Despite my best efforts to find some depth in modern intellectual conservatism, instead about the best we get is just about the worst imaginable. Much discussed is the Atlantic piece by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule who argues for what he calls “common good constitutionalism” that asserts that an authoritarian assurance in defining a moral basis for legal decisions is best for all of us. Individual concepts of life and liberty be damned:
…that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” and so on—fall under the ax. Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.
Vermeule’s opening salvo is that the doctrine of originalism that conservative legal thinkers have hewed to has shown little progress in reversing the trend towards greater and more expansive liberties. These freedoms, without paternalistic guidance, take us down the slippery slope of moral turpitude. We need stronger hands at the tiller who can properly control the minds of the mob for their own good. In reality, though, Vermeule is just a “Catholic integralist” in disguise, which is to say he is promoting a kind of theocracy where law is subservient to the best guesses of Catholicism.
Conservatives were as alarmed by this as the casual reader might be, with Ramesh Ponnuru defending originalism while deriding the authoritarian premises encoded in Vermeule’s essay, and George Will, fresh off his tour of trying desperately to pretend the Trump regime is over, opining with a mild fury freed of his characteristic excursions in linguistic alliteration. I look back to compassionate conservatism and even neoconservatism with a certain fondness; both at least were largely respectful of core concepts in American constitutional law, with the former even having a little empathy built into it.
The notion that there are extremists in their ranks should surprise no one. After all, in liberal circles there are a spectrum of types from full-blown socialists to more moderate types who see market-based approaches to solving social problems as having a valid place at the table. There is nothing inherently authoritarian in regulation or taxation as part of the social contract, just complaints about the relative scope and consequences of them. Restructuring law to favor Catholic ideas of a common good for resource distribution has its only parallel in a hard communist revolution or, not surprisingly, in the fascist regimes. Catholicism’s historical alliances with such regimes bring Vermeule’s suggestions into a better light.
That this is a topic of discussion among the think-tank set is mostly indicative of a great flailing about in the age of Trump. Where an authoritarian populist has usurped any intellectual inputs into policy and decision-making, from foreign affairs, to education, to even an orderly functioning of free markets, there is little left to be done other than to try to find new extremes that might correct this bizarro-world of aberrant political instincts.
Edits