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Opus Dei could school the neoreaction

I believe I first heard of Opus Dei in 1999 when I was working on a political campaign with a good friend who I would describe as a “devout” Catholic. I was interested in the Church at the time, mainly for its central place in the history of the West. My friend and I had numerous late-night discussions (beer for him, martinis for me) about history, politics and the Church. One night after we’d had a few he asked, “Have you ever heard of Opus Dei?” I hadn’t.

He told me a fairly amusing story about how Opus had tried to recruit him during his distinguished undergraduate career at Georgetown University. Someone invited him to an event at the Georgetown Opus Dei “Center for Men” and he hung out there a bit, but never seriously considered joining.

“Two interesting things about them,” he told me. “One, these guys would only drank one beer, then stop. Two, they had the Washington Post in the lounge, but the ads for women’s lingerie had been cut out.”

Despite his own intense faith, this wasn’t for him. He was at the School of Foreign Service studying to be a diplomat. Detractors of Opus Dei love to shout that it tries to recruit the best and brightest young Catholics who are planning to go into international relations, law, politics and journalism.

Of course, MSNBCBS, the Department of State, Senators and NGOs try and recruit the same set of people to work for them, but they’re Righteous Progressive Warriors for Peace and Justice, so that’s just fine.

My friend still had a copy of Camino they gave him, and he gave it to me to read. After that, I did some more research on the organization and its founder, Saint Josemaria Escriva.

At any rate, this post is not meant as a thorough history of Opus. The Wiki bio of Escriva is a pretty balanced presentation of the history and development of the movement. Some years later I read Dan Brown’s excrescence of a book and was much amused by the albino Opus Dei assassin. The traitorous FBI agent Robert Hannsen was a member, for what it’s worth.

At this point, the reader may fairly ask, what the hell has all this to do with Neoreaction? “NRx” is a mainly internet-based socio-politico-philosophical inquiry, not a religious order, has no leader that can be discerned, no structure, no history, no monuments or even office space. Opus has this:

opus-dei-hq-new-yorkBut here’s the crux (think about what that means): Neoreaction can only affect society if it gets elites to support its ideas, intellectually, financially and eventually physically. Right now, Western elites, the Princeton-Harvard-Yale-DC-Oxford-Davos-Brussels axis, are about 99.44% pure Cathedral Prog, (with a Ted Cruz thrown in for color). The tip of the NRx spear realizes that its real mission, at this point, is to recruit elites as supporters (or at least, sympathizers. Opus calls them “collaborators”). The Neoreaction doesn’t seek political power within the current liberal democratic nation-state systems of the West, nor is it a mass movement, nor is it interested in “members” who aren’t very intelligent. Like Opus Dei, NRx has a certain exclusivity that keeps it lean and focused, and at the same time seems to make even intelligent opposition lose objectivity.

Opus and the NRx bring out something primal in “Progressives,” because they’re impervious: men without shame or fear or guilt, at least of the kind that Progs use as a rhetorical hammer to threaten and bludgeon their opposition. “Conservatives” can’t stand for long against charges of racism or sexism or ableism or whate’er, because they’re liberals. Nothing enrages the Progs like a person who refuses to be intellectually cowed by charges of “hate.” A powerful, organized group of such people is their deepest secret fear.

Neoreaction isn’t there, yet, not by a long way. It might take some steps by imposing more demands on its followers, the same way that Opus does, and all the successful religions do. The “Mainline Protestants” have withered in direct proportion to their embrace of “inclusiveness” and their depiction of Jesus as your Special Boyfriend who won’t judge you, and who will always take you back despite the fact you cheated on Him.

Opus Dei demands you sleep on the floor once a week, arise the instant the alarm goes off and dedicate your every waking moment to excellence and to raising up your daily work to God.

There’s a hint of this in some Neoreactionary blogs, lately. While they have different forms, organization (or lack of it), and goals, Opus Dei and the Neoreaction have in common a distaste for the disgusting aspects of modernity and an ethos of raising up the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Of right reason guiding a right social order. Neoreactionaries need emulate Opus Dei in this way: to raise their standards, to conduct themselves as elites and to improve themselves physically, mentally and spiritually. The best way to spread the word is by living example.

Guest hosting the Mike Church Show again on Friday

I’ll be back on Sirius XM Patriot 125 this Friday hosting the Mike Church Show from 6-9 AM.

So far I’ve got Bill Kauffman, Slate’s Betsy Woodruff, and Mike Godwin (yes, that one) lined up, so don’t miss it.

Friday is also the day when, in 1649, King Charles the Martyr was executed, so I’ll have to find some way to work that in.

Update: The other two guests tomorrow morning will be John Gay, of The National Interest, and radio host Steve Deace. The order starting at 6:30 will be Woodruff, Godwin, Deace, Gay, then Kauffman. If you’d like to call in, the number’s 866-95-PATRIOT.

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Thanks, and Happy New Year

A new year is cause for thanksgiving and rededication, so here’s a dog’s breakfast of housekeeping and personal things. The blog is now a little over eight months old, and has grown from just myself to the 19 bylines we’ve had since then. So first of all, my thanks go out to everyone who’s contributed a piece this past year. This blog would not be what it is without you. I learn a lot from all of you, and I value your ideas. In case you were wondering, the undisputed traffic king around these parts is Rob, especially for his posts on Gamergate. Here’s to more in 2015, and those reading this who have not published here but might be interested in doing so, please contact me.

Secondly, thanks to all our readers and those who have linked or blogroll’d us. To name some of them roughly in order of the traffic they’ve sent us: Marginal Revolution, Nick Land, Free Northerner, Scott Alexander, Ace of Spades, Social Matter, Nick Steves, Robert Stacey McCain, Real Clear Policy, and Ed Sebesta, bullier of churches, who despite putting up two posts about me sent us a grand total of 39 visitors. Sorry nobody reads you Ed!

We’re averaging over a thousand pageviews a day now, which is awesome.

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On a personal note, yesterday I was received into the Catholic Church at St. Luke’s at Immaculate Conception, an Ordinariate parish in Shaw, not far from where I live. I went into some of the reasons why I became a lapsed Anglican in this post, largely out of suspicion of the neoconservative sympathies of many leaders of the Anglican realignment in the DC area. I still think they were and are right to flee the Episcopal Church and its tyrannical leadership. Episcopalianism is historically a religion of American elites, and as the elite consensus has shifted further to the left, it faced a choice between Christian orthodoxy and its historic class affinities. The Episcopal Church made the wrong one. TEC is resolutely pro-abortion and its health ministry is helping to implement Obamacare; Gene Robinson and the NEHM’s director are fellows at the Center for American Progress.

However, it is not at all clear to me that people like Fred Barnes, Michael Gerson, Howard Ahmanson Jr., and other politically connected movers in the Anglican realignment have any particular concern for what we in the Ordinariate call “Anglican patrimony.” In fact, they seem to see the matter as just another front in the culture wars. Those first two, among others, were chief propagandists for the disastrous second Iraq invasion, which has reduced the Christian population of Iraq by around a million. Most disturbingly, there is evidence that Barnes, Ken Starr, Mort Kondracke, and the rector of my family’s parish put themselves under the instruction of Jerry Leachman, who is, to put it mildly, certainly not an Anglican. It seemed to me that leaving the Democratic Party at prayer, only to become the Republican Party at prayer, was not going very far at all. I had always been against abortion and preemptive war, for the same reason.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all, and many have admitted after the fact that the Iraq invasion was a catastrophe. But if this doesn’t speak to a crisis of authority, I’m not sure what would. When reporting the above for a piece I ended up withdrawing for personal reasons, I couldn’t help but compare Rev. Yates’ response to me on the Iraq war — that it had gone badly, but that weighing in on matters political was unwise in such an influential congregation — to Michael Novak’s fruitless petition to the Vatican in 2003. The Holy Father, at least, was able to speak the truth about injustice without worrying about offending powerful congregants in the media or civil service.

Not long after I put up that post, news broke that there will probably never be another Lambeth Conference, due mostly to TEC’s desire to hew more closely to the Democratic Party than the rest of the Anglican Communion. Around the same time a friend informed me that St. Luke’s, once an Episcopalian congregation that converted, was moving from Bladensburg to downtown, on my way to work. Given the above, I took this to mean that the Catholic Church wasn’t going to leave me behind, and knew it would be wrong not to honor that. At that point it was a matter of putting my money where my mouth was.

I received the Eucharist for the first time yesterday, and to put all this behind me is truly a gift from God. I encourage anyone else who’s been disturbed by any of the above to do the same. There is peace and security in the Universal Church.

The picture above is of St. Alban Roe, whose name I took during confirmation, a martyr of the English counter-reformation, hung at Tyburn during the Long Parliament for the crime of being a priest. A convert himself, he is described by the main sources as being “remarkably chearful and facetious even in the midst of his sufferings.” Here’s the exchange he had on the gallows, from Bishop Richard Challoner’s account:

“Pray sir,” said Mr. Roe, “if I will conform to your religion, and go to church, will you secure me my life?”

“That I will,” said the sheriff, “upon my word my life for yours if you will but do that.”

“See then,” said Mr. Roe, turning to the people, “what the crime is for which I am to die, and whether my religion be not my only treason.”

Bp. Challoner’s says his speech from the gallows was taken to parliament and stored there, but it hasn’t been found. He is occasionally pictured with a playing card, in reference to him gambling while in prison, betting small prayers instead of money.

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To get back to business (blogness), I’d like to hear from you, reader. If there are changes you’d like to see, topics you’d like to see covered, writers we should get, or have any other kind of comment or criticism, please sound off in the comments.

Guest hosting the Mike Church show Monday and Tuesday

Tune in tomorrow and Tuesday morning to Sirius XM Patriot from 6-9 AM, I’ll be hosting the Mike Church Show. Many thanks to Mike and Paul for the opportunity. Still finalizing the lineup of guests, but a few I’ve confirmed are CEI/Real Clear Radio Hour’s Bill Frezza on Uber and New Zealand’s economy, Mediaite’s Andrew Kirell talking about the year in media, and Aaron Houston on the state of DC pot legalization.

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Leave the 24 hour Christmas music cycle alone

The season of joy is here. And while many of the same troubles that have beleaguered mankind since antiquity (wars, famine, suffering) are still afflicting much of the globe, Christmas continues unabated. Department stores are decked out in green and red. Multi-colored lights decorate houses in middle class neighborhoods. Makeshift Christmas tree shops have sprung up in vacant parking lots. Children are excitedly begging their parents for the latest and greatest gizmo. Brightness is all around.

In present-day America, the Christmas season is known for another tradition: 24-hour holiday music playing on local radio stations. Like many staples of life, the continual playing of festive tunes is met with a fair amount of derision. There are a few reasons for this. The digital revolution is slowly making FM radio obsolete. These days almost everyone opts for their own music rather than the pre-set choices on corporate airwaves. Not only that, but growing secularism and rampant consumerism have eaten away at the real meaning of Christmas. Luke 2:8-14 seems quaint compared to the new Xbox, or whatever video game system is poisoning young minds these days.

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Coming of age with The American Conservative

I must begin by thanking Jordan Bloom for the invitation to become a contributor to The Mitrailleuse. Some readers may know me from my intermittent blogging from about 2009 to 2011 for The American Conservative. Others might even know me for my frequent appearances in roughly the same period at Mondoweiss. And perhaps a few might know me for my first book that was released in 2011, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism. In April, the book I’ve been at work on ever since will be released, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

Introducing myself effectively is in many ways exceptionally timely this month with the demise of The New Republic. As an intellectually curious young person who came of age at virtually the very moment of the September 11 attacks, I learned to have a particular hatred for The New Republic at the tail end of its recently much-ballyhooed heyday. I’m mature enough now to have an appreciation for those who are lamenting the apparent demise of the public intellectual and their forum in political magazines as a matter of principle. But in all candor I remain blind to the greatness and romance surrounding TNR, and in particular Leon Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book.

And the reason for this, frankly, is because my adolescent romance for the life of the mind – from politics to literature to ideas – was with The American Conservative. I still remember well when I was 17, first seeing and reading the first issue in the magazine section of Borders at White Flint Mall; two institutions now joined in meeting their reward by TNR, which memorably blasted the premier of TAC as “Buchanan’s surefire flop” (only in the recent coverage did I realize that this was a tasteless reference to The Producers, in the company of their charming headline on the vindication of Iraq realists in 2004, “Springtime for Realism”).

Some background is in order: I was a Jewish kid from Bethesda, Maryland who got his GED as soon as he turned 16. I was in community college for the next two years at the same time I was actively pursuing a highly unstable brew of radical involvements on both the left and right, fancying myself some kind of journalist-revolutionary (like 12-year old Henry Hill, I was living in a fantasy). The critical point of departure for my intellectual journey was some time just after 9/11, as I was becoming enamored with Justin Raimondo, who proved a formative influence to be sure, and discovering that his seemingly half-crazed notion about the Trotskyist roots of neoconservatism was very much true – it turned out my father knew several of them through the Harvard Young People’s Socialist League (Elliott Abrams, Josh Muravchik, and Daniel Pipes well; Bill Kristol just slightly. Anyone curious as to why he didn’t become a neocon should read his recent book on new urbanism).

In other words, the much-storied New York Jewish intellectual tradition, that Carol Kane assured the young Alvy Singer was a wonderful cultural stereotype to be reduced to, was in many ways a birthright. And yet I fell in love with TAC. In that first year or two as America was being conquered by Iraq, I still had high hopes for the Green Party, and even on the eve of TAC’s premier was startled to see Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” cover story at National Review and knowing there had to be a much, much, much better forum for this (by the time the book came out in 2006, I was of course well past recognizing that the typical figure covered in the book, if asked why they weren’t involved with the Green Party, would simply answer “because I like a steak every now and then”). When I was 18 and first living on my own, I subscribed to four magazines – The American Conservative, The Progressive, Chronicles, and an intriguingly semi-serious short-lived left-anarchist bi-monthly called Clamor.

I hardly need revisit the intellectual climate that surrounded the launching of the Iraq War, and why it was no contest between TAC and any more mainstream magazine – even the sincerely antiwar and often thoughtful liberals at The American Prospect could never stir the intellectual passions. Nor does a great deal need to be said here about what slowly but surely disillusioned me with the radical left, though to this day a large part of me is mystified as to why Bill Kauffman (or for that matter Jim Webb, at least in his career as a politician) is considered anything but a perfectly kosher man of the left. (more…)