis therefore stands in significant need of revision. The religious conservatives of the interwar period really did line up with the fascists—and they are lining up with them again today. 

And so, I say of my younger self what Shelley did of his own: "I know / Too late, since thou and France are in the dust, / That Virtue owns a more eternal foe / Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, / And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time."