Where Zohran Mamdani and JD Vance Find Unexpected Common Ground

Undeterred by the axiom that there can be indecent exposure of the mind as well as the body, the Democratic Socialists of America candidly announce their agenda. Religious “integralists” should be similarly explicit.DSAers want to scrap the Constitution in order to facilitate confiscating wealth, private property, and other impediments to government-enforced equality and social perfection. Christian integralists, who are disproportionately Catholic, are devout and determined to make the nation more so. They would enliven politics if they would specify the measures they advocate to (as they mistakenly say) return America to being a “Christian nation.”Integralists want to integrate spiritual and temporal (government) power, subordinating the latter to the former. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, the most intellectually interesting integralist, opposes “the relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy,” and those who are “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution.” Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule giving the 2018 Chorley Lecture. LSE Law via Wikimedia Commons CC3.0Integralists have no “horror of political domination and hierarchy” because law — government — must be “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.”Mr. Vermeule’s constitutionalism aims not to “protect liberty” as “an end in itself,” because “constraints on power are good only derivatively,” by serving the integralist agenda, which requires robust parental government. Government should “direct” individuals and society toward virtuous living through “respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function.” Well.All societies somewhat legislate morality by prescribing and proscribing, and otherwise encouraging and discouraging, certain behaviors. Classically liberal societies do this tentatively and warily. Vermeulean integralists promise to do this directing enthusiastically and comprehensively. So, consider:One reason abortions occur more frequently since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade is the almost simultaneous mass availability of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. While pursuing a national abortion ban, integralists presumably would want to ban this.Mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 19, 2026. Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Brooklyn Academy of MusicAnd to make divorce — putting asunder what God has joined — more difficult. The road to Roe in 1973 was paved by the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision overturning a Connecticut integralist law affirming that state’s moral objections to contraception. The regime change today’s integralists envision might protect states’ rights to use such laws to bolster community values, solidarity, and natalism.Mr. Vermeule notes that in 1811 the influential New York Supreme Court chief justice, James Kent, wrote the opinion upholding a conviction for blasphemy against Jesus. An integralist regime might favor, as New York did, laws criminalizing blasphemy as an offense against public peace and morals.“Blue laws” once restricted work, commerce and pleasure on Sundays. Until 1934, Pennsylvania’s piety prevented the Pirates and Phillies from playing home games on the Sabbath. Integralists could court, and probably achieve, martyrdom by banning all NFL Sunday games.DSA radicalism is ethereal because of society’s thickness, the rootedness of America’s social arrangements built by, and for the perpetuation of, private property bolstering individual striving. Integralists’ unreal radicalism presumes a root-and-branch rejection of all jurisprudence construing the First Amendment’s proscription of “establishment” of religion. School prayers again? Of course, as 50 state governments write them.Integralists illustrate the “horseshoe” rather than the linear conception of the political spectrum: Integralism and socialism bend toward each other. Mr. Vermeule: “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.”“The bureaucracy,” Mr. Vermeule promises, “will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule,” protecting “atomized individuals” from, among other things, “corporate exploitation.” Where, one wonders, do the devout integralist vice president, JD Vance, and New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, differ concerning what the mayor calls “the warmth of collectivism”?An integralist might oppose immigration and a socialist might oppose economic disparities for similar reasons: Both favor government-enforced social homogeneity. Neither agrees with Robert Frost, who opposed the urge to “homogenize society,” because, he said, “I want the cream to rise.”Integralists who speak, as Mr. Vance does, of “the Christian foundation of this country,” are baptizing the Founders without their permission. The six most important — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton — held, tepidly, various flavors of deism, which says a clockmaker deity got the universe going, then His attention wandered. The six tended toward unitarianism, the watery belief that there is at most one God.Integralists, like socialists, promise political transformations that will achieve salvation for our fallen world. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Integralists, like socialists, are more ambitious.The Washington Post

Where Zohran Mamdani and JD Vance Find Unexpected Common Ground

Where Zohran Mamdani and JD Vance Find Unexpected Common Ground

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