Adrian Vermeule

Um, I'm unaware, you know, that like 300 years of almost un- uninterrupted world progress, at least economically, if not necessarily politically, uh, you know, uh, constitutes a suicide when the la- if the last 20 years may constitute a suicide, that doesn't vitiate the 350 that preceded it.

Nonetheless, the Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, uh, post-liberal world that is the J.D. Vance footsie playing, dog whistling, that's who, that's the kinda Catholic that he became when he converted to Catholicism, uh, world is no less powerful in its, uh, effect in some ways than the leftist version that we all have r- been reviling for, for years.

Um, in fact, could be more powerful if J.D. Vance becomes the Republican presidential nominee in 2028.

He is basically more aligned with the idea that the Enlightenment was a mistake [chuckles] than that the Enlightenment was, you know, the reason that we can like fly to the moon, uh, that the, the, the alteration in consciousness created by Enlightenment thinking led to the unbelievable scientific progress that we have now seen.

The

kinds of influences that he has coming from the Catholic world, Chad Pecknold, Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Kevin Roberts, These are folks, when you dig into their theologies, which I do at length in the book, these are folks arguing that we really do need to resurrect something like Christendom.

something like a post-democratic, post-liberal way of life that is built on imposing morality and virtue on other people.

Those guys all believe as Catholics that there is a universal common good, a natural law, and that needs to be imposed on everyone whether they like it or not.

'Just as the goal of overruling Roe is unique in its ability to unite the movement, the failure to overrule Roe in Dobbs would be unique in its ability to destroy the movement,' he wrote.

In October 2021, Professor Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School tweeted that, 'If Roe survives in any form without being overturned, it will represent a shattering crisis for the conservative legal movement.' In a piece headlined, 'If Kavanaugh and Barrett Betray Pro-Lifers, We Must Blow Up the Conservative Legal Movement,' the conservative strategist Rachel Bovard went further.

'If the conservative legal movement has failed to produce Supreme Court justices who are comfortable overturning two outrageously constitutionally defective rulings on abortion, we will be left to justifiably wonder what the whole project has been for.'" That failure would have reverberated across the political landscape.

The left was already organizing a campaign to brand the Supreme Court as illegitimate.

So there are people in Latin America, in Spain, in Italy who are enthusiastic about these ideas, which is, I think, unsurprising given what we see happening politically in all of these countries.

But if one reads the works of people who are involved in this movement, And the principle text, I suppose, is a book by Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule called Common Good Constitutionalism.

In some ways, the content of what they're arguing for seems rather vague and even banal.

For the reason that you mentioned, I mean, who could be against the common good?

My guest today is University of Queensland Law Professor Jim Allen.

Today we discuss whether recent proposals to ban the burning of the Australian flag would be constitutional, other matters before the Australian High Court, such as a proposed ban on the, quote, White Australia Party, unquote, and Pauline Hanson's bid to overturn hate speech laws, what his views are on common good constitutionalism provoted by-- promoted by people like Harvard Professor Adrian Vermeule, and why he remains unconvinced about the value of a bill of rights, and much, much more.

I hope you enjoy our discussion.

[upbeat music] Professor Jim Allen, welcome back to the Nat Con Australia podcast.

And left-wing people really like it, and academics love it.

Okay.

Just to change gears entirely, what do, what's your view on so-called common good constitutionalism promoted by, well, Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, which, which Sets itself up not as in contrast to, say, the originalist, um, school pr- uh, the position-

Well, it does really.

Instead, there's just a sort of judicial or bureaucratic judicial state that authorizes what people are and are not allowed to do.

So one major post-liberal figure, Adrian Vermeule, likes to refer to Americans under a post-liberal order as subjects for this reason, because they would not be citizens.

He's a he's a Harvard law

professor.

The other thing is with defining post-liberalism, we run into the difficulty of like, I don't know if you guys remember when Wittgenstein talked about There's a sort of definition by family resemblance.

It's hard to get at a core that that's common to all of them.

Like, for instance, the thing about democracy, Adrian Vermeule famously wrote this article or not famously, but he wrote this article for Washington Post once where he said, hey, what if we didn't have Congress? And he basically says we'd be better off.

He doesn't like democracy.

Yarvin dabbles in all this stuff, and you can see how it maps onto his COVID response.

The more academic version, there's this Harvard law professor that I've studied named Adrian Vermeule.

And he's the 9-11 war on terror link because he started as like a Scalia-type conservative law professor, which are very rare in and of themselves.

But during the mid-2000s, he becomes obsessed with emergency power.

Obviously there are people who don't want Vance to be the next leader of the Republican party, et cetera, et cetera.

But this thing where we take populism conflated with post-liberalism attribute to everyone, the views of like Adrian Vermeule or Chad Peck mold or whatever.

And promiscuously, uh, I think is weird.

I think it's weird.