Antifascism 104A: Why America?

This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, ‘But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?’ He replied with total gravity—he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar—‘Yes, but in England it’s true.’ To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid. 

… If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century, the English became very conscious of such duties: the ‘white man’s burden.’ What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians. … And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties. 

—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

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But why is this even happening? How is it fascism, of all ideologies, getting a comeback tour? Weren't the upsets of Fascist Italy in 1943, Nazi Germany in 1945, and Nationalist Spain in 1974, enough to establish that this is a political dead-end?

Honestly, no—for a mixture of reasons, some more thoroughly unflattering than others. In this post I will begin to address just two of the relevant culprits. One is the nature of fascism, and the other is the history of American politics.

Let's start with that second one first. We all know, in a vague and general way, that the U.S., like a child who has thrown up only once, is not done getting racism out of its system. Our almost-definable right, infighting-riddled left, and aggressively shapeless center all insincerely and equivocally agree about that. What our various factions disagree about is what racism consists in, how it manifests itself, and how to correct it; so, most things. Two rough models of what an American might mean by racism can be described. I’ll refer to these models as the Whig and the Jacobin, because I feel like it. Most self-described conservatives in this country use the Whig model, and most self-described liberals, the Jacobin.

The Whig model defines racism as being primarily an issue of personal arrogance, prejudice, and dislike, and thus as a primarily moral issue. Racial bigotry and spite are acknowledged to be real problems and (by Christian Whigs) serious sins, but insofar as the problem is a moral one of individual attitudes, a systemic solution is neither called for nor helpful, on this view—and most Whigs, while they will allow that government interventions are occasionally necessary, maintain that the government is even less to be trusted than the individual and that its interventions (whether political or judicial) are to be avoided accordingly.

By contrast, the Jacobin model defines racism as being primarily an issue of power dynamics among groups of people. (The groups in question may be socially constructed, and so in a sense artificial, but this does not make them fake, any more than the fact that a house is a construct rather than an organic growth means the house is fake.) Racism is, primarily, a tool for keeping racial minorities—black, brown, red, or yellow—at a group-wide disadvantage as compared to whites; the occasional excelling minority person is not a threat to this system, because it is precisely occasional and exceptional. Reform of these diseased systems is therefore both necessary and appropriate as a response.

Thus you can have a Republican (Whig model) arguing with a Democrat (Jacobin model), or a Green (Jacobin model) arguing with an Independent (Whig model), and they can all be agreeing that racism is bad and yet coming away from the discussion each thinking the other is a total idiot. I don’t know that I personally have ever met a Republican who didn’t admit both that the South is pretty racist, and that that was a serious problem; but they’re basing that belief on the stereotype (fair or not) that more Southerners are personally disdainful of black people than elsewhere in the country, not that the South has more egregious systemic problems. Even if the latter were true, and acknowledged to be true by the Republicans I’ve met, it wouldn’t enter into their calculations of racism (although it might enter into their view of a society’s general healthiness, independent of its political structure). A shared term with a disputed definition is worthless. [1]

It’s no secret that I think both the Whig and the Jacobin approaches, insofar as they can be reconciled, are right; and I think they can be reconciled a lot more than many of their proponents think. Any social and political system is more than the sum of its parts, and having laws and systems that encourage (even if they cannot compel) a just outcome is desirable: that is the Jacobin side. But it must also be recognized that every system is constructed and enforced by individual people, individuals who aren’t necessarily better than anybody they’re drafting laws and policies for: that is the Whig side. I don’t consider this problem totally insoluble—but it’s a genuine problem.

But here’s the thing. American history has a lot of systemic keeping-the-coloreds-down shit in our history, quite apart from slavery. Segregation is the ur-example: ‘separate but equal’ was the mantra, but it was obvious to anyone who wanted to look that the separation was into two flagrantly unequal segments of the populace, and anyway, why have a separation in the first place if we’re equal citizens? Or there’s the Muskogee syphilis experiments, or the Japanese-American internment camps of the 1940s, or the current US policy of ripping families apart for requesting asylum (something that can only be done on US soil). The US treatment of First Nations is an equally egregious: one of the less-publicized facts about the Dakota Access Pipeline that caused so much controversy in 2016 and 2017, was the fact that it violated the territorial sovereignty of the Sioux tribes in the area, which the US had guaranteed by multiple treaties. A white-centric idea of America may have arisen from individual prejudices first; it is surely not something that can be totally eradicated by law, because laws aren’t perfect; but it is something that’s incarnated in our history, our habits, and even our laws—not just a phenomenon of individually awful human beings.

Fascist ethnonationalism plays to this. Not many people would want to go to bat for everything the US government has ever done, but not many people would want to go through and repent of all of it, either. The exercise would be exhausting. And fascism offers a way around it, a way to define all those whiny brown and black and yellow and red people as Somebody Else: as critics of America rather than wronged Americans, people whom we therefore don’t have to listen to—because who can really blame any nation for looking after itself? It’s what we have nations for, isn’t it? All of these Other People should go to their own nations if they want to complain about it!

By defining itself in terms of ethnicity and appealing to a colonial history defined by whites, modern fascism makes itself instantly appealing to people who are bothered by a sense of socio-historical guilt, but aren’t sure what to do with it, or resent it, or just find the people who talk about it insufferable. (To be fair, many people who talk about socio-historical guilt are insufferable: being right does not make a person pleasant.) It’s pretty natural that this should become appealing at some point following the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. If anything, it’s something of a miracle that it took this long to do so.

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[1] Of the two definitions, I’ll confess to having more sympathy with the Whig one, partly because it’s the understanding I grew up with, and partly because it does often seem to animate the use of the term by leftists and liberals. I mean, when a journalist or a politician calls somebody a racist, I doubt they even frequently mean ‘You participate in a system that disfavors nonwhite racial groups!’, nor would that term be very useful if they did, since (on Jacobin principles) that described basically everyone in the US. Rather, what I take them to mean is closer to ‘You’re bigoted against people of nonwhite races!’ And while we can never be completely certain of that charge, we can be certain enough to make the term a useful one.

Nonetheless, the thing that the Jacobin usage defines as racism is a real thing, and merits a term to denote it. I don’t know that I have a good alternative; ‘systemic bias,’ maybe?

Review: "Jennifer the Damned"

When my mother sat me down at the kitchen table one night, about a month before my 

class was scheduled to receive Holy Communion, I had no idea she was about to tear my world apart. My mind could not conceive of anything worse than that she was going to have to work a double shift again.

‘Jennifer, you won’t be receiving Communion with the rest of your class.’

Tiny shards of pink crystal hope exploded inside my heart, lacerating my dreams. ‘Why?’

‘Communion is not meant for us.’

‘Sister Joan says it’s meant for everyone, to save our souls from the devil.’

My mother smiled her crooked, perverse smile. ‘Jennifer, you and I … we don’t have souls.’

—Karen Ullo, Jennifer the Damned

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So not only is Catholic vampire fiction its whole own subgenre, we have a Facebook page now! We are: Karen Ullo (Jennifer the Damned), Eleanor Bourg Nicholson (A Bloody Habit), J. B. Toner (Whisper Music), and myself (Death’s Dream Kingdom). I’ll be reviewing my three compatriots’ novels, beginning here with Mrs Ullo’s book, which I got last week and whose nigh-400-pages I devoured in just a few days. (All four novels, I believe, can be purchased on Amazon; I have included direct-from-publisher links for each, both because the books are sometimes cheaper that way and because screw Amazon.)

Jennifer the Damned is set in contemporary Louisiana and California. The titular Jennifer was stolen from her birth mother by the lovely, heartless, and masterful Helen Carshaw, a vampire centuries old, who chose Jennifer as her protégé. She raises Jennifer as her own daughter—feeding her only the raw or rare meat that she can digest—and places her in Catholic school, in order to nurture her in both knowledge of God’s love for humanity and hatred that that love is withheld from the likes of them.

As the novel opens, Helen has disappeared, and Jennifer Carshaw has been in the care of a small convent of teaching nuns for a few years. She has been receiving a robustly Catholic education, and even a fairly normal high-school-misfit social experience—save that she alone is excluded from the sacraments, and especially from the Communion, that she so badly yearns for and envies her classmates for being able to access.

But Jennifer is experiencing her transfiguration into a full-fledged vampire, and the insatiable bloodlust that goes with it. The very smell of the Precious Blood at Mass drives her close to blind frenzy. Left to navigate undeath on her own, Jennifer decides to attempt a balance between her secret life as a vampire and the life she wants as a human being.

Here Be Spoilers

(Jump to Next Section to Skip Them)

The attempt, though valiant, fails. Jennifer learns a degree of self-control and develops the cunning to dispose of her kills without leaving any incriminating evidence behind, but she cannot truly balance the demands of the human life she has led till now with the new urges of the vampire: after a handful of anonymous disappearances, she loses control and kills the boy she has been dating. Around the same time, Helen’s bizarre plans, which involved turning a classmate of Jennifer’s named Jeremy into a vampire as her ‘brother,’ gradually become clearer: Jennifer despairs of ever managing a semblance of human life at home, and, as the FBI zero in on her, finding more and more evidence of her murders, she deserts the nuns and her school, adopting a false identity and telling Jeremy how to reach her later.

A few years later, while she is living in Los Angeles and working as a makeup artist, she meets someone new, a young actor named Conner who takes a shine to her. She begins toying once again with the idea of leading a human life, at least part of the time. But Jeremy, who is now experiencing his own growth into full vampire-hood, comes to find her: abandoned by their pseudo-mother, they have only each other to rely on as fellow undead. Nevertheless Jennifer opens herself up, little by little, to Conner’s increasing affection and seriousness about their relationship. Against all her prior experience, Jennifer even begins to see signs of mortality returning to her body—until her false identity is exposed and, like a pantomime demon out of a trap-door, Helen emerges. Helen informs them that she, Jennifer, has become the most pathetic of creatures, a mortal vampire, and demands that her two pseudo-children kill Conner and come with her; driven by rebellion and revenge for the humanity she took from them, they instead destroy her.

Jennifer leaves Conner, hospitalized after their confrontation with Helen, with a note expressing her regret and her love for him, and returns to Louisiana and the nuns. She confesses what she has been and done, including all her murders, and agrees to face justice, asking only to receive the Eucharist first, now that she at long last is sure she has a soul. The priest consents, she drinks the Precious Blood, and there the novel ends.

(Spoilers End)

Here Be Lit-Crit

Jennifer the Damned is comparable to Twilight in premise, yet with the superior craftsmanship of Anne Rice. It takes the psychological and spiritual gravity of being a vampire seriously, in a way that many of its rivals fail to do, even Dracula, whose vampires are indeed evil but merely evil, without the depth of a human sinner or even of a fallen angel like the possessed Weston of Perelandra. Feeling cut off from humanity not merely in a social way, but in an urgently sacramental sense, is something I’ve rarely come across outside of Rice’s work. I wonder whether the choice of Louisiana, such an important location in Interview With the Vampire, may itself be a tribute to Rice. (Louisiana has become virtually the Transylvania of Southern Gothic, also popping up in Vampire: The Requiem and the stories of Jacques St Germain).

Structurally, the novel works well enough; stylistically, though it has a few sags into cliché, it’s generally very good—better than Dracula. But where Jennifer the Damned really shines is its pacing. This is itself a cliché, I know, but I couldn’t put it down! I always needed to know what was going to happen next: I cared what happened to Jennifer and the people around her.

If the novel has weaknesses, they are two: audience grasp of the mechanics of vampirism, and the ending. Now, it is appropriate that we don’t fully understand how being a vampire works at the beginning, partly because we the readers are learning with Jennifer as the story progresses. However, a major mechanical shift away from what we had been led to think, one that’s highly plot-relevant, takes place fairly close to the end without really being foreshadowed. This leaves us feeling more like the mechanics have been fiddled with to convenience the plot, than that we are continuing to learn with Jennifer and that if we’d been a little cannier with the facts we had we might have seen this twist coming. It’s not a fatal flaw but it’s the worse of the two, in my opinion.

The other flaw is that the closing feels kind of rushed. Jennifer’s love interest in the last third of the book falls for her so quickly that I was inclined to put it down to vampire charm, but then that explanation seemed to be repudiated, which resulted in the romance coming across as over-idealized—though, to be fair, not cloying or problematic like Stephenie Meyer’s; the characters’ behavior and dialogue stays convincing. The one truly important death of the book happens with little fanfare, which was a real disappointment. And while I can’t quite bring myself to call this a problem—because if I’m truthful, it’s kind of the point of the book—I am furious over the openness of the very end! I want there to be sequels so I can find out, even indirectly, what happened.

Should You Read It?

If you are a fan of vampire literature or coming-of-age stories, definitely! All in all I give Jennifer the Damned a B+, with the note that it could’ve gotten an A- if Ullo had stuck the landing just a little better (and if there are sequels I am optimistic that she will). Go forth and buy.

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Beauty and the Horde of Ruiners

Does Belle have Stockholm Syndrome?

No.

Thank you for watching. Like, share, and subscribe to my channel. Thank you of course to all my lovely patrons, I couldn’t do this without y- … oh. You want me to actually, like, talk about the thing.

—Lindsay Ellis, Is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ About Stockholm Syndrome?

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So listen. I am here for weird, creepy readings of films. The Brazil reading of Sleeping Beauty, for example: it makes more sense to think that after Prince Philip’s capture by Maleficent, the rest of the film is an illusion crafted by her to keep him quiescent. After all, she knew about Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather (fairies so incompetent they can’t bake a single cake in secret), and Maleficent is the mistress of all evil—how plausible is it that she would leave the one person with the ability to break her revenge spell, unguarded no less [1], in a dungeon that her principal rivals can enter and leave at will? It makes much more sense to suppose that the vision of Aurora in the castle is only the beginning, and that the rest, fairies, dragon, and triumph, is still part of the vision. Prince Philip never gets out.

Or, this woman lost. Which is plausible. Sure. Sarcastic? Why would you ever think I'm being sarcastic?

Or the interpretation of 101 Dalmatians that it’s secretly a coded anti-nuclear satire, in which the dogs are the ordinary people who will be both metaphorically and literally skinned by the H-bombs crafted by the wealthy and insane elite, and—wait, this was the actual premise of a bizarre sequel to the novel? Really? Huh.

Or the incredibly uncomfortable reading of I, Robot, which, well, was just not a very good movie in the first place; but it becomes rather nauseatingly lucid if you read it as a race allegory, with the humans as white people and the robots as their black slaves. Detective Spooner is an abolitionist, not although but because he’s a racist: basically he doesn’t trust the robots to be slaves, which is an unkind but not wholly false interpretation of the original Republican Party (look up how Oregon handled the slavery controversy); meanwhile Sonny, the good robot, is a race traitor, raised to the level of human free will by a kindly, white-man’s-burden-minded scientist. Through the race lens it is a super fucked up movie, though to be fair I doubt this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

But there is a steaming cold take that I am not here for: partly because it ruins the single best Disney film ever made, yes I will fight you, but chiefly because it isn’t actually justified by the story. And that is the obnoxious ‘Beauty and the Beast is about Stockholm Syndrome and/or falls into the toxic I-can-fix-him trope’ take. [2] These takes typically rely on the fact that the Beast is savage at first, but later Belle falls in love with him. Which, yes, that’s the plot of the movie. What it isn’t is an adequate analysis of Stockholm Syndrome or the I-can-fix-him trope.

Now, there is dispute in the psychiatric and law enforcement professions about whether Stockholm Syndrome is even real; it has not been thoroughly researched and does not appear in the DSM-V. So rather than beg that question, and since the trope of abuse victim who is loyal to their abuser due to affection-based denial does have a basis in reality, independently of the events the putative disorder is named for, I’m going to refer to this trope as Frollery. Frollery, thus defined, would include all varieties of loving and trusting an abuser or believing that one can ‘fix’ an abusive partner with enough longsuffering sweetness and obedience. The question, thus re-termed, is this: is Belle a victim of Frollery?

The answer is still no: Belle maintains her freedom, her own judgment, and (most importantly) complete clarity of mind throughout.

Let’s start with Belle’s captivity in the Beast’s castle. She agrees to this under some duress—well, she suggests it under duress; the Beast either isn’t mean enough (not likely, he’s still in jerk mode at this point of the story) or isn’t cunning enough (more plausible) to suggest this; but it is still under duress, insofar as it’s to save her father from imprisonment and possible death. [3] So I’m prepared to agree that she’s being held against her will. Captivity, check.

… Except that it’s quickly made clear that she has no intention of respecting the promise she made if the Beast gets intolerable, as he does over the enchanted rose. He acts violently, maybe not toward her per se but in a way that could certainly have injured her; she leaves immediately, and to all appearances for good. Whatever implicit threat there may have been in living with the Beast, there is evidently no threat involved in leaving the Beast, implicit or explicit.

And even after he saves her from wolves, there is a clear moment of hesitation in Belle’s face over whether to take him back to the castle and patch him up, or to just leave. She chooses to take him back out of compassion—which is demonstrated even further by her repeated, point-blank refusal to accept his blame-shifting or excuses in the scene where she tends his wounds. She gives absolutely no weight to anything he says, and isn’t even intimidated by his roars of anger, insisting that no, both this situation and this narrative are going to go down her way. This is not only uncharacteristic, it’s the exact opposite of how a victim of Frollery behaves. Placating and agreeing with an abuser are the traits of Frollery, not telling him in no uncertain terms that this mess is entirely his fault.

Moreover (though this is a less important note), it’s worth pointing out—as Lindsay Ellis does in the excellent video that I’m more or less ripping off—that the animation of the Beast and the backing score after his rose-rage episode, showing a sudden devastating realization that he’s made a horrible mistake, reveals a genuine example of something that abusers like to pretend to have: genuine regret. An abuser exhibits their regret to the victim as a manipulation tactic. The Beast, though he has this beat of regret, never brings it up to Belle at all; it is shown exclusively to the audience: the Beast, in a moment where he can gain nothing by it, experiencing and exhibiting remorse. Taken together with his trying to save face with Belle in the wound-tending scene, as opposed to trying to manipulate her by saying how sorry he was that she drove him to his bad behavior, that is one of several reasons we have to credit his change of character as the film proceeds.

And speaking of that change of character, while it’s occasioned by Belle, she doesn’t prompt it. That is, she doesn’t take it upon herself to be his therapist, or threaten to leave again if the Beast doesn’t clean up his act. He feels for her, wants to be better because of her, and she responds to him actually doing that. At no point does she set out to fix him. He fixes himself. The literary parallel is Darcy's change of character in Pride and Prejudice after being called out by Elizabeth, not the dubious penitence of Christian Grey.

Grey is a Gaston type when you think about it; he only gets away with it because 

Jamie Dornan's smouldering gaze and sharp jawline and perfectly sculptured torso, 

which is set off so perfectly by the lines of suit, and, uhh, what was I talking about?

The famous library scene has been criticized on the grounds that the Beast was really just informing Belle of an additional room in the house that she hadn’t known about, which is stupid on two different levels. To begin with, him giving her the library as a gift is not just telling her about a room. It’s a transfer of ownership (i.e., what a gift is, guys). That library is now hers. She could ban the Beast from it, like he banned her from the West Wing, if the mood struck her. She could demand to take the books with her if she ever decides to leave again.

Which leads us to the second point. Belle, as she has demonstrated, is prepared to leave; she’s staying because she made an agreement, but she doesn’t think that agreement outweighs her safety. There’s no indication that the Beast could leave even if he wanted to, but even supposing he could, where is he going to go? He’s not only a monster, he’s one who has a curse to break that’s intimately connected with his castle. Other than (i) the castle itself or (ii) some of its contents (like, say, a library), what the hell was the Beast supposed to give Belle? And the choice to give her a library, i.e. something that’s transportable at least in principle, suggests that this is not an attempt to bribe her to stay. He’s doing this because he likes her and wants to do something for her that she will enjoy. Remember your fairy-tale rules: something other than genuine love wouldn’t have broken the curse.

And speaking of the agreement and of fairy-tale rules, here, as so often, the fairy-tale tellers show a very sound instinct for orthodoxy and even for canon law. Westley in The Princess Bride is a similar exemplar, quite correctly pointing out that Buttercup’s putative marriage to Humperdinck was invalidated by both defect of form and lack of consent on her part. Belle being held in the Beast’s castle is cited by some critics of the story as a diriment impediment to their possible marriage, a diriment impediment being one that voids a marriage (as distinct from a prohibitory impediment, which simply makes it an act of disobedience to the Church but still a valid marriage).

But what the crucial Canon 1089 of the Code actually states is this: No marriage can exist between a man and a woman who has been abducted or at least detained with a view of contracting marriage with her unless the woman chooses marriage of her own accord after she has been separated from the captor and established in a safe and free place. Well, the captivity itself was suggested by Belle in the first place and had nothing to do with marriage, even on the Beast’s end (since it is mutual true love that he needs, not marriage); but even if we fudged those facts, Belle was separated from the Beast and established in a safe and free place when she went to rescue her father from dying of exposure. True, her village rapidly became unsafe for her—thanks to Gaston, who had been stalking her and ignoring her No for months at least, and who is the only character in the film who does imprison her against her will, in the cellar, while he leads the townsfolk off to murder the Beast. And speaking of Gaston, his increasing violence throughout the film and especially his threat to commit Maurice does arguably bar him from ever validly marrying Belle: Canon 1103 says, A marriage is invalid if entered into because of force or grave fear from without, even if unintentionally inflicted (an ameliorating clause, but Gaston clearly can’t plead even that), so that a person is compelled to choose marriage in order to be free from it.

A last-ditch effort I’ve seen to make Beauty and the Beast problematic is the argument that Belle is self-isolating, even that she has Schizoid Personality Disorder—which is characterized by a lack of interest in relationships, detachment, apathy, and emotional coldness—on the grounds that she has no real friends in the village. This, it is argued, is why she doesn’t respond to Gaston’s advances either, and it also explains why she is more at home with a castle full of animated objects than she is in the town.

But here again, the actual facts of the film refuse to fit that narrative. For one thing, Belle does have relationships she cherishes, not only with her father Maurice but with the bookseller; she’s even shown trying to be friendly with the baker, telling him about the book she’s reading, but he shuts her down with a dismissive ‘That’s nice’ and immediate pivot to his business concerns. And the notion that Belle is emotionally self-isolating and cold is ludicrous. She’s introverted, certainly, and it doesn’t help that the villagers harp ceaselessly on her oddness, that being the only thing other than her beauty they’ve bothered to notice—of course it’s going to be hard to make friends in that environment. But she’s capable of everything from casual kindness to animals and strangers (as shown in “Bonjour!”) to finding compassion for a hideous monster. Cold, she ain’t.

Critique is so limiting and emotionally draining.

So yeah. If you want a bona fide example of Frollery romanticized and justified, try the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, or Overboard (which is a fun romp and was also Problematic Romance: The Movie before E. L. James ever set pen to royalty check). Or hell, look to something like Interview With the Vampire for a toxic romance acknowledged and deconstructed within the narrative itself. But get your grubby illiterate paws off Beauty and the Beast’s innocence, ruiners.

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[1] And don’t give me any ‘But there’d be no point in guarding him because her minions are incompetent’ stuff. She’s well aware of that after their failure with Aurora, and if Maleficent can transmogrify herself into a dragon, I decline to believe that she can’t magick up a simple home security system with fairy-oriented facial recognition software.

[2] Note that I am not saying the film couldn’t be used as a manipulative pretext by an abuser; it absolutely could. But I don’t consider ‘An abuser could lie about it’ to be a particularly damning critique of anything.

[3] Not that the Beast was planning to kill Maurice or anything. But it was a freezing, drafty cell, and Maurice was an old man.

Antifascism 103: Chinks in Catholic Armor

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged. … Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the ‘Cause’ is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true. … The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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CW: White ethnonationalist/neo-Nazi ideology and language.

This series hasn't yet addressed a different urgent question: why do Catholics keep falling for authoritarian nationalism?

And I do say keep falling; it's been a historical trend for a hundred years minimum. Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and, yes, Hitler’s Germany were all obtained with either the popular and general support of Catholics, or without effective resistance from them whether grassroots or institutional. Catholics like to cite the strong Catholic presence in the many resistance movements of Europe and the efforts of Bl Pius XII to mediate a peace; and we remember with well-earned pride Catholic heroes of both spiritual and material resistance like St Edith Stein, St Maximilian Kolbe, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Erich Klausener, Charles de Gaulle, St John Paul II, and Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg. But that pride of resistance was earned by them, not ourselves; and we must also blush for the criminal short-sightedness of Franz von Papen, the ineffectual self-interest of Ernst von Weisäcker, and, yes, the errors and miscalculations of Bl Pius XII and of Catholic bishops throughout Europe.

There are several reasons for this vulnerability, and I expect I don't have a handle on all of them. But I believe the following causes contribute:

1. Catholicism has historically been at odds with political Liberalism. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been plagued with wars over religion; taking the Peasants’ Revolt as the first outbreak, and the final defeat of the Catholic Stuart cause in Britain as the last, we could say that wars over which version of Christianity should triumph in Europe lasted, intermittently, from 1524 through 1746: two hundred and twenty-two years. Small wonder that people would want something other than religion to occupy their minds and their passions alike. As Charles Williams caustically remarked: As a virtue toleration does not yet exist, though we once thought it did. Our fathers became bored and miserable and decadent through their incessant killing, and we, the children of that killing, supposed ourselves to be convinced of charity, when, in truth, we only shuddered still at the memory of blood. [1]

The more tolerant forms of Liberalism took root in America, where pluralism was increasingly the ideal; but in Europe, Liberalism came to be defined principally by the French Revolution, whose Voltairean maxim—Écrasez l’infâme—was aimed at the Church's very existence, or at least her existence as an institution of political, social, and cultural importance. Charles Carroll in the United States, or G. K. Chesterton in Great Britain [2], could afford to be tolerant Liberals: the martyrs of Compiègne enjoyed no such luxury. Given the European situation of the papacy, it is no surprise that their outlook on Liberalism should have been, at warmest, suspicious and defensive.

But one of the results of this suspicion has been that many Catholics (especially traditionalists) are, at most, little interested in protecting the structures of any democratic society. The most romantic would like to thoroughly revive the Mediæval order, complete with not only a territorially sovereign Pope but a Holy Roman Emperor in subservience to His Holiness; others, less idealistic but equally convinced that the state should take responsibility for the moral formation of the populace, are content to advocate for a state that is explicitly and officially Catholic, and therefore prepared to abrogate freedoms of the exercise of religion, of speech and the press, and of assembly—not abolishing such things, exactly, but restricting them to religious, political, and ethnic minorities that already exist (and seeing to it that those minorities don’t get any bigger). This would, to their minds, not only effect a far more just and pious society; it would also effect many conversions—and the fact that many of them would be rather insincere conversions would hardly matter, because the sacraments work of their own power rather than through man’s belief in them [3], and people have a very great tendency to become what they are pretending to be besides, so that a Catholic state would in fact be an instrument for saving souls. Traditional-minded Catholics are by no means all of this mindset, but it does exist.

And white nationalism panders to it. Nationalists don’t care about Catholicism, traddie or otherwise, any more than anti-Liberal Catholics care about democracy [4], but nationalism offers these Catholics a lot: a way to be visibly patriotic (and thus mainstream rather than ghettoized) without subscribing to Liberal ideas about what the state is; a role in a movement that professes traditional, family-centered values (the race needs children and values mothers); a position as members of one of the seminal institutions of Western culture; even, maybe, a chance to convert an authoritarian nationalist government, and thus realize their dream of an officially Catholic state.

2. Catholicism and nationalism both recognize the value of culture and heritage. They qualify this recognition, in differing ways: Catholicism does so by subordinating every culture (at least in theory) to divine revelation, while white nationalism does so by first equating culture with race, and then ranking races from best to worst. But they share something that, to be blunt, neither Liberalism nor its godchild the modern Left are very good at recognizing: the beauty and value of the past. A great proportion of Western past, including a lot of our most magnificent and recognized art, is Catholic, which makes Catholic heritage (if not actual Catholic faith) a nice talking point for ethnonationalists who want to coöpt it. Moreover, legitimately Catholic emphases upon tradition and continuity in institutional authority, and upon the legitimate role of culture in how religion is expressed, along with the teaching that states do have a right to preserve their own existence and heritage, are easily manipulated by white nationalist conspiracy theories—especially since Catholics have a long history of troubled relationship with the Jews, often taking the form of blatant anti-Semitism.

It is certainly true that the past must be considered critically, and that is arguably the special talent of the Left. But nobody likes being criticized, even when their critics are not smugly judgmental about it; and smug judgment is arguably the besetting sin of the Left, as it is frequently the besetting sin of anybody who has good reason to be confident in their convictions. And we are so awash in patriotic myth—accurate and fabricated, innocent and corrupt, subtle and overt—that there are things to critique about America at practically every turn. Which then makes it easy for the contemporary fascist to paint all criticisms of America, or of the West, or of those aspects of Catholicism that are susceptible to an ethnonationalist slant, as nothing more than biased, whiny, ungrateful attacks on our whole culture.

3. In the last fifty years, the Republican Party has made a strong and largely successful effort to siphon the Catholic vote away from the Democratic Party. This would be insignificant in itself; except that the GOP, as the conservative voice in American politics, was inevitably going to be where racists threw their caps when civil rights reforms went through in the 50s and 60s. [5] The siphoning happened, of course, due to Roe vs Wade and the subsequent addition of the abortion rights plank to the Democratic platform—since, before then, while abortion had been a topic of political discourse, it hadn’t been a specially partisan issue (much as, say, neither Democrats nor Republicans in our day have taken up a party-wide stance on the independence of Puerto Rico).

The GOP’s decision to paint itself as the pro-life party was a stroke of cynical brilliance: brilliance, because that alone has kept a large proportion of Catholics loyal to them at any cost due to the Church’s insistence that every human being has the right to life, and despite the fact that Catholics were overwhelmingly Democrats before 1973; and cynical, because, while sincere pro-life politicians really have no option but to coöperate with the Republican cause due to the Democrats’ implacable pro-choice stance, pro-choice Republicans are a commonplace, and they can still win Catholic votes because the GOP is always dangling the carrot of maybe-they’ll-go-pro-life-one-day (or at least, the parsnip of they-won’t-introduce-bills-expanding-abortion-rights) in front of them. Cynical, too, because Republicans are reliably opposed to other aspects of a holistically pro-life approach to issues like the death penalty, and because they widely resist laws supporting access to the things that make life possible, like a living wage and universal health care—causes which the Catholic Church has also supported in no uncertain terms.

But all this just sets the stage. The massive shift of Catholics from a staunchly Democratic bloc to one split about evenly with Republicans, means that Catholics of all stripes and especially conservative Catholics have been rubbing shoulders with the racist and ethnonationalist elements that also cling to that party (GOP, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of political clout). Which in turn means that the ethnonationalists have far more opportunity to introduce the Catholics to points 1 and 2 above, as well as point 4 here.

4. The sidelining of traditionalist Catholics within the Church. I am not here saying whether sidelining traddies is good or bad. But I do think it can be said that it’s a fact. Liturgical and pastoral reforms, such as the decisions of the Second Vatican Council largely consisted in, always have their sincere opponents, and the hierarchy is generally ill-at-ease even with the most moderate and conciliatory of them. The self-styled conservatives of the Quartodeciman, Montanist, and Donatist movements all threatened (or were held to threaten) the unity of the Church from the earliest centuries of her existence, and liturgical conflicts contributed not only to the Great Schism of 1054, but to several later fissures within Orthodoxy, and at least one major rift that lead thousands of Eastern Catholics to leave full communion with Rome for the Russian Orthodox Church. It is, therefore, understandable that Catholic bishops of the last fifty years should have been wary of all devotees of the Usus Antiquior, however firm their protestations of Catholic fidelity.

And the brute fact is, not all of them have protested Catholic fidelity with much firmness. Schismatics like the Society of St Pius X, or the authors of the damagingly misinformed and insolent letter being shopped around by LifeSite accusing His Holiness of being a heretic, are only the tip of the iceberg. There are fanatical Latin Massers who deny that the Novus Ordo is a valid Mass, sedevacantists [6] who claim that every Pope since Bl Pius XII has been an impostor, and a veritable conclave of traddies who seem determined to not only excuse but canonize Catholic anti-Semitism and the Feeneyite heresy. Keep that sort of company and a lot of people are going to look at you funny.

If I may make an aside. As an Ordinariate member, I don’t know whether I’m quite eligible to be considered a traddie myself. But for what it’s worth, I certainly prefer the austere beauty of the Tridentine liturgy, even when celebrated poorly, to the typical celebration of the Novus Ordo with sloppy ritual, cartoonish music, and a homily that deserves to be slept through. The point is, I say these things about the traddie element of the Church because I think they need saying, not because I have any pleasure in saying them; and it bothers me that some people enjoy dunking on traddies, who, to do them/us justice, have been much exasperated.

Anyway, the point here is, many traditionalist Catholics feel shouldered aside by the Church as a whole and especially by the hierarchy. And the feeling of being at once deserted and betrayed is ideal soil for white supremacists to sow their tares. The people who are supposed to be helping you preserve this precious and beautiful thing have let you down. You’re the only ones who see it, the only ones who recognize the crisis. And we’re the ones who are on your side, who value what you care about. They treat you like the enemy because they don’t care what happens to this precious heritage; no, worse, they’re in cahoots with people who want to destroy it. We’re the ones you can trust. It’s the same temptation that practically always lures zealous Catholics, when they perceive the brokenness and corruption of the Church they have so long been confessing to be one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic: the temptation to re-apply the terms of the Creed, instead of believing it. Clarity is always easier to live with than mystery; and iniquity is a perennial mystery.

Like I said, this is not an exhaustive list. I’m sure there are other important factors at work here. But I dare say this is quite enough to be going on with.

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[1] The Descent of the Dove, p. 182.

[2] At any rate as of 1829, when Catholics obtained political emancipation in Britain. And though the Tudors (obviously excepting Mary) martyred a great many Catholics, the Stuarts generally preferred to live and let live outside of directly political affairs, as did the Hanovers, so that Catholics were in less danger of losing much by the hands of Liberalism than they otherwise might have done. Moreover, since the established church in England was, well, the Church of England, it was as much in the interest of Catholics as of any other religious minority to support Liberal policies, even if only cynically.

[3] This is actually an extremely ill-formed grasp of how sacraments work, but we can’t stop for a full catechesis in mysteriology right this second. For now, we must be content with this: in six of the sacraments (all but the Eucharist), the disposition of the recipient is one of the determining factors in whether it works: e.g., a person who goes to confession merely to look like a practicing member of the faith, but has no serious belief in Catholic moral or sacramental teaching, may have the words of absolution pronounced over him, but nothing objectively happens.

[4] That is, nationalists as such. There are certainly individual nationalists who care very deeply about Catholicism.

[5] I.e., I am not arguing, and don’t believe, that there’s any intrinsic connection between conservatism (whether as a philosophy or as a habit) and racism, but, in a society with a racist history like ours, people who want to push racist ideology and policy will certain use conservatism to do so. In a society with little or no racist history, people who wanted to push racist ideology and policy would most likely claim to be very modern and fashionable—whatever gets the job done, the job being mainstreaming racism.

[6] From the Latin sedes vacans or ‘empty seat,’ referring to the Holy See. (Incidentally, sedes is also where English gets the ecclesiastical term see for an episcopal seat.)