Patterson Responds to Pinkoski

Law&Liberty: A Strawman and a Scotsman Walk into the Café de Flore by James M. Patterson

James Patterson @McGillPatterson responds to Pinkoski in the Integralism Debates: Part 2 https://t.co/DBeJeRiMBZ

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 11, 2020

Patterson thought it necessary to rebut Pinkoski to show that his brief summary does not implicate him in being historically ignorant of the various movements which he mentioned. Is Patterson accurate in his recounting that part of European history? If he isn't, someone will probably write a response to correct him.

As for the optics of Latin integralists being associated with Franco and thus "fascism," is Patterson really doing integralists (or neo-integralists as he labels them) justice? Or is he just trying to smear them, though not as going as far as a SJW? Did Franco really carry out an integralist program with respect to the promotion of Roman Catholicism in Spain? I am thinking that he didn't go far enough in that respect to satisfy integralists. If there was punishment of apostates and heretics by the Spanish state under Franco, someone please provide a reference.

As to the European anti-Republican tradition, readers of Law & Liberty may need his remediation; unfortunately, I have suffered through the theurgical revenge fantasies of Joseph de Maistre, the dull and repetitious condemnations of Proudhon by Juan Donoso Cortés, the aforementioned bilious and bottomless Jew-hatred of Maurras, and the real genius of Carl Schmitt deranged by his reverence for an anti-Christ. What made these figures anti-republican was their confusion of lack of republican virtue in the nations they studied—France, Spain, and Germany—with the nature of republican government itself. Tocqueville explained this problem in The Ancient Regime, as I mentioned in my original essay.

Should that tradition be styled "anti-Republican" or "anti-liberal" or even "anti-democratic"? If they were anti-Republican, could it be that they didn't think a republican form of government was possible for their countries? Perhaps they approved of republican government in the abstract.


Other than his own personal example of what is parish life, which I have already addressed, if briefly, in my previous post, Patterson relies upon the 20th ce participation of American Catholics in the system (or the state) and in ecclesial and civil organizations as evidence of republican virtue and the training of American Catholics in republican virtue. In that previous essay, he writes:

In the absence of those institutions that had once made America a place of deep faith and committed to liberty, these young men have had recourse to the Internet and attach themselves to the sublime historical experience of sacramental kingship, Iberian Falangism, or straight-up fascism supported by the general ideas purveyed by Vermeule and the like.

If those institutions no longer exist, then how are his opponents to be trained in republican virtue? Parish life isn't enough. And I would argue that the historical institutions which he cites were not sufficient either, as they failed to stop the sort of moral and political decay that the United States has fallen into.Any group or organization that actually inculcated true Republican virtue would be viewed as a threat by the state and stopped, either by the state or its proxies or allies.