Wikidworld (#46)
We’ve seen this queasy moment before, when Convert Catholics realize Cradle Catholics are definitely not more Catholic than the Pope. That they are, in fact, infinitely less Catholic than the Pope.
This is the 10th episode and final week of Wikidworld’s first season. At the end of this week, I’ll take a three-week break. Season Two – also consisting of ten weekly episodes — will begin on Monday, October 3 and end on Friday, December 9.
I want to thank everyone who has signed up to receive my Wikidworld newsletters. I appreciate that I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at you— fascinating and exciting, but also scary. In Season Two, I’m planning to make changes to the newsletter that will provide more conceptual handholds, narrative signposts, and research and visualization tools for readers.
Season One newsletters have included a lot of philosophy. In Season Two, the focus will shift to the history of the conservative legal revolution of the past 60 years. We’ll start in the 1960s, with attention to the emergence of a broadly based Catholic middle class in cities and suburbs across America. From this starting point, we’ll consider the effects of the Second Vatican Council, the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon, the legalization of abortion that resulted from Roe v. Wade in 1973, and the tumult surrounding efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
The philosophical traditions and concepts that I’ve tried to introduce in Season One will reappear in Season Two, not as abstractions but embodied within the legal and political struggles and institutional transformations of the past six decades. Having laid this foundation in philosophy, law, and politics in the first two seasons of Wikidworld, in Season Three, we’ll journey back to the High Middle Ages in Europe, where we’ll witness the birth of what we now call Western Civilization.
But today, I want to start circling our plane and begin our descent toward our final destination for Season One. I won’t tell you just yet where that destination might be. But I can tell you that the recent shift in the language of natural law philosophers and of their political and legal avatars on the right — from Anglo-Analytic Thomism to German-Historicist Authoritarianism — has required us to alter our own course. I also can tell you that spy novelist John LeCarre figures prominently in the story.
This first three newsletters this week will focus, respectively, on New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the Claremont Institute in southern California, and the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss (whom we’ve encountered previously). Let’s start with Ross Douthat.
What can I say about Ross Douthat that hasn’t already been said? That he was a wunderkind; born in 1979, raised in San Francisco and New Haven, raised in Pentecostalism and Catholicism; a student of politics and philosophy at Harvard; followed by a post-collegiate fellowship at the Claremont Institute and publication of his first book at the age of 26 (a takedown of Harvard, of course!); hired by the New York Times, at the age of 30, as the youngest opinion columnist on record (for the paper of record).
By all accounts, Douthat is an extremely nice guy, thoughtful, sensitive, conservative yet reasonable, devoutly Catholic yet undogmatic, sincerely interested in understanding all sides of a question. He’s endearingly self-disclosing. Extremely relatable. A favorite of the progressives who run the Know Your Enemy podcast and of liberals of the NY Times readership variety who find him to be a helpful, and safe, window into the mysteries of right-wing religious and political fanaticism.
Which makes two of his recent columns all the more interesting. The first – about John Eastman and the Claremont Institute – we’ll explore tomorrow. Today, I want to talk about his most recent column – entitled “Does Biden Really Think We Are in a Crisis of Democracy?
Of course, Douthat is referring to Biden’s recent stemwinding binge, in which he’s called out the “semi-fascist” leanings of Trump and his MAGA maggots. Followed by an even more recent rewinding binge, in which Biden pretty much takes it all back.
And weirdly — but probably not too weirdly, because even NY Times opinion columnists have to play to their base — Douthat seems to be arguing that even though you and I might believe our democracy is in ruins, Biden and his political cronies and operatives couldn’t really believe this themselves. Because if they really believed we’re on the eve of destruction, how could they in good conscience funnel money to the Trumpiest candidates in Republican primaries, on the assumption they will be the weakest (or most terrifying) candidates facing their Democratic opponents in November? How could they take the risk of strengthening Trump, by giving his favored candidates the frisson of electability (at least by Republican standards)?
There’s a lot going on in Douthat’s column, which is a bit embarrassing to admit given the level of insipidity to which within the first 10 words it has plunged. “Strip away the weird semi-fascist optics, the creepy crimson light,” he writes about Biden’s quite accurate claim in his recent Philadelphia speech the MAGA party was “semi-fascist.” How clever, then, that Douthat would invoke “semi-fascist” in the first sentence. Biden fell right into Ross’s trap on that one!
Douthat sees Biden playing to his base, which is Progressive, and so just another version of the Wingnut Personality Disorder we commonly apply to the MAGA crew. And because Biden is playing to his base, Douthat assumes Biden is cynically using a hysteria-tinged set of tropes about violent, authoritarian MAGA deplorables that conflates them, by design, with the entire Republican Party.
Douthat then makes all sort of bizarre both-sides-ism type statements. He mentions — again, with lead-balloon humor — Biden’s “semi-Caesarist announcement of a $500 billion student-loan forgiveness plan.” He suggests that Democratic “tactics” questioning the 2004 and 2016 election outcomes greased the wheels for the efforts of Republicans such as John Eastman to overturn the election in 2020. He wonders why Biden has not condemned the May and June 2020 BLM riots, the vandalism of crisis pregnancy centers, the “assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh.”
To which I say, “Seriously?” This is why wunderkinds should be required to take a decade-long gap year to properly season their wunderkindiness. I’ll bet there’s something deeper at work here. Let’s read between the lines to find out what that might be. Here’s a clue.
Biden’s speech conflated the refusal to accept election outcomes with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — implying that the positions of his own Catholic Church are part of a “MAGA Republican” threat to democracy itself.
OMG. How could Biden, a Catholic himself, even imagine that opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, the positions of his own Catholic Church, could ever be part of a “MAGA Republican” threat to democracy itself? Moreover, how cynical and depraved must one be to tar-and-feather the entire Republican Party with the taint of Trump and his followers?
I get it. Douthat viscerally dislikes Biden. That’s fine. I’m not too crazy about him, either. Most people aren’t. It’s not really Biden’s fault. He’s 150 years old, for Christ’s sake.
But it seems to especially gall Douthat that Biden is also a devout Catholic. Douthat, imagining himself and Biden sharing the same pew. Ewww. Or even worse, Douthat and Nancy Pelosi and Biden sharing the same pew. Double ewww.
We’ve seen it before, this queasy moment when Convert Catholics realize that Cradle Catholics like Biden are definitely not more Catholic than the Pope. That they are, in fact, infinitely less Catholic than the Pope. How shocking and demoralizing this would be.
Douthat concludes by citing an article from Julius Krein’s American Affairs magazine, authored by Julius Waller and entitled Authoritarianism Here? According to Douthat, this piece argues that the models that predict authoritarian movements will capture the state “almost always involve a popular leader and a dominant party winning sweeping majorities in multiple elections, gaining the ground required to entrench their position and capture cultural institutions, all the while claiming the mantle of practicality and common sense.”
Hmmm. Whom could Douthat possible have in mind here? What moderate, “semi-Caesarist” leader do we know who claims “the mantle of practicality and common sense”? And how would we distinguish such a leader from all of the other non-authoritarian leaders who also claim this mantle of moderation? These moderates are pretty damned sneaky.
For Douthat, the explicit message is that —insurgency and constitutional meltdown be damned — Trump and his people might fuck everything up, maybe for a long time, maybe forever. But they could never actually “consolidate” power “in the style of” any authoritarian leader one might imagine. And so we need not worry. And so Biden’s histrionics are just that — garden-variety election year gamesmanship. No one should pay him any heed.
There is a thread here (if not a point). As one might now predict, Ross Douthat “sort of” believes in Catholic natural law. Some years ago, Viktor Orban fanboy Rod Dreher happily wrote about a Twitter argument concerning the merits of positive law versus natural law in which Douthat jumped in to defend Ryan Anderson’s position that a definition of marriage to include same-sex couples is “incoherent.” It’s important to note that Douthat doesn’t actually say he agrees with Ryan Anderson, although he implies that he does (since why would anyone value incoherence over coherence)?
We learn elsewhere that Douthat’s defense of what he terms Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy (LHM) earned from Andrew Sullivan the gently patronizing rebuke that these views were “Ross at his most Catholic.” Douthat actually cites the ethnographic evidence of the many and diverse ways in which people historically have cohabitated and procreated. He concedes that our cunning disregard for how the Catholic God wants us to cohabitate and procreate challenges the natural law idea that the “traditional marriage” is inscribed in our nature.
But of course, as Douthat also acknowledges, the anthropological record is no sense a defeat for the Church and its philosophers, only a call for redoubling their efforts. And his own claims are less themselves a rebuke to natural law itself, than a way to argue that LHM is “one of the great ideas of Western Civilization.”
The Anglo-Analytic-Thomist tradition of natural law philosophy argues from within a matrix of logical propositions that are, generally, “coherent,” because deduced from fixed natural law premises — concerning Revelation, Character, Creation, Creator, Freedom, Human Dignity, Human Flourishing, Imago Dei, Individuality, Nature, Reason, Self-Evidence, and Virtue — that exist outside of time and space. Acceptance of these propositions is the outcome of human reason.
This is the tradition to which Robby George and many other Anglo-American moral philosophers subscribe. It is also the tradition that frames how we in America have generally understood legal concepts such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and originalist jurisprudence. Because these premises are abstract, universal and inclusive, they resonate with the Enlightenment and other aspects of the liberal tradition (even while they continually threaten to subvert them).
By contrast, the German-Historicist-Authoritarian tradition of natural law philosophy argues from within a matrix of historical propositions that are also “coherent,” but in this case because they are perceived and valued as the outputs of culture and tradition. They exist within time and space. They are not universal. Acceptance of these propositions is the outcome of human feeling.
This is the tradition to which Adrian Vermeule and many other National Conservative philosophers subscribe. It is also the tradition that frames how continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt have generally understood spirituality and morality, political power and legal sovereignty. Because this historical and cultural approach is concrete and bounded, it resonates with Catholic and other medieval institutions for which inequality, hierarachy and exclusion are the given and immutable — the natural — features of our existence.
Ross Douthat likes coherence. We know that. He appreciates that freedom ultimately must attach itself to ideals that are fixed like stars in the firmanent. But he also likes history and tradition. In this sense (although he is probably not aware of it), Douthat stands athwart the two traditions of the natural law I’ve outlined above, these two sides of the same coin, the philosophical and the political. We will see them doing battle with each other when we visit John Eastman and the Claremont Institute tomorrow.
What I am reading today.
Biden Shouldn’t Apologize to the Republicans (NY Times)
Does Biden Really Believe We Are in a Crisis of Democracy? (NY Times)
What Happened to “America’s Stonehenge?” (New Yorker)
The Coming Republican Inquistion (The American Prospect)
Florida let them vote. Then DeSantis’s election police arrested them. (Washington Post)
If you like what I’m doing, please recommend Wikidworld to people you know. I don’t do any social media, so am dependent on the kindnesses of friends (and strangers) to gain more subscribers. Thanks!
Wikidworld. Reimagining Western Civilization.
Season 1: Dark Enlightenment
Episode 10: Final Descent
Part 1: Ross Douthat and the Perils of Being a Wunderkind
Issue#: S1-E10-P1
Date: September 5, 2022