The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man

When journalists write about ties between Donald Trump and the religious right, they usually focus on evangelical Protestants. That emphasis makes sense, given that evangelicals make up a sizable portion of the GOP’s electoral coalition, and their enduring devotion to the morally and religiously louche Republican nominee remains more than a little shocking.

But Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate puts a spotlight on a different faction of the religious right: the so-called post-liberal Catholics, who have been Vance’s friends, allies, and interlocutors since his 2019 conversion to Catholicism (he was raised Protestant) and transformation into a MAGA Republican shortly after.

This group of Catholic intellectuals—which includes Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and an editor of the eclectically populist magazine Compact—is known for its sweeping attack on classical liberalism. It claims that a long list of contemporary problems (rising rates of economic inequality, drug addiction, suicide, homelessness, childlessness) can be traced back to moral-philosophical errors made centuries ago by the American Founders and their ideological progenitors. In place of our polity’s commitment to individual rights, autonomy, and pluralism, the post-liberals aim to create a society unified around the common good, which is itself fixed on a theological vision of the Highest Good.

Hence the need for what Deneen calls “regime change” in the title of his most recent book. In concrete terms, this means replacing the people and institutions that dominate America’s cultural, economic, and political life with a new elite willing to eschew liberal norms in service of supposedly higher ideals. In this respect, Vance is the man the post-liberals have been waiting for—a self-identified member of the “post-liberal right,” and now a contender for one of the country’s highest political offices.

[Adrian Vermeule: Beyond originalism]

Trump and his immediate circle may not share theological convictions with the post-liberals, but the two groups do share certain political impulses. Both exhibit a populist skepticism of elites, deference toward social conservatism, and a preference for putting “America first” when it comes to immigration, trade, labor, and foreign policy. Most of all, Trump and the post-liberals share a willingness, even an eagerness, to smash the entrenched power of the liberal cultural establishment. Vance is the embodiment of these shared hopes and drive for disruption. As vice president in a second Trump administration, he would bring both to the highest levels of government, allowing, for the first time, post-liberal Catholic ideas to exert real political influence.

These ambitions mark a significant change in the Catholic right compared with its most recent moment of maximal influence, during the administration of George W. Bush. Then, writers such as Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Robert P. George argued that, when properly understood, Catholic Christian revelation, American history and ideals, and the Republican Party’s platform were perfectly harmonious. These thinkers made their case by contending that American liberalism was rooted in theological sources, that Catholic orthodoxy was essentially liberal, and that the GOP was tailor-made to unite the two.

Things feel very different on the Catholic right today. Setbacks at home and at the Vatican—including the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama, Pope Francis’s efforts to push back against the conservative legacies of his predecessors, and the Obergefell decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right—discredited the idea that liberalism and traditional Catholicism could go together. One radical response to these developments can be found on the furthest extreme of the Catholic right, among a group called the integralists. Despite their name, they aim to subordinate the state to the Church, not integrate them.

Vance hasn’t gone that far in his public statements. Yet his account of his conversion to the Catholic Church, published in 2020 in the online journal The Lamp, marks him as very much a man of our post-liberal moment. In his essay, Vance explains the intellectual influences on his spiritual evolution. Some are conventional, such as St. Augustine, the theologian and bishop who has been an inspiration to Christian converts down through the centuries. But one is decidedly less orthodox: the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Before Thiel spent roughly $15 million on Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio, Vance worked as a principal for Mithril Capital, one of Thiel’s many firms. Their first encounter, however, came back in 2011, when Thiel delivered a talk at Yale Law School, where Vance was then a student. As Vance recalls in his essay, Thiel, who has described himself as Christian, observed that the meritocratic striving of smart young people (like Vance) often results in both personal existential emptiness and societal stagnation. That’s a variation on a critique of liberal democracy that Thiel has been developing for much of his career. In his idiosyncratic reading of Western history, the theological precepts of Christian civilization are what inspired the great scientific and technological achievements of the past several centuries. The ideals of liberal democracy, by contrast, are responsible for the meaninglessness and inertia that supposedly plague the present.

[Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

Over the decade following his meeting with Thiel, Vance remained broadly committed to a Bush-era vision of continuity between Christianity and the moral outlook and policy agenda of the pre-Trump Republican Party. That earlier Vance favored pro-business economic policy and saw democracy promotion as a crucial element of American foreign policy. He also emphasized the importance of personal character in public life: Poverty could be explained, in part, by moral depravity, and holding political office required integrity. But around the time that he decided to run for the Ohio Senate seat vacated by the retiring Rob Portman in 2021, Vance underwent a second conversion—to the ideas of the post-liberal Catholics and the right-wing populism associated with Donald Trump.

That’s not to say he got more conservative. This new Vance often sounds like Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, when he talks about economic policy—emphasizing poverty’s structural causes and advocating for a higher minimum wage. On foreign policy, he began defining American interests so narrowly that the fate of a liberal democracy on NATO’s border was a matter of indifference. (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said in early 2022, shortly before Russia’s invasion.)

Most strikingly, after more than four years of condemning Trump, Vance began defending the former president’s most reckless acts and ambitions. He started denouncing the American “regime” and, in September 2021, told a far-right podcaster that “we are in a late republican period” in which it would be necessary to “get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” This included “a de-Ba’athification program” with the following directives: “seize the administrative state for our own purposes … fire every civil servant in the administrative state [and] replace them with our people.”

The post-liberal Catholics, including Deneen, in his book on regime change, insist that the moral and political revolution they seek can be accomplished peacefully. But Vance appears ready to excuse some dangerous political brinkmanship. In a recent interview with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Vance defended the idea of states across the country appointing alternative slates of electors after the 2020 election. He seemed to concede that such actions could have precipitated a “constitutional crisis.” So be it.

What might be most strange about this unapologetically radical style of politics is how tenuous its ties are to the Catholic Church as an institution and even Christianity as a historical community of faith. Whereas the Bush-era Catholics regularly cited the New Testament, Thomas Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray, today’s post-liberals rarely invoke the Bible or theologians in their political commentary. They don’t base their policy commitments on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They aren’t in the habit of referring to the social teachings in papal encyclicals.

Rather, their theological convictions tend to remain in the background, serving as fuel for something more central to their public thought: a politics of reactionary negation. Their faith confirms that liberalism is the great enemy that must be fought and defeated so that something more wholesome and spiritually invigorating can take its place. But until liberalism has been expunged from the world, Christianity remains mainly a civilizational symbol or identity marker whose public substance is held in abeyance.

[Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance]

That’s quite a shift for the Catholic right in a single generation. Not long ago, the group insisted on a near-perfect identification between the Church and American liberalism as expressed by the Republican Party. Now it insists on the discontinuity between Christianity and America’s ruling ideology, which requires nothing short of political revolution to overcome.

Maybe somewhere in between these extremes, a more responsible and enriching form of political engagement for pious Catholics could be found. Regardless, we’re unlikely to see anything resembling such a theological deescalation from J. D. Vance and his post-liberal Catholic allies.