Integration from Within
Author: Adrian Vermeule
Published: February 2018, American Affairs (Vol. II, No. 1)
Genre: Review essay
Ostensible subject: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
What It Is
A landmark essay in the intellectual history of the MAGA New Right. Published as a review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, but Vermeule uses the review as a springboard to lay out his own, far more radical strategy for dismantling liberalism: occupying the liberal administrative state from within and turning its machinery to “postliberal” ends.
The essay was published in American Affairs, the journal co-founded by Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness orbit.
Argument
On Deneen: Vermeule praises Deneen’s diagnosis — liberalism has been undone by its own success, hollowing out the very institutions (church, family, community) that it needed to sustain itself. But he attacks Deneen’s prescription: the “Benedict Option” of retreating into localist communities. Vermeule’s objection is strategic: liberal agents have a comprehensive theory of the good and will not ultimately allow nonliberal communities to exist. Localism is a holding pattern under permanent existential threat.
The alternate ending: Vermeule proposes what he calls “integration from within.” Rather than retreating, nonliberal actors should:
“Strategically locate themselves within liberal institutions and work to undo the liberalism of the state from within.”
His models are biblical: Joseph, Mordecai, Esther, and Daniel — people who operated loyally within hostile imperial structures while preserving and ultimately advancing their own faith community. And more radically: St. Paul and St. Cecilia, who sought not merely to survive but to transform the empire from within.
The key operational vision:
“These agents may even come to occupy the commanding heights of the administrative state… They may have a great deal of discretion to further human dignity and the common good, defined entirely in substantive rather than procedural-technical terms.”
The goal: to turn the vast liberal administrative state — “the great instrument” liberalism has built — toward “a new and doubtless very different future.” In other words: seize the state and use it for integralist ends.
On coercion vs. persuasion: Vermeule waves away the distinction, quoting James Fitzjames Stephen: “the weaker opinion… is rooted out to the last fiber, the place where it grew being seared as with a hot iron.” The essay endorses “soft paternalism” and “nudging” as modes of reshaping populations — but its logic clearly extends further.
Significance
This essay is a blueprint for what became known as “Common Good Constitutionalism” and is arguably the founding document of Catholic integralism as a practical political strategy (rather than just a theological position). It influenced Vermeule’s later book Common Good Constitutionalism (2022).
The strategy it describes — occupying the administrative state and using it for illiberal ends — is visible in Project 2025 and the second Trump administration’s approach to the federal bureaucracy.
Field’s assessment: Vermeule represents the “most sophisticated” thinkers of the New Right, and also the most “sincerely committed” to populist economic reform. But his program is a “constitutional defense of far-right conservative authoritarianism” dressed in Catholic natural law language.
Key Concepts Introduced
- Integration from Within — the strategy of occupying liberal institutions rather than building alternatives
- Liberalism as a “fighting faith” — Vermeule’s framing of liberalism as a world religion with its own clergy, sacraments, and eschatology
- The gravity well of liberalism — how even critics of liberalism get pulled back into its assumptions (his critique of Deneen’s localism)
- “It takes a comprehensive theory to beat a comprehensive theory” — the core strategic argument
Tensions and Contradictions
- Vermeule appeals to democratic legitimacy and “service to the regime” while describing a strategy of using state power to impose a substantive vision of the good on a population that has not consented to it
- The biblical models (Joseph, Esther, Daniel) were minorities surviving in hostile empires — Vermeule is appropriating their strategy for a movement that seeks majority domination
- The essay was written in 2018, before Vermeule became fully associated with MAGA; by 2024 its prescriptions looked less like political theory and more like a literal playbook
Cross-References
- Adrian Vermeule — author
- Patrick Deneen — the text under review
- Why Liberalism Failed — Deneen’s book
- Catholic Integralism — the theological tradition Vermeule draws on
- Common Good Constitutionalism — Vermeule’s later full articulation of this program
- Postliberalism — the broader movement this essay helped define
- American Affairs — the journal that published it
- Gladden Pappin — co-founder of American Affairs