Reactionary Catholics are a major threat to liberal democracy in America

Here’s (gift link) a great piece of reporting by Thomas Edsall, on how Leonard Leo’s Grifting for God (in Latin: Opus Dei) has made Leo both extremely rich — the long con here is raising enormous amounts of money via tax-exempt non-profits and then channeling a lot of that money straight back to Leo’s own pocket, via Leo’s for-profit consulting rackets — and extremely powerful.

The difference between Leo and, say, Donald Trump, is that Trump just wants money and power, because his only goal in life is to be rich and powerful, while Leo wants money and power for a very specific purpose. And what is that purpose comrades?

In a 2022 speech he made upon receiving the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, Leo warned fellow Catholics: “Catholic evangelization faces extraordinary threats and hurdles. Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess, and how we act.”

Leo describes the adversaries of Catholicism as “these barbarians, secularists and bigots (who) have been growing more numerous over the past few years. They control and use many levers of power.”

Leo is determined to wrest the levers of power from “the grasp of liberals” and restore them, permanently if possible, to what he sees as their rightful owner: social and economic conservatives. . .

“Conservative philanthropy,” Leonard wrote, “is too heavily weighted in the direction of ‘ideation’ — the development of and education about conservative ideas and policies. In contrast, vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.”

To counter this misallocation of right-wing money, Leo told the grantees that “If others are not going to devote funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision, then the 85 Fund needs to weight its support much more heavily in that direction and much less in the direction of research, policy and general education.”

The 85 Fund, Leo continued, “intends to gap-fill by placing much, much greater emphasis on projects and leaders that operationalize or weaponize ideas and policies.”

For beneficiaries of Leo’s grant-making organization struggling to figure out how to “operationalize or weaponize” ideas and policies, what better place is there than CRC Advisors [one of Leo’s for-profit consulting firms] to get guidance?

Which brings me to the recent convert to the same brand of extremely reactionary Catholicism which drives Leo’s work, Senator JD Vance, or whatever name he’s adopted this week:

JD Vance, 2012: “A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”

JD Vance, 2016: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

JD Vance, 2024: Deport everybody with joy in your heart. Wherever an immigrant is unafraid, I’ll be there, terrifying her.

How does a man go from there to here? An intelligent man by conventional measures. Unlike Trump, JD Vance can write coherent pages, books even. Unlike Trump, JD Vance can speak for minutes on end, from thesis to support to conclusion. (Goes without saying that possessing this skill is very much not equivalent to speaking the truth.)

The simple answer, with much explanatory power, is that he will change his values on a dime to acquire and wield power. Clearly he will. I don’t think though that he’s purely a cynic. He is very impressed with himself. He reads Yarvin and Vermeule and that Bronze Age Pervert (sic) guy. He drinks deeply of big ideas. He convinces himself that he is the man to integrate it all into a postliberal synthesis. To carry that synthesis to the masses, to be in the vanguard of history. His values didn’t change, they elevated.

IOW, pretty sure he really believes all this crap, just as he believed the better things he thought a decade ago.

A certain style of big thinker is prone to whiplash. Dedicated Stalinists became even more dedicated reactionaries. Hippies became Francoists. Believing passionately in huge ideas, especially if those ideas are out of the mainstream, is a psychological need. It makes the believer special. The bigness of the idea is more important than the content.

So yeah, Vance is self-serving, obviously. He’s also (currently) sincere. And incidentally something of a mark. The right con artist could take him for all he’s worth. In total, a frightening man.

That’s my friend Steve’s attempt toward a unified theory of JD Vance. I tend to agree with him that Vance isn’t merely a cynical opportunist, although he’s that too.

Vance’s biography is that of a man who, for whatever complex set of reasons, is extremely uncomfortable in his own skin. Hillbilly Elegy is at bottom an attempt to deal with his deep sense of shame about his white trash family, by exorcising it, via confession and renunciation. His episodic name and religion changes are of a piece with this pattern. Conversion to extreme right wing Catholicism (see also Adrian Vermeule) is a common psychological strategy among men who hate themselves, and hate the modern world as a consequence of that same self-hatred.

Now one of the peculiarities of our culture is that it’s A-OK to say I don’t want a Maoist anywhere near the presidency because those people are basically insane, but it’s not OK to say I don’t want a reactionary Catholic anywhere near the presidency, for the same reason. The latter is “religious bigotry” dontcha know, as Leonard Leo will be more than happy to tell you, while he extracts a big contribution to his charity, and then wets his beak a little as part of the bargain.

The analogy breaks down however, when one notes that actual Maoists are both extraordinarily rare, and many parsecs away from any point of political power in America, while reactionary Catholics are already in control of one of the three branches of the United States government, and angling quite successfully at the moment to possibly get direct control of one of the two others.