Biden Out + JD Vance’s Postliberal Monarchist Catholicism
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In this episode, we react to President Joe Biden's surprising decision not to seek reelection, focusing on Kamala Harris's rapid emergence as the new Democratic frontrunner after raising $60 million in one day. We examine the implications of a Harris candidacy and explore JD Vance's connections with reactionary Catholic intellectuals and Silicon Valley monarchists. Additionally, the show reviews Patrick Deneen's vision of 'common good conservatism' and Curtis Yarvin's radical political ideas, while touching on the influence of conspiracism in American religion and politics. The discussion highlights how certain religious traditions can prime individuals, especially American evangelicals and Christian nationalists, to believe in conspiracy theories.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Yesterday, July 21st, 2024, President Joe Biden announced he would be stepping aside and not seeking re-election this fall.
In the moments after that, Kamala Harris's candidacy appeared strong out of the gates.
And by the end of the day, she had raised $60 million via the ActBlue platform.
We give our first reactions to Biden's dropping out and what seems inevitably to be a Harris candidacy and nomination.
Now, because of the news yesterday, our entire week of content is a little bit mixed up and not what we scheduled.
So today, we're bringing you what is meant to be our bonus episode.
That's the monthly episode that Dan and I do together.
And the first half, the first hour or so, is free to everyone and you will find it on your feed whether you're a subscriber or not.
If you are a premium subscriber, you will find another half an hour or so.
of content for me and Dan.
We did have to cut it a little bit short because I am solo parenting this week and have a sick kid who was up all night and needed my attention before we were able to finish the final couple of minutes.
Tomorrow I'll bring you an interview with Natalie Hastings, an activist from Ohio who reports on LifeWise, a school education program that takes kids out of their normal school programming in public schools and allows them to go to Bible lessons and Christian teaching.
It's spreading across the country, and you guessed it, it's connected to Project 2025.
Wednesday we'll have It's in the Code and Friday the Weekly Roundup.
So today, on this bonus episode, not only do we have our reactions to Biden and Harris, but we dig deeper into the J.D.
Vance candidacy and the ways he ties together two groups who desperately want to reshape American public life.
On one side, reactionary Catholics.
Those who want to impose their understanding of the common good on all of us.
This is not only a wing of Catholicism that is associated with the likes of Leonard Leo and Opus Dei, but also a host of Catholic and right-wing intellectuals.
People like Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame philosopher who has gained fame in recent years for his post-liberal philosophy and calls for a regime change in the United States.
On the other side of him is, of course, Peter Thiel, who we talked about Friday.
But beyond Thiel, there is a Silicon Valley monarchist, yes, monarchist, named Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin has called for the firing of all government employees.
He also believes that it would be joyous if democracy ended.
He wants a United States led by a single autocrat surrounded by a board of directors, kind of like a venture capitalist CEO in charge of the entire country.
Vance is the connection here because he holds together the similar interests of these two groups, one religious, one motivated by tech dreams of utopia and freedom.
Nonetheless, his candidacy is more radical than the mainstream press is reporting, and we dig into it here.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Hello, Dan.
Good to see you on our bonus episode.
And the fun continues.
So yeah, how are you doing today?
I'm doing all right.
We're recording early, which means for you it's really early.
And as I understand, you've, you know, been up doing dad stuff with young kids all night.
So I think we should be in for an entertaining, an entertaining episode here.
Yep.
Haven't slept really.
It's five something in the morning and I'm just running on pure.
Pure adrenaline.
Pure, just fell out of a coconut tree, Kamala Harris adrenaline.
What's funny though is that Brad running on just adrenaline, like all you can tell is the hair's a little out of place.
It's like just a little, little off.
Like other than that, like I feel like you've got the real fake it till you make it kind of ability to be like, I can look like it's all put together.
I can even look like this was the carefully disheveled academic look that, you know, so many, so many have.
Yeah, I appreciate that, Dan.
I appreciate that, because the way I feel is not reflective of that.
All right, we're going to talk about, first thing on everyone's mind is Joe Biden dropped out of the race, so we'll talk about that.
We're going to continue story time, Dan, and talk about some even kind of more, I think, disturbing connections that J.D.
Vance has, and more disturbing interpretations of St.
Augustine, but You know, what we started on Friday, I think is worth continuing because from what I've seen from the mainstream media, people are just not putting these pieces together and they need to be put together.
So I'm going to lead that into some conspiracists, conspiracism discussion and why so many folks who take part in American religions, especially American Christianities, We'll finish with a really serious discussion of Dan's mug collection and all the places he's gotten mugs.
It's going to be something to behold.
We will get there.
All right, Dan, let's talk about Biden dropping out.
I was literally at the beach with my kid, my older kid.
And I got up on, you know, it's one of those things you got sand all over you.
And you like, tell your like, you stop making a sandcastle for a minute.
You're like, Hey, I gotta go check the phone just in case.
And it's like, your phone won't work because your hands have like sunscreen.
Like you can't get the screen to do anything, right?
Like that kind of thing?
Maybe that's just me.
You and my brother and everyone else texting me like, Biden's out.
It's over.
So just what are your thoughts?
We'll probably talk more about this Friday, but what are your thoughts for now?
I think there's a chance we'll talk more about this Friday.
So, quick hit thoughts.
I think it's the right move.
I think we've been clear about that.
I've had people ask me, they're like, do you really think that Kamala Harris can win?
I'm like, I don't know.
I don't think that she's going to do worse than it looked like Biden was on track to do.
And to use one of my many football metaphors, right?
Sometimes you've just got to pull somebody out of the game and try something different.
A few things, the faux outrage, I think one of the things I'll probably want to talk about a lot on Friday is some of the responses on the right, calls that Biden should have resigned as president, or the same people on the right who've been fighting against the voting rights of Democratic-leaning voters for, well, forever, but really we've seen it a lot in the last four years, right, putting things into place.
Suddenly decrying how democratic voters have been disenfranchised by elites and so forth.
So I think people on the right are strategists.
I've got to be nervous about this.
I think they've got to be nervous about a boost of energy.
I think they've got to be nervous about the fact that they've got a well Rot and well laid out a plan of attack against Biden, but I don't think they fully gamed out like what to happen if he actually did leave the race.
And so I think that they're concerned.
I think there's huge opportunity.
I think there's downside as well.
And we'll dive into all of, you know, I think more of all of that, not just Friday, but moving forward.
But those are some of my quick hit thoughts.
Yeah, you know, I spent as much time as I could yesterday, you know, thinking about this, looking at reactions, takes.
So, a couple things happened yesterday.
Today's Monday.
Yesterday was Sunday, the day that Biden announced, and what was clear was a couple things.
Kamala Harris was strategic and relentless in getting endorsements from key people, whether it was Josh Shapiro, whether it was Senators... The Clintons, I believe both endorsed her.
Yeah, exactly.
So it all kind of went quickly in terms of like, it's really hard now to imagine anybody being the Dem nominee.
You know, I'm not even going to mention that oil baron from West Virginia who's out here talking about things.
Okay?
I'm not even going to say his name.
I'm not even going to, we're not going to do it.
Okay?
So there's that.
They raised $60 million yesterday in one day via ActBlue.
That's massive.
It was in the top two biggest days of fundraising ever for Democratic nominees and the ActBlue platform.
So that tells you something.
There was just jubilation on Twitter because so many people went from despair to hope.
And I really do think that counts.
I think we'll get more into this on Friday, but I think there's some things here that I'm going to watch.
I'm going to watch Gen Z. Are they going to get behind Kamala Harris?
Are they going to feel different about Kamala Harris than they did Joe Biden?
What about Gaza?
Is she going to maybe in a few weeks or in a month or somewhere down the road Lay out a position on Gaza that's different than Biden and will allow some of those folks who will not vote for Biden on conscience, you know, whether it's Muslim voters, whether it's Gen Z voters, whether it's any voter who says, I'm not voting for Biden because of Gaza.
Will they be able to say to themselves, well, I will vote for Kamala Harris.
And it's because her stance is different.
And I expect there to be difference here.
I think that's, I mean, I've laid it out a hundred times on the show, but I think that matters a lot.
Who does she pick as VP?
I think we'll see that.
I think if you made me bet right now, it's Bashir, the governor of Kentucky.
He, you know, he's won twice in Kentucky as a Democrat.
Midwestern white guy with a big family.
He's just sort of that compliment to the Harris ticket.
Some people, including myself, think Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania would be a good choice.
He's new.
I think he has less name recognition.
Nonetheless, he's in Pennsylvania.
I think Pennsylvania, to me, this has to be a middle-of-the-country pick.
It has to be someone that has, so like Kentucky touches Ohio, right?
Like Cincinnati is like, you know, a hundred feet from Ohio, from Kentucky.
So it could be it could be Bashir.
It could be Shapiro.
It could be Whitmer.
I don't think they will do that, but it could be.
I think it's got to be.
You could pick Mark Kelly, and I understand that, and I understand the astronaut appeal.
There's no more.
It is really hard to, like, make J.D.
Vance out to be a hero when he's a Silicon Valley magnate, financier, and the dude who's on the other side of him as VP is an astronaut.
So I get it.
I just don't think that gets you the Rust Belt.
So anyway, those are some of my thoughts for now.
We'll get into it Friday.
Anything more on this, Dan, that you want to say before?
I do think it's the right decision.
Let me give you one more analogy.
One more sports analogy about Biden resigning, because what you're going to hear is, well, if he can't run for election, he should just resign now.
I'm a Lakers fan.
I've been a Lakers fan my entire life.
I'm a fourth generation Lakers fan.
I'm not a bandwagon Lakers fan.
I'm not a LeBron Laker fan.
Okay.
My great-grandmother could not speak English, but she would tell me, well, she would tell the family in Japanese, like, how Byron Scott was playing, like, horse stuff, or, you know, how Magic Johnson was averaging this many points a game.
So, it runs deep in our family, the Lakers.
Kobe Bryant's last game, Dan, he, that, it was his last year.
It was not the same Kobe Bryant, and everyone knew it.
He could still play though.
He's still good enough to play in the NBA.
He wasn't the Kobe Bryant who was an all-time great.
It's not the world changer that he had been.
But I watched his last game, like many of you have, and the man scored 60 points.
Now, he took a lot of shots.
Don't care.
Show me a handful of people in the world that can score 60 points in a NBA basketball game.
Let them shoot every time.
See if they can score 60 points.
Kobe Bryant's like one of like five players in the NBA that could probably done that that year.
And then he retired.
What's the point?
Joe Biden may not be up to the job, Dan, for the next four years.
Right?
Like, the next four years may not be us thinking, as voters, Joe Biden's our guy.
It doesn't mean that right now— Four months.
Right now—well, that's the argument.
It does not follow that if I can't do something for the next four years, I can't do it for the next four months.
Those two are not—if we were in logic class, We would knock that down.
And so I just, I want everyone to hear that, right?
People have retirement parties.
People retire.
Okay, so for the last three months of my job, before I retire, I can do the job, even if I'm projecting that two, three, four years from now, I may not be up for that job.
So, just don't get it twisted.
I don't think that the Trump campaign planned for this.
I think they're scrambling.
I think they're having a hard time.
I really do.
This is the October surprise, but it's in July.
Like, you know, we'll see what happens, but...
The October surprise is going to be God knows what.
I mean, what could that be at this point?
Like, what could we have now that would be an October surprise?
Like, you know, there's just, there's anyway.
All right, Dan, we did Storytime on Friday.
You ready for more Storytime?
Ready for more Storytime.
Okay, so let's keep talking about JD Vance and not lose sight of this.
You and I looked over this essay that J.D.
Vance wrote about becoming a Catholic this week.
It's How I Became Part of the Resistance.
That's the title.
It's at Lamplight Magazine.
And first of all, I don't know how becoming Catholic is becoming part of the resistance, but that tells you a lot about what J.D.
thinks about his conversion, right?
So I just want to put that in there.
But he does quote our good friend Augustine, or Augustine, in there, and he does quote the City of God.
Dan, do you want to go through that quotation, or do you want me to do the honors?
Yeah, there's a few things here.
So he does quote, sorry, let me scroll up to it.
It's a long quote.
So one of my takeaways from this piece is, and we've talked about this, the wanting to appear as the intellectual, right?
And so he cites this passage from Augustine on Genesis, I believe.
Yep, it is.
Yes.
It's on the book of Genesis and Augustine says, and this is just for people, I bring out quotes like this, you know, when people are like, think that these arguments in Christianity are new.
Augustine's basically like, you're going to look like an idiot, Christian, if you don't know stuff about like science and basic cosmology and stuff like that, because you quote the Bible.
And Vance is like putting this, he's like, see, so I took science more seriously and Catholicism allowed me to do that.
And yeah, whatever.
I'm just going to throw this out on that intellectual thing.
All Christian intellectuals did that up into the 19th century.
The 19th century for my money is when you really get a fracturing and what was called natural philosophy, philosophy about nature, about the cosmos, about The planets and planetary motions, where life came from, stuff like that.
And what we would now call science, biological science, geological science, cosmology in the sense of physics, that's where they diverged.
And that's where it became just simply, in my view, no longer tenable to hold what had been a kind of Orthodox Christian perspective.
And say, yeah, we're the real science-y ones.
There's no tension at all here.
I think that somebody can be a religious person or a Christian and fully embrace science.
My personal view is you're not going to be able to sign on the dotted line of every aspect of traditional Christian orthodoxy to do so.
So I think that's another piece of this.
It's like this time warp thing.
Like, look, Augustine, yeah, Augustine said that.
There was no Darwin yet.
There was no theory of relativity, there was no Big Bang Theory, there was no awareness of, you know, things like that there's no evidence of global floods or whatever.
I think there's also, and I'd be curious if more card-carrying evangelicals actually read this essay what they would think, It's a pretty strong, non-literalist, non-inherentist conception of the Bible in there that I think he plays down, but I'd be curious how that would actually play with the Al Mohlers of the world or the, you know, Wayne Grudems or whatever.
So, and that's the more wonky intellectual side, but to me it's part of that faux intellectualism of we can have it all.
We can be anti-abortion and say that embryos are full persons, but also still say we believe in science and, you know, everything else.
I think that was Something that stood out to me specifically about the passage that he chose, which to me was a weird passage to choose for the argument that he was making.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So and I think you're right about the non literal non non kind of inerrantist approach.
And I think that actually, to me, that's an approach that I appreciate more than than the inerrantist one.
But I think it's going to be telling about J.D.
Vance's Catholicism here in a minute.
So, he also quotes City of God, and if you remember from last time, friends, he says in this interview with Rod Dreher at one point, That there's a chapter in the City of God by Augustine that really informs my public policy and my view of the common good and how the government should work.
Well, seemingly, this is that chapter.
And it's this chapter where Augustine is basically decrying what he takes to be the vices and the licentiousness and the The libertine nature of his society that, you know, he is living in this age where you build ornate houses and you, you accrue wealth and you partake in fleshly delights.
And if you say that those things are not what they seem, then you'll be laughed out of the public square.
Like this is what JD Vance holds up is like, Hey, this is why Augustine is so important to me.
Okay.
So that's interesting.
Right?
I mean, he's basically saying that there's a chapter in the city of God.
He, these are his words.
So this leads me to ask the question, Dana, what kind of optimal state?
Like what is JD Vance up to when he imagines what the government should be?
And I want to point us to May 2023.
Because in May 2023, there is a panel discussion By a philosopher, Dan, a philosopher.
This is fun.
This is like actually getting kind of fun.
This whole story time involves such fun characters.
He's a philosopher named Patrick Deneen.
Some of you out there know who I'm talking about.
He works at Notre Dame, but he had a book very popular called Why Liberalism Failed.
And that book was praised by none other than Barack Obama and many others.
Okay.
Dan's getting excited now.
It's on my shelf, like right over there.
Dan's getting excited because he knows we're going to talk about liberalism and social theory and political theory.
So I can tell his juices are flowing now.
Okay, so who's on the panel?
There's a couple people, but I want to point out three people.
They're there to talk about Danine's new book called Regime Change.
And this is the more like edgy follow up to why liberalism failed.
So this is May 2023.
Vance is on the panel, and Vance and Deneen are good pals.
If you read various write-ups about Deneen and Vance, when Vance sees Deneen, they do big bear hug.
They're pals.
Another panelist is Kevin Roberts, who happens to be, Dan, the head of the Heritage Foundation.
I don't know, that group... Wait, who authored?
What did they write?
What did they put out?
Remind me, I forget.
The Berenstain Bears do... DC or something?
Oh no, Project 2025!
Yep, Project 2025.
Kevin Roberts, who's also...
A traditional, conservative, reactionary Catholic.
When he was leading a small school in Wyoming, they forewent all government funding and called themselves Cowboy Catholics, so they did not have to deal with any oversight from the federal government.
So they're on this panel.
Together.
So I think that's just something we need to like take hold of now.
When when Vance is talking about like, let's do Augustine, let's do Catholicism, let's do government, let's do public policy.
The kind of Catholics he's thinking of are the Napa Institute we talked about last week.
And people like Patrick Deneen.
So let's talk about Patrick.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna say real quick, for those who maybe are uninitiated in the world of academia, right?
When you talk about these figures like Augustine, or, you know, any other big name, like these figures whose names you might know even though you've never read them, they are always, there are a thousand different ways to appropriate these thinkers, right?
So, in academia, or in, say, Christian studies, or in philosophy, if somebody says, oh, I work on the thought of Augustine, you really gotta probe deeper and be like, okay, cool, but like, which Augustine are we talking about?
Is it this, This, you know, super conservative Catholic Augustine that we're talking about.
Is it some different progressive Augustine where we think there's this radical current in Augustinianism that could be revived in some way or whatever?
And this is true of lots of thinkers.
It doesn't matter if you're talking about like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or, you know, John Locke or Augustine or Aquinas or any number of political or religious thinkers.
All of which is just to say, just because they say, yeah, it's Augustinian, that doesn't automatically tell you anything.
You have to do exactly what you're doing, Brad.
Okay, so which Augustinian crowd are we moving in?
And that's what you're doing in a situation, oh, okay, I see who's Augustin this is.
This is Dineen.
This is Kevin Roberts.
This is Project 2025.
This is the Augustine who's like, the reason the Roman Empire fell wasn't about economics or territorial expansion or that they had to expand indefinitely and got so big that they couldn't do anything.
But, and it wasn't, nope, it was, it was moral license.
Um, or he's also not going to talk about Augustine and all of his issues with like physicality and embodiment and sexuality and whatever, and how pathological that is.
It's a very specific Augustine.
I just want to put that out there because sometimes people may run into this and say, I love reading Augustine, but their Augustine is radically different.
And that can happen.
And it can drive, I think, the uninitiated nuts because they're like, nobody seems to know what these people say.
But it's always important to contextualize how they're being used and what's being drawn from them.
So if you're at home and you want to write something down, I know most of you are like, Brad, this is not class.
Cut it out.
OK?
But if you want to remember something, The Augustine we're talking about today is the Augustine of common good conservatism.
Common good conservatism.
There's your vocabulary word for the day.
Common good conservatism.
That's the Augustine we're dealing with.
It's an Augustine, Dan, that is steeped in Aristotle.
Okay?
And Dan is gonna...
I'll rant on that in a minute, I can feel it.
But I'm going to stop here and say that Dineen is a post-liberal political philosopher.
He's a post-liberal Catholic.
So when I think of J.D.
Vance on this panel, when I think of J.D.
Vance being heavily influenced by Patrick Dineen, when I hear J.D.
Vance say, all the smartest people I know were Catholic, And this is 2018 that is the, I'm sorry, he converts in 2019.
I'm thinking that he has Patrick Dineen in his mind as like, oh, that's the kind of smart Catholic who's making me want to be Catholic.
So what does it mean that Patrick Deneen is a post-liberal?
Okay?
Well, it means this.
Let me give you some quotes from Patrick Deneen and some ideas from him.
There's a good write-up in Politico that helped me with this, but there's so much material on Deneen elsewhere, there's just a ton of sources.
So, Deneen, this is from Politico, argues in his book, Why Liberalism Failed, liberal regimes promised their citizens equality, self-government, and material prosperity.
But in practice, they gave rise to staggering inequality, crushing dependence on corporations and government bureaucracies, and the wholesale degradation of the natural environment.
At the same time, liberalism's incessant drive to expand individual freedom eroded the non-liberal institutions.
The nuclear family, local communities, and religious organizations.
Okay.
So, Dan, I think that Deneen's first book, Why Liberalism Failed, was so popular because a lot of us feel this, okay?
Now, so, and I'll throw it to you to give us a little, like, primer on what liberalism is, because I know you can do that way better than me.
You're the one who spent so much time on your second book writing about liberalism and, you know, modern political theory.
But, I think a lot of us feel this, like, all right, we do have a kind of neoliberal order where the free market and capitalism are kind of the driving forces and the emphasis is on individual freedom and things.
So sometimes I do think, wow, You can get to a point where life is nothing but, you know, Walmart and Home Depot and track homes and, you know, all of the the socrality of the modern world has left us.
We're not alone in feeling that, okay?
So, on one hand, it's like, okay, Patrick Tannin, I think I understand what you're saying here, and I understand the diagnosis you're making, and in many ways, I kind of feel some of that too.
I imagine you are somewhat sympathetic with this, Dan.
I think a lot of people out there are like, it's hard to find community.
It's hard to find a way of being with other people that's meaningful.
It's hard to, like, I live an atomized life.
I go to work, I'm in my house, I'm online.
How do I find a sense of the sacred or a sense of, you know, overall significance to my life?
You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Those are hard questions.
And it can feel like, yeah, life is nothing but Amazon and Apple and Walmart and, and Walgreens.
And we're just living in this kind of like hyper modern, hyper technological kind of thing.
I could get together at a party with Marxists, Socialists, Conservatives, Catholics, Evangelicals.
I think they would all sort of, if we stopped there, agree.
I don't know, Dan, how's this hitting you?
And if you don't mind, tell us what liberalism is, because some people are like, well, what do you mean?
You mean like the Democratic Party?
Yeah.
And so that's the first thing.
And we didn't make up the terms.
And so I apologize for how confusing it is.
When people use the word liberal like classical liberalism, and they're talking about people like, I don't know, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, people that influenced the framers of the U.S.
Constitution, things like that, all right?
Those are the names.
That word liberal refers to a political philosophy.
It does not align with political liberalism in the present.
So the person who comes to mind is Paul Ryan, remember former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who called himself a classical liberal.
And you're like, but wait, he was a Republican and a conservative.
Kind of traditional American conservatism carries forward liberalism.
So all the stuff about so-called small government, individual freedoms, free markets, all that sort of stuff, that's liberalism.
So, there are other currents in liberalism that can be intensified, and so modern quote-unquote liberals are actually critical of classical liberalism in lots of ways.
So, for a shorthand, Often when you heard the word conservative, a political conservative, or like the British Tories or somebody like that, they are more classically liberal than the people who call themselves liberals now.
So that's the confusion.
So we're talking about a basic, everything you described, laissez-faire economics, individual rights and freedom as the basis of everything, small government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And you're right, and Dineen is right when he lists like a litany of like, here are some ways that it failed to deliver on its promises.
Yes, but here's the trick, right?
Lots of people see that.
There are lots of ways to respond to that.
You just listed Marx.
Karl Marx is like one extreme example of a response to that.
He lists the same kinds of things.
My what I call radical or queer democratic theory I view as a response to many of those failings and so forth.
Another one is a kind of retrenchment back into tradition and traditional society and a kind of revitalized model of a pre-liberal social order in the contemporary period and that's the direction of a J.D.
Vance or or a Dineen or something like that.
So I think you can take us I think that's the direction we're going we say he's a post-liberal political theorist is that that's the model and it's it's one of many there are lots of lots of people recognize the problem with classical liberalism problems There are lots of ways of trying to respond to those, trying to rectify those, trying to find, you know, are there elements of that tradition to keep a hold of and elements to discard?
Are there elements to sort of, the model I always use to sort of turn up the volume on some and turn down the volume on others, sort of, you know, play with the mixing board and have something different.
And what we see in people like J.D.
Vance and Deneen and Roberts is one very extreme, radically traditionalist move against that liberal model.
So if liberalism is this idea that you have a free market, right, and you have private business and private companies and private enterprise, and they should be somewhat unimpeded with some regulation.
And then you have individuals who have rights, inalienable rights, and they should be able to live out their lives as individuals with those rights.
And that's where we get the idea of freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
And that basic model that people should be able to exercise their rights to the greatest extent possible until and unless They harm others or prevent others from exercising their rights.
That's the kind of liberal vision of rights in a nutshell.
Yeah.
And so that's liberalism 101.
What Dineen has a problem with is that this seems to not be a basis for a common sense of the good life.
A la Aristotle, right?
A la others.
A la Augustine.
That the good life seems to be going back to J.D.
Vance's quote of City of God, nothing more than getting a bigger house, more fancy stuff, more pleasure, more hedonism, whatever.
And it's a kind of classic Christian reduction of like human desire to the like, I just want to sin all the time and have orgies and like do cocaine and have a McMansion, right?
So your life got so much wilder when you stopped identifying as Christian, didn't it?
Well, the cocaine parties and the orgies.
Yeah.
And yeah, the McMansions.
It's amazing.
Okay, so what Deneen is going to say then is what we need is a government that provides us with a common good such that life is more meaningful with things beyond just, you know, individual rights and capitalism.
Okay.
And in some sense, some of you are still somewhat sympathetic to this, but it's telling that when Deneen's book took off, Why Liberalism Failed, where's one of the places he went?
He went to Hungary and he hung out with Viktor Orban.
Okay.
And he said that Hungary offers a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says there's a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies.
That's the whole ballgame right there.
Dan, he hung out with Orban and he's like Orban's Hungary is a way that the state And the political order can be oriented.
Let me just tell you the shorthand here.
The government can be used to instill or impose the common good on everyone.
Right?
Now, the classic philosophical question then is, well, who's common good?
Who gets to decide that?
Well, Dineen is like, I know, I'm Catholic.
I know who's common good.
J.D.
Vance is like, I know too.
And that's where the theology comes in.
Like, well, our theology makes ours true.
So we're not imposing anything on anyone.
It's, you know, that's really what it is.
And yeah, that's the logic of their position.
So here's more from Politico.
Within the cohort of post-liberal thinkers, Dineen is focused on articulating a vision of what he calls common good conservatism, an alternative to the so-called liberal conservatism that has dominated right-wing movements around the world since the onset of the Cold War.
Dan, When Dineen thinks of liberal conservatism, what he's thinking about is libertarians.
He's thinking about laissez-faire libertarians.
And if everybody has been paying attention to this show for the last two weeks or ten days, we talked about NatCon, and everything at NatCon, from Al Mohler to Josh Hawley to Doug Wilson to Little John to all the other figures we talked about, was conservatives need to stop being libertarians and start imposing Themselves on the social order that government should be used to impose.
It's not small government anymore.
They don't want just small government.
That's not the goal.
The goal is not for government to go away that used to be the classic like Ronald Reagan line.
Nope.
Now it is government imposes common good on everyone.
And now you should start to get scared, I think, if you're listening to this.
Because, right, Danin is going to say that he's pro-worker.
He's anti-elite.
And by anti-elite, he means that the folks who want to advocate for economic freedom and individual rights.
He's pro-worker in that sense, but on social questions, he's reactionary.
So what does he oppose, Dan?
He opposes, quote, progressive ideas about race, gender, and sexuality.
And he supports policies to promote heterosexual family formation.
He opposes gay marriage.
He denounces critical race theory.
If you listen to the talk he gave at the panel with JD Vance and Kevin Roberts, he makes fun of surgeries for people to transition.
He talks about how sex has been decoupled from reproduction, and that's a big problem.
So we start now to see that the common good Danine wants to impose on everyone is a Catholic pre-modern common good based on an Augustinian or Thomas Aquinas a la Aristotle idea of you should do this.
Now, I'll give you one more thing, Dan, and then I'll let you jump in.
And that is a quote from Danine's book, his latest book about his book is called Regime Change.
Okay.
He proposes that we should have a kind of aristopopulism.
That means like a populism based on Aristotle's philosophy.
And it should be led by whom, Dan?
Self-conscious aristoi, who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people.
The central goods of family, community, good work, and an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods.
Constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity and support for religious belief in institutions.
He says that the party that he wants to get rid of is the party of progress and the party he wants to support is the party of order.
Dan, this is an articulation of the rule by a few in service of the many, the ordinary.
It's an understanding that the aristoi are those that will hold the gates to the common good and that they will make sure it's secured and ordered in the public square so that the ordinary guys with their wrenches at the mechanic shop and the electricians driving to work and the women at home baking pies can all enjoy an orderly, meaningful life.
I'll stop here.
There's way more on Dineen.
You know me, Dan.
You know I could go on for another three hours.
This is the kind of Catholicism J.D.
Vance converted into when he converted.
Now, there's another thing to say about Vance, but I'll let you jump in here about Aristotle, about Augustine, about Dineen, whatever.
Yeah, so first of all, you throw the Greek in, the aristoi, right?
It's the same, the preface that comes from the word aristocrats.
I mean, that's the model, right?
An aristocracy that tells everybody else how to think and how to live.
All of us simpletons who just simply are not capable of ordering our own lives.
So like, you just put the Greek aristoi in there and it sounds all sophisticated and cool and like whatever.
Kind of sounds like old school aristocracy to me.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, a couple things, like, I just want to put forward a model.
So like, again, a contrast, right, of a different model of liberalism, probably the most famous articulator of a more, let's call it a progressive liberalism was this political philosopher named John Rawls.
And I'm not a Rawlsian, but he he came up with, I'm not gonna go into details, but I don't care kind of where you are on Rawls, this really, really, really creative articulation of liberal theory.
But basically, one of the points that he makes is he says, One of the reasons we need a liberal social order, as he understands it, is because we live in a pluralistic society.
We shouldn't have to believe that everybody has to have the same and common good.
The point of a liberal society is that different people, different groups, can pursue their own vision of what the good is.
As long as they respect the rights of others to pursue that same vision.
And that's an idea that I don't mind, right?
At all.
And so if you take that idea and somebody we hear this all the time, it's impossible to have community.
It's impossible.
It's not.
That's what multiculturalism is.
Right?
For example, it's a formation of people forming communities that take shape around something in common, a common identity, a common tradition, a common background.
What people often dismiss as quote-unquote identity politics or whatever, that's another form of community.
We use the word, right?
The LGBTQ community, the African-American community, the And they sort of emerge and take shape in different times and places.
So don't let these people who are like, no, we're the ones that have it.
No, you have a vision of your common good.
And don't come at me with this, like, we're the ones who are in favor of community.
We're the ones who are in favor of this when all you do is critique every community that you're not part of, or that you feel threatened by.
So LGBTQ community, if somebody like Dineen is serious about being like, community's good.
It's something we've lost.
It's something liberalism did away with.
We should be embracing that.
You should be embracing that.
Nope.
It's not the right kind of community.
It needs to be dismantled.
They're all a bunch of groomers.
Black Lives Matter, DEI initiatives, anything race-based, multicultural.
Nope.
All those hyphenated identities.
Those are bad.
They destroy identity.
They don't destroy identity.
They don't destroy community.
And they are not even, Philip Dineen, a threat to your Patrick.
Patrick Dineen.
Patrick Dineen, yes.
I said it and I was like a wrong first name because it's what I do.
They're not even a threat to your community.
That's the other piece of it, right?
So this is a totalizing perspective.
That is about dominating others.
It is not about liberating others.
It is not about creating the space where everybody can flourish.
If somebody asked me, Dan, what's your vision of the common good?
If once I quit cringing about notions of the common good, I'll probably say, I guess my notion is a society where as many people as possible can flourish as the people that they are.
Which means Let people form those communities they want.
Let them have the religious beliefs they want.
Let them say the things that they want.
Let them listen to the music that they want, or read the books in the library that they want, or watch what they want to watch on the internet, or do whatever, as long as I don't have to watch everything they're watching, or read everything they're reading, or believe everything they're believing, and they're not coming after my kids or my family.
That's a model.
So all of which is just to say we can fall into the trap.
They want us to fall into a trap of it's either or.
It's this moral decadence and whatever or you're a traditional Catholic, a radical traditional Catholic in this model.
It's a forced choice that's not real.
But let's do some decoding, right?
You're saying, Hey, that's domination.
And they would say, no, that's Christian love, because we know the truth.
We know how God created us.
We know he designed us for this kind of community, this kind of sex, this kind of love, this kind of gender, this kind of whatever.
So I'm not dominating you and I'm not hurting you.
I'm loving you by ordering your life, even though you don't know how to order it.
Come on!
I'm doing what God asked me to do by ordering your life.
I'm a part of the Aristoi.
I'm one of the Catholic Aristois, right?
And it's a burden.
We're not doing it because we want to.
It's a burden that we carry and, you know, we have to.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Catholic Aristois is an a cappella group that...anyway.
So, so that's what they would say, right?
It's like, I'm, I'm, and this is what you hear from every, you know, religious, xenophobe, homophobe, whoever, like, well, I'm loving you, even though you don't know that how to love yourself.
That, that is where we got liberalism.
It's because so many people were forced into a certain regime.
Okay.
So I think that's number one.
Number two, We already, Patrick Dineen's a philosopher, Dan.
He knows how to speak like an academic.
He's exceedingly vague.
When you try to like nail him down on government, he's like, he gets really kind of skittish.
We got the answer at NatCon, okay?
When, you know, Doug Wilson and Al Moller were asked, how will Hindus and Muslims fare in your Christian utopia?
They were like, eh, they won't.
Jews will, because we're so like, you know, we love the Jews so much.
That was Moller and Wilson.
So when I hear Dineen talking about the common good conservatism, what I hear is like, and supporting religious institutions, what I hear is like, One kind of religious institution, the one that fits the vision of the common good.
But if you're Hindu or Muslim or atheist, you're out of luck.
Now, Dineen's not crude.
He's not going to say it like Doug Wilson.
But we know what's lurking behind this.
We know the kinds of people he empowers.
And he chooses to be on a panel with, with, with Vance and Kevin Roberts, right?
Like, I mean, that's, that's the other piece of it.
And, and hang out with Orban.
And hang out with Orban.
Yeah, you hang out with Orban, you are on a panel with the, the, the, the...
The person behind, organizationally, Project 2025, like, come on, let's just quit with the, oh, I'm just a, I couldn't say for sure without, you know, writing three more books, the academic thing that people will do to avoid answering a question.
You can tell by the company he keeps how it would be operationalized, what that would look like.
All right.
Last bit on Vance.
And again, thanks to Tiffany Wicks for helping me do some research here this week.
So some of you are like, all right, so you told me about Vance.
He converted to Catholicism.
And on Friday, you guys basically said, if you get Vance, you get Leonard Leo.
And I stand behind that.
Like J.D.
Vance is the pick for the Leonard Leo set.
I mean, when you get J.D.
Vance, you get the Patrick Jennings of the world.
Like J.D.
Vance fits perfectly in a cohort of Clarence Thomas, of Sam Alito.
Of Patrick Dineen.
Of Leonard Leo.
Opus Dei.
The Federalist Society.
The Napa Institute.
These people are so excited about J.D.
Vance as the pick.
Period.
And I don't think the mainstream media sees that.
I don't think most people understand that this is not a hillbilly pick.
This is not a, you know, whatever.
Now, the other side of it, you're like, well, wait a minute, Brad.
You started on Friday by saying this was about Musk and Teal.
Are you forgetting about that?
And I am not.
J.D.
Vance holds two sides of the reactionary right.
And I want to just give you one more guy that we need to be aware of.
And some of you out there already know about him, and that's fine.
And if you do, this will be a review.
But if J.D.
Vance is the guy that gives you Leonard Leo and Patrick Deneen and that whole set of pre-modern Catholics, he also gives you the reactionary Silicon Valley people.
Now, you all know about Peter Thiel.
You all know about Elon Musk.
You need to know about Curtis Yarvin.
Some of you do already, that's fine.
Curtis Yarvin is the quote-unquote philosopher of the Peter Thiel, you know, entourage.
He's the guy who has been blogging for a long time.
He has this moniker, Mencius Moldbug.
He's been written about everywhere.
You can look in The Baffler, you can look at Vox, you can look at Politico.
Curtis Yarvin is not religious in the ways that Vance is, but he's a monarchist.
He has said that it would be joyous if democracy was overthrown.
He wants to get rid of all government workers.
His acronym that he put forth is Retirement all government employees.
Rage.
He wants to do what?
He wants an executive branch that is so powerful that it has sway over the entire government?
Kind of sounds like Project 2025.
It also sounds like a monarchy.
He thinks that we have gotten to a place, and this sounds like Dineen, Where life has become so defined by woke liberals in the media and in the academy that real power, real freedom, real human life cannot exist outside of the Atlantic and the New Yorker and Princeton and Harvard and Bill Gates and Microsoft and whoever.
So you know what we need?
Here's what he literally wants, a monarchy with a board of directors That's kind of an oligarchy around him.
Kind of sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO who has a board around him that helps him direct the company.
Also sounds a lot like a guy named Putin.
It very much does.
You're looking for those parallels, right?
So I'm not making this up.
He has said democracy would be good if it went.
He wants to completely change and overrun our current political system.
He thinks all government employees should be retired.
And remember when I started Friday with that quote from from J.D.
Vance saying that Donald Trump should fire all the federal workers.
And then when the Supreme Court says you're wrong, just say to them, come get me.
If I had played you the entire clip, it begins with there's this guy named Curtis Yarvin, and he's where I got that idea, essentially.
So here we have J.D.
Vance, and J.D.
Vance holds together these two reactionary right-wing movements that may seem different, but hold very similar ideas about why democracy is not a good form of government.
That is the senator who is now the VP pick of the Republican Party.
You have the Catholics.
Like Patrick Dineen, who want common good conservatism and to impose this vision, this anti-LGBTQ vision on the entire American electorate.
They want to impose things that you are like, well, what do you, what do you mean?
And common good conservative, how does that affect me?
It affects you when we have an abortion ban, when we have an IVF ban, when we have a contraception ban, when we have a ban on HRT.
Those are the things they want to do as common good conservatives.
And then you have the Silicon Valley reactionary right-wingers, the monarchists in Silicon Valley, who are like, yeah, democracy?
Not good.
We're the smart people.
We're the Silicon Valley luminaries.
We should be in charge.
Give us a CEO who's one of us.
And then give him a board of directors that'll help him figure it out.
Dan, they're both into Aristoi.
They're both into elites who will order the world for the common good who, I'm sorry, for the common man who just doesn't know how to organize their own life.
And J.D.
Vance holds both of them together.
And there's increasingly crossover between the Curtis Yarvins of the world and the Claremont Institutes of the world.
So there's a podcast with Michael Anton, the guy who's part of the Claremont Institute, and Curtis Yarvin having a discussion, right?
What I'm trying to convey to everybody is that the J.D.
Vance pick, it was just not about getting Musk his money, even though I think it's part of it.
It was not just about, oh, he's from Ohio.
Cool.
It was not just about like, you know, he's kind of good at talking about MAGA stuff.
No, like there is so much behind the J.D.
Vance pick that is so sinister.
And it makes me think that if we have to not let Donald Trump and this ticket win, Not only because Trump is a maniacal narcissist who wants to be a king and a dictator, but because the guy on his VP, the guy he chose as his VP, Is really the one that the Leonard Leos and the Peter Thiels are hoping will be president someday.
I mean, they are really hoping it's him.
Donald Trump is a way station.
If you think it will be bad with Trump, I cannot imagine if J.D.
Vance got in there and started doing this stuff that Yarvin and Dineen and the rest are influencing him to do.
So any final thoughts on this before we go to some other things?
Yeah, so first you said the Leonard Leo set and I feel like that's a good big band name.
Yeah, yeah.
Like so the Leonard Leo set.
Yeah, they're opening for the Catholic Aristoi.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.
Like it's on some variety show.
But so just a couple of things to tie this together.
So when regular people hear the word the common good, the phrase the common good, it's this incredibly Philosophically freighted word, but I think it operates as a good code because it sounds good.
Who could be opposed to the common good?
And what people need to understand is when somebody like Dineen or Vance or somebody else uses the common good, they do not mean that which is in the best interests of everybody.
Or that which will help everybody, right?
That's not what they mean by the common good.
Somebody who's what we might call a utilitarian might say, we need to have policies that, you know, help the greatest number of people in this or that way or whatever.
That's not what it means.
It is some group's particular vision of the good that will be enforced on others.
So as you're outlining this common good, if you identify as trans, this doesn't feel good.
If you're a person of color, this doesn't seem real good.
If you're a working class person, I think this is not good.
So I think that's the first thing to recognize because it can really throw people.
It can be because, you know, who wants to be opposed to the common good?
It is this this kind of code word that doesn't mean what people think it means.
And then the second one is if everyone wants to take all everything we've been talking about and distill it down and be like, OK, like I can't, you know, Labor Day, we got the cookout with with Uncle Ron.
I can't like trot out all this.
Project 2025.
Like seriously, distill it all down, put it in a pressure cooker, boil it down, and see what's left?
That is your document that says this is what it would look like.
All those intellectual currents, political currents, economic currents, ideological currents are flowing together into that one place, which is why they pushed it so hard.
It's why they've been shopping it around.
They worked really hard on this.
Now they're trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
But if you want to go to a place and see in concrete terms how all this plays out, there's the blueprint.
Well, and I think, I think what we can talk about with Project 2025 is the what and the why.
Like, I think, I think you can explain to Uncle Ron, here's what it is.
Or you can explain to your neighbor who's not sure they want to vote for Kamala Harris, you can explain it to your Your young, you know, 19-year-old son who's not sure they care to vote this time, you can explain it, right?
Anyone who's like, why should I vote?
Why Kamala Harris?
Why the Democrats?
Right?
You can just have, and there's plenty of these online, a nice little cheat sheet of what, what, what, what Project 2025 would do.
The last 40 minutes on Dineen and Vance and Yarvin is the why.
Why Project 2025?
Why would they want this?
Why would they do it?
Because friends, they're not conservative libertarians.
This is not Barry Goldwater.
This is not, you know, this is not any of the Rands.
Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, none of the Rands.
Ayn Rand, they're out.
No more libertarian laissez-faire, just let it happen.
This is common good conservatism means why Project 2025?
So we can impose order on you.
And if you're not in order, if your body's not in order, if your identity is not in order, if your marriage, your love, your desire, your sex, your family's not in order, well, we're going to get government and laws and policies to get it in order.
That is the, that is the why of Project 2025.
And I think that that's important because I think one reaction, just regular people again, or the uninitiated or somebody hears, they'll hear Project and be like, that can't be real.
There's no, there's no way.
Why would anybody do that?
Why would anybody say that?
Why would anybody think that?
And this is the, it takes, it takes a deeper dive to get the context, but this is the context.
This is the kind of social world, the thought world in which that makes sense, in which that is desirable, in which that is an ideal society.
And I think that's what helps it to just not be ridiculous, right?
It doesn't mean you agree with it, but to be able to understand it and be like, oh, that's why these people say this.
I don't agree with them.
I don't have the same vision of society that they have.
I don't have the same vision of God that they have.
I don't have the same vision of any number of things.
I think that's what helps it to seem as if it's not just crazy and therefore easily dismissed.
All right, let's take a break, come back, talk about conspiracism, American religion, and then Dan's incredible collection of memorabilia and other amazing artifacts from neoliberal America.
