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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.
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?
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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