The Influence of Austrofascism on JD Vance
Where many of the ideas buzzing in his ear come from.
REPUBLICAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JD VANCE, an anti-establishment populist, has unconventional voices in his ear. As many have noted, some of those who seem to speak to him the loudest—the journalist Sohrab Ahmari, blogger Rod Dreher, and Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, among others—belong to an elite coterie of illiberal Christian conservatives animated by an attitude reminiscent of what historian Fritz Stern once called the “politics of cultural despair.”
Stern used this notion to illustrate the tendencies of members of the conservative revolution in Germany, a movement of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectuals who shared a loathing of liberalism rooted in personal frustration:
They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it. . . . Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts.
Similar to these Germans living through enormous social transformation around the turn of the twentieth century, the intellectuals who have Vance’s ear have sought to escape the uncertainty of our own age by adopting closed systems of thought. Lashing out against a world in which they are unhappy, they seek the sources of their discontent in an amorphous and carelessly defined liberalism.
The worldview many of Vance’s muses hold up as the alternative to liberalism is self-avowedly Roman Catholic. Catholicism offers anti-liberal intellectuals a way to anchor their dislike of the modern world in something bigger, a tradition that promises timeless truths and solutions to every social problem. Yet their Catholicism is much smaller than the tradition it rests on because of the way they have politicized it: Their use of the Catholic tradition is motivated by their animus against liberalism and therefore selective.
One sees this in the barely disguised admiration some of them have for twentieth-century Catholic “corporatism,” what others call clerical fascism. Corporatist regimes existed in Portugal, Spain, and Austria, and arguably Mussolini’s Italy. The influence of corporatism on today’s illiberal Catholics has been commented on and criticized by James M. Patterson, a professor at Ave Maria University. One hears echoes of corporatism in Patrick Deneen’s notion of “aristopopulism.” Gladden Pappin, another member of the illiberal clique, has even gone so far as to argue that the U.S. Senate should be restructured along corporatist lines. Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor who has called for a new “illiberal legalism,” draws heavily upon an apologist for Austria’s corporatist regime named Johannes Messner in developing his ideas about “common good constitutionalism.” Messner, a Catholic priest, was a close adviser to Austria’s interwar dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss. Obviously a problematic figure, Messner is nonetheless held in high regard in certain circles; a group dedicated to cultivating his memory has pushed to have him canonized. Among the members of this society is an Austrian-American monk named Edmund Waldstein, who has played a key role in propagating Catholic integralism; Vermeule often cites him and describes him as “brilliant.”
Indeed, anyone familiar with Austrofascism who reads how Vermeule and other Catholic integralists talk about politics and the common good is apt to experience déjà vu. The unsettling parallels suggest one can learn about their illiberal ambitions—about the ideas JD Vance’s friends have for America’s future—by studying Austrofascism. Let’s start with the foundation of Austrofascist ideology: Catholic corporatism.
The origins of Catholic corporatism
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH RESPONDED to the political challenges of the nineteenth century—liberalism, nationalism, and socialism—by seeking a “third way.” A third way would avoid the twin evils of liberalism and socialism while preserving what the church understood to be its rightful place in society. As part of that search for a third way, many conservative thinkers in central Europe began to talk about “corporatism.” One particularly interesting figure to do so was a publicist named Karl von Vogelsang (1818–1890), a convert to Catholicism who romanticized the Middle Ages and rejected capitalism. Vogelsang’s essays were brilliant, provocative, and full of sparkling half-truths.
The origins of capitalism, Vogelsang argued, lay in the Renaissance, which he characterized as a spiritual revolt against medieval Christian civilization. In the Middle Ages, a lord who owned property also had obligations toward his vassals. The system of feudalism stipulated mutual obligations between classes that guaranteed social justice. But the Renaissance overturned this mutually beneficial and just order by reviving the ancient Roman concept of property as a private possession to be disposed of however one pleased. That cleared the way for market economies, with their attendant exploitation and social dislocation.
Only a return to the social vision of the Middle Ages, Vogelsang argued, could deliver Europe from its misery. In the Middle Ages, the value of labor and products was determined by principles of intrinsic value and a just price, not by the pursuit of profit and rules of supply and demand.
The medieval social order was also hierarchical. But its natural hierarchies were being destroyed by the ideals of the French Revolution, especially the ideal of equality. Equality was myth, Vogelsang claimed, which leveled society and destroyed its social fabric. The end result of such leveling, Vogelsang believed, would be socialism.
According to Vogelsang, liberalism and socialism were twin evils connected by an inner logic. By contrast, a society structured in accordance with Christian truth and natural law—one that embraced the principles that provided society with structure throughout the Middle Ages—would organize labor into Stände. In the Middle Ages, the Stände were social estates, things like the church, the nobility, the peasantry. Stand is usually awkwardly translated into English as “corporation,” which is why the system of thought that espoused recreating these medieval social estates is called corporatism.
The corporatist idea drew inspiration from medieval guilds. Tradesmen in guilds shared common interests—a marked contrast with the situation under capitalism, where business and labor were inherently in conflict. In a corporatist system, according to the theory, the whole of society would be organized into distinct corporations arising from common interests. One corporation might be organized around agriculture, another around trade and industry, another around cultural production like the arts, and so on. This organization would overcome class conflict and produce social harmony by integrating society’s diverse units into an integrated structure, supervised by the state, whose animating purpose was to advance the common good.
The high-water mark for Catholic corporatism came in the wake of the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno. Speaking to the social question, Pope Pius XI explicitly embraced the idea of “corporations.” In a controversial set of paragraphs, he even appeared to approve of Italian fascism. Years later, the primary ghostwriter of Quadragesimo anno insisted the encyclical had been misread. Be that as it may, the encyclical was widely understood in its time as endorsing clerical fascism. In the words of one historian, “Virtually every Fascist revolution of the next decade was to fly the flag of Quadragesimo anno and its corporative State.”
This was true in Austria, where the corporatist regime explicitly claimed Quadragesimo anno as its inspiration.
The short history of Austrofascism
EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT the difficulties Germany faced after the First World War, but the challenges Austria faced were even worse. The Dual Monarchy simply collapsed as many provinces broke away to form new countries. One of Europe’s great powers was reduced to a rump state, prevented even from unifying with Germany by the Treaty of St. Germain. Many doubted that the tiny new Austrian state would prove viable.
In November 1918, a provisional assembly of German-Austrians proclaimed the formation of a democratic republic. For the next fifteen years, politics in the new republic was shaped by three blocs, or constituencies. First were the Social Democrats, a Marxist party based in Vienna. Although not as radical as the Russian Bolsheviks, they saw themselves as a party of the proletariat, and toyed with the idea—at least in their party platform—of breaking the grip of the middle class through dictatorship. Second were the Christian Socialists, a less rigidly ideological party rooted in the tradition of political Catholicism and shaped by the philosophy of corporatism. One of the party’s forebears had been Vogelsang, the romantic advocate of a medieval social vision. Third were pan-Germans, who wanted union with Germany. They played a role subordinate to that of the Social Democrats and Christian Socialists, but their influence increased as Hitler rose to power, and they became regular coalition partners with the Christian Socialists.
While both the Social Democrats and Christian Socialists claimed to support democracy, neither understood democracy in the Western liberal sense. The Austrian republic had been founded less on principle and more on pragmatism. Each side wanted to keep the other side in check, and saw democracy as the best way for doing that. The leaders of both parties became increasingly inflexible. Pragmatism gave way to partisanship and even intermittent outbreaks of political violence. The Christian Socialists, frustrated by their political opponents, grew particularly skeptical of parliamentary democracy.
Then one day in March 1933, the national assembly tangled itself up in a sequence of parliamentary maneuvers that left the chamber without a presiding officer. No one could lead proceedings. The chancellor, a Christian Socialist named Engelbert Dollfuss, took advantage of the situation to declare that the parliament had dissolved itself. Having manufactured a constitutional crisis, he quickly restricted press freedom, prohibited public demonstrations, and outlawed strikes. Next he dissolved the constitutional court, implemented elements of martial law, and erected detainment camps for political opponents. He banned all political parties, replacing them with a single organization called the Fatherland Front.
In an important programmatic speech, Dollfuss laid out his vision for Austria. With echoes of Vogelsang, he praised Austria’s medieval past as the “the time when the people were organized and divided according to corporations.” The neglect and decline of these corporations gave rise to the spirit of the French Revolution, where the individual was left to his own devices and money ruled all. That in turn had led to Marxism. But now, Dollfuss proclaimed, “the time of the capitalist system, the time of a liberal-capitalist economic order is gone; the time of a Marxist, materialistic seduction of the people is over. The time of parliamentarianism is past! . . . We want to live in a social, Christian, Austrian German state resting on a corporatist foundation, under strong authoritarian leadership!”
On May 1, 1934, Austria received a new constitution. Whereas the old constitution had read, “Austria is a democratic republic. Its law comes from the people,” the new constitution began, “In the name of God, the Almighty, from whom all law flows, the Austrian people receive this constitution as a Christian German federal state on a corporatist foundation.” The preamble was meant to include an explicit reference to Quadragesimo anno, but under pressure from Mussolini, with whom Dollfuss was closely allied, that was removed.
A few months later, Dollfuss was assassinated in a failed coup attempt that was probably instigated by Hitler. Paramilitary forces stormed the building where the government was meeting. As Dollfuss tried to escape, he was shot in the neck, paralyzed by a bullet that severed his spinal cord. Placed on a couch, denied medical care and a priest to administer last rites, he slowly bled to death as conspirators in the room smoked cigarettes and the coup collapsed outside. (Hitler annexed Austria four years later.) Allegedly, Dollfuss’s last words were: “All I ever wanted was peace. We never attacked, we always had to defend ourselves. May the Lord God forgive them.”
The murdered dictator immediately became a martyr-saint. At his funeral, the archbishop of Vienna addressed Dollfuss as an intercessor, asking that he “be our advocate at the throne of God.” According to a general secretary of the Fatherland Front, “Dollfuss, our leader, is not dead! . . . Dollfuss is an intercessor for Austria at the throne of the Most High.” The Dollfuss mythos, as Lucille Dreidemy has documented, was elaborate and extensive.
Numerous works of hagiography, purporting to be biographies, were published in Dollfuss’s honor. One of them—written by Messner, the thinker who has influenced Vermeule—was published in English translation only in 2004. The English edition comes with a preface by John Zmirak, an American Catholic and political right-winger who describes Dollfuss as a “saintly” man who should “be remembered among all other principled, patriotic opponents of totalitarianism.”
What illiberal American Catholics take from Austrofascism
OF THE HANDFUL OF CORPORATIST REGIMES to have traipsed through the annals of history, the one in Austria is perhaps the most sympathetic. It emerged under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and lasted only a few years, making it easy to overlook its grievous shortcomings. The corporatist philosophy that inspired it was grounded squarely in Catholic thinking of the time. Dollfuss himself was a pious Catholic with a compelling biography who died a martyr’s death. This lends Austrofascism a degree of legitimacy for those who are looking for political alternatives to liberalism.
That is not to suggest those who admire Austrofascism simply want to produce it in America. But they do look to corporatism as a model with much to offer contemporary politics. Moreover, by reading the Catholic tradition through the lens of twentieth-century clerical fascism, they can disguise the extent of their authoritarian intentions in the respectable language of Catholic social teaching. Consider, for example, the way Adrian Vermeule talks about subsidiarity.
The principle of subsidiarity was solidified in Catholic social thought by Quadragesimo anno, the same encyclical that embraced corporatism. Subsidiarity stipulates that tasks properly completed by lower, subordinate social bodies should not be assigned to higher, superior bodies. This is usually understood as recommending decentralization. But in fact the concept of subsidiarity can be read and applied in a variety of ways, both democratic and authoritarian.
As the political philosopher Andreas Føllesdal points out, the principle of subsidiarity does not answer questions about how to allocate authority. It can be understood as proscribing intervention from above, in which case lower bodies function autonomously. But it can also be understood as prescribing intervention in order to ensure that social burdens are properly distributed and performed. In that case, subsidiary bodies are subject to political oversight and even domination. They enjoy autonomy the way children completing their homework do, by willingly performing the tasks assigned to them while understanding that they cannot do otherwise without being punished.
An authoritarian interpretation of subsidiarity was central to Catholic corporatism. Messner, the Dollfuss hagiographer, developed precisely such an interpretation of the concept in a book-length apology for Austrofascism whose title roughly translates to The Corporatist Order. According to Messner, the principle of subsidiarity means that “the right of corporations to self-administration has a tiered ordering: higher associations are entitled to power of management and supervision over lower associations, lower associations have entitlements over individuals.” When lower bodies don’t perform their tasks correctly, “the State, whose entire task consists in caring for the common good, has to bend corporations to the common good with a strong hand and align their efforts with the demands of the whole.”
Catholic postliberal Adrian Vermeule uncritically advocates Messner’s interpretation of subsidiarity in his 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism, describing Messner’s treatment as “canonical” without giving his readers a clear understanding of its origins. Explaining an argument Messner made in the 1960s that dictatorship can sometimes be compatible with subsidiarity, Vermeule writes that “we should understand that Messner with his massive classical erudition is certainly best understood as speaking not at all of the modern strongman or junta, but rather within the tradition of the carefully cabined Roman model of dictatorship.”
This is highly and perhaps even deliberately misleading: Messner originally developed his understanding of subsidiarity not by drawing indulgently on his “massive classical erudition” to speculate about theoretical political arrangements, but to defend Austrofascism. He was not thinking of a temporary dictatorship but one he had hoped would last. By its nature the project of constructing a corporatist society demanded, in Messner’s words, “the authoritarian state.”
DEFENDERS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY clerical fascism like to downplay its defects. John Zmirak notes, for example, that corporatist ideas played a role in shaping West Germany after the Second World War. He is not incorrect, but by the same token one might note that the Soviet Union promised universal healthcare and Hitler built the Autobahn. We don’t overlook the evil of those regimes by noting they also had a few real accomplishments. If illiberal Catholics extended even a quarter of the empathetic nuance they have for corporatist regimes to liberalism, their criticisms of the latter would melt away.
More to the point, corporatist regimes were not merely experimenting with policy proposals that others might copy; they were engaged in a radical project of social transformation. The corporatist organization they envisioned aimed to embrace every aspect of society and define life’s meaning. “In the corporation,” Messner wrote, “the individual discovers himself placed in a community whose reality he experiences, which embraces him in the day to day life of his vocation, but which also shapes the entire surroundings of his life, because it determines an area of life and cultural values of a special kind.”
One needn’t engage in endless debates about the nature of fascism to recognize corporatist Austrofascism as a political vision that treated individuals as parts of a societal collective, assigned the state responsibility for directing the pursuit of happiness, and had the audacity to equate its repressive regulation of people’s lives with human flourishing. That such a vision is deeply inimical to America’s Constitutional tradition should be self-evident to every honest legal scholar.
Which brings us back to JD Vance. One cannot tell the extent to which he is an unprincipled opportunist, a true believer, or just a very online guy. What we do know, however, is that he moves among a small circle of intellectuals who toy with dangerous, deeply un-American ideas. Vance’s remark that the United States is currently in a “late republican period” in need of a Caesar may be an indication that he’s studied De bello civili—but it’s much more likely he’s reading figures from the conservative revolution like Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler who talked about how Germany needed a Caesar to deliver it from parliamentary democracy. Or, likelier still, he’s reading others who have imbibed their ideas.
That ideas like these, and the people who promote them, have influence with a man who might be placed a heartbeat from the presidency is one more piece of evidence, if more were needed, of the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America.
H. David Baer teaches theology and philosophy at Texas Lutheran University. He spent this past summer in Vienna researching Austrofascism as a fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, whose support contributed to this article.
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