Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants 3/11/24, 10:23 AM

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W
Liberalism’s hat passes for the American
intellectual right is a sorry thing.

Good and
Indeed, it lacks even the virtues of
unity and coherence; in reality, it is
fractured, an ever-changing
Faithful hodgepodge of views and conflicting mini-
movements. To the extent there exists any

Servants institutional structure at all, it is only to be

found on the right wing of liberalism,

Adrian Conservatism Inc., which coheres in a brittle

way only at the price of stasis, recycling

Vermeule nostrums for Reagan’s birthday, policing

intellectual challenges, and establishing yet
another Center for Madison and Mammon at
some nominally Catholic university or other,
February 28, 2023 Share ↗
funded to the tune of $10 million by some
calculating donor who suspects Leo XIII was a
dangerous socialist.

So what is organized isn’t opposed to liberalism

in any real sense, and what is genuinely
opposed to liberalism—genuinely critical of
the endless revolution of liberalism, genuinely
interested not merely in slowing its progress,
but in defeating it, undoing it, curing its ills,
and then transcending it to rebuild a
civilization—isn’t organized.

What’s even worse—and this is my thesis—is

that most of the sub-movements on the
American right that imagine themselves to be
ILLUSTRATION: SCOTT MENCHIN critical of liberalism are, objectively, its
servants. They serve the liberal order by

practicing and, indeed, advocating, in one form

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Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants 3/11/24, 10:23 AM

practicing and, indeed, advocating, in one form

or another, political quietism: the fundamental
refusal to mount a political and public
challenge to liberalism itself.

(No, such a challenge doesn’t mean

“overthrowing the government,” because the
government was here before liberalism and will
be here after it; nor does it mean “betraying the
Constitution” or some such, because the
Constitution can be interpreted on nonliberal
premises and, indeed, was for a long time
interpreted on such premises, as I have argued;
nor does it mean “theocracy,” for liberalism has
no monopoly on recognizing a legitimate
sphere of independence for the temporal
power, and a legitimate sphere for the
individual conscience as well. If these or similar
slogans leapt into your thoughts, you already
suffer from the very infection of the mind I
mean to diagnose here.)

This quietism takes a bewildering variety of

forms, united only in their proud, unyielding,
and, indeed, occasionally angry commitment to
political defeat. Liberalism offers an infinite
variety of ways in which to retreat into a private
and nonpolitical sphere, surrendering any
fundamental contest for sovereignty—which is,
of course, the only outcome that the liberal
order really cares about. It is like entering a
sort of gourmet market for lotus-eaters, in
which all the goods appear to be temptingly
different, yet in reality all contain the same
powerful soporific.

Would you like to frequent artisanal

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Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants 3/11/24, 10:23 AM

Would you like to frequent artisanal

coffeehouses in a college town, writing
overlong screeds about authentic anti-
liberalism and the primacy of the local? Be my
guest, says the liberal order, we will even fund you
to do so; you are a good and faithful servant. Might
you prefer the “traditional” life — a
picturesque farm, some chickens, a vaguely
Mennonite aesthetic, and an Instagram
account? Of course!, says liberalism, you are
welcome to be a domestic extremist, so long as your
extremism remains safely domesticated.

If your aesthetic runs more to the suburban

book group with a bit of Aristotle and a glass of
wine, so be it, as long as you promise not to
think too deeply about the political dimensions
of human excellence. Or, if all that strikes you
as too feminized, please step this way; here is
your basement gym, where you can bulk up and
then go online, anonymously, to talk tough
about Nietzsche, Evola, and neo-reaction, and
slip in a few of those slurs you have been dying
to use—so long as you report to work when the
boss tells you to.

Are you more ambitious for a public

reputation? Even that can be given to you, so
long as your work remains within safely defined
limits. With great fanfare and all the regalia of
worldly honor, you may be given a post from
which to express thoughtful opinions about
nuanced policy reforms that never quite seem
“Quietism takes to lead anywhere, or about this or that
religious-liberty case you are definitely

a bewildering planning to pursue. If things go well, you may

even, eventually, get that poor baker from
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 a bewildering
Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants 3/11/24, 10:23 AM

even, eventually, get that poor baker from

variety of Colorado off the hook—a signal victory.

forms.” The only intellectual movement on the

American scene that is genuinely political is so-
called integralism or, as I think a more accurate
term, political Catholicism. This political
Catholicism is frequently accused by critics of a
will to power (or, more pompously, a libido
dominandi). In a certain sense, the accusation is
true. Indeed, it is far more true than the critics,
whose horizons are truncated by the basic
compromise with liberalism, can begin to
understand. The political Catholic looks at the
series of false alternatives offered by the
localists, the free-marketers, the cheerleaders
of martyrdom—national or local action? state
or market? Rome or the catacombs? —and
says, “Yes, both/and; I will take them all.” The
political Catholic wants to order the nation and
its state to the natural and divine law, the
tranquility of order, precisely because doing so
is the best way to protect and shelter the
localities in which genuinely human
community, imbued with grace, can flourish.
Conversely, those localities are to be protected
as the best way to generate well-formed
persons, who can rightly order the nation and
the world towards truth, beauty, and goodness,
rooted in the divine. Not everyone must engage
in politics in the everyday sense, but some
should make a vocation of political action in
the highest sense. The political Catholic thinks
that not even the smallest particle of creation is
off-limits to grace, which can perfect and
elevate any part of nature, even the state and
even the market.
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Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants 3/11/24, 10:23 AM

even the market.

What is at stake is, indeed, far more elevated

than power. What is at stake is no less than
authority, the full authority of a reasoned
political order, composed of both temporal and
spiritual powers in right relation to the natural
and divine law, that would put a mere Rome to
shame. That limitless ambition is why
liberalism finds a genuinely political
Catholicism intolerable; why the liberal order
will accept only a version of Catholicism that
submits to be ruled; and why, whatever their
justifications and whatever their self-
conceptions, the practitioners and advocates of
political quietism unfailingly receive their
present rewards.

Adrian Vermeule is a professor of constitutional law at

Harvard Law School and the author, most recently, of
Common Good Constitutionalism.

@Vermeullarmine ↗

More like this

#right liberalism #new right #gop

#catholicism

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