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J.D. Vance, Catholicism, and the Postliberal Turn

J.D. Vance, Catholicism, and the Postliberal Turn is an essay authored by Dermot Roantree, published in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review volume 114, in August, 2025.

It seems to be a call-in from a Catholic perspective of Vance's misapplication of Girard's theory of the scapegoat to enact Schmitt's Nazism, notably a suspension of elections.

Notes

Opening
1. Opens talking about John F. Kennedy winning the U.S. Presidency
  1. Marks an end to an anti-Catholic Kulturkampf: a "belief that Catholics should be excluded from high office as their allegiance to the State will always be subordinate to Rome."
2. From 1776 to the Kennedy Administration, there were six Catholics on the Supreme Court of the United States
  1. As the paper's publishing, there are six Catholics on the court, right now.
3. One-third of Cabinet of the Second Presidency of Donald J. Trump is Catholic
4. Leaders in political foundations and political think-tanks that support Trump are Catholic:
  1. Project 2025
  2. Leonardo Leo at the Federalist Society
  3. Tim Busch at the Napa Institute
  4. Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation
  5. Linda McMahon and Larry Kudlow at the America First Policy Institute
    1. McMahon is now Secretary of Education of the United States
5. Catholics are less than one-quarter of the United States population
Postliberal conservatism
1. All mentioned Catholics (except Sonia Sotomayor) identify as political conservative
  1. Many are identifiable as postliberal, even if they don't self-identify that way
2. Postliberalism is "neither left nor right"
  1. Postliberalism contests the fundamental principles of liberalism, especially:
    1. "protection of individual rights and individual freedoms through value-neutral proceduralism"
    2. "rejecting any specific conception of good or of a just social order"
  2. Postliberalism sees these principles as a paradox: maintaining neutrality requires its own set of values, "and these invariably are individualist, consumerist, and relativist."
  3. American leftist postliberalism rejects the liberal concept of the self as an autonomous individual.
    1. Leftist postliberals include Stanley Hauerwas, Eugene McCarraher, William Cavanaugh
    2. Leftist postliberals advocate human socialability and interdependence, solidarity, justice, peace, and care.
    3. "bottom-up":
  4. American right-wing postliberalism approach the same paradox differently
    1. restoring religious and cultural traditionalism
    2. "The parameters of a just society are clear."
      1. not testing through discourse
      2. known through tradition, natural law, right reasoning
      3. imposed through State power, government institutions, and the law
      4. Patrick Deneen may be seen as chief American right-wing postliberal theorist.
        
        Calls for "regime change"
        
        "the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place, as long as a fundamental different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions."
        
        emsenn: This really speaks to the difficulty American leftists seem to be having in understanding the threat of American right-wing postliberalism: they are waiting for a violent overthrow that is not planned.
        
        Damon Linker explains Deneen's regime change further: "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."
        
        emsenn: I can't help but hear how this definition is inclusive of the work of most American Marxists and American anarchists, in a way that it feels like the postliberal theorists recognize more than the leftist theorists, who seem to do worse and worse understanding their liberal bias as time goes on.
      5. Most of "these postliberals" (seems to mean American right-wing) admire Viktor Orbán's illiberal democracy in Hungary:
        
        installed strongmen
        
        transformed democratic culture into a means of expanding executive power
      6. American right-wing postliberalism is not exclusively Catholic, but many are, either from family or adult conversion to Catholicism: Deneen references the role of Catholicism in shaping his political philosophy
        
        Gladden Pippen, one of Orbán's advisors
        
        Sohrab Ahmari, author and columnist
        
        Rusty Reno, editor of First Things
        
        Chad Pecknold, theologian
        
        Adrian Vermeule
        
        common-good constitutionalism
        
        legalistic support for originalism and procedural liberalism
        
        interpreting the Constitution through natural law, oriented toward Catholic Social Teaching
        
        common-good constitutionalism "does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised fro the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects' own perceptions of what is best for them - perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the rulers whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being."
        
        emsenn: Aristotelian teleology is back on the menu!
        
        emsenn: Here's a quote from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks: "The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as 'domination' and as 'intellectual and moral leadership'… The State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules."
        
        For American right-wing postliberalism:
        
        Catholic philosophy, Catholic political theology, and historical forms of Catholic leadership are resources for expressing the postliberal turn from liberalism, gradualist conservatism, neoliberalism, and libertarianism.
        
        Common American right-wing postliberal glossary:
        
        Aristotle
        
        Augustine
        
        Aquinas
        
        natural law
        
        common-good constitutionalism
        
        common-good capitalism
        
        common-good conservatism
        
        King Louis IX
        
        Joseph de Maistre
        
        Juan Donoso Cortés
        
        natural hierarchy
        
        Carl Schmitt
        
        Alasdair MacIntyre
        
        noted as having distanced himself
        
        social kingship of Christ
        
        teleology
        
        "the rich and varied apprehension of higher things, the glorious pagenant of Catholicism… broaden[s] the political and active imagination" (Vermeule)
The conversion of J.D. Vance
1. converted in 2019ce
  1. during the First Presidency of Donald J. Trump
2. formed friendship with Rod Dreher, an "Orbán apologist"
3. formed relationship with Deneen and Ahmari, spoken together, along with others
4. "[Vance's] choice to join the Catholic Church did not interfere [with] but rather accompanied his conversion to Trumpism; while he had been very critical of Trump just a few years earlier, he then embraced and became Trump's more presentable face." - Massimo Faggioli
5. Vance has self-identified as on "the postliberal right"
  1. claimed that his "views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic Social Teaching"
Influence of René Girard
1. Vance says Peter Thiel introduced him to memetic rivalry, a concept from REne Girard:
  1. "It was [Girard's] related theory of the scapegoat - and what it revealed about Christianity - that made me reconsider my faith."
  2. "human civilisations… are often, perhaps even always, founded on a 'scapegoat myth' - an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community."
    1. emsenn: Lakota people came out of a cave because we got tired of eating Pleurotus pulmonarius
  3. Vance notes Girard's differentiating of the Christian story from other traditions
    1. Christian reveleation reveals the divine to humanity, and also humanity to humanity
    2. Christ as Lamb of God who submits to scapegoat shows the heart of darkness
    3. "We progress by way of violence." - Roantree
      1. "Disordered, mimetic desire leads to violent conflict,
        
        "which is eventually contained,
        
        "though only temporarily,
        
        "by the warring sides redirecting their violence toward a scapegoat."
    4. This requires a "truly guilty" scapegoat
    5. Christ interrupts this process:
      1. shows the scapegoat narrative as a narrative
    6. Girard shows a pattern in the Bible: narratives that side with the viction:
      1. Abel
      2. Saint Joseph the Patriarch
      3. the Psalmist
      4. Jephthah’s daughter
      5. Saint Job the Prophet
      6. Susanna the Righteous
      7. Isaiah's suffering servant
      8. Saint Daniel the Prophet
      9. in general:
        
        the widow
        
        the orphan
        
        the foreigner
        
        the oppressed
    7. Girard: the "modern concern for victims" is a gift of the victim-centering master-narrative of Christianity.
      1. a fundamental principle of the modern world
      2. may be credited for:
        
        individual rights
        
        abolition of chattel slavery
        
        "protection of women, children, the aged, and the foreigner"
        
        emsenn: this phrasing from the author is so Christian.
        
        same for:
        
        "battle against poverty"
        
        "extension of medical care"
      3. Girard calls these things the "secular mask of Christian love"
    8. Returning to Vance:
      1. Vance's Trumpism makes Vance's Girardism seem "more performative than deeply considered." - Paul Leslie
      2. In September, 2024, Vance spread the false rumor that illegal immigrants from Haiti were abducting and eating domestic pets in Springfield, Ohio. Town managers refuted the claims: the people were legal immigrants and there was no credible report or evidence of the claim.
        
        When challenged, Vance said:
        
        "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, that that's what I'm going to do."
        
        Vance understands scapegoating, but rather than exposing and disempowering it (as Girard attempted), Vance weaponizes it
        
        This is in-line with Trumpism: scapegoating and demonizing is a mode of Trumpism, esp of:
        
        migrants especially
        
        left-wing American politicians
        
        non-Trumpist Republicans
        
        left-wing academics
        
        non-Trumpist judges
        
        journalists
        
        foreign people, especially foreign leaders
        
        Vance defends Trump's scapegoating, especially of migrants
A different vision: Carl Schmitt
1. So, Vance's conduct isn't much like Girard's theory, even if Vance credits Girard
2. Instead, it looks like Carl Schmitt's theories
  1. State is secularized Church
  2. Church is there to reason about and impose reason on society
  3. Schmitt rejected Enlightenment optimism about human rationality
    1. Schmitt wrote of normativism: letting norms emergent from "human reason" govern
    2. instead, Schmitt says, we need decisionism
  4. Schmitt has dark origins:
    1. early 1930s during Hitler's rise
    2. justified Hitler's state
    3. friend/enemy bifurcation
    4. argued that democratic procedures and democratic legal norms were slow and ineffective at dealing with an existential threat to the state
      1. interpreted Article 48 of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic as justifying Hitler's power seizure after the Reichstag fire
      2. Schmitt defened the Night of the Long Knives
        
        "The true Fuhrer is always a judge as well, from his domain as Fuhrer flows his domain as judge."
        
        To separate the two domains would be to create an "anti-Fuhrer" and "unhinge the state with the help of the judicial system."
Trump's Schmittian logic
1. Apparently in Agenda 47 and Project 2025
2. Vance supports it
3. Roantree: "Are there grounds for fear that this is an effort to declare a 'state of exception'… invoked as justification for suspending elections?"
4. Using state of exception was not uniquely Third Reich
  1. Giorgio Agamben looks at this
    1. claims totalitarian logic structures the state of exception in liberal democracies today
    2. Agamben's "the camp" is today Gitmo, CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, etc.
  2. Hannah Arendt
    1. These sites reduce life to mere existence, as Arendt termed it.
5. Author questions how Trumpist postliberals can "insist that lliberal democratic regimes can pave the way for a new social order that is in line with the Gospel"
  1. "the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends" - Deneen
    1. decisionist realpolitik to induce common-good Christianity
Vance and the order of love
1. right-wing postliberalism has Augustinian pessimism of human nature:
  1. Augustinian pessimism:
    1. Humans are:
      1. damaged by Original Sin
        
        prideful
        
        concupiscent
        
        disordered
        
        incurvatus in se
      2. incapable of
        
        good
        
        salvation
      3. without
        
        divine grace
  2. Ring-wing postliberalism:
    1. Humans are:
      1. incapable of
        
        order
        
        stability
      2. without
        
        decisive State
    2. Supporting thinkers:
      1. Machiavelli
      2. Thomas Hobbes
      3. Joseph de Maistre
      4. Louis de Bonald
      5. Joan Donoso Cortés
2. Vance, speaking to Sean Hannity, explained Trumpism as ordo amoris (rightly ordered love):
  1. "You love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world." - Vance
  2. Vance claims to have learned from Augustine
  3. Author doubts:
    1. Vance claims ordo amoris may dimish with distance from self, but does continue
    2. Where is the love for distant people in Trump policy?
  4. Much more related to Schmitt's friend/enemy than Augustine's ordo amoris
  5. Additionally, Augustine's ordo amoris doesn't value physical distance but value in relation to God, i.e. love God the most, love pure things a lot but not as much, love sinners and sin less, etc.
    1. Augustine straight-up says "all men are to be loved equally"
      1. But this is the ethos of Christian love, not its phronesis
        
        Augustine establishes principles for where to allocate love: need and chance
        
        "he is our neighbour whom it is our duty to help in his need, or to whom it would be our duty to help if he were in need"
        
        "since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you."
        
        There's no parochialism or nationalism:
        
        help who circumstance puts you in a position to help
        
        i.e. Parable of the Good Samaritan
  6. Pope Francis, likely responding to Vance citing ordo amoris to defend Trump's immigration policy, wrote a letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
    1. "The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."
  7. Vance claims its nature to love those closest to you
    1. Many conservatives agree
    2. So does Jesus, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, but he calls for Christian perfection:
      1. "If you love those wyou love you, what reward do youhave? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same?"
      2. "[God] makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous."
      3. "Therefore, be as perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Return to Girard
1. Girard and Schmitt saw conflict and violence at the heart of the human story
  1. Schmitt was pessimistic, thus justified fascism
  2. Girard was not:
    1. felt the cause of violence, the mimetic capacity of humans, is "intrinsically good" because it is an "extreme openness" to others
    2. violence can be murderous or "the basis of heroism"
    3. mimetic desire "is also the desire for God"
2. Schmitt adds divinity to violence with state power
3. Girard maintains its humanity
  1. Girard's God "abhors violence and victimisation":
  2. The Kingdom of God "is always a matter of bringing together the warring brothers, of putting an end to the mimetic crisis by a universal renunciation of violence."
4. The paper ends on a hope that Vance will look at Girard again to learn this.

Notes

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