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Notes -
On John Senior
John Senior- the one I'm talking about, not the British one- is one of the more influential figures that you've probably never heard of. On the face of it, he was an obscure academic at a state school in flyover. But his Integrated Humanities Program was shut down by the university of Kansas for producing hundreds of converts to Catholicism, despite a thorough investigation debunking allegations of proselytism. One of those converts is the current president of the American bishop's conference. Another one is the abbot of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey; there are a handful of somewhat less broadly influential bishops as well. This was when Catholicism was at a low point, in the seventies, when no one knew what it was really.
So what was the integrated humanities program? Well it would probably look quite familiar to those of you who follow classical education, but with an emphasis on the ability to occupy the mind with understanding. To do this, the courtly graces were emphasized as a means of practice, alongside spending time with nature, avoiding the television, stargazing, singing folk songs(not pop songs), and other things of the like. I think we have a couple of homeschoolers here- if you're aligned with the classical education school, this guy was the ideologue who developed your curriculum. It's been watered down for younger grades, but it's fundamentally his project.
After his program was shut down, Senior wrote two books- The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture- and drifted into the burgeoning traditionalist movement. He then went on the speaking circuit, and his followers moved around creating a network of conservative Catholic universities which embraced his methods and teachings. Senior died a pessimist, more or less affiliated with the SSPX(and this was in the 90s, when traditional Catholicism was more or less a game preserve for reactionaries and the SSPX was officially schismatic). But his ideas were gaining in popularity; shortly after his death the 'Newman guide' list of universities for conservative Catholics became a normal feature of orthodox Catholic life in the US. The model is now under threat due to the extreme cost of private college education, but it's trickled down. Classical schooling is fairly common. Florida is now allowing a special standardized test for classical educators to be an SAT/ACT equivalent for state colleges, and they're unlikely to be the last.
But you're motteizeans and you want the culture war relevance. Ok. We've had posts about the Trump admin being full of Catholics- one of which I'm not quite sure if it's a satire of Jewposting or not. You wonder why that is? It's because you can't run a society with all stemlords. Look at western society's literati- you will find, almost literally, conservative Catholics and SJWs and no one else. The conservative intelligentsia converts to Catholicism so often it's nearly a 'personal life check' on wikipedia, and the few noncatholics are mostly Anglicans with self-interested reasons or suspiciously Catholic-inflected Orthodox. Republicans put Catholics on the supreme court because they won't Sandra Day O'Connor, all due to John Senior. Yes, the pro-life movement provided money and alignment, but Senior provided something even more important.
That thing is elite formation. Every society, including ours, is led by an elite. Senior built a counter-elite, and you can't have conservative policy successes without it. This counter-elite staffs the republican party, it holds a majority on the supreme court by itself, it's most of the staffers at conservative think tanks- in short, it's why US conservatives are less singularly useless than their Canadian and British counterparts. The 'rise of christian nationalism' is because his elite stratum has been taught to think in terms of Christian culture(see their founding ideologue). The legitimate sociological term for this is the American Conservative Catholic renaissance, of which John Senior is the leading ideologue.
What we can learn from this is 1) you need an elite stratum 2) that elite stratum needs customs and ideology to sustain itself. What's your plan? Because Stemlording isn't one. Complaining about woke casting in movies isn't one(you'll notice the one director who avoids this is... Mel Gibson, a[n insane] member of the elite stratum I've just described). Being reflexively anti-woke isn't one. Are you going to form a pro-white elite(I have bad news for you about the skin colour of those attempting to join)? At the moment, we're very slowly winning, simply by being indispensable to the dominant party.
Catholicism contains an aesthetically rich culture that can compete with the aesthetic richness of progressivism, but only in the sense of a large antique store which happens to contain invaluable treasures behind polyester fabrics and worthless mass printed paperbacks. The elites and would-be elites of Catholicdom know how to find these treasures and the treasures are some of the most beautiful things humanity has produced. But if you enter into a Catholic Church, you will not find it. You will find nothing like it. The majority of people entering into the establishment leave disappointed.
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Islamists stage huge shows of force in public, harassing and intimidating. And then there's the raping and killing and waging holy war.
SJWs impose new speech codes, new rites, censor and suppress media, import tens of millions of migrants, siphon state resources directly into equity and their own NGOs.
Nationalists deport these migrants, directly confront SJWs at rallies and fight them. Nationalists are on the front lines of just about every war, including the culture war.
Zionists make settlements, wage war and get others to wage war for them.
Stemlords are deploying trillions in capital, reshaping the whole world economy to create a machine god. It may come in one of three flavours: Chinese atheist, San Francisco atheist or direct worship of Elon Musk.
Catholic conservatives write two books (one even got 56 reviews on Amazon!) and go on the speaking circuit. Catholic conservatives get a majority on the Supreme Court and... devolve abortion to the states. There are no fewer abortions than before, no effective change. By some measures abortion figures actually rose, breaking a decade-long downtrend. Every ideology is doing something substantial and overt to advance their goals but the Catholic conservatives.
Even complaining about casting in movies or review bombing games on Steam is more effective and vigorous than what these people do in high office. It imposes active pressure, however insignificant.
Pure defence, no bite. Never has an elite done so little with so much!
It is a misunderstanding of how ideological movements advance their goals in the cultural and regulatory environment of the United States to suppose that the burden rests entirely on the Supreme Court.
I'm going to use a (mostly) fake example: supposing that conservatives decide to really go after weed. In some states, they have the political power to just straight up ban it. But they want to be able to hit it in Colorado and New York, too, so they go after insurance providers and banks on the institutional level, using public and private resources to establish a baseline of "best practices" that will apply nationwide. Suddenly your insurance premiums if you smoke week skyrocket, and weed dealers increasingly have trouble opening even personal bank accounts. Private schools and universities start screening out the children of weed-smokers under a best-practices risk paradigm and banning weed on campus. Rental car companies do the same. Palantir puts together a national list of weed-users and makes it available at trivial prices to accelerate this effort. This effort goes slowly, but after 25 years it becomes extremely pervasive.
The legal-weed movement on the libertarian left quickly realizes this is a potentially existential issue. Even if they have some ways to fight back (e.g. working with local banks that don't practice in red states and so are less concerned about the legal and reputational ramifications of banking weed providers) the pressure is quickly drying up demand for legal weed. Worse, it is making it uncool because strivers want to send their kids to private schools, and normies want affordable insurance. Weed is quickly returning to a product for losers reputationally, and financially it is rapidly returning underground.
They launch a legal battle aimed at overturning the web of private regulations that are locking weed enjoyers out of so many services. The Supreme Court rules that no, private entities have the freedom of association to do what they want, and even public entities are not required to not discriminate against drug users. This ruling only accelerates the right's momentum on the issue. Legal weed users are still a holdout, and it is still legal in many places, but the weight and momentum have shifted. Everyone in the legal-weed movement would understand that their cause had been set back tremendously and are concerned that in another 25 years, nobody will care enough about protecting weed to fight back against renewed attempts at legal bans.
But someone who wasn't aware of how these developments were all fitting together would look at the ruling in 2051 and say "so private companies can do what they want? big deal" and continue to believe that the legal weed movement had overwhelmingly won based on the fact that it was technically legal in many states.
It's true that the burden doesn't rest entirely on the Supreme Court, there are things you can do without the court, more bottom-up ways to impose pressure.
But OP's point is all 'elites are great for policy wins' and my question is where are the policy wins? The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions. You can't win by defending alone.
In your example, the Court could've said 'you can't discriminate against weed people' as a defensive action.
But they could also reinterpret the US constitution such that there is a right to access weed. What about the pursuit of happiness, doesn't that include weed? It's pretty silly but courts have done much sillier and more unjust things.
You are missing some of the more interesting recent ones.
I recommend going to to https://www.scotusblog.com/ and look up the cases that seem to be big culture-war-y cases. Go to the amicus briefs. Find the briefs written by the parties that opposed the ultimate outcome of the case and read them, or go to their websites and read their press releases after the decision came down. (Perhaps avoid the more zealous activist groups, but you can generally expect the ACLU or someone with a similar track record and expertise to show up and opine). Note whether they [the legal experts] construe it as a limp-wristed defensive action or not.
If you want to get really into the weeds, note also the practical outcomes of the case. If the court says "states can do X," note how many states are trying or might want to do X. If the court says "states cannot do X [if they do Y]" note how many states that impacts as well. If you prefer thinking in strictly partisan terms, note whether they are blue/red/purple. Note which institutions they strengthen and which they weaken. Compare the current precedent with the old precedent. Ask yourself what behavior the decisions make easier and more difficult.
And then at this point you might as well write it all up and get an AAQC here!
I'm not really a law/judges guy, I think detailed investigations of individual cases should be left to lawyers. I'm trying to compare ideologies around the world on a high level.
Isn't the burden of proof on OP to show how powerful the conservative Catholics are, the literati, the counter-elite? Where are their wins? What is he gesturing at, that's what I want to know. I don't see any power projection. MAGA can project power, deportations are active. The neocons project power, wars are active. They push forward, they represent a significant change to the status quo. You can see and hear and sense power projection on the TV, you don't need to go to scotusblog to find out about it.
Is he saying that conservative Catholics are instrumental in mass deportations or the war on Iran? That would surprise me! The point OP made is that the conservative Catholics were a counter-elite, they were running all these universities and books and so that means they're winning very slowly... but nobody ever heard of this Senior guy. That's my point. I don't think universities and books or Mr Senior matter if people haven't heard them and we can't observe any clear, significant effects from their activism.
The Warren Court projected power, they made schools desegregate, they made schools bus kids around, they were part of the process that ended with 101st Airborne marching around Arkansas with bayonets fixed, enforcing a new social policy. Or the due process revolution, giving criminals a leg up, making police read out these rights. Abortion legalized nationwide. That's power.
A judge in Kansas decided that schools were segregated and so mandated that so much money be spent on them that white students would be brought back by how nice they'd be. Billions were spent on planetariums, swimming pools. He doubled property taxes. That's power!
More recently: Gay marriage! It's a thing all of a sudden, country-wide. Changing a fundamental social rite.
Now you can say that's just banning things, just like the cases I mentioned. But the Warren Court and some judge in Kansas were banning or enforcing actively and transformatively. The conservative Catholics on the Court don't have that same pushing power to them. There's no elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics, is there? What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion? Why not make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business: they have to use surgery so delicate there's never any scarring?
That pushing power doesn't exist and I don't need to read legal arguments to observe that, I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
I think this would be a good idea! Look at:
I would not chalk the developments you find entirely up to John Senior's efforts but you'll find the fingerprints of the Catholic literati on a great deal of them, I reckon.
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Catholic big wins are in immigration, especially in europe they have succeeded in greatly increasing immigration as well as legalizing existing illegal immigrants.
Isn't that catholic progressives, rather than catholic conservatives?
The Catholic Church is not as pro-immigration as many claim, and it does allow positions that code as conservative on immigration(there are cardinals saying this, even). But Catholic conservatives not being thrilled with anti-immigrant politics is probably why it hasn’t seen the same success as many other conservative policy crusades.
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It's both. Progressivism would be about recognizing gay marriage and women priests. There's really no dobut that the catholic church is pro immgration except in the minds of some online tradcaths that have projected their policy wishes on an organization because they like their buildings.
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I perceive contemporary Christian culture as driven primarily by evangelicals and megachurches, not Catholics. I'm not sure I buy that there is a Catholic renaissance, though I guess I acknowledge that Peter Thiel keeps on giving strange religious talks.
J D Vance's new book is a second data point and specifically Catholic. As the reviewer says
I feel that Vance's Catholicism would just be an example of the Thiel influence, and that is only if he is not still culturally mostly evangelical, which is what I would think of him.
But I think your point is mostly about an idea of a background Jewish policy-making elite rather than active and highly visible Jewish politicians, so I am not sure that Vance is a major example here the way that Thiel is, nor would Vance's individual shift be evidence of a Catholic renaissance.
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The same Vance that thinks the Pope is mistaken? He's an American Catholic, with a heavy emphasis on "American".
The same Vance who prays two decades of the rosary of the day and said, "But I always kind of liked that Pope Francis would just throw these bombs out there in the media. Because it would force a conversation... he was kind of a genius at that."
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Time truly is a flat circle, I guess.
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I'm coming at this more from a position of ignorance than hostility, so this is a genuine question and not just snark. In what way is "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism" anything other than a massive oxy-moron? In other words, what is the ultimate goal of this ideology, and how does it not end up being a mess of contradictions?
Come to Baltimore. Very Catholic. The kids from the nice families go to Catholic school. (The ones who aren't Jewish, that is.)
And even a few of the ones who are!
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Are you a Baltimorean? Didn't know we had more than one on theMotte
I am by virtue of marriage. I don't really count because I don't have a grudge against Mayflower.
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America has been Catholic for a 100 years. And the Irish and Italians have been here a lot longer than the Mexicans. The Catholic Great Replacment was a long time ago.
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The strawman is real.
American nationalism is more or less incidental to these people's worldview- they believe in a Christian culture, that might be led by the USA or France or Canada or Spain or any other particular country. They are however, Americans who believe patriotism is a virtue and notice there aren't a lot of other candidates. Most of them are probably Catholic supremacists; but they do believe in a broader Christian culture and focus on that. Moreover, many aren't traditional Catholics; American traditional Catholicism exists in a broader landscape of orthodox and politically conservative Catholicism heavily influenced by John Senior and, despite the personal sympathies of John Senior, the traditionalists are not the largest group therein(that would be charismatics). It is extremely possible that John Senior would have preferred a more moderate group had the religious landscape in 90's Catholicism been different; certainly the SSPX is a minority of self-described traditionalist Catholics today in a way it wasn't in the 90's. It is probably fair to say that they have an ideological... predisposition to further integration with Latin America, even if that comes at some cost, and this is probably why they generally oppose strict immigration enforcement- because they think in terms of civilizations and not nations, and they are elites who tend to like western hemisphere integration anyways.
If you're asking 'why does the GOP struggle with American ethnic nationalism' that's a fair answer- they simply do not have access to American ethnic nationalist elites, because America is an empire and doesn't produce ethnic nationalist elites. Instead they have... that.
It's not that the GOP doesn't have access to ethno-nationalist elites so much as ethno-nationalist elites despise civic nationalism in general and MAGA in particular and MAGA returns the favor
I would not call hypenated-Americans ethno-nationalist elites. If you want to say Israel-supporting (and therefore ethno-nationalist) Jewish-Americans, say so. But I do not think that there are a lot of Irish- or Italo-American elites who are meaningfully ethno-nationalist.
Also, MAGA despises elites generally. RFK and Hegseth are decidedly not members of the intellectual elite, and that is precisely why they are in Trump's cabinet.
Italian and Irish Americans are also not in any particular beef with MAGA.
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MAGA does not despise elites generally, though it does despise much of what the Blue Tribe regards as elites. To MAGA, both Trump and Hegseth are elite.
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This is the stereotype in the Southwest, and it's what I essentially believed as a Protestant. In the northeast and sprinkled throughout the country, there are a lot of Irish and Italian Catholics; one was my neighbor growing up, with the Saint Francis statue and everything. Another is a business owner and gives a lot of money to local charities, and of course church organizations. In the midwest, there are many German Catholics (alongside many German Lutherans, and historically-united-church Germans, of course), and in those parts of the country historically Catholic towns are often the nice, well-tended areas where people have civic pride, with "Jesus I trust in You" signs and Saint Francis statues in well-kept, green lawns with flower beds.
The SSPX is very loud, but most traditionalist Catholics are much more common than SSPX afficionados -- especially if we look at beliefs rather than strict "Traditionalist Catholic" identification. In Catholicism, traditionalism is something closer to, say, fundamentalism among Protestants: much maligned, often a boo-word, but descriptive of many conservative members in point of fact. Evangelicals are, almost to a man, fundamentalists, because they believe in the "Five Fundamentals," Biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, atonement for sin, the resurrection of Jesus, historical reality of miracles, even if they wouldn't describe themselves using the word. (And the current strain of neo-evangelicalism emerged essentially as an ecumenical movement among Protestants designed to resist the sepratism inherent in historical fundamentalism while preserving fundamentalist beliefs; many evangelical leaders like Billy Graham were known for warm relations with Catholics, as well as explicit outreach to Black Protestants.) In Catholicism traditionalism is tied up with the Latin mass, such that a guy who attends a Latin mass celebrated by a local priest with permission of the canonical bishop would likely be described as a traditionalist even if he thinks Vatican II is the best thing since sliced bread. Whereas, in fundamentalism... well, liturgy isn't considered as important as "pure Biblical preaching", although I suspect self-identified fundamentalists may be more likely than self-identified evangelicals to prefer old hymns and congregational singing.
"Traditionalism" in Catholicism emerged as a concept during the Catholic version of the same crisis that produced "Fundamentalism" in Protestantism: the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. As secular Bible scholarship and more liberal theologians wanted to "update doctrine to reflect modern concerns," Protestantism responded with polemic, schism, and bitter rhetoric, and Catholicism responded with Pope Pius X (much beloved by the SSPX) declaring a loyalty oath. Vatican II, and some scholars would argue this just as some conservative Catholics would disagree, served as essentially the partial victory of Modernism in Catholicism, although at the level of pure doctrine relatively few things were really changed. The "Fundamentals" remained intact, and it was essentially some elements of moral theology, especially around the rights of man against the state, that were revised, though the level of practice went far further than Modernists in the early 1900s would have ever imagined.
Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic Traditionalists, are, of course, often bitter enemies, because Protestant and Catholic doctrine is traditionally, fundamentally (heh) opposed to the other. But their concerns, the denominational specifics aside, were very similar: preserve fundamental supernaturalism in the Christian faith against scientism and metaphysical naturalism, preserve the inspired nature of the Biblical text against higher criticism, preserve the objective existence of the historical Jesus-God against Jesusism that attempted to proffer a Jesus not featured in the Gospels.
I take no position on the coherence of "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism." Such a thing would splinter the religious right into many tiny pieces at the very thought of it.
Yeah, in my experience in the Northeast, the shrine & statue garden decor is absolutely Italian-coded.
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