Update, 3/20/15: The link to Twitter below is incomplete due to John Zmirak deleting his Tweets. A number of them are, thankfully, archived at The Mitrailleuse here.
I am a tad bit embarrassed to say this, but “friendly fascism” — sometimes used on social media as #friendlyfascism — isn’t real. That is to say, it is not an actual tag which can be meaningfully applied to any political, social, or intellectual position that I am familiar with. Although it has been used as a gag expression before, it seems to have entered the stream of Catholic quibbling due to a tongue-in-cheek line I deployed in my Front Porch Republic piece, “Illiberal Catholicism One Year On.” I have also, jokingly, made reference to it here on Opus Publicum. Now comes John Zmirak and Elise Hilton of the Acton Institute to both treat “friendly fascism” as if it were a real thing and then, amusingly, misapply it to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig. My apologies to Ms. Stoker Bruenig. I think it is safe to say that her brand of Christian socialism is not what I had in mind when I first used the term.
Zmirak and Hilton’s inability to get a joke is secondary to the more troubling reality that Catholic neoliberals/libertarians seem largely incapable of making fundamental distinctions between principled positions which they happen to have no sympathy for. This became clear to me last night on Twitter when, after alerting me to his article, Zmirak proceeded to conflate Catholic integralists with so-called radical Catholics such as Patrick Deneen, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Artur Rosman. (Rod Dreher, despite being Eastern Orthodox, was thrown into the mix as well.) Had Zmirak taken the time to actually read my Front Porch Republic article, he would have noticed that I set forth all of the distinctions for him. Hilton should have realized it, too, though I have no evidence that she actually read anything beyond Zmirak’s article. Although it is true that integralist and radical Catholics are deeply critical of liberalism, their reasons are sometimes, maybe oftentimes, significantly different.
None of this is breaking news. In two pieces for The Josias, “A Reflection on St. Pius X and Contemporary Approaches to Catholic Social Teaching” and “Catholic Integralism and the Social Kingship of Christ,” I set forth clearly the ways in which integralists approach the Catholic Church’s social magisterium while highlighting what separates integralists from liberal and radical (socialist) Catholics. As for any attempt which might be made to paint integralists as racists, nationalists, or totalitarians, that, too, has been covered. Finally, I have also offered additional clarifying remarks about integralism on this blog.
With that noted, perhaps it is time to put to bed the “friendly fascism” gag. Had I thought it had any chance of being taken seriously, I never would have used it. Now it is being tossed around carelessly by pro-liberal Catholics. So let us speak no more of “friendly fascism” and, please, let us keep firmly in mind that integralist and radical Catholics are not the same thing.
Gosh, this is an instance of the blind beating the dumb with a baseball bat. I would not know what side to take if I did not detest Zmirak with a holy hatred. He’s right mostly on the Magisterium front, but the Magisterium is pretty dumb on this topic anyway. It’s the equivalent of citing reddit threads on TV shows or something: who cares? Other than that, his characterization of the rise of capitalism is totally screwy: he and the person he cites make it seem like it was some internal process of buying and selling by the Church when it was reality the conquest of the Western Hemisphere, the decimation of the peoples there by disease and war, the sacking of precious metals, and the boom in commodity production fueled by the Atlantic slave trade that were what made modern capitalism possible. Before then, you just had loose federations of city-states and crappy kingdoms that barely reached the level of “civilized” in places. Indeed, in some ways, when Cortes and Pizarro reached the ancient civilizations of the “New World” the cities there were much larger and cleaner and the social organization more advanced than the Europeans. (The Aztecs in particular went back and forth between seeing them as gods or beasts, particularly since they were ill-mannered and filthy). As Jared Diamond stated, what won the day was guns, germs, and steel (but mostly germs). In one sense, Europe was squeezed and Europe got lucky.
Other than that, ESB is dumb because a socialist reading of the New Testament is impossible since the closest political-economic system that we have to describe what’s going on in there is anti-imperial eco-anarchism. There are lots of radical exegetes who read it this way. The problem with ESB and Co. is that they are easy pickings for conservatives who poke holes in the obvious statist readings of the New Testament. For the most part, the attitude of the NT writers was against the State and the economic order in that it wanted nothing to do with them, it thought that God was going to judge and destroy the Temple and the Empire, and re-found society on an order in tune with God’s original creation. Both sides of this debate are wrong, but they find ample ammunition with which to attack each other because their readings of the Gospel avoid one facet in support of another.
>anti-imperial eco-anarchism
Explain please? Is this like anarcho-primitivism or more like Bookchin’s democratic confederalism/social ecology? I feel like I’m missing something here.
Anarcho-primitivism. Bookchin is just socialism in one Vermont hamlet.
Interesting. What would you suggest as a good resource for Anarcho-primitivism? As a leftist I’ve heard a lot of bad shit about and I’d like to read stuff from the other side of the fence.
Personally, I’d take everything with a grain of salt, but Kevin Tucker is the person I find I disagree the least with:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/kevin-tucker
Thanks! :)
I got banned from The Catholic Thing’s combox last time I read a Zmirak article. I find it unfortunate that he has taken to internecine warfare.
Isnt it really just like the way “compassionate conservative” has been used ironically once it became clear the content was all that different than what preceded it?
Alliteration always does more than may be intended, too.