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October 20, 2022 Catholic Social Thought, Economics

Gregg Contra Corporatism

Samuel Gregg is not sharp. Despite grabbing a graduate degree from Oxford, his highest intellectual achievement to date was serving as the Acton Institute’s de facto propaganda minister. Now that he has parted full-time ways with Acton, Gregg serves at the behest of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank with no religious pretensions. That is good news for Gregg. Now freed from having to pay lip service to the Catholic Church’s social magisterium (a loose requirement over at Acton), he can let it all hang out, so to speak. In one of his latest pop pieces, “A Threat Worse Than Socialism?” (National Review, Oct. 16, 2022), Gregg chases after the specter of corporatism while denouncing its endorsement in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno. According to Gregg, the Church abandoned corporatism long ago; if it has any purchase today, it is primarily among American Catholic integralists.

Gregg, like many liberal-economic ideologues, relies on tired tropes concerning “human liberty” and “dignity” to assail any policy that dares threaten the “free market.” According to Gregg, government “intervention” invariably distorts the market, undermines freedom, and leads to an array of immoral outcomes. The problem with Gregg’s attack on corporatism is that he never defines what corporatism is; rather he throws together a few tenets associated with corporatism before snuggling up with conservative Catholicism’s favorite error: the genetic fallacy. (For another example of the genetic fallacy in play, see my comments on Edward Feser’s latest book on critical race theory here and here.)

Fascists are corporatists, or so says Gregg. And because “unsavory” political movements used some (though perhaps not all) corporatist tenets when laying out their economies, corporatism is guilty by association. And while Gregg is kind enough to not label all corporatists as fascists, he draws perilously near to the line. He is also concerned with alleged forms of corporatism emanating from “stakeholder capitalism” and “woke capitalism.” Their greatest sin, aside from promoting policies that Gregg doesn’t seem to like (e.g., environmental protection), is not letting businesses decide what is good for business. Negative externalities be damned; shareholder profits deserve primacy of place.

That is all fine and dandy if one is already disposed to accept Gregg’s ideological leanings. Aside from a brief example of “corporatism gone wild” over at Volkswagen in 2008, Gregg offers no evidence that corporatism yields worse outcomes (however measured) than the utopian free-market capitalism he has advocated for in a series of banal articles and books for the past two decades. Like his fellow liberal travelers, Gregg fails to account for the fact that the “crony capitalism” he claims to detest is the very form of capitalism that has delivered the economic fruits he typically claims only unmolested markets deliver. Pay no mind to the fact that the utopian free market Gregg and others dream of has never existed.

For those interested a non-polemical discussion of corporatism, please see these posts from the archives. (I apologize, but the cross-links in the posts themselves no longer work.)

August 24, 2022 Books, Catholic Social Thought

A Few More Thoughts on Edward Feser’s All One in Christ

Following my initial thoughts on Edward Feser’s All One in Christ (Ignatius 2002) (AOIC), I had a brief exchange on Twitter with Feser where, inter alia, he accused me of not understanding what a genetic fallacy is. This is due to the fact that I believe he commits this very fallacy in AOIC with respect to Critical Race Theory (CRT) when he repeatedly links it to postmodernism and Marxism. According to Feser, all he does in AOIC is “point out that there are certain features that CRT shares with Marxism and postmodernism, and that they’re as problematic in the one case as in the others.” Feser does this, but that is not all he does.

According to Feser, the genetic fallacy “involves rejecting a claim or an argument merely because of some disreputable historical or cultural association it has or is alleged to have” (77). This fallacy, also known as the fallacy of origins or the fallacy of virtue, has been defined elsewhere as holding that “if an argument or arguer has some particular origin, the argument must be right (or wrong). The idea is that things from that origin, or that social class, have virtue or lack virtue. (Being poor or being rich may be held out as being virtuous.) Therefore, the actual details of the argument can be overlooked, since correctness can be decided without any need to listen or think.” Whether one accepts Feser’s truncated definition or the more expansive version matters not. What matters, at least to Feser, is that he did not commit it. That is debatable to say the least.

Turning back through the pages of AOIC, Feser wastes no time in linking CRT to postmodernism and Marxism. He does it right away in the very chapter where he defines CRT (53-54):

Because CRT is energetically promoted in the name of “antiracism”, many suppose that it must be benign. That is as naïve as thinking that Marxism must be benign given that it presents itself as an ally of the working class. In fact, Marxism has only ever yielded an oppression worse than the kind it claims to eradicate. Similarly, in the name of remedying the evil of racism, CRT actually promotes a novel and insidious form of racism. Like Marxism, CRT is a grave perversion of the good cause it claims to represent, and it is utterly incompatible with Catholic social teaching.

Setting aside for a moment that Feser has not demonstrated that Marxism qua Marxism, as opposed to disparate applications of Marxism, “has only ever yielded an oppression worse than the kind it claims to eradicate,” why mention it at all? Even if Marxism invariably leads to greater oppression, Feser does not prove that CRT creates more racism; it rather “promotes a novel and insidious form of racism.” However, by weaving Marxism and CRT together, Feser intends the reader to believe that the problem with Marxism (oppression) is the same problem found in CRT without demonstrating as much. Perhaps Feser would say he is making a (casual?) comparison between Marxism and CRT. Such a claim could hold water but for the fact Feser returns to this matter repeatedly in AOIC. Here is what he says in Chapter 5 (71-72):

Readers familiar with Marxism and postmodernism will have noted the similarities CRT bears to them, the main difference being that CRT substitutes an obsession with race for the Marxist’s obsession with class and speaks of “whiteness” rather than the bourgeoisie as the sinister power lurking behind all legal and cultural institutions. This is no accident for Marxists and postmodernists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, respectively, were key influences on the development of CRT.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that CRT is essentially a reformulation of some of the main themes of Marxism and postmodernism in racial terms. Where Marxism speaks of the conflict under capitalism between oppressive bourgeoise and the oppressed proletariat, CRT speaks of a struggle under “systematic racism” between an oppressive “whiteness” and an oppressed “people of color.” Where the postmodernist takes all norms and truth claims to be culturally relative and masks for the vested interests of power, CRT identifies this power in the case of European and American civilization with “white supremacy”, specifically.

Feser has more to say about CRT’s connections to postmodernism and Marxism, though never does he try to upset their claims. He takes it as given that postmodernism and Marxism are wrongheaded, pernicious, destructive, and so on and so forth. This is ironic given that just a few pages later, Feser chastises “CRT writers” for “the extremely poor quality of its [sic] argumentation and analysis.” He goes on to say, “Because these writers typically present ideas with a matter-of-fact and even aggressive confidence, unsophisticated readers may be unduly impressed” and that “[t]he self-assured style of this writing functions…as a rhetorical device by which its intellectual flimsiness might be masked” (74).

Though Feser is not committing the genetic fallacy here, he is partaking in another fallacy he notes in the book: special pleading, “which involves applying an arbitrary or unjustified double standard” (81). Here Feser blasts CRT for its “matter-of-fact and even aggressive confidence” in making arguments all the while arguing in a matter-of-fact and aggressively confident (if not dismissive) manner about postmodernism and Marxism—the corrupt soil from which the rotten tree of CRT allegedly sprung. Feser wants his audience to give him a pass where he fails to provide one to CRT.

Returning to the genetic fallacy, Feser may again claim he is only highlighting similarities rather than rejecting CRT (and encouraging others to reject it) because of its “disreputable historical or cultural association” it has with postmodernism and Marxism. Given all of the aspersions, well-grounded or not, that Feser casts upon postmodernism and Marxism, that defense is hard to take seriously. By AOIC’s final chapter, Feser does nothing to mask his belief that CRT should join postmodernism and Marxism as ideologies condemned by the Catholic Church (127):

As noted already, Critical Race Theory essentially reformulates, in racial terms, some of the key themes of Marxism and postmodernism. Now, the Church has consistently and strenuously condemned the key ideas of Marxism and all other forms of socialism and communism, along with the relativist and other themes that are characteristic of postmodernism. It follows that CRT, which is a mere variation of these malign ideas, is no more compatible with teaching of the Church than Marxism and postmodernism are.

In other words, the apparent condemnation of CRT’s intellectual forebears is a condemnation of CRT. Feser goes on to spill more ink about the incompatibility of Marxism with Catholic social teaching while returning to the theme of genetically linking CRT and Marxism (e.g., 131, 137, & 139). And while I have never stated that Feser fails to make arguments against CRT other than genetic ones, his reliance on tarring CRT with Marxism and feathering it with postmodernism undermines AOIC’s strength. CRT is not vanquished fairly in the ring; it is kneecapped by association before the bout gets fully underway. Such a move only has the dubious benefit of appeasing an audience already committed to opposing CRT.

August 22, 2022 Books, Catholic Social Thought

Edward Feser’s All One in Christ: Initial Thoughts

This is not so much a review as it is a series of initial thoughts on Edward Feser’s new book, All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory (Ignatius 2022) (AOIC). At a mere 147 half-sized pages, this brief work attempts to restate the Catholic Church’s position against racism (and by extension chattel slavery) while also laying waste to Critical Race Theory (CRT). Feser spends more time on the latter than the former. Why? Because though Feser is correct to identify logical difficulties with certain popular presentations of CRT, most of what he says has already been hashed out before, his intended audience is undoubtedly less concerned with racism than being accused by CRT of being racists themselves. Moreover, AOIC does not read like a work intended to save misguided Catholics from embracing CRT. Rather, its CRT-related chapters come across as little more than preaching to the choir, with the “choir” being the typical Ignatius Press audience of conservative white American Catholics who typically vote Republican and support neoliberal (if not libertarian) socio-economic policies.

Feser might quickly accuse me as he accuses certain espousers of CRT of engaging in ad hominem attacks rather than engaging in a fair intellectual discussion. Ok. However, before getting there, let me say that AOIC’s first two chapters—“Church Teaching Against Racism” and “Late Scholastics and Early Modern Popes Against Slavery”—are excellent. The third, “The Rights and Duties of Nations and Immigrants,” is inoffensive insofar as it makes a number of commonsense claims backed up by papal opinions on the exercise of prudence when it comes to national immigration policy. One glaring difficulty with this chapter, one that returns several more times during the course of the book, is that Feser assumes the countries like the United States are coherent, monolithic nations with an identifiably unified socio-political culture that needs special care and protection from alien influences. Feser ignores, in the American context at least, the extent to which anti-immigration positions are backed by narrow conceptions of what it is to be “an American” that are not shared by the whole of the American population.

Turning to CRT, or in truth a small handful of popular presentations of CRT, Feser detects the vile specters of postmodernism and Marxism lurking behind it. And despite spending all of the work’s fifth chapter decrying logical fallacies allegedly embedded in CRT, Feser embraces the genetic fallacy wholesale as he dismisses CRT because of its apparent postmodern and Marxist origins. Believing (rather than proving) that both postmodernism and Marxism have been overcome (or proven invalid, wrongheaded, stupid, silly, etc. by the course of history), Feser does not perceive how CRT can survive except as another dangerous ideology that threatens the milquetoast libertarian-esque political ordo with incense that has taken a shine to over the years. Maybe if Feser had only made a passing reference to postmodernism and Marxism as intellectual antecedents to CRT, he could be forgiven for only pointing out a fact of life rather than mounting an argument. Yet time and again he returns to this connection to “demonstrate” that CRT is no darn good.

As Feser runs through CRT’s logical fallacies (many of which are contained in Robin DiAngelo’s pop polemic White Fragility), he posits a series of conclusions that could be true absent their espousers’ racism, albeit with little in the way of proof. And so, when it comes to income disparities among certain races, are they the result of systemic or institutional racism or differences in culture? Are blacks charged and sentenced for allegedly committing crime at higher average rates than whites because of racism in the criminal justice system or is it because blacks are often raised in single-parent households with absentee fathers? Feser notes that suggesting cultural and familial differences as a cause for negative social outcomes is evidence of racism by CRT’s lights. This is a problem, not just because it is intellectually dishonest, but because it stifles open discussion. On this point, I agree with Feser. Where I am cautious is with respect to why Feser uses these conclusions as his examples. Is it because he believes they are correct? Does he think his audience will accept them as highly likely if not undeniably true? Finally, why does Feser not posit other conclusions, like the role class plays in these problems? Perhaps Feser worries that doing so would undermine his own political commitments.

Those commitments are on muted display in AOIC’s closing chapter, “Catholicism versus Critical Race Theory.” Here Feser again turns his sights against postmodernism and Marxism to discredit CRT. According to Feser, “the Church has consistently and strenuously condemned the key ideas of Marxism and all other forms of socialism and communism, along with relativist and other themes characteristic of postmodernism.” Feser does not say in detail what these “key ideas” are, nor like many contemporary Catholic critics of socialism does he bother to define what socialism is. Given that “socialism” today means everything from total state ownership of the means of production to food stamps, it is impossible to say that the Church has ever issued a full-throated condemnation for everything that passes for (or is accused of being) socialism. Feser quotes Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (RN) approvingly on what it says against class conflict (more on that in a moment) but is silent on the principle of just wages or the topic of social safety nets, which are addressed throughout the Church’s modern social magisterium.

On the topic of class, Feser announces that “the Church has condemned the Marxist thesis that social classes, such as the rich and the poor or capital and labor, are inherently and necessarily hostile to one another.” According to RN as cited by Feser, this thesis “is abhorrent to reason and truth” because “nature has commanded…that the…classes mentioned should agree harmoniously and should form equally balanced counterparts to each other” (emphasis added). “Should” is not “do.” While Marxism of the strict observance is wrong to posit class hostility as an inevitability, neither Leo XIII nor any other pope ever taught that class conflict is empirically false. Without the establishment of a just social order, class conflict will likely persist; one need not be a Marxist to grasp that.

Feser’s class blindness coupled with his apparent acceptance of neoliberal economics leads him away from anything more than “cultural” conclusions concerning racial disparities. Even if cultural differences could explain differences in wealth, education, and crime rate, far more work needs to be done to address the development (or degeneration) of culture; its origins; and why certain cultures persist among certain populations and not others. Keep in mind that when it comes to immigration policy and foreigners, Feser appears fine with positing a unified American nation with a homogenous culture in need of safeguarding. As his eye turns inward, however, Feser sees numerous cultures, many of them bad, and many of them responsible to some degree for a plethora of social ills.

As stated at the outset of this post, AOIC is a mixed bag. The strength of its opening chapters is dampened by the intrusion of Feser’s personal policy preferences, backed up by a selective reading of Catholic social teaching. CRT’s flaws, of which there are many, are addressed, but regrettably in a manner that feeds into persistent conservative beliefs that either racism is not a genuine problem or the extent to which class exacerbates this problem. It is a shame Feser felt the need to package all of this in a book rather than a series of discrete blog posts. They would make it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

August 1, 2022 Catholic Social Thought, Integralism

Distributism vs. (Neo-)Integralism: Some Remarks

The following are some loosely formulated comments on the differences, or tensions, between distributism and integralism. As I am working on an article (or two) addressing this topic, it seems worthwhile to play around with it first on this web-log. Everything written below is provisional, even highly provisional. Two not-inconsequential problems that afflict a side project like this is that people disagree, sometimes vehemently, what distributism and integralism even are.

For integralism, many rely upon Pater Edmund Waldstein’s oft-cited “Integralism in Three Sentences.” Although I have immense sympathy for this definition, it points to an intellectual conception of integralism divorced from what I typically dub neo-integralism, that is, a power-intoxicated ideology that seeks to selectively blend medieval ecclesiastical history, papal pronouncements, neo-Scholastic philosophy, and atheistic authoritarianism into a practical political program. This worldly form of integralism pays lip service to the common good, but what it aims for is a hierarchically ordered society with technocrats holding the levers of power with divine and natural law serving as a distracting rhetoric to fig-leaf reality. For neo-integralism, religion, specifically Catholicism, has an instrumental purpose, and its pretense toward ultramontanism is in service to this open deception.

The meaning of distributism is also difficult to pin down, though an introduction to the topic by John Medaille is instructive: “Its key tenet is that ownership of the means of production should be as widespread as possible rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few owners (Capitalism) or in the hands of state bureaucrats (Socialism).” The mechanism of distribution remains contentious. Economic liberals, such as those affiliated with the Acton Institute, believe that distributism requires top-down economic planning with heavy taxation and regulation leveraged to disperse property far and wide. Socialist critics of distributism complain that it does not go far enough. Rather than serve as a viable economic ordo, distributism is an aesthetic that is unlikely to come to fruition through voluntary cooperation; the state must get involved.

Noting this, some might argue that since integralism or, rather, neo-integralism possesses a zest for state intervention, it can incorporate distributism. That assumes, of course, that a top-down solution is consistent with distributism; it is not. As Medaille and others have argued, distributism is not another form of Keynesianism or other economic ideology that seeks to constantly re-distribute wealth through taxation and/or regulation. Medaille in particular distinguishes between income (re-)distribution and property distribution, favoring the latter over the former. In Medaille’s view, if workers were paid just wages consistent with the tenets of natural law (and discussed in part by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum), then property would be more widely distributed as workers throughout the economy would have the means to acquire it. As neo-integralists tend to shy away from a thick conception of natural law, preferring instead to make mention rather than operationalize it, that solution is probably not on their radar. Additionally, given that neo-integralism is, by and large, promoted by white, educated males, with most holding incomes higher than the national average, distributive questions are likely peripheral; the power to make distributive choices, right or wrong, is far more enticing.

Two other tenents of distributism, which are also tenets of Catholic social teaching writ large, are solidarity and subsidiarity. According to Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, “Solidarity refers to the virtue enabling the human family to share fully the treasure of material and spiritual goods” while “[s]ubsidiarity is the coordination of society’s activities in a way that supports the internal life of the local communities” (Address to the 14th Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (May 3, 2008)).

Neo-integralism defies both of these principles. Embracing to a toxic degree Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction, neo-integralists oppose the idea of a human family, that is, a single human race made in the image of God. There are, for neo-integralists, “natural” enemies, namely all of those who oppose their attenuated political Catholicism. These proverbial Dalits are only redeemable to the extent they can either support or provide cover to neo-integralist ambitions for power. (That these ambitions have and likely will forever go unfulfilled is beside the point; it is the allure of power that animates neo-integralist thinking.) As for subsidiarity, the neo-integralist administrative state, which models itself off of the current administrative state present in the United States, it is of no use. Local communities cannot be depended on to care for themselves. A plurality of voices expressing reasonable disagreements under the umbrella of a shared moral, social, and political grammar cannot be left to stand if those who have vested themselves with centralized control disagree. Technocratic uniformity is the highest end.

In closing (for now), it is not clear that distributism has a direct answer to integralism outside of what should be the Church’s answer, and that is well and good. While neo-integralism purports to conform with Catholic social teaching, it does so with as much sincerity as the Acton Institute when it informs young people that Leo XIII was a crypto-Lockean and Pope John Paul II baptized capitalism. And because distributism, like other attempts to put Catholic principles into practice, refuses to fit neatly within the structures of late-modern ideological systems, particularly those that feed the libido dominandi, it remains unattractive to moral miscreants.

June 19, 2021 Catholic Social Thought, Roman Catholic Church

“Clericalism” Part 1 – Catholicism’s “Rural Hangover”

Note: I will return to my series on on defending debt collection lawsuits shortly. I am going to mix them in with some thoughts on Eric Voegelin’s under-appreciated lecture, “Clericalism.”

Tucked away in the rear of the first volume of his collected correspondence lies Eric Voegelin’s 1946 lecture, “Clericalism.” Delivered after the close of the Second World War, this short talk, like many of Voegelin’s writings at the time, foreshadow his turn from chronicling the history of political ideas to developing a philosophy of consciousness, particularly in the final two volumes of his massive Order and History. Although Voegelin’s Christianity, to the extent that he was a Christian, could hardly be called “orthodox” by either Catholic or his native Lutheran lights, there is no doubt that he took Christianity seriously and was committed to the Christian intellectual tradition, often in an Augustinian key. Voegelin had also drunk deeply from the well of Aquinas, though there is scant evidence that he ever held Catholic neo-Thomism any closer than arm’s length. He expressed at points admiration for certain papal statements, but they carried no doctrinal weight for him; they could be criticized freely. Before saying more about Voegelin’s lecture, it is important to highlight what Voegelin means by “Christianity.”

Christianity is not a system of social ethics, but a religion. It is a faith concerned with the destiny of the soul; and this faith as such has no direct bearing on the formation of the social environment; it can have a bearing only indirectly insofar as the conduct required of the Christian is not compatible with the exigencies of every social order. Hence the Church cannot develop a positive social program; it can only deal with concrete social questions as they arise, and try, by counsel, to guide the conduct of individuals in such a manner that it will become Christian conduct.

When Voegelin speaks of “the Church,” he almost always has in mind the Roman Catholic Church, even when he touches on Protestant thinkers. Some, particularly contemporary integralists, may take umbrage with Voegelin’s dismissive attitude toward the Church “develop[ing] a positive social program” rather than “deal[ing] with concrete social questions as they arise.” That is fair, though throughout “Clericalism,” and indeed against the European backdrop that intellectually formed Voegelin, he witnessed the pitfalls of Catholics aligning with this-or-that political movement to resist what can broadly be called the de-Christianization of society. To the extent the Church ever articulated something like a social program, it came to the table too late. Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces were already at work; all the Church could do was react, and sometimes react poorly.

By way of illustration, Voegelin casts a glance toward Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (RN). His initial assessment is rather positive: “The Encyclical is in many respects a laudable document, particularly in its analysis of the ideology of class war, but it fails in the crucial point, that is in the discussion of private property. It restates the position of the Church with regard to the justness and necessity of private property for the building of an integral human existence, and insofar it is on safe ground.” What’s so bad about that? Voegelin continues:

The ground becomes less safe, however, when the Encyclical proceeds to berate Marxism flatly for demanding the abolition of private property, without entering into the distinction between property of objects of consumption and long-range personal use on the one side, and property in the instruments of large-scale industrial production on the other side. …[W]e might at least expect of the Papal counsellors that they would offer a more palatable substitute of their own for the condemned solution. But what do we find instead? A concentration of the argument on the property in land. The idea of a Communist society is against natural law because it deprives the individual of the possibility to own his piece of land as the basis of his personal existence. Under a Communist society the industrial worker would not be able to invest his savings in land. Well, our attitudes towards the merits of a Communist society may differ, but, I think, we can all agree that it is not the primary sorrow of the industrial worker in our society to invest his savings in landed property and that a few other factors determine the drive towards a nationalization of industries and planned economy. The later Encyclicals, in particular the Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, have become more cautious in their formulations, but the position is not yet surrendered in principle. The Church is still today seriously handicapped in dealing with the burning problems of industrial society by what we may call its rural hangover.

The “burning problems of industrial society” continued to rage for most of the 20th century with the Church sending what Voegelin would likely call “mixed messages” about how not just Catholics, but all peoples, ought to relate to it. While I have never been shy about arguing that there is a consistent anti-capitalist thread running from RN to the social pronouncements of Pope Francis, the fact that well-funded organizations such as the Acton Institute can take the Church’s social magisterium and tilt it toward pro-market ideology may be a sign of the incomplete, reactive, and somewhat ambiguous nature of that teaching. A certain romanticism, the Church’s “rural hangover,” pointed to a concrete economic situation beyond capitalism because it consciously pointed backwards. After the 1960s, the Church purported to be more “forward facing,” though it seems Voegelin is correct that no comprehensive social program has emerged and there remains more questions than answers lurking about.

Catholics who take RN and the pre-Vatican II social magisterium seriously are few and far between. Even traditional Catholics, those purported champions of authenticity in Catholic doctrine, are routinely lured to embrace market-economy ideology under the guise of “freedom” (or, worse, “rights”). Pockets of “back to the land” Catholics, those eccentric few, still exist; God bless them. However, to say they exert any meaningful influence on contemporary Catholic thought stretches credulity. Although the decades just before and after World War II revealed examples of “Catholic Action” whereby the laity, with the direct or indirect guidance of the clergy, tried to develop on-the-ground responses to industrial society, they too have faded out of history. And now that we have arrived at, or are rather drowning in, post-industrial society, what is to be done?

To listen to Pope Francis, something akin to a socialist solution, understood broadly, may be required, though that is not a popular solution by any stretch of the imagination. Whether Francis and the curia understands the state of the world economy is an open question. What appears evident, though, is that the Sovereign Pontiff understands deeply that something is terribly wrong with it and no amount of misguided faith in the “Invisible Hand” is going to correct it. Integralists may have once had something valuable to add to the conversation if they hadn’t become preoccupied with genuflecting before the altar of raw power while developing their own brand of “QAnon Catholicism.” By casting so many aspersions on Marxism over a century ago, the Church, particularly Francis, will struggle mightily to suggest a socialist solution that can in any sense be called “Catholic.”

There is more to say on Voegelin’s “Clericalism,” but I will leave it there for now. By the close of the lecture, Voegelin expressed enthusiasm for the hope that certain thinkers would keep the light of Christianity burning. They were “the future” and on that score, he was correct. Of course, Voegelin had no idea what that future would look like in 1946.

March 6, 2019 Catholic Social Thought

Voris and the Idea of Socialism

The latest episode of Michael Voris’s boorish online show, The Vortex, raises the fear flag on socialism. According to Voris (by way of President Donald Trump), socialism is creeping back into American politics through the Democratic Party. Since, according to Voris, socialism is the natural enemy of the Catholic Church, all Faithful of good will should be alarmed at this outbreak. Never mind, however, that Voris fails to define precisely what socialism is; he simply wants Catholics to be afraid (very afraid).

That socialism has become a political buzzword again is beyond dispute, but what does that mean? The “socialism” promoted by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not particularly radical. For nearly a century the United States has embraced an array of social safety nets and entitlement programs. While Republicans continually call for retracting these programs, they have never mustered the political capital to abolish them in toto. What is potentially different today is the small but growing number of Democrats willing to speak freely about adding on to existing programs along with offering new entitlements such as student-loan forgiveness. Whatever the wisdom of these proposals, it is hard to fathom how American is any more socialist today than it was at the time of the New Deal. It has been more than eight decades since the “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). I see nothing on the horizon from the new “socialists” that is anywhere near as radical.

All of that aside, Voris’s latest tirade distantly reminded me of recent installment in Bernard Harcourt’s ongoing Praxis 13/13 series at Columbia University. (I wrote last week about the seminar on the alt-right here.) The 8th seminar, “The Idea of Communism,” discusses, inter alia, liberating the idea of communism from the contingencies of history. Communism as realized in the 20th century may leave much to be desired, but that does not mean there is not a more desirable, more pristine, form of communism still available to us. If we can find a way to circumvent historical communism, both in its 19th century Marxist form and 20th century realized iterations, maybe it still has something to “say” to us; maybe it can still save us from the horrors of capitalism (or not). Regardless, according to Harcourt (and many others), it is worth finding out.

Voris, in his own way, is fascinated and terrified by the idea of socialism. It does not matter that neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez are espousing anything resembling historical socialism; what matters is that the idea of socialism—even the very word “socialist”—is sufficient cause to sound the alarm. Resisting the idea is more important than understanding the idea. Voris, and others of his ilk, are uninterested in the concrete proposals of these so-called “socialists,” and with good reason. As a recent article in Jacobite highlights, Ocasio-Cortez—on a limited level—takes inspiration from Catholic social teaching. Should Catholics, including conservatives like Voris, pay attention to this concrete reality, then the specter of Ocasio-Cortez’s supposed “socialism” becomes less frightening. And if that “socialism” becomes less frightening, then Voris and his followers lose the opportunity to leverage a newfound “socialist panic” for their true end, which is the eventual reelection of Trump.

None of this is to say that Catholics should support socialism per se. Then again, given that conservative Catholics, including the neoliberals occupying the seats of power at the Acton Institute, believe that the likes of Chesterton and Belloc waved the red flag in their works, maybe there is no meaningful polemical difference between socialism and distributism (or Catholic social thought in general). Any platform or policy that seeks to lift a single finger of the “Invisible Hand” off the marketplace is anathema. It is little wonder that, in reaction to such stale liberal dogmas, a significant percentage of young Catholics now flee to “socialism” (or some idea of socialism). Granted, most of that is just posturing on social media, but that does not mean it isn’t noteworthy.

December 28, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Economics

Uplifting Year-End Thoughts – Part 2

Archbishop Fulton Sheen is remembered for many things, but his thoughts on political economy are typically not among them. On the question of socialism and capitalism—a question which haunts (Western?) Catholics to this very day—this is what the Venerable one had to say in 1952: “Both capitalism and socialism are opposite sins against property. Capitalism emphasizes private rights to property without any social responsibility to the common good; socialism emphasizes the social use of property, to the forgetfulness of personal rights.” Although Sheen did not present a “theory” or a “model” of a well-ordered economy in detail, he did suggest that “[t]he… solution is one in which the rights to property are personal, but the responsibility is social.”

To get a fuller sense of what Sheen has in mind, it is necessary to go back to his February 7, 1943 address where, inter alia, he sets forth the following principle regarding wages: “[W]hen an industry is unable to pay a wage sufficient not only for a moderately comfortable life but also for savings, the difference should be made up either by industry pooling a percentage of all wages paid, or, in default of this, by the State.”

Sheen goes on—in the spirit of papal documents such as Pope St. Pius X’s Fin Dalla Prima Nostra and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno—to argue for greater cooperation between capital and labor, noting that neither the right to profits on the one hand nor the right to organization (or unionization) on the other are absolute; both are subservient to the common good. Where Sheen may have fallen short is with regard to his belief that democracy is the best way to ensure that the rights of capital and labor are protected without infringing upon the common good. Although Sheen is right to note that historically political power was held in the hands of capital, his faith that greater democratization would provide labor with a greater balance of power did not come to fruition. Sheen did not anticipate the extent to which capital, through control of advertising, mass marketing, and social media, would be able to manipulate the voting direction of labor, leaving capital firmly in control.

At the same time, it does not appear that Sheen anticipated the extent to which capital would go to curry favor with Christianity, specifically Catholicism. In the United States today, the Acton Institute—which is run by and directed primarily toward Catholics—houses some of the leading Christian apologists for capitalism, specifically the “good” of the free market, unfettered rights to profits, and the conflation of the common good with material social-welfare gains. No doubt Sheen would be horrified to learn that an institute presided over by a Catholic priest would come out against minimum-wage laws, promoting so-called right-to-work legislation, and argue that a “just wage” is the prevailing market wage. To Acton, of course, this is a non-issue; Sheen was not an “economic scientist” in the way the denizens of the Cato and Mises institutes allegedly are. Sheen’s concerns, by Acton’s lights, are those of an ill-informed man relying on theological and doctrinal statements which, by virtue of their “unscientific” nature, can be left to the side by faithful Catholics.

As I mentioned in my previous post, many Catholics today, particularly in the United States, are fundamentally confused about what the Church actually teaches concerning political economy. A certain brand of youngish Catholics, rightly concerned with the ubiquity of capitalism, recently made a serious intellectual and moral misstep by believing that socialism (of a naively Marxist variety) will save them. Others have chosen to give up the fight altogether by aligning either with Actonite ideology or embracing, in one form of another, the emptyheaded economic nationalism trumpeted by the Trump Administration. There have of course been some nods here n’ there toward the poor, the underclass, the downtrodden, etc. all in the name of Pope Francis’s ostensible “papacy of mercy,” but much of that has come from the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the same which believes that entitlement programs and centralized redistribution is all it takes for a country to align itself with the tenets of the Gospel.

Ultimately, it is hard to shake the notion—the fear—that Catholics today no less than Catholics in the previous decades have lost their sense of what being here is for. Material concerns are prioritized over spiritual ones, and “things economic” have replaced “things moral.” Granted, in an age of iPhones-for-all and incessant streaming services which banalize culture just as easily as they corrupt the intellect, there is little reason to be this dreadful state of affairs. It’s important to keep in mind that for a certain breed of Catholic between, say, 21-35, posturing on social media with indistinguishable microbrews and books they’ve barely read is an easy substitute for the hard work of restoring all things in Christ. Prayer has given way to pedestrian Tweeting and man’s final end is no longer Heaven, but the special kind of hell that is social recognition.

December 19, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Economics

Uplifting Year-End Thoughts – Part 1

A strange phenomenon seems to be overtaking the Catholic world, or at least that minority portion of the Catholic world that spends way too much time on web-logs, online magazines, and other forms of social media. Just as it seems that conservative-to-traditional Catholics are prepared to shake off liberalism once and for all, there has been a noticeable decline in thoroughgoing Catholic critiques of economic liberalism. That is not to say they’ve disappeared altogether. The Distributist Review, for instance, still publishes, and Thomas Storck has a new book out. However, the waters have been muddied a bit. The ill-conceived, ill-designed, and ill-executed Tradinista! “project” (debacle) seems to have taken the wind out of some Catholics’ sails. Maybe a few too many have bought into the idea that to oppose markets is to embrace socialism, something which the Tradinistas! had no qualms over.

Some thought, with the election of Donald Trump, that Catholics no less than other conservatives would begin to embrace economic populism. The problem with this “hope” is that few seem to understand what economic populism is. Moreover, Trump isn’t really interested in that line of thought anyways; his presidency is one built upon contradictions and fueled by the ever-dwindling hope that the blue-collar workers and rural poor who helped get him elected will be better off economically by 2020 than they were in 2016.

Catholics, as best as I can tell, haven’t paid much mind to such things. Liberal Catholics, of course, continue to advocate for economic centralism with a thick, federally backed menu of entitlements and welfare transfers. They are rightly suspicious of not simply economic populism, but the rolling back of government funding for everything from healthcare to food stamps. They see Trump’s economic vision, and the economic vision of the Republican Party, as antithetical to Catholic social teaching (CST). Maybe. The problem is that instead of critically reviewing the economy as a whole, seeing where liberalism has created serious moral and material pitfalls, they naïvely look to the federal system to correct market failures and inequality. Starting from the top and working back down is exactly what CST recommends against; but unsurprisingly the liberal Catholicism’s ignorance of true social principles matches that of their slightly estranged conservative brethren.

Traditional Catholics, historically, were the torch bearers of CST, albeit with some occasional blind spots. Unlike conservatives who love to latch onto the “Lockean” portions of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and rework John Paul II’s social magisterium into an apologia for free-market capitalism, traditionalists see a golden thread in CST running from the pontificate of Pius IX all the way through Pius XII. Rerum Novarum is great, but so, too, are papal documents such as St. Pius X’s Notre Charge Apostolique and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno. The Catholicism nurtured by these cornerstone teachings and, indeed, the Church’s millennia-long theological and philosophical reflections on society, politics, economics, etc. produced, in the first half of the 20th century, a rich body of literature on (re)building Christendom from the ground up. Where has that thinking gone today?

Sadly, the temptation to be “relevant” has gripped the contemporary Catholic imagination, even the imaginations of those who find so many aspects of liberalism abhorrent. These Catholics will go on about the importance of the environment, abolishing the death penalty, and other social-justice issues, but they have little to say about how to make small businesses flourish; the corrosive nature of the ostensibly “free market” on communities and ecclesiastical life; the immorality of peddling inessential goods and services on Sundays; and so on and so forth. They are silent on the social rights of Christ the King and perils of democracy. They may speak of what “the Gospel” dictates while texting on their smart phones, filling their online shopping bag at J. Crew, and positing pictures of their dinner n’ drinks online in order to broadcast an unearned air of “sophistication.” If this is the brain trust of the Catholic Church and, more specifically, CST, then any hope of vanquishing economic liberalism as a justifiable “option” for committed Catholics is, at best, a fool’s hope.

August 14, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Integralism

A Remark on the Racist Right

A great deal has been made of this past weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia where the “Unite the Right” rally descended into violence. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how many pundits and social-media “experts” are only now coming to the realization that racism and bigotry in the United States is not confined to fever swamps and southern mountains. For decades, civilized white America has patted itself on the back with the self-confident belief that racism, by and large, had been eradicated from everywhere except the peripheries of society. The election of Barack Obama in 2008, so the story went, proved that America had overcome the race problem. All the while disparate groups identifying as neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, nationalist, and, eventually, alt-right had begun leaning on increasingly more subtle and complex arguments for why race—and indeed racism—still mattered. America, they claim, is on the verge of losing its white-European-Christian-whatever identity; the time to stand up and fight has finally arrived.

Of course, how many “soldiers” of this particularly distasteful manifestation of the Right are available is something of an open question. By most accounts, only a few hundred folks attended the “Unite the Right” rally. And while there are plenty of racist trolls lurking around social media, many are anonymous, cowardly, and lacking anything resembling a coherent outlook. So now the media, indeed white America as a whole, is at risk of compensating for its prior dismissal of the race issue by overblowing the extent to which ideological racism shapes the thinking and political choices of a noticeable swathe of Americans. The reason this is a risk is because racial issues, like gender issues, tend to obscure one of the deepest problems in the United States (if not the West), namely class. But few people want to talk about that.

There is another risk that should also be noted: giving the racist Right a deeper (but ultimately false) sense of their own power and influence. Make no mistake about it: “Unite the Right,” a rally involving anything but a proper sampling of the American population, is now being heralded as a victory for no other reason than it has upset the Left so. Those who adhere to the true principles of the Right or, rather, principles often associated with the Right but only have coherence and meaning if moored to the Catholic tradition should worry about this. While there can be no doubt that civilizations must be defended if they are to be preserved, it is only Catholic civilization—Christendom—which warrants defending. The racist Right’s nationalism, fueled by such idiotic pieties as “Southern pride” and “Western values,” is devoid of any sense of the common good; whatever its purposes, the salvation of souls is not among them.

Unfortunately, too many Catholics (meaning any Catholic, anywhere) have been enchanted with the racist Right and its wobbly nationalistic outlook. Instead of identifying with the Church and working for the restoration of all things in Christ, they cling to the useless hope that by marginalizing minorities, mindlessly halting immigration, and touting the “glories” of America, they are somehow engaged in a holy crusade that finds favor with God. The reality is that the only thing pleasing to God is the re-Christianization of society, of bringing to Christ His lost sheep (of which there are hundreds of millions in America alone).

Although it should go without saying that integralists can have nothing to do with the raw nonsense spouted by the racist Right, certain remarks popping up on social media compel me to point to an early piece I wrote for The Josias that makes clear the racism and nationalism being promoted in certain circles has nothing to do with integralism or Catholicism. Catholics are not concerned with the color of man’s skin but the state of his soul. The civilization we seek to rebuild has nothing to do with the heritage of a country infused with the false principles of liberalism, but everything to do with the timeless principles articulated and defended by the Church for centuries. Ultimately, we have no use for secular presidents and legislative bodies that serve the interests of elites. It is Our Lord Jesus Christ, not liberalism, which we wish to see reign over society, and until He does again, our work for the rights of God, modest though they be for the time being, will never cease.

August 8, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Politics

John Zmirak’s Silliness Continues

At this point there is little use highlighting how out-of-step John Zmirak is with the Catholic Church’s social doctrine. For years, Zmirak has attempted to blend his idiosyncratic form of the Catholic religion with secular liberalism, choosing to side with the latter when any conflict presents itself. In a recent piece for The Stream, a garbled mess of hysteria and hyperbole, Zmirak once again takes umbrage with Catholics who, following the timeless teachings of the Church, oppose liberalism. For reasons which are difficult to discern, Zmirak opens his salvo by attacking the “Tradinista!” collective which, if you haven’t heard, went belly up months ago due to petty infighting and intellectual incoherence. By the close of his article, Zmirak conflates the positions of these wannabe socialists with those advanced over at The Josias. Perhaps someone should have informed Zmirak that The Josias, through its editor Elliot Milco, never had much time for the inanities of the “Tradinista!” project.

Zmirak’s confusion does not end there. One of the focuses of his piece is this idea that Catholics who reject liberalism—including integralists and those who follow the Church’s traditional doctrine on religious liberty—believe that the stae, the Church, or Church and state acting in concert should actively persecute non-Catholics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of what one thinks about the status of Dignitatis Humanae, it has never been maintained that the spiritual or temporal authorities should coerce non-Catholics into accepting beliefs against their will. The issue comes down to whether or not an individual or religion has the right to promulgate error. When Catholics speak of coercion, it is the coercion necessary, for example, to stop Mormons spreading error door to door or prevent Muslims from publicly rejecting Christ.

As for the Church’s right to coerce baptized Christians through penalties, Zmirak panics at this suggestion—but why? Has no one told him what excommunication is? Does he know nothing of the suspension of priests and bishops from their duties for certain infractions? The Church’s denial of the sacraments to Protestants and others who reject Catholic teaching is a form of coercion, arguably the most powerful form available. While I doubt that Zmirak would advocate for the Church to remove all ecclesiastical penalties from the table so as to not be accused of coercing anyone, it seems that he has not thought his position through with much rigor.

Or maybe he has. It’s not out of question that Zmirak knows that he is appealing to some of the basest prejudices of his readers in order to advance his private cause against those who take Catholicism more seriously than liberalism. By leaving the impression of angry mobs armed with pitchforks and torches marching toward the local synagogue in his readers’ minds, Zmirak may be trying to shame his opponents into walking back their ideas or, at the very least, making certain compromises with the liberal order. Thankfully, that is not going to happen. What Zmirak fails to understand is that illiberal Catholics (whatever their particular affiliation) did not set out on the hard path of resistance only to abandon the fight at its earliest stage. The Catholics Zmirak has no time for are the very sort who take the Church’s teachings seriously and will not forego the instructions of reason and revelation simply to get along with a socio-political ideology which, odds are, will recede into the darkness in the centuries (if not decades) to come.

Zmirak may not want to accept this, but it matters not. He can continue to pander to the lords of this world; the rest of us have business elsewhere.