Originalism has plenty of tools within itself to advance the common good.
Professor Vermeule can better serve the cause of Catholic integralism by pairing his laudable zeal for the natural law and for statecraft as soulcraft with a statesmanly rhetorical restraint in better accord with sensibilities shaped over centuries by the democratic republican traditions of America’s providential constitution. I would respectfully suggest to the learned professor that if he continues to puckishly troll the American democratic and scholarly publics with visions of an authoritarian bureaucracy that suppresses all vices, the integralist project he has seemingly made his life’s work risks being the work of a hero with a tragic flaw—an admirably pious and zealous, impressively clever, scorchingly witty, but recklessly imprudent crusader for Christendom who “violently bloweth his nose, and bringeth out blood.”
The question to be asked of integralists: "How many divisions do you have?" Do they realize they have no political power to implement their "ideals" at the national level or even at the state level? If we need political theorists doing intellectual work, it's to continue the work of Aristotle and the localists, and to look for concrete solutions to oligarchy in specific places.
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