Vanity Fair reports that once-prominent social conservative Sohrab Ahmari recently showed up at an event in London held by the Open Society Foundation — which funds his magazine Compact to the tune of $200,000. Also working at Compact is Matthew Schmitz, formerly of First Things (whose sad collapse into crankery I wrote about here in 2017).

Compact’s editorial line is both pro-life and socialist, traditionalist and quasi-Marxist. In other words, it’s a lot like the bizarre Catholic Tradinista movement which we here at The Stream tried to mock out of existence — and which Schmitz defended in First Things. As Vanity Fair explains, Compact

has published writers whose intellectual origins lie on the left and right, from Slavoj Žižek, an advocate of “moderately conservative Communism,” to Curtis Yarvin, race theorist, advocate of “benevolent” dictatorship, and New Right blogger.

What logical thread holds together these disparate strands? It’s simple: an opposition to freedom, in principle. A hunger for power to coerce and silence, to dictate the lives of one’s fellow citizens from the top down because you believe you know better.

Sorehead Jihadi and David “Vichy” French

Since 2013 I’ve been warning against “post-liberalism,” a movement in some conservative and church circles to convince Christians that the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Anti-Defamation League are right: Christian faith is incompatible with freedom, the American founding was profoundly anti-Christian, and the logical culmination of orthodox Christian faith is some kind of theocratic dictatorship.

Except that unlike the ACLU, the post-liberals favor all that. They own it. They’re out, loud, and proud.

I remember when Ahmari tried to position his muscular intolerance as the only alternative to the lavender cultural masochism of David “Vichy” French. As I wrote here, if forced to choose between the two worldviews at gunpoint, I’d say, “Shoot me. Twice, to be on the safe side.”

On the face of it, you might think it strange to hear self-styled conservatives agree with Rob Reiner and watch them take money from George Soros. But for a wide variety of motives — ranging from pitiable to contemptible to corrupt — many prominent writers have. Catholic Integralists call for a kind of Vatican-sponsored sharia, asserting (as nineteenth-century anti-Catholic nativists loudly warned) that the Catholic faith demands dominance over the government, and the power to persecute non-Catholics. Christian nationalists in the Protestant world seek biblical sharia, with varying positions on how much or whether the State should tolerate heresy.

The State Shouldn’t Enforce Faith in the Resurrection

Now, it’s one thing to say that religious motives and principles ought to inform our political consciences, that people of faith have every bit the same right to advocate in the public square as non-believers or pagans. But traditionally in America we have drawn a bright line here, marking off what kind of things we’re willing to legislate and which things we merely exhort people to do. For good, principled reasons, we only use the violent, coercive power of the State to enforce moral claims that can be defended via Natural Law arguments — not claims that we derive purely from divine Revelation, which requires the miraculous gift of supernatural faith to accept.

So we advocate against abortion, or slavery, or segregation, or child mutilation — any one of which can be shown by Natural Law arguments to be evil. We’re willing to use the billyclubs and prisons of the State to enforce those moral judgments. We don’t seek to use the State to enforce belief in the Resurrection of Jesus and punish those who deny it.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use biblical rhetoric to oppose evils like slavery, abortion, or segregation. Of course not. Our history is full of noble moments when the Christian view of man led us to liquidate injustices. But you decide which causes are legitimate to invoke State coercion based on whether they can be argued by Natural Law reason alone, not religious authority. Go further than that, and you have a recipe for endless religious civil war, as our ancestors in Europe knew all too well, which is why so many fled here.

When self-styled conservative Catholic (and former Clinton administration official) Patrick Deneen published his book Why Liberalism Failed, denouncing the American founding and all its principles as anti-Christian, I was a little suspicious — especially since Barack Obama endorsed the book. I knew that Deneen’s book could only have one predictable effect: driving Christians out into the fever swamps of theocracy or convincing them to give up on politics (as it convinced the gullible Rod Dreher). If a lifelong Republican claiming to be a Progressive published a book urging Jews and Muslims to give up on politics, with a blurb from Donald Trump, I think most on the Left would conclude something wasn’t halal. (Maybe I just discovered my next writing project, actually … .)

So is Patrick Deneen a fed, someone consciously working to help the Left by making the Right seem crazy — or actually go crazy? Are Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz aware that they’re part of George Soros’s psy-op, or are they just his useful idiots?

We may never know. Such men seem too smart to be doing so much damage merely by accident. But maybe I’m giving them too much credit.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.