Sofia Nelson wrote a column on MSNBC that is really disturbing: My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA.
Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. . . .
The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.
And then comes the scary part:
Post-liberalism, unlike MAGA, has no grassroots following. Most Americans aren’t Catholic, and most Catholics support the separation of church and state. But post-liberalism, despite its ideological and moral disdain for Trump, needs MAGA. To accomplish any of its goals, it must leech off of a populist movement. The movement needs to exploit Trump’s popularity for its own unpopular aims. This may explain why Vance, who had more integrity when I knew him, abruptly flipped from calling Trump “cultural heroin” to the greatest president of his lifetime.
Now, here’s the thing (one of the things). Much of Trump’s support comes from the fundamentalists and other fervent Christians — Protestant Christians. Many of them don’t like Catholics (to put it mildly); you might remember this little gem from a couple of years ago: Marjorie Taylor Greene says Catholic Church is ‘controlled by Satan’ in remarks on bishops and the Catholic League. The MAGA movement includes some who think that Trump will lead them to a post-millennialist fantasy world of a Christian theocracy that will prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus. A fundamentalist Protestant theocracy, of course.
Now look where we are. Trump is backed by these fundamentalists, by and large. Vance is a product of the extreme Catholics. Suppose (Bog forbid) they win. How long before Vance eases (or pushes) Trump out of the way as part of this post-liberal Catholic plot? And how long will the MAGA religious types stand for it?
The First Amendment was in part the handiwork of men who had studied the recent history of Europe, including England’s wars of religion. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) was in large part an all-out struggle between Catholics and Protestants for religious supremacy; it destroyed Germany and ended mainly because the parties were too exhausted to continue.
Up to now we’ve managed to avoid much of Europe’s wars of religion. (Religious violence here happens, but it happens on a small scale.) If Trump, who doesn’t give a fart in hell about religion except as it helps him (or he thinks it will), manages to steal the election, this could lead to even more and worse chaos than we’ve been warning about all along. And he will have no idea what hit him.
Caveat: I am in no sense talking about most Catholics or most Protestants. But the ones I am discussing here are the fanatics who will let nothing — especially our laws and traditions — stand in the way of their divine missions.
