Reflecting on how decisive Catholics were in bringing about a Trump/Vance victory, Magister observes that J.D. Vance represents the ascendency of a new set of ideas which have emerged on “the Catholic and post-liberal right.”
Trump’s selection of the Catholic JD Vance as running mate is particularly revealing, both for his personal history and for the figures [influencing him]…
Let it suffice here to underline that his successful autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy” portrays the harsh life of the white working class in the decayed industrial area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Lakes, but not with the compassionate gaze of one who stoops down to these modern poor, whom he instead puts to the lash, demanding that they go about climbing back up the slope with the inventiveness, courage, and boldness that he himself embodied first as a Marine in Iraq, then as a student at the elite universities of Ohio and Yale, then with his connection with Peter Thiel, a dynamic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who introduced him to entrepreneurial and political activity, and above all with Patrick J. Deneen, professor of political science first at Princeton, then at the Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, and today at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who became his teacher and friend.
Deneen is the great theorist of the critique of liberalism, both economic and cultural. His book “Why Liberalism Failed,” published in 2018, was at the time among the most widely read and discussed, with a long review and three editorials in the “New York Times” in just a month. It was translated into a dozen languages, and even an adversary like Barack Obama recognized it as a must-read.
But Deneen, a Catholic, a reader and scholar of Augustine, Tocqueville, and René Girard, is also a leading figure in that small but influential “New Right” of Catholic thinkers that includes Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, political theorist Gladden Pappin, theologian Chad Pecknold, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari, former editorial director of the “New York Post” and founder of “Compact,” one of those brilliant cultural magazines recently born on the post-liberal and Catholic right.
The success of Deneen’s book had a precedent of equal stature, in 2012, with the release of “The New Geography of Jobs” by Enrico Moretti, a professor at Berkeley, who attributed the fracture in the United States between the two exuberant and technological coasts and the devastated and impoverished interior of the country to the overwhelming development of new technologies, which although they were indeed killing many jobs were creating space for many others. Moretti was among the experts consulted by Obama, at the polar opposite of Deneen and Vance and their postliberalism, which however, with its anti-market statism, today also takes on the appearance of “a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift,” as Vance himself said in an interview with the “New Statesman.”
In short, the American Catholic “New Right” — which is also isolationist in the field of international relations — has little or nothing in common with the geopolitical and theological battles of the Catholic “neocons” of past decades, from Michael Novak to Richard J. Neuhaus to George Weigel.
Magister cites J.D. Vance’s pledge to cut off all aid to Ukraine in pursuit of an end to the conflict as being particularly aligned with the Vatican Secretary of State Parolin’s interest in an Administration that would promote “détente and pacification in the current conflicts that are bloodying the world.”
Being such a senior observer in the Catholic world, Magister has a long memory of the influence of American Catholic “neocons” upon both Washington and Rome. Yet today he sees the influence of that older generation waning, and the Catholic “New Right” as ascendant in a postliberal era.
We certainly hope so.
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