I’ve been burrowing into anti-liberal Catholic social teaching over the last year or so. It is refreshingly different from the normal, cliched manure I hear from the usual suspects about “left-wing” this and “right-wing” that. I don’t expect it to ever grow big enough to change much in the coming two or three decades, but the Catholic traditionalist movement based around the idea of the common good is growing and I am rooting for it to become big in this country (not because I necessarily like it, but rather because I want see something different on stage). And my favorite lesson from it is a a paradigmatic shift in perspectives on political categorization:
Is Harrison Butker who just gave a graduation speech to a Catholic class on the same page with the OP?
Butker bemoaned an erosion of traditional Catholic values in daily life, claiming that things like “abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media” come from “the pervasiveness of disorder.”
He criticized Biden for proclaiming his Catholic faith while being “delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” accusing the president of making it appear “that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.”
I understand what you mean, but from Burke onward, conservatism developed in large part as a reaction against Enlightenment ideas:
All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.
Burke was a thoughtful, perceptive person, even when he was wrong. The contemporary American right—not so much. But their relentless rejection of empirical reality, loathing of secular society, hostility to liberal democracy tracks with counter enlightenment.
I can’t remember if we’ve ever discussed Curtis Yarvin, but he strikes me as an excellent contemporary representation:
What is it about a certain faction of tech bros that rail against the system that got them where they are and instead puts forth a vision of society where they are perpetually in charge and make all the money?
