Modern politics go to extremes.
There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that modern thought likes to draw far-reaching conclusions from a few simple principles. In the natural sciences, where exact verification is possible, it has been extremely productive.
In politics, it leads to insanity.
That’s what has happened to liberalism. It once seemed moderate, practical, and reform-minded. Its belief in the rule of law and constitutional protections for individual rights seemed part of that. But the logic of those principles said otherwise. Liberal rights famously evolve, and they trump practical considerations, so the liberal right to equal freedom eventually comes to require the eradication of all traditionally accepted human distinctions.
The result is that liberal rationality has gone insane, and liberalism itself has become extreme and illiberal.
The Great Awokening, which began in earnest a decade or so ago and reached its peak in 2020, was the collapse of liberal moderation in favor of the progressive radicalism that now dominates respectable opinion. The latter has softened a bit, at least temporarily, but the former seems unlikely to return. Basic liberal commitments leave no principled case to make against radicalism. “You’re right, but you’re in too much of a hurry” is not a winning political slogan in the face of what have come to be considered the demands of basic justice and decency.
But is Catholic political thought different? Does it also go to extremes, at least when it can? Influential people think so. Are they right?
Standards of extremism vary. Rejection of transgenderism is commonly considered extreme today. And even people who are willing to concede some legitimacy to that position are likely to consider those who think there are differences between the sexes that sometimes give men a legitimate advantage—for example, in the military—to be simply bigots.
Others, of course, believe that today’s progressive views demonstrate deep deficiencies in public thought. Sexual differences go back to Adam and Eve, and perhaps hundreds of millions of years before that. What sense, they ask, does it make to consider them a human construction with no special significance?
Such disputes are notoriously difficult to decide in a way that seems rational to both sides. We should nonetheless make the attempt.
Concepts such as God, sin, and “no salvation outside the Church” certainly have extreme aspects. And the saints are known for doing extreme things. If Catholic social and political views follow from basic Catholic beliefs, as they should, it seems they would have extreme aspects as well.
But there are other considerations. One is the Christian injunction to respect the powers that be. That injunction has been ingrained among Catholics to a degree some have found excessive, as with the 1933 Reichskonkordat with Germany and the current Vatican deal with China. So it has sometimes led to a degree of cooperation with extremist regimes, to the extent needed to secure permission for the Church to operate. Even so, it leaves little room for the Church to pursue its own forms of political extremism.
Another is that Catholic thought insists on the human tendency to make a mess of things, and the acute need for each of us to guard against that tendency. An implication of that insistence is an emphasis on caution in practical affairs, including politics.
Still another consideration is the emphasis on the authority of the hierarchy, which values its independence from secular powers, and whose training and concerns differ radically from those of politicians and secular officials. These qualities favor a generally arm’s-length approach to practical politics. In addition, the Catholic hierarchy runs a very large and very ancient organization, so its members have personal as well as long institutional experience of the practical difficulties of governing. That experience inculcates realism.
The most basic consideration, perhaps, is that Catholicism is not fundamentally about politics, and does not put its hope there. Some very influential people in the Church have been trying to change that in recent decades: consider, for example, the pronouncements of the Synod on Synodality, which seem to make the Faith mostly a matter of promoting solutions to global social problems, as defined from a progressive perspective.
But this politicizing tendency is likely to be transitory, and is not truly radical in any event. Whatever may have been true decades ago, the people now attached to such projects are mostly aging religious professionals who are more interested in their careers and the memories of their youth than radical social transformation. As such, their “radicalism” is likely to consist mostly of verbal support for progressive initiatives such as unrestricted migration that are already being pushed by powerful mainstream institutions.
That situation is unlikely to change. Ordinary people—and talented young people choosing careers—probably will not bother with the Church if she only tells them the same things as secular political movements, but with the addition of religious rhetoric, baggage from the past that must constantly be explained away, and a requirement, however vestigial, of obedience. So the effort to make the Church basically about the progressive version of social justice means a weak and imitative church run by mediocrities. Such a church can pose no threat of extremism.
It seems clear, then, that Catholicism is fundamentally biased against political extremism. But how, as a practical matter, has that worked out?
To start with, the grossest form of extremism—terrorism or religiously motivated violence—has been rare among Catholics. The Rhineland Massacres during the Crusades provide an example. But mindless mob violence partially motivated by greed is not usually counted as terrorism or even as political.
The Gunpowder Plot, in which Catholics plotted to blow up the House of Lords as part of a scheme to bring about a Catholic restoration, and the Catholic anti-communist group Black Hand in Slovenia, which was active during the Second World War, are more distinct examples of terrorist efforts. During the latter period, many Catholics—notably in Croatia—also supported right-wing regimes that engaged in terrorist conduct. But the support was, in most cases, a response to violence in a period in which good alternatives seemed hard to find.
That’s not many clear-cut examples, and it’s hard to think of others other than a very few violent anti-abortion activists. Some Catholics, including clerics, aligned themselves with violent revolutionaries under the inspiration of liberation theology during the post-1965 period. But it is not clear how often that went beyond verbal expressions of sympathy with movements whose basic inspiration was not Catholic at all.
Compared with secular and certain other religious tendencies, Catholics and Catholic organizations seem unusually resistant to the appeal of political violence.
But what about Catholic political behavior when aligned with power?
Integralism, which might be defined as the view that Catholicism ought to play a political role rather like that now played by the liberal conception of human rights, is commonly considered extreme. And indeed a pope like Innocent III exercised extensive political power—organizing crusades, intervening in the choice of emperors, annulling Magna Carta, and so on.
But some view of man and the world always provides the setting for politics. Why is Catholicism a worse choice than an ever-changing understanding of human rights that easily becomes overreaching? The question is not whether there is a social orthodoxy—there always is, in any reasonably coherent and functional society—but what the consequences of whatever the orthodoxy might be.
And in fact, Catholic rule has generally been comparatively mild. As the Germans said when there were Prince-Bishops, “Es ist gut leben unter dem Krummstab”—it’s good to live under the crozier. The example thought to demonstrate the essential extremism of Catholicism is the Inquisition, and prosecutions for heresy generally. But when stripped of Black Legends and other exaggerations, such conduct seems much more limited than recent secular persecutions of opinion.
Liberalism itself has persecuted opinion, sometimes violently, as during the French Revolution, and sometimes not violently but nonetheless steadily, as in present-day Britain.
Neither theory nor history suggests that a religion that places its ultimate hope in God’s action is more at risk of abusive conduct—which is, perhaps, the best definition of extremism—than secular faiths that put their hope in the organized physical force of state action.
What reason is there to think otherwise?
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Some good points about the Leftist extremism of Democrats, but little about Republicans vectoring too far right. Balance?
Honestly speaking, I’m not sure that the average Republican is an extremist. For many decades, neocons and RINOs steered the party, and there was not really much of a difference between the parties from a practical standpoint. I think Republicans are moving from the center & center/left to the right, which is actually an appropriate course correction. We should be upholding the rule of law, deporting illegals, and offering economic opportunities for people. I think that half of the issues in our country would disappear relatively quickly if people were thriving economically.
Yes,upholding the rule of law, deporting illegals,but adhering to the Constitution. For example, tariffs are a tax, which according to the Constitution are the realm of the Congress, not the President. Being conservative and Right Wing are not the same. Mussolini was not a conservative. He was a right Wing dictator. Supporting right wing dictators is not “conservative.”
Mussolini was a fascist, so he was left wing, not right wing.
Mussolini and Hitler were right wing. Stalin was Left Wing. All were deplorable.
Since when was Mussolini left wing? Read History! Or has Trump changed that too?
“tariffs are a tax, which according to the Constitution are the realm of the Congress, not the President. ”
Several statutes that may authorize the President or an executive agency to impose tariffs under various circumstances are currently in effect. Here are six: Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962; Sections 122, 201, and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974; Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930; and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. These laws afford varying degrees of discretion to the President. For example, some of these statutes require an executive agency to conduct an investigation and make certain findings as a prerequisite to raising tariffs.
Congress should have some input on an issue of taxation. Trump is filling a vacuum due to the cowardice and incompetence of Congress. It would have gone much better had there been a well planned grand strategy, rather than emotional, shoot from the hip type tariffs. The tariff action with Canada appeared to be emotional bullying, rather than planned targeting of certain industries.
Many of the tariffs made no sense, such as with Kenya and coffee. We don’t grow coffee in the US. Why punish Kenya?
You praise Trump no matter how little sense his trade policies make. I could agree with Trump tariffs if they made sense.
Where is this happening?
You really need to get help for your political hallucinations.
What do you mean?
I write about the left because I take them more seriously than the right. Their views seem to me more unified, and they align more with dominant tendencies in public thought. The right as it actually exists seems to me more reactive and lacking in vision. So it’s harder to see it as an a live alternative to an overall Catholic view of things.
Maybe it’s simplest to say that progressivism is a substitute for religion. There’s no real equivalent to that on the right. So I’m more concerned about the left.
The left is not “unified”, it’s conformist. There’s a reason they are described as hive-minded and with the “NPC” meme. Their “locus of identity” is pathologically external. It’s also why something like the “Talking Points Memo”, which debuted 11/12/2000 and still persists and why that political cohort constantly cries for “leadership” (by which they mean submission to an approved position, enforced through coercion or violence if necessary). They also have a tendency to call for “vision” which is equally nebulous.
Of course, assuming that political sentiments are unidimensional and can be depicted along a line segment is a gross oversimplification, perhaps worse than those bowling ball on a bed sheet depictions of how mass distorts space-time to produce gravity. Political sentiments might be mapped in a geometric object, but it would be in a tesseract or higher dimensional hypercube, not on a line segment. It’s especially noxious when one assumes that “the center” is correct or amiable.
People have all sorts of preferences that combine into final disposition.
I find that those who are practical atheists i.e. have no lived experience/relationship with God evetually wind up worshipping the Self and the State. Worship of God tempers both.
MAGA seems to ring of state worship!
That’s your thing.
How long have you suffered from political tinnitus?
Speaking of foot stomping and holding your ground Nancy has finally announced her retirement.
That’s good news. Thank you.
Extremism, or “complexity”?
We live in an era of photo ops, slogans, abbreviated “texting” and memes. Is the term “extremism” also a meme? Does it falsely imply a middle ground when (as Kalb affirms) the reality of the incarnate Jesus Christ cannot be reduced to a middle ground between political “extremes”?
Take, for example, the passing remark that Pope Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta. Extremism, or complexity…
The Magna Carta arose in a complicated context. It’s a listing of rights violated by King John, based on the earlier Charter of Rights granted by Henry I. The principal author of the Magna Carta was Stephen Langton, a Catholic archbishop (!). The broad intricacy of Church-State entanglement involved papal financial expectations from England to help prevent the German Hohenstaufen dynasty from taking Sicily, plus threats of interdict and invasion, plus the fact that King John had made England a papal fief, plus the immediate fact that Langton’s pope (Innocent III) then opposed the Magna Carta as having been extracted under duress by the barons (whom he excommunicated), and under oath which the pope regarded as invalid without his sanction. A revised version was produced in 1225 (Innocent died in 1216).
Complexity and selective optics? Media-driven politics today, (the 24-hour news cycle) is crippled by near-sightedness and amnesia, and could learn from the fact that the early 17th-century scientific world produced the twin inventions of the microscope and the telescope. Together, a complex and yet coherent picture.
It’s almost as if the Second Vatican Council was onto something when it combined “aggiornamento” (engagement with the world) together with “ressourcement” (a return to sources–like the well-grounded Church Fathers and the historicity of the Gospels and the witnessed Incarnation).
In politics, it leads to insanity. What does? Modern thought that draws extreme conclusions from simple principles, basing its hopes on the physical force of state action (synopsis on Kalb opening argument).
From this writer’s perspective Catholicism has reduced itself amid the influence of modernism, as might be predicted by Pius X into a whining puppy. Faith in God Kalb says does not risk abuse of opinion as seriously as liberalism. Perhaps the closing query whether we might think otherwise may be best responded by regarding our voice, loud and clear in remembrance and deference to the early Church in not too distant circumstances.
No mention of Saul Alinsky?
To what end need he be mentioned?
By otherwise, I agree with Kalb, although I include reference to the interpretation by liberals that the simple difference of belief in context of opinion is perceived as an illegal attack on democracy, which leaves Catholics with little option other than standing openly and strong on what we’ve been commissioned to witness to.
Political extremism exists on BOTH sides of the spectrum and both are equally dangerous in different ways and must be exposed and avoided. Catholics are misled and used by both ends. To be anti ( you fill in a name ) does not automatically make one pro ( you fill in a name). Many on this site can’t seem to get this through their heads. As Catholics we must stand with ALL of the teachings of the Church which frequently cross party lines. It’s time to stop rationalizing actions and ideals which are not in line with Catholic teachings. Pro life and pro environment, for instance, both are part of our teaching and should be upheld. Some issues are more important than others, but that does not mean that some should be ignored or rejected. Not all people need to work on all issues, not all are called to the same ministries. Scripture teaches us that there are many members of the body and all are important and none should be scorned. To be pro one doesn’t mean you are anti another. It’s time to work together and try to understand each other with respect and charity. There’s a lot of work to be done and much can be accepted if we all work together for the common good. We have a new Pope and we must be willing to listen to him and work with him. We don’t need to agree with him all the time, but we must respect, love and support him. His job is not an easy one and we must not question his every move or motive. He’s human and will make mistakes. If we can’t give him the benefit of doubt,perhaps it would be best for all to leave the Church and join others of like minds. Our in fighting is used by the Devil to cause the world to mock us so they will not take us seriously. Why be a Catholic if this is the way they act? The world is watching our every move and our actions should be in line with our words. Enough said. I am trying to change, are you?
Do you have anything but tedious hyperventilation and tu quoque arguments?
Extremism means absolutely nothing. If you insist that the law should protect the unborn, you are an “extremist”, if you believe marriage is between one man and one woman and is indissoluble except by death, you are an “extremist”. If you believe that a person is born with an immutable sex and attempts to alter it are merely mutilation, you are an “extremist”.
In a relativistic society where even the most objective fact is be seen through the lens of private belief, the temptation to argumentum ad temperantiam argument is deep, but it’s still a fallacy. In spite of what one Brittany Marshall “tweeted” five years ago 2+2 always equals four.