The Experiment Failed

 I got a bit of blogging done Thursday morning, but Thrusday evening I still crashed. Nothing done with the fiction.

I talked to MW.

More annoyances at work on Thursday and today.

I made it to the group. Nothing to report there that I have not already reported.

Again, nothing was accomplished this afternoon and evening. I ordered a pizza when I finally got moving - I laid down and let my heating back work on my back.

I talked to CC but did not see her.

More blog posts were done, but I found a YouTube channel that has videos about Indiana.

I have been spending maybe a little less time with politics, but I cannot help myself.

The Influence of Austrofascism on JD Vance

The worldview many of Vance’s muses hold up as the alternative to liberalism is self-avowedly Roman Catholic. Catholicism offers anti-liberal intellectuals a way to anchor their dislike of the modern world in something bigger, a tradition that promises timeless truths and solutions to every social problem. Yet their Catholicism is much smaller than the tradition it rests on because of the way they have politicized it: Their use of the Catholic tradition is motivated by their animus against liberalism and therefore selective.

One sees this in the barely disguised admiration some of them have for twentieth-century Catholic “corporatism,” what others call clerical fascism. Corporatist regimes existed in Portugal, Spain, and Austria, and arguably Mussolini’s Italy. The influence of corporatism on today’s illiberal Catholics has been commented on and criticized by James M. Patterson, a professor at Ave Maria University. One hears echoes of corporatism in Patrick Deneen’s notion of “aristopopulism.” Gladden Pappin, another member of the illiberal clique, has even gone so far as to argue that the U.S. Senate should be restructured along corporatist lines. Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor who has called for a new “illiberal legalism,” draws heavily upon an apologist for Austria’s corporatist regime named Johannes Messner in developing his ideas about “common good constitutionalism.” Messner, a Catholic priest, was a close adviser to Austria’s interwar dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss. Obviously a problematic figure, Messner is nonetheless held in high regard in certain circles; a group dedicated to cultivating his memory has pushed to have him canonized. Among the members of this society is an Austrian-American monk named Edmund Waldstein, who has played a key role in propagating Catholic integralism; Vermeule often cites him and describes him as “brilliant.”

Indeed, anyone familiar with Austrofascism who reads how Vermeule and other Catholic integralists talk about politics and the common good is apt to experience déjà vu. The unsettling parallels suggest one can learn about their illiberal ambitions—about the ideas JD Vance’s friends have for America’s future—by studying Austrofascism. Let’s start with the foundation of Austrofascist ideology: Catholic corporatism.

This is what the Austrians got in 1933:

In an important programmatic speech, Dollfuss laid out his vision for Austria. With echoes of Vogelsang, he praised Austria’s medieval past as the “the time when the people were organized and divided according to corporations.” The neglect and decline of these corporations gave rise to the spirit of the French Revolution, where the individual was left to his own devices and money ruled all. That in turn had led to Marxism. But now, Dollfuss proclaimed, “the time of the capitalist system, the time of a liberal-capitalist economic order is gone; the time of a Marxist, materialistic seduction of the people is over. The time of parliamentarianism is past! . . . We want to live in a social, Christian, Austrian German state resting on a corporatist foundation, under strong authoritarian leadership!” 

Sound very American.... not.

More to the point, corporatist regimes were not merely experimenting with policy proposals that others might copy; they were engaged in a radical project of social transformation. The corporatist organization they envisioned aimed to embrace every aspect of society and define life’s meaning. “In the corporation,” Messner wrote, “the individual discovers himself placed in a community whose reality he experiences, which embraces him in the day to day life of his vocation, but which also shapes the entire surroundings of his life, because it determines an area of life and cultural values of a special kind.”

Wake up, people, MAGA means the end of America, not a return to greatness.

This was a first: Polite Rejection from the North Dakota Quarterly.

Thank you for sending your work to the North Dakota Quarterly. We are always excited to read new submissions, and although this is a rejection note, it should not discourage you from sending your work to other magazines. Please keep in mind that literary tastes are entirely subjective. What one editor rejects, another might be excited to publish.

Thanks again for the chance to read your work,

NDQ

That was for "The Rational Actor", which I sent them in September 2023.

Done and over-done.

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