My cousin Sylvester has a few critiques of Kevin Vallier’s All the Kingdoms of the World. Now Sylvester is an unrepentant traditionalist reactionary. His side of the family has been resisting freedom of association since 1792. Thus, he has a pedigree in this type of art. Don’t take him too seriously.

“Dear Kevin,

“Your book is at once too short and too long. It is too short, because you leave so many ideas on the table as mere placeholders for a full argument. You want me to fill in the argument against my own position. Unlikely! On the other hand, it is too long a book since most of those pinched off arguments are irrelevant anyway. You modern political philosophers are anxious to make a formal theory of a position and deal with its consequences. 2/3rds of your book could be ignored if your integralist interlocutor just relaxed the constraint that the state should use religious coercion on the baptized – which he should. That is an extraneous feature of a Christian nation. Just because Patrick Smith and Adrian Vermeule might anchor on it in writing, doesn’t mean we should take it that seriously.

“The key is to realize that Anglophone classical liberalism has a lot of room for an additional layer of ideological nudge-ocracy. We have seen the WASP nudgeocracy in the American North, the white Baptist Nudgeocracy in the South, the university educated nudgeocracy in the 20th century (which was the compromise between the former two groups to stop anyone else getting in), and the woke nudgeocracy of today which is the repentance of secularized WASPs and Baptists. Every Western nation has a nudgeocracy, and there is nothing shameful about it. It is bound to exist within the liberal order. I just think it should be a Catholic nudgeocracy that nudges religiosity, family life, widely dispersed access to capital, and the “success sequence.” We are not ever going to live in a post-ideological pure libertarian dream land of Rawlsian doxastic volition concerning cultural mores. The state will always influence and be influenced by prevailing ideologies. To that end, we should consciously choose the ideology that best advances what is going to be the most fulfilling lifestyle for the modal American: some religion, a lot of family, and the freedom to try to become economically independent owners if they want to be.

“All your writing about religious coercion, the justice of unequal enforcement, and the diminishing marginal utility of Masses each week might even be true! But it is beside the point. You are a Christian. Surely you would like the nudges to swing differently – for vice to be taxed, even if subtly, and normal civilizing virtues like marriage and children more greatly rewarded.

“While sometimes individual integralists might point towards upending things a bit too much, the key is that the nation has never been ideologically uncontaminated creating a level playing field. We have always had integralism – more or less. Southern Baptist Race Integralism, Northern WASP Integralism, their shared Manifest Destiny integralism, and post-civil war rapprochement against non-elites and their later repentance. Today, American legislators pass funding packages with all sorts of wish list DEI integralism. Some of that might even be good and worthy. But surely it is an integralism of some ideology with the state!

“Okay, I suppose this the standard whataboutism, the same whataboutism that has pushed on your book since publication. I don’t want to rehash the old objections only. Human Flourishing should be defended on its own terms then.

“Let me try one more counterpoint then. You say that integralism is unlikely to be stable, because the stability of a regime decreases as coercion increases. But your model totally misses that there are several equilibria. China and Iran and Russia, while not great role models are acceptably stable. North Korea is miserable, but stable. None of those are democracies and only China is even moderately close to flourishing. I don’t want to rid the world of democracy. But if we had 20% less democracy and a more republican structure, we could be both more moral as a country and more effective as a state bureaucracy. Garrett Jones writes about the effectiveness benefits of 10% less democracy. The integralist goal would be an additional 10% more trustee republicanism after that, accompanied by extensive legal, economic, business training for the younger generation to take up the mantle.

“Just as the stability of a pluralist regime does not require Title IX protected classes, so too does an integralist regime not require extremely inequitable treatment. A lot of little taxes on behavior shifts behavior, a lot of little subsidies incentivize it. And I believe there is plenty of evidence that culture is far more elastic and choose-able than my status quo feting opponents dare recognize.

“The link between morality and political stability is not a claim, I will make nor defend. Hobbesian state may be stable, Madisonian liberalism may be stable, Ghandi can rule. Maybe all those are stable in the long run or maybe they are not. In the long-run we are all dead. What matters are the nudges of today towards the good life and the salvation of the marginal citizen. Pax.”

So that’s Sylvester. You will notice he isn’t quite ready to say exactly which policies and nudges would be favored in his world. He is prone to the motte and bailey. You may also notice a style of nationalism in his outlook. C’est la vie.