The MAGA New Right

Adrian Vermeule

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Adrian Vermeule

The Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School; raised Episcopalian/Anglican; converted to Catholicism November 2016 (supported by Robert P. George); Catholic integralist; Postliberal; author of Common Good Constitutionalism (2022); collaborator with Cass Sunstein and Eric Posner; Schmitt rehabilitator; Field: “the movement’s high priest, simpliciter”

Who He Is

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard Law professor who is simultaneously one of the most technically sophisticated constitutional scholars in the country and the most intellectually radical thinker in the Postliberal camp of the MAGA New Right. Field: “If Rufo is the high priest of New Right propaganda, then Vermeule is the movement’s high priest, simpliciter.”

He is both a Postliberal and a Catholic integralist — he believes political life should be subordinated to spiritual aims and that the liberal separation of church and state is a false ideal. But his public legal scholarship is written in the secular language of constitutional law, not Catholic theology — which makes it more dangerous. His integralism provides the substantive ends; Common Good Constitutionalism provides the legal means.

Biography

Vermeule grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother, Emily Vermeule, was a celebrated archaeologist and expert on the Bronze Age — one of the first women professors at Harvard. His father was an art curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. He spent summers near archaeological sites in Europe, developing a strong affection for classics and the ancient world.

He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, studying ancient Chinese philosophy (which he told the Financial Times in 2022 was “different enough to give him scope for independent thinking” from the classical tradition he knew growing up). He graduated summa cum laude in 1990. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1993, and clerked for Judge Devid Sentelle on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, then for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court (1994-1995).

He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School in 1998 and returned to Harvard Law as a professor in 2006. He has been there ever since. In 2012, at age 43, he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Scholarly Career (Pre-Conversion)

Vermeule is unconventional within the conservative legal world, and has been so throughout his career. The consistent themes of his pre-Catholic scholarship:

  • In defense of governmental authority: consistent emphasis on the legitimacy of executive and administrative power; concern about excessive constraints on government
  • Against the Madisonian straitjacket: in a 2015 friendly review, he approvingly recalled Hamilton’s warning that “Establish a weak government and you must at times overleap the bounds. Rome was obliged to create dictators.”

Collaboration with Cass Sunstein: Vermeule and the liberal University of Chicago law professor (and Obama White House official 2009-2012) have been regular collaborators since 2005. Together they published Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020), which defended the basic “morality of administrative law.” This is not a conservative document — Vermeule’s defense of administrative authority has always been bipartisan.

Collaboration with Eric Posner (also at University of Chicago Law School; son of Richard Posner):

  • 2004: Defended John Yoo — author of the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos” — in the Wall Street Journal
  • 2009: Co-authored working paper “Tyrannophobia” — argued that in an American context, fear of dictatorial power was irrational
  • 2011: The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic — argued “the legally constrained executive is now a historical curiosity” and “the Madisonian separation of powers is obsolete.” This was a good thing. Modern executives should be empowered to act decisively.
  • Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt contribution: “Demystifying Schmitt” — argued for “governance through ex post standards, rather than ex ante rules” — i.e., acts first, asks questions later. “Schmittian commissarial dictatorship is just the purposive approach to legal interpretation, writ very large and applied to the constitution as a whole.”

Schmitt scholarship:

  • 2009: Long Harvard Law Review article “Our Schmittian Administrative Law”
  • 2015: Northwestern University Law Review — “Optimal Abuse of Power”

Field’s verdict: Vermeule and Posner helped “rehabilitate” Carl Schmitt as a “visionary of executive authority in the modern age.” The scholarship consistently “amounts to something like a total preemptive grant of authority to the executive branch of the United States government” and “opens the door wide to unaccountable rule.” His work is “lopsided toward autocracy.”

Conversion to Catholicism (November 2016)

Vermeule was raised Episcopalian and Anglican but fell away from religion in college. On November 4, 2016 — four days before Trump’s election — First Things published his conversion interview: “Finding Stable Ground.”

Key elements:

  • Disheartened by “heterodox” changes in the Episcopal Church (the church had allowed some gay marriage in 2015)
  • Persuaded by John Henry Newman (19th-century English theologian who converted to Catholicism in midlife) and Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory that “there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheist materialism”
  • Supported in conversion by Robert P. George (Princeton; McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence)
  • Mystical/personal dimension: twice mentioned influence of the biblical Mary — “Behind and above all those who helped me along the way, there stood a great Lady”; when asked about who influenced him, said “nearest to my heart, a young and fiercely courageous Jewish refugee girl who teaches inexhaustible lessons, Miriam bat Joachim”

At the end of the interview, asked which areas of law he finds most hopeful, the professor of constitutional law answered: “I put little stock or hope or faith in law… In the long run it will be no better than the polity and culture in which it is embedded. If that culture sours and curdles, so will the law; indeed that process is well underway and its tempo is accelerating. Our hope lies elsewhere.”

A year later, First Things published “A Christian Strategy”: liberalism saves its “deepest enmity” for the Blessed Virgin; pointing to Genesis 3:15 and Revelation 12:1-9, Vermeule suggested “the true identity” of liberalism is aligned with Satan.

The “Integration from Within” Strategy

In his 2018 essay Integration from Within (review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed), Vermeule argued Postliberals should not retreat to local communities (Deneen’s “Benedict Option”) but instead:

  • Occupy the “commanding heights of the administrative state”
  • Use administrative discretion to advance “human dignity and the common good”
  • “Sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” take over liberals’ hearts and minds, facilitate “the final destruction of the liberal order”
  • Model themselves on St. Paul — the Roman Empire transformed from within

In The Josias blog (three posts, 2018) and First Things writings, he was explicit: infiltrate American liberal democracy, which he expected would implode soon, at which point integralists would “generate a newly Catholic state.”

His strategy is explicitly Schmittian: “radically dogmatic as to ends, radically flexible as to tactics and means” — “viewing political commitments not as articles of a sacred faith, but as tactical tools to be handled in whatever way best serves the cause of Christ.”

Common Good Constitutionalism (2022)

Vermeule’s defense began with a 2020 Atlantic article that made his comfort with authoritarianism plain: “Unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” The just law transforms subjects “against their will and coercively if necessary” — and “subjects will come to thank the ruler” later.

The 2022 book was written in the modest language of legal interpretation rather than integralism and Schmittian existentialism, but it carried the same program. It was a counter to the two reigning interpretive traditions:

  • Originalism: asks what the founders meant — for Vermeule, too constrained; originalists beset by a “horror of judgment” (i.e., afraid to moralize)
  • Progressive “living” constitutionalism: too active and individualistic

Vermeule’s alternative: the aim of legal interpretation is “to promote the common good.” Field: “the Goldilocks of judicial interpretation” — if you need to determine whether a law is legal, you ask “Does it serve the common good?” and voilà.

The key unanswered questions: What is the common good? Who decides? What limits the court’s ability to impose it? What about individual rights? For Vermeule, integralism supplies the answers — whether they line up with actual American constitutional history or not.

The Schmittian Core

Vermeule’s Schmitt interest spans more than a decade, disclosed most fully in his essay “All Human Conflict Is Ultimately Theological” (speech at Robert P. George’s James Madison Program, 2019): “sacramental liberalism” is an idea about the fundamentally religious and ceremonial character of liberalism; liberals are driven by compulsive theological urges that disrupt other important goals and are revealed in moments of liberal overreach (Vermeule’s example: Obergefell). He ended the speech with Schmitt: “To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief.”

Vermeule mocked those who bridle at Schmitt as “demi-intellectuals” infected by “intellectualized moral Puritanism.”

Field’s summary: Vermeule “sees liberals and liberalism (but not Schmitt) as the Satanic enemy. He believes in granting extraordinary power to the executive and shows few concerns about potential abuses of power. And he defends the idea of ruthless political ‘flexibility’ in the service of divine spiritual ends.”

The Salazar Reference

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): in his integralist-strategy writing on The Josias, Vermeule has cited Salazar’s Portugal as exemplary of bureaucracy flourishing in an illiberal regime — and argued the integralist focus should be on “executive-type bureaucracies rather than on parliamentary-democratic institutions per se.” This is the wiki’s load-bearing data point for the structural reading: Vermeule’s “Common Good Constitutionalism + administrative state capture” program has Salazar’s Estado Novo as its closest 20th-century real-world analogue. Where his colleague Waldstein (the integralist theologian whose work Vermeule’s CGC is theologically downstream of) has been critical of postliberal Salazar admiration as a “veneer of Catholic Social Teaching without the reality,” Vermeule’s interest is precisely the administrative-state dimension Waldstein discounts.

European Connections

Vermeule’s international allegiances reveal the depth of his anti-liberal commitments:

Nigel Farage: In 2018 Vermeule called Farage — the controversial right-wing Brexit politician and major Trump backer — “the defining mind of our era.”

Ryszard Legutko: Vermeule is an admirer of Ryszard Legutko, an arch-conservative Polish intellectual and politician who is a prominent intellectual leader in Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party and was elected to the European Parliament in 2009. Legutko is also a regular participant at NatCon conferences. Vermeule defended some of the controversial Polish judicial reforms through which that party achieved power. In 2022 Vermeule praised Legutko’s embrace of “the European tradition in the broadest sense…. Which stands upon the three pillars of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Catholic faith.” Field: “This way of putting it erases the Protestant and Enlightenment parts of the European tradition.” At the same time, Vermeule praised the (American) New Right for being “unafraid to use public authority in the service of the common good where necessary.”

Viktor Orbán: The Postliberals’ admiration for Orbán’s Hungary is well documented. Vermeule offered a similar sentiment during his visit to Hungary in 2021.

Nowhere did Vermeule, Deneen, or Pappin question the illiberal measures that Polish and Hungarian far-right leaders took to gain and consolidate power. Field: presumably they approved — “Such measures are entirely consistent with notions like ‘Common Good Constitutionalism,’ ‘Aristopopulism,’ and using ‘Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.’”

Field’s Assessment

Field calls Vermeule “the movement’s high priest, simpliciter” — the most sophisticated intellectual defender of the New Right’s use of government for conservative moralizing ends. His work “gifted the New Right a constitutional defense of far-right conservative authoritarianism” — sophisticated enough to be genuinely threatening.

The irony: Vermeule’s body of scholarship consistently defends the legitimacy of the administrative state against libertarian and originalist critics — and he co-wrote with a liberal Obama official defending that same state. Once the integralists control the executive, the administrative machinery he defended becomes the machinery of Catholic transformation. What he opposed was not the state, but the liberal state.

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