Catholics in Callaghan's America
To the New Right I say: no gas, all brakes. Before they try to lead us to the post-liberal promised land, they might want flick on Channel 5.
“An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?” — Pope Francis, epigraph to Adrian Vermeule’s “The Party of Nature”
“There is a second front, in this war, a hidden battlefield on which the social justice movement is slowly losing to the forces of… not liberalism, not reaction, not conservatism, not civil liberties, not plain ol’ common sense, but anarchy, resistance, revulsion towards piety, the desire for revenge, the death drive, animal spirits, the id, the unheimlich, Jungian impulse, and most of all utter and total moral exhaustion.” — Freddie de Boer
Patrick Deneen and the Postliberal Order
I. Hospice Care
Patrick Deneen surveys America’s political and cultural landscape and concludes that “we live in a diseased body politic.” Deneen is a Catholic, a Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, a cultural conservative. We’re all used to conservatives lamenting America’s decline. But Deneen is no ordinary American conservative.
In fact, he’s eager to distance himself from the pack: in his account, the conservative movement in America was from its inception “designed to ‘contain’ the pathologies of liberalism while remaining devoted to the underlying illness.” Conservative intellectuals that Deneen considers friends (Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher), as well as those that he does not (David French), now appear to him all alike in one respect: they’re doctors who are decent at diagnosing symptoms of decline, but who are unable to identify root causes, and thus powerless to offer a cure.
So America is a terminal patient — its illness: liberalism. The conservative movement, clinging as it does to the liberal tenets of free speech, free markets, and religious liberty, is merely “engaged in long term hospice care.” And Deneen is sick of watching the spectacle from the sidelines. So he’s teamed up with a group of like-minded Catholic scholars and launched a new Substack called The Postliberal Order, which is devoted to identifying the underlying causes of liberalism’s collapse, and to ensuring that the new order emerging out of its ashes breathes a new life into our body politic.
II. Root Causes
A distorted concept of the human person forms the rotten root of liberalism. Liberals “deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that man is the law to himself.” Humanity, cut off from its highest end — which is the glorification of God — takes on the disfigured image of radical individualism. People live primarily for their own pleasure and so are free to do as they please, right or wrong, so long as they don’t inhibit anyone else’s ability to do the same.
Deneen holds that adhering to the ideal of liberal personhood, or merely living in a polity ordered around it, makes authentic personal fulfillment impossible. We have our lives and our liberty, but the pursuit of happiness is only ever a pursuit. This is what makes American liberalism so pernicious. At the outset it makes grandiose promises that it cannot possibly hope to keep, its failure to deliver happiness being baked in from the beginning.
Liberalism can’t deliver happiness because by its nature it “undermines the very goods that… [a flourishing life] depends upon.” Excessive freedom helped birth the distorted liberal concept of personhood. That concept of personhood helped enable the unrestrained pursuit of material pleasures. Those material pleasures, in turn, disrupted the life of prayer, which is a “central practice of a flourishing human life, one in which we are cognizant of a horizon beyond our time and place, aware of our neediness, humbled by our dependence, and called to think and pray for others.” Because “prayer is not possible without certain conditions of silence, solitude, and rule,” the life of prayer is incompatible with modern liberalism: “church towers are overshadowed by the skyscrapers of high finance, and its bells rendered silent in preference to auto horns, the cacophony of construction, and earbuds playing noise produced by a music ‘industry.’”
Just as liberalism disrupts the life of prayer, so it disrupts other necessary components of a flourishing human life: family, community, church, tradition. Liberalism tells us that we’re free to have all of these things, of course, but reality tells us otherwise. We can marry, but fewer people wed. We can have children, but birthrates are dropping. We can practice religion, but we’re abandoning it. The “corrosive effects of unbridled capitalism on community and solidarity” are all around us:
“[W]e know that wherever churches embrace liberalism in their religion or their politics, they decline. We know that localities are crushed by the power of economic liberalism, we have seen what liberalism does to labor unions, and what its view of human sexuality, marriage and children does to families.”
Nearly everything that human beings need to flourish has been pulled out from under them like a rug by the malicious forces that liberalism lets roam freely: “big tech, big finance, big porn.” These forces are unrestrained by any morality. They seek only profit. They will manipulate human beings and the natural world as they see fit, all Creation a blank slate upon which to exert their will, everything in their environment a commodifiable object from which to extract wealth and derive pleasure. They will keep on “strip-mining and poisoning both the landscape for economic benefit and the human body for willful self-expression,” until we’ve run out of “endangered species and endangered sexes” to protect, until every last bit of wealth has been extracted from the Earth and taken from the hands of the common man.
For Deneen, liberalism tells the little man that he’s free and equal, then kicks him to the curb, where he’s left to live a broken life of addiction, crime, and unemployment before dying a death of despair.
III. Cure
Liberalism has proven lucrative for a few and left the rest destitute. In response to this grim reality, Deneen argues that “we will and must advance a vision and a practice of the good that is common.” For the Postliberals, culture is downstream of politics. As such:
“The only cure for our decline is to act politically to build legal and political structures that make it easier for people to believe in God, that don’t place obstacles before the Act of Faith, but rather encourage and support it… we need a new political vision that is principally and publicly ordered to God as our summum bonum — whence our salvation comes.”
Once these changes are made, imago dei — the idea that man is made in the image of God — can start to replace our disfigured liberal anthropology. And then we can reign in the unhinged institutions that have sprouted up upon the shoddy foundation of that anthropology. We can also reign in big tech, big finance, and big porn, so as to start making the life of prayer possible once again. We can strengthen unions to counter the corrosive effects of unbridled capitalism on workers and communities. We can strengthen families by restoring the viability of single-earner households. That restoration will require price reductions in the housing market, the healthcare system, and the world of higher education. Direct family payments could be used to further incentivize family formation, thereby boosting the birth rate.
But hold on. This is all assuming that Postliberals even manage to assume positions of power from which to begin the work of legislating their vision into reality. To Rod Dreher, that assumption is foolish — after all, only about a fifth of Americans identify as Catholic. To the Postliberals, Dreher is flailing around a phony brand of realism. They call it the “futility trope” — American conservatives love to assert confidently that “current political constraints are immutable or that current political trends cannot be reversed or even redirected.” Deneen et al. are having none of it.
“Our political world is far more fluid, far more malleable and susceptible to shaping through intentional action, especially the action of committed political minorities,” than “putative realists” like Dreher would have you believe. “The public’s seemingly fixed views are weakly held… susceptible to elite influence… quick to acquiesce to changes in law or political practice put into place by tiny minorities with access to the crucial levers of power.” Indeed, “committed minorities have often been able to set the terms of political life for large, relatively apathetic majorities, especially in a system like our own that offers many points of access for minority influence, such as the courts.”
As proof of such claims, the Postliberals offer up the recent successes of Chris Rufo, who “has achieved the nearly unimaginable in the wars over critical race theory and public education.” Rufo has rallied the public against critical race theory and gotten governors to sponsor bills with titles like “Stop W.O.K.E.” And it just so happens that Rufo loves the Postliberal Order, which he’s referred to as “the most important new Substack.” So it’s conceivable that this anti-CRT success will translate to other Postliberal policy items too, no?
One way or another — whether through legislation, judicial decision, or executive action — the Postliberals intend to exert their will. And they don’t intend to fuss over constitutional limitations on governmental authority, like the conservatives of old were wont to do. In their framework, political authority is bounded only by a proper conception of the common good. The exercise of authority is legitimate if it promotes the good and illegitimate if it does not. Accordingly, the Postliberals plan to create a polity ordered toward the common good, trimming as necessary around the edges of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc., the unfettered versions of which, it turns out, are hindrances to human flourishing.
The common good is “the sum of the needs that arise from the bottom up, and which can be more or less supplied, encouraged, and fortified from the top-down.” Those at the top, doing the supplying, encouraging, and fortifying?
“[A] new elite who are forthright in defending not merely the freedom to pursue the good – and who then shrug their shoulders when ordinary people drown amid a world without guardrails or life vests – but instead is dedicated to the promotion and construction of a society that assists ordinary fellow-citizens in achieving lives of flourishing.”
Concretely, then, this new elite looks very much like the authors of the Postliberal Order. But these “ordinary fellow-citizens” in need of top-down assistance to achieve lives of flourishing? In his essay “A Good that is Common,” the most concrete Deneen gets is a discussion of Jean-François Millet’s grandmother, who inspired Millet’s painting The Angelus, which depicts a simple farmer standing in her field around dusk, bowing her head in prayer.
Shall we take a closer look at some real Americans who belong to the class of commoners that the Postliberal Order plans to lead to the promised land?
Andrew Callaghan’s America
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“Many of the things that attract elite conservatives to the New Right—a thick sense of traditional morality, a communitarian ethos, a revolt against licentious modern excess, a sublime integration of spiritual and political life, and punishing, antiquarian modes of religious worship—bewilder and annoy their prospective electoral base, which is composed primarily of folk libertarian Trump voters… the New Right derives its philosophic impulses from Puritanism—a top-down, northeastern tradition of communal obligation and piety. Meanwhile, archetypal Trump Country is inhabited by the descendants of Scots-Irish anti-authoritarians who deplore outsiders, hierarchy, and learned university men.”
— Sam Adler-Bell, writing for The New Republic
***
In the Postliberal Order’s flagship essay, Deneen notes that by “ordinary people” he means “the ‘working class,’ citizens in ‘flyover country,’ ‘essential workers.’” When he speaks of such people, he seems to have in mind humble folks like Millet’s grandmother. No doubt, many such people exist. But so do many that don’t conform to Deneen’s ideal in the slightest.
Flashback to December 2019 in Rosemont Illinois, a small Republican stronghold just northwest of Chicago where, eight months prior, then-Vice President Mike Pence told the crowd at Turning Point USA’s Midwest Conference to persevere against opposition, criticism, and ridicule in their stand for conservative values. The crowd now assembled looks a bit different than that at the Turning Point USA conference in March. Instead of young conservatives in suits, Rosemont is hosting, as it does every year, a gathering of folks wearing a different kind of suit: the Midwest FurFest (MFF), many of its attendees decked out in full fursuits for the world’s largest furry convention. It’s the 20th annual MFF and 11,000 people are in attendance.
And here’s some on-the-ground footage featuring Andrew Callaghan, YouTube chronicler of America’s weird underworlds (formerly at All Gas No Brakes, now at Channel 5):
So, while the common good conservatives are reflecting on immaculate conception, many a common man is at MFF, buying an alien dildo to fulfill his fantasies of extraterrestrial impregnation.
The patron saint of the postliberal is Aquinas; the common man’s is Q-Anon:
Catholic tradition holds that Jesus, with two fish, fed thousands; meanwhile, the nitrous mafia, armed only with balloons, is feeding thousands of Phish fans at concert after concert:
Deneen wants to lead “the common man” to a Postliberal Arcadia, but in the America he hopes to revitalize, actual common men might just opt for Talladega instead:
The New Right fetishizes gothic architecture, with post after post glorifying medieval cathedrals, but the members of its base would sooner go to Chicago to see the Trump Tower than to Paris to see Notre Dame. Many would sooner go to a flat earth conference in Texas than to a Turning Point USA conference in Rosemont — better yet, a Fourth of July day-drink in Michigan or spring break in Miami beach.
Rufo’s anti-CRT successes have been pure negation — riling people up in opposition to an enemy they despise. But what happens when it comes time to build? What happens when the Postliberal Order stops vanquishing opponents and starts playing the role of “good gardener,” trying to “shape, structure, and prune” the “flora and fauna” of America’s political landscape, bringing the “objects of its stewardship to flourishing in accordance with their real natures?”
Will the common folk of Callaghan’s America react with the same enthusiasm when the Postliberals begin to bar them from acting as they please, or try to order them to act as they don’t? Will irreverence give way peacefully to piety? Will ordinary Americans be eager to let go of their sexual deviancies, their drug habits, their “noise”-spewing earbuds… in short, all the material comforts that disrupt the life of prayer? Will they turn their back on the Trump Tower and listen to the church bells once again, dropping everything at dusk to bow in humble observance like Jean-François Millet’s grandmother?
Or will they, perhaps, cling violently to the demons Deneen would exorcise?
Notes on Dostoevsky in the Dead House1
As a young man, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived under the despotic rule of a czar, and he had an acute sense of the system’s cruelties. Resistance to czarism was on the rise. Dostoevsky fell in with a circle of utopian socialists who, in the aftermath of violent uprisings across Europe, drew the ire of the emperor. Nicholas I began cracking down on radical intellectuals. He broke up the so-called “Petrashevsky Circle,” charged Dostoevsky with “attempting to set up a clandestine printing press,” and sentenced him to “four years at hard labor followed by four years of military service in Siberia.” Four years in shackles and four more in uniform, first wasting away in a political prison camp — the very heart of Russian injustice — and then fighting to uphold the cruel system he’d have just suffered under so intimately.2
“Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress, right by the fortress rampart. You could look at God’s world through the chinks in the fence: wouldn’t you at least see something? But all you could see was a strip of sky and a high earthen rampart overgrown with weeds, and on the wall sentries pacing up and down day and night, and right then you would think that years would go by, and you would come in the same way to look through the chinks in the fence and see the same rampart, the same sentries, the same little strip of sky, not the sky over the prison, but a different, far-off, free sky.”3
So begins Chapter 1 of Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House, a semi-fictional account of his experiences at hard labor. When Dostoevsky arrived at his prison camp he was faced with a choice: spend the next four years standing with his face pressed to the fence, staring out into the “far-off, free sky” — or, turn his back on the freedom that was out of reach, enter into the life of his prison camp, and try to figure out what freedom was available to him then and there. He chose the latter.
Dostoevsky spent his term meticulously observing his fellow prisoners — many of whom were peasants. He jotted down notes when possible and left them with a medical assistant at the prison, who later returned them to him as a free man, thus enabling him to incorporate them into Notes from a Dead House. The book that resulted is a moving portrait of prison life — the clothing, the food, the underground prison economy (gambling, bartering, vodka smuggling), successful attempts by prisoners to have sex with local village women and unsuccessful attempts to escape the camp altogether, the way prisoners treated animals (a dog, a wounded eagle) and each other and the prison guards, the character of hard labor itself, the prisoners’ Christmas play, their visit to the local bath house, the logistics of corporal punishment, the practices of the prison hospital, etc., etc., etc.
“[T]here is an underlying unity to this seemingly random sampling, an inner unity, in the author’s deepening perception of the people he has been thrown together with. He begins to fathom their difference not only from himself but from his former assumptions about the “Russian peasant” — an abstract figure idealized by the radical intelligentsia.”4
As a young man with an affinity for utopian socialism, Dostoevsky’s sympathies for the plight of the Russian peasant led him to aspire to a radical political project. Russian society was corrupted, its ordinary citizens bearing the brunt of the suffering. Only after living in close proximity with — and opening his mind up to the realities of — actual Russian peasants did he begin to reconsider the radicalism of his youth. He emerged from Siberia more familiar than ever with the worst cruelties of the Russian empire. But he also had a new appreciation for the profound complexities and deep contradictions displayed by individual members of the Russian peasantry. No longer could Dostoevsky entertain the fallacy contained in the phrase “THE Russian peasant.” Once he opened himself up to the full humanity of the peasants right in front of his face, he became increasingly weary of grandiose political projects.
Even beneath the “rough exterior” of “robber-murders,” Dostoevsky saw “deep, strong, beautiful natures.” And he also bore witness to the “hatred of the peasant convicts for the nobility.” These experiences shattered any grand visions he had of radical reform — the common man was no longer a mere malleable class of persons with weakly held views waiting to be led to the promised land by a benevolent elite. They were fully formed human beings harboring all the inner contradictions and complexities that make it so damn difficult to effect sweeping change for the betterment of society.5
After his experience at hard labor Dostoevsky became, at least in part, a traditionalist. His political views remain difficult to classify, but he was opposed to the destruction of institutions — perhaps because his time in Siberia led him to fear the forces that those institutions, no matter how corrupted they may have seemed to him, held at bay.
Patrick Deneen and the Postliberal Order want to test Pope Francis’s theory that “an authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture.” They hope to be the source of this new synthesis, to preside over the beautiful spectacle of “all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance” to the corruption of our current institutions. But I fear that the spectacle won’t turn out as planned, because I see a great deal in the phrase “all that is authentic” that the Postliberal Order seems to overlook.
Freddie de Boer has written of the “anarchy, resistance, [and] revulsion toward piety” that presently permeates the American people. Andrew Callaghan has put these forces — and much else — on display for all to see.
Fools rush in.
All quotes in this section pertaining to the history of Dostoevsky’s life and to Notes from a Dead House are taken from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of the book.
Quotes in this paragraph from the foreword — page vii.
This quote opens Chapter 1.
From the foreword — page xiii.
Quotes in this paragraph from the foreword — pages viii & ix.