Religious ‘integralists’ on the right, meet your socialist soulmates: Where, exactly, do JD Vance and Zohran Mamdani differ on “the warmth of collectivism”? (George Will, September 25, 2026, Washington Post)
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.” Integralists have no “horror of political domination and hierarchy” because law — government — must be “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.”
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.