I haven’t followed the debates that swirl around “integralism” closely. So this will be an amateur take by a curious bystander.
For those new to the term: integralism is an idea that has been revived in certain precincts of the Catholic right, one that is hard to state without eliciting guffaws of incredulity. Namely, that the state should be turned to the purpose of ordering society towards God. This, of course, would be to reverse the modern trajectory of secularization. Understandably, it triggers liberal cries of “theocracy” that sound hyperbolic in any other setting, but maybe aren’t too far off here. It’s almost as if the integralists were conjured by the liberal imagination to lend credence (finally!) to incantations of 300-year-old polemics by today’s guardians of progress.
You can imagine a version of integralism that would look to the Middle Ages for political inspiration. But in fact, one beef you hear against the integralists, coming from other Catholics, is that what the integralists want is something entirely modern: to leave the administrative state in place, and just seize control of it for their godly purposes. On this reading, integralism is a kind of Leninist project, insufficiently impressed with the venerable truism that power corrupts. It shares in the 20th century political culture of revolution, but with a constituency so vanishingly small that the enterprise looks comically Quixotic. Insofar as integralists tie their project of spiritual rejuvenation through state power to the doctrinal authority of the Roman Catholic Church, some Catholics worry about corruption of the Church through such entanglement with state power, on historical grounds that seem fairly compelling.
But there is another objection one can raise, from a perspective that is neither that of the liberal who is vigilant against theocracy, nor that of someone with a special concern for guarding the integrity of the Catholic Church. It goes like this: to turn the modern state to these new purposes would be to leave untouched the structural features of that state, which are the real problem. The scope for meaningful action by citizens has become so constricted that people don’t enjoy real ownership of their world, whether on the level of individual agency or of collective sovereignty. Initiative and discretion have been so crowded out by bureaucracy and expertise, wielded remotely, that the basic requirements of a dignified society cannot be met.
The worry is that, for all its apparent radicalism, there is a basic continuity between integralism and technocratic progressivism, which tends to rule by administrative fiat. This suspicion gets some heft and warrant from the collaboration of Adrian Vermeule (integralist) with Cass Sunstein (chief nudger of the Obama White House). Together they wrote a book titled Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State. It is a left-right collaboration that seems baffling until you grasp the common ground. I read Vermeule quoted (by a critic) as having said “The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism … may, by the invisible hand of Providence,” be turned to new ends.
If the nudge is a way of getting people to behave virtuously (according to the liberal table of virtues) without their having to become virtuous, because their behavior is being steered beneath the threshold of awareness, one has to ask, is something like this to be the case in the imagined new Christian polity as well? If so, would this not reproduce the vacant pseudo-citizenship we are permitted under the nudgers’ system of social cybernetics, which treats the human being as inert material to be molded by a new class of Conditioners? However much it is to be guided by Christian ends, the worry is that under this kind of politics, our thumotic capacity for overcoming obstacles, working in concert with our erotic attraction to some ideal, is left moribund and atrophying, just as it is under technocratic progressivism. Reality and its conflicts would be filtered elsewhere, so there would be little occasion for the development of practical reason and basic competence by men and women who are in full possession of their world. Unless the Christian element can limit the expansion of the “immense, tutelary power” Tocqueville warned us of, a technocratic Christian polity, like its progressive cousin, would too much resemble WALL-e world.
The subjects of such a regime would remain demoralized, in both senses: effaced as moral agents as well as dispirited. This would be to continue the frustration of our God-given capacities of reason and action. Indeed it would be to occlude the divine spark in the human, to kindle which ought to be the point of any politics meant to turn men towards God. I mean the spark whereby we participate in the generative or creative responsibility of the one in whose image we were made. I should think this is the anthropological fact upon which any non-tyrannical government must rest.
Have I gotten this wrong? I find Vermeule one of the most penetrating critics of liberalism. But if I have understood the integralist proposal correctly, I don’t find it terribly appealing.
I haven't followed the debate very closely either - it does seem to be quite specifically American - but it's interesting to me that what I've seen never refers to either of the two existing examples of Catholic integralist states from the 20th century West: Franco's Spain and De Valera's Ireland. Both attempted exactly what the integralists seem to want, which is a state turned to Catholic ends. I live in Ireland, and even today the state and Church are legally intertwined. But the news from both countries is bad: the state corrupted the church and vice versa. Here in Ireland the legacy of Magdalen laundries and a deeply oppressive version of Catholicism, backed up by the heavy hand of the state, has caused a counter-reaction so big that Ireland has become, in the blink of an eye, Europe's most progressive-integralist state instead. Here today we celebrate Pride month loudly and proudly, cheer on abortion, and were the first EU state to legalise gender self-recognition. The Catholic constitution is ritually shredded year on year and nobody but the old respects the Church, or even listens to it. I think the Catholic integralist state destroyed the Irish church. Be careful what you wish for, intellectuals ...
This is pretty much precisely right for the Vermeule strains of integralism, and a tight general criticism. There are other strands (e.g., that analyzed by Andrew Willard Jones in "Before Church and State," about the times of Louis IX; https://theworthyhouse.com/2018/12/22/book-review-before-church-and-state-a-study-of-social-order-in-the-sacramental-kingdom-of-st-louis-ix-andrew-willard-jones/). But those suffer from that we are not medieval France.
It seems to me that you hit on the key--restoring the virtue of the people. Trying to do that by installing a new operating system into the state, or installing a new type of inherently-virtuous state artificially that will by itself make the people virtuous, is a fool's errand. Any such desirable change will have to happen organically, probably after cataclysm and catastrophe of some sort (using the James Poulos typology of catastrophe-cataclysm-apocalypse, the latter in its sense of unveiling).