This is Peter. Since July 2022, I’ve published more than 230 issues of my Wikidworld newsletter on Substack. Wikidworld reimagines post-war United States history through the lens of American Catholicism, offering a new interpretation of our discontents that I’ve termed the “medievalization of American politics.”

At the center of this sturm und drang is a cadre of reactionary Catholic intellectuals, politicians, and jurists — in the present day, we may think of Adrian Vermeule, Robby George, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — who have leaned into medieval Catholic natural law traditions to launch a systematic assault on Enlightenment liberalism.

I’m reaching out to everyone now to invite you to sample Wikidworld, partly because it’s great, but also because I’m at an inflection point, shifting my gaze more into the future and to mark this transition renaming the newsletter with the new title, Catholicpunk.

In Wikidworld, I have explored the vast gap that exists in popular and academic understanding of these religious and theological foundations of the American conservative movement since the end of World War II. Few people within the secular mainstream of American politics can even comprehend the active presence of natural law moral philosophy within the sluicing undercurrents of American politics.

In his 1954 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, Harvard political theorist Louis Hartz exposed this blind spot and revealed some of its fatal contradictions. In essence, Hartz told us, our national vision, our national cosmology, lacks depth because our history as a nation lacks depth.

With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism and the Enlightenment the beginning of our history, we simply cannot interpret political activity within our own nation that does not conform to the precepts and practices of procedural liberal democracy.

But the intellectual roots of conservative culture-war Catholicism are theological and medieval, the product of a cosmology organized around hierarchy, inequality, authority and power.

We do not see conservative Catholics. But conservative Catholics see us. Which in their triumphalist gloating following Trump’s election victory has never been more clear.

Anyway, the below is what I wrote to my Wikidworld people a few minutes ago. If you’re intrigued, please check out wikidworld.substack.com. At some point, I’ll change the url to catholicpunk.substack.c…, but will probably wait a few days. I’m probably the worst person in the world at marketing myself. I’ve got only 137 subscribers to my newsletter. But almost certainly would speak to a far larger body of the unitiated. So yeah. Please give it a go!

Thanks!

Peter

___

This will be short but I wanted to let you guys know that going forward, Wikidword will be called Catholicpunk. Which I think is a cool name that evokes more of the medieval, rape-and-pillage, crusading, edgelord vibe these guys are now gorging themselves on. I don’t know. If you want to put a face to Catholicpunk as a cultural phenomenon, imagine Steve Bannon.

The election has been cathartic and liberating for me. All is now clear. I aim to go hard, because it seems to me everything is at stake, and so how can we do otherwise?

By going hard, I don’t mean channeling my anger and distress into attacking and judging others. That’s too easy. We are past the time for that. I mean channeling it into being hard-nosed in my curiosity and demanding a lot of myself in terms of what I think and write, while also responding to my adversaries with appropriate levels of sarcasm, irony, satire, and derision.

Anyway. I’m flying back from Berlin as I write and am excited to press forward tomorrow morning.