THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Vallier goes to some lengths to illustrate that contemporary integralism is not a monolithic phenomenon. Among its ranks are numbered thinkers like the distinguished British philosopher and historian Thomas Pink. He has focused explicitly on intra-Catholic arguments about the meaning of Vatican II's 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious2 (to give the declaration its full title) and what it means for the Church's relationship to the secular political order.

Pink has shown no particular interest in pushing specific political and economic programs like the corporatism typically favored by integralists. His primary concern is ad-intra (to use a Latin phrase used during discussions at Vatican II): that is, his attention is overwhelmingly upon the Church's self-understanding and then what that means for the Church's relationship with the state.

By contrast, the priority of integralists like the Harvard professor of constitutional law Adrian Vermeule is ad-extra. Such integralists are often cagey, Vallier observes, about the precise theological-political roots of their agenda. They are not, however, shy about working towards the realization of very specific political, constitutional, legal, and economic programs in the world outside the Church in ways that go far beyond anything proposed by Pink. These invariably involve rigorous use of state bureaucracies like the administrative state to reshape society in non-liberal directions.

These arrangements and goals--such as those associated with the corporate state--are largely antithetical to those which characterize the United States Constitution. If the changes desired by integralists were to be realized democratically, it would require 1) the mass conversion of a majority of Americans to Catholicism 2) plus the conscious decision of these Catholics to embrace integralism, and then 3) overcoming the presumed opposition of millions of non-Catholic Americans to integralism.

"The parallels between progressives and integralists cannot be understated."

The sheer unlikeliness of this progression makes an alternative approach more probable: that is, integralists doing what progressives have been doing since the 1900s--working to subvert the Constitution via creative reinterpretation of the Constitution and building bureaucracies that gradually neutralize the influence of political institutions identified in the Constitution. The parallels between progressives and integralists cannot be understated.

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