On Vallier, Vermeule, and straw men (Updated)

Over at his Substack, Kevin Vallier responds to my recent review at The Josias of his book All the Kingdoms of the World.  Vallier claims that I “mislead the reader” vis-à-vis his characterization of the views of Adrian Vermeule.  In particular, says Vallier, “Feser… makes several claims that make it sound as if I think Vermeule endorses violence and authoritarianism.  Feser does note at one point that I say Vermeule does not want coercion.  But that leaves the impression that I only say this in passing.”  He then cites five remarks from his book that he says show that he clearly acknowledges that Vermeule does not endorse violence.

So, have I given a misleading impression of Vallier’s treatment of Vermeule?  Not in the least.  Note, first, that I explicitly said in my review that Vallier acknowledges that Vermeule does not advocate violence.  I wrote:

Vallier tells us [that]… whether they like it or not, in order to bring their desired regime about, integralists “must use violence in ways that the Catholic Church rejects” (p. 137)…

Vallier admits that in fact “Vermeule wants to avoid coercion” and “says little about how hard integralists should fight for the ideal” (pp. 134-35).

Most of what Vallier describes is not anything Vermeule himself actually says, but only what Vallier claims would have to be done in order to realize Vermeule’s vision.

End quote.  The problem, as I show, is that Vallier also says things that give the impression that Vermeule advocates a radically revolutionary political program that manifestly could not be realized without violence.  And material of this latter sort greatly outweighs the qualifying statements Vallier makes here and there, and which he cites in his response to me.

Hence, as I noted in my review, we have page after harrowing page in Vallier’s book describing how the political program he attributes to Vermeule “probably requires abolishing democracy” (p. 136) and would entail “mass surveillance… [to] suppress dissent” (p. 150), “Chinese-level tactics” (p. 148), “modern heresy trials” (p. 149), “pressure to segregate religiously diverse populations” (p. 154), “ultra-loyal troops [to] subdue career military officials. (Hitler’s SS springs to mind)” and “youth programs to increase loyalty to their leader. (Hitler Youth springs to mind)” (p. 146), “human rights violations” and “secret police” (pp. 151-52), and “leadership purges, replete with execution, torture, and show trials. A one-party state” (p. 147).  Vallier warns that to uphold the regime Vermeule would set up, “Protestants could face heresy charges” (p. 153); that “according to integralism, Black Protestant churches have no right to exist” and “the state must decide whether to declare Black Protestant churches criminal organizations” (ibid.); and that “we should not assume that an integralist regime will treat Jews well” (ibid.). 

And so on.  Vallier concludes that “Vermeule’s integration from within requires massive violence” (p. 239).  Indeed, the political program he attributes to Vermeule is so extreme and unhinged that it is hard to see how anyone could fail to perceive that it would require massive violence.  And again, though Vallier makes a few disclaimers here and there, they are nowhere near as numerous or prominent as the detailed descriptions he gives of the coercive regime he says Vermeule’s views would entail.  When an author briefly notes here and there that Vermeule doesn’t advocate violence, but also goes on at great length about how Vermeule’s extreme political program would manifestly require massive violence, it is hardly unfair to judge that he has given his readers a misleading impression of Vermeule’s views.

Then there is the fact that Vallier’s qualifying statements are hardly full-throated.  For example, as Vallier notes in his reply to me, he concedes that “Vermeule would not suppress liberalism with violence” (p. 134).  But here is the longer passage in Vallier’s book from which that line is taken:

Vermeule wants to protect the Church from malignant states.  His method: train strong Christian leaders who will take power and defend the church.  When I have spoken with Vermeule’s defenders, often young people, they characterize his strategy as concerned chiefly with defense rather than offense.  I do not think Vermeule’s theory of liberalism allows for any such distinction.  Vermeule would not suppress liberalism with violence.  Liberalism will destroy itself.  But liberals and the liberal state can still do significant damage in the meanwhile.  Further, once liberalism dies, it could revive.

As Vermeule so evocatively claims, we must “sear the liberal faith with hot irons.”  It must not rise again.  Only a strong state combined with a strong church can complete this urgent task.  Vermeulean protectors must become conquerors.  They must then rule with an iron rod.  And so, however much Vermeule wants to avoid coercion, he is stuck with it.  Integralists must exercise hard power. (p. 134)

End quote.  The impression given here is that while Vermeule does not endorse violence and even eschews it, he does endorse a radical political program that would clearly require violence.  But as I showed in my review, the problem is not just that Vermeule does not endorse violence itself.  The problem is that Vermeule does not in the first place actually endorse the extreme political program Vallier attributes to him.

Hence, in “Integration from Within” (from which the “hot irons” remark is quoted), Vermeule is not talking about Catholic integralism, but “nonliberal” politics more generally.  Indeed, he explicitly says that “there can be no return to the integrated regime of the thirteenth century, whatever its attractions.”  Nor does he advocate any positive concrete political program of any other kind for replacing liberalism, and indeed explicitly says that the “postliberal future [is] of uncertain shape.”  Vermeule says that “for the foreseeable future, the problem will be to mitigate the spasmodic, but compulsive and repetitive, aggression of the decaying liberal state” rather than promote an alternative.  Indeed, he says that nonliberals who follow his advice will:

mainly attempt to ensure the survival of their faith communities in an interim age of exile and dispossession.  They do not evangelize or preach with a view to bringing about the birth of an entirely new regime, from within the old.  They mitigate the long defeat for those who become targets of the regime in liberalism’s twilight era, and this will surely have to be the main aim for some time to come.

End quote.  Similarly, in “A Christian Strategy,” far from endorsing the “party capture” approach that Vallier attributes to him, Vermeule says that “the Church… must stand detached from all subsidiary political commitments, willing to enter into flexible alliances of convenience with any of the parties.”  Rather than calling for going on offense with a revolutionary political program, he says that “the main proximate short-run goal must be largely one of survival.”  Rather than pushing some doctrinaire integralist vision, he emphasizes flexibility: “Christians will always have many different options for political engagement.  In some or other circumstances, one or another of them will prove best in the light of prudential judgment; none has any logical or theological priority.”

In short, Vallier is saying, “I didn’t accuse Vermeule of advocating B!  I accused him of advocating A, which will inevitably lead to B!”  And the problem is that Vermeule not only does not advocate B, he doesn’t advocate A either.

Or consider Vallier’s remark that “Vermeule has publicly declaimed all such [violent] tactics.”  Here is the passage in Valler’s book in which that remark appears:

Vermeule has publicly declaimed all such tactics.  Indeed, even in “Integration from Within” he indicates hesitancy about coercion, though what he says is curious: “It would be wrong to conclude that integration from within is a matter of coercion, as opposed to persuasion and conversion, for the distinction is so fragile as to be nearly useless.”  On the one hand, integration from within is not “a matter of coercion.”  But the distinction between coercion and noncoercion is “nearly useless” – which leaves one to wonder which tactics Vermeule has in mind. (p. 147)

End quote.  One problem here is that Vallier is misusing the word “declaim,” which literally means “to speak in an eloquent or impassioned way.”  So, the literal meaning of what Vallier says in the first line here is “Vermeule has publicly spoken in an eloquent way of all such [violent] tactics”!  Obviously, that is not what Vallier means, which is why I didn’t bother quoting this particular line. 

The more important point here, though, is this.  On the one hand, Vallier here acknowledges that Vermeule shows “hesitancy about coercion.”  But on the other hand, Vallier says that it is “curious” that Vermeule says that the distinction between coercion and persuasion is “nearly useless,” so that one “wonder[s] which tactics Vermeule has in mind.”  Since the larger context is a discussion of the violent means Vermeule’s program would allegedly require, some readers might get the impression that Vermeule might not be entirely committed to eschewing violence after all.

But here is the longer passage from Vermeule’s article “Integration from Within” where he makes the remark in question:

It would be wrong to conclude that integration from within is a matter of coercion, as opposed to persuasion and conversion, for the distinction is so fragile as to be nearly useless.  As J. F. Stephen noted, there is a type of intellectual and rhetorical “warfare” in which “the weaker opinion – the less robust and deeply seated feeling – is rooted out to the last fiber, the place where it grew being seared as with a hot iron.”  In a more recent register, we have learned from behavioral economics that agents with administrative control over default rules may nudge whole populations in desirable directions, in an exercise of “soft paternalism.”  It is a useless exercise to debate whether or not this shaping from above is best understood as coercive, or rather as an appeal to the “true” underlying preferences of the governed.

End quote.  Seen in this context, there is nothing at all “curious” about Vermeule’s remark, or remotely suggestive of violence.  On the contrary, as I noted in my review of Vallier’s book, it is clear from this passage that when Vermeule speaks of cases where the distinction between coercion and persuasion is unclear, what he actually had in mind were soft incentives of the kind liberals like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Here is another example where Vallier’s reading of Vermeule is careless to such an extent that he ends up attributing to Vermeule the opposite of what he actually said.  As I noted my review, Vallier compares Vermeule’s program to that of a Marxist revolutionary party.  Hence, in his book, Vallier writes: “Vermeule analogizes his view [of liberalism] with Karl Marx’s claims about capitalism: ‘Liberalism is inherently unstable and is structurally disposed to generate the very forces that destroy it’” (p. 127).  The remark from Vermeule is quoted from “A Christian Strategy.”  But here is the larger passage in that article in which it appears:

There are two ways of understanding [the liberal] dynamic.  One is that in the long run, liberalism undermines itself by transforming tolerance into increasingly radical intolerance of the “intolerant” – meaning those who hold illiberal views.  On this view, militant progressivism is distinct from liberalism, indeed a betrayal of it.  Such an account would make liberalism analogous to Marx’s claim about capitalism: Liberalism is inherently unstable and is structurally disposed to generate the very forces that destroy it.

A different view, and my own, is that liberal intolerance represents not the self-undermining of liberalism, but a fulfillment of its essential nature.  When a chrysalis shelters an insect that later bursts forth from it and leaves it shattered, the chrysalis has in fact fulfilled its true and predetermined end.  Liberalism of the purportedly tolerant sort is to militant progressivism as the chrysalis is to the hideous insect.

End quote.  As the reader can clearly see, in the line Vallier quotes, Vermeule is not stating his own view, but on the contrary, a view he explicitly says is “different [from his] own.”

More could be said, but that suffices to make the point.  Vallier is for the most part admirably fair-minded, and I don’t think for a moment that he intentionally misrepresents Vermeule.  But that he does in fact give a misleading characterization of Vermeule’s views, however inadvertently, there can be no doubt.  (Vallier addresses some other issues too, and says that he will address yet others in a future post.  I may return to those in a future reply.)

UPDATE 12/15: Vallier responds over at Substack.  Here’s the reply I posted at Twitter:

Sorry, but the case remains unmade. When @Vermeullarmine offers us specific models for a Christian politics to look to, he gives biblical examples like Joseph in Egypt, Esther and Mordecai, and St. Paul. Are these models of the integralist “state capture” envisaged by @kvallier? No, they involve using state power defensively, to protect a faithful minority (in the first two cases) and seeding the ground for a centuries-long change in the culture (in the case of Paul). Any “state capture” that such models could lead to are so very far down the line (perhaps centuries) that the relevant concrete cultural circumstances are impossible to predict, giving Vallier’s imagined Catholic integralist state capture scenarios no purchase. And as I keep saying, Vermeule himself does not, in any event, actually propose any such scenario. In order to attribute it to him, Vallier’s latest response has to rely in part on what other people have said, and on extrapolation from a tweet from Vermeule (despite conceding, at p. 123 of his book, that tweets and other off-the-cuff social media ephemera are not a good basis on which reconstruct someone’s considered views).