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The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man

As vice president, J. D. Vance would elevate their disdain for American liberalism to the highest levels of government.
Source: Photograph by Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

Updated at 10:24 p.m. ET on August 8, 2024

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When journalists write about ties between Donald Trump and the religious right, they usually focus on evangelical Protestants. That emphasis makes sense, given that evangelicals make up a sizable portion of the GOP’s electoral coalition, and their enduring devotion to the morally and religiously louche Republican nominee remains more than a little shocking.

But Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate puts a spotlight on a different faction of the religious right: the so-called post-liberal Catholics, who have been Vance’s friends, allies, and interlocutors since his 2019 conversion to Catholicism (he was raised Protestant) and transformation into a MAGA Republican shortly after.

This group of Catholic intellectuals—which includes Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and an editor—is known for its sweeping attack on classical liberalism. It claims that a long list of contemporary problems (rising rates of economic inequality, drug addiction, suicide, homelessness, childlessness) can be traced back to moral-philosophical errors made centuries ago by the American Founders and their ideological progenitors. In place of our polity’s commitment to individual rights, autonomy, and pluralism, the post-liberals aim to create a society unified around the , which is itself fixed on a theological vision of .

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