"My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA"

[Nevilledog]

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/sofia-nelson-jd-vance-trump-maga-post-liberal-right-rcna171095

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. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.

They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. 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.

To repeat, I once considered Vance a friend. We were in the same class at Yale Law School, he knew me as an openly trans person, and we remained in communication until 2021. That’s the year that he announced he would be running in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio the next year. Before running in post-liberal and neoreactionary circles, Vance was far less angry and extreme. He was also, as everybody will remember, riding the attention from his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and was a vocal and unambiguous critic of Trump, using words like “idiot” to describe Trump and “reprehensible” to describe his views on “Immigrants, Muslims, etc.”

Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneen, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance’s baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019. What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump’s racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance’s worldview.

*snip*

[TommyT139]

1. Such an important story

This is such an important story that has been slow to emerge, perhaps too late to impact election decisions for some voters. In my opinion, this danger is what the current Pope was pointing to when he seemed to endorses Kamala Harris as the "lesser evil." The Roman Catholic conservative wing - Latin Mass and all - is no friend to the poor and outcast, despite its seeming clarity on hot topics like abortion and same sex loving relations.

There is a new book, "Opus," by Gareth Gore, which goes into another aspect of the ultra right-wing "post-liberal" faction of the Roman Catholic Church. In a way, it represents the smarter, more deeply hidden minds that shaped Alito et al., and the most nefarious components of Project 2025.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gareth-gore/opus/