The Heritage Foundation Plan to Help Trump End Democracy in America

[Kid Berwyn]

7. Pro Property

Serving God and Mammon

The Rise and Influence of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society

BY PETER HAMMOND SCHWARTZ
Patheos, JULY 14, 2019

The Creation Project excavates Western history using the conceptual tools of complexity science. The contemporary story that foregrounds this archeological dig emphasizes the philosophical and political influence in the past five decades of a reactionary slice of American Catholicism. In this period, the ideas, organizations, and personalities of impresarios ranging from Antonin Scalia to Robert George to Leonard Leo to Steve Bannon have driven wedge politics and moved the political landscape decisively to the right.

This focus on “radical traditionalist” undercurrents of conservative American politics allows us to explore interesting, important, relevant, and hitherto underreported themes that inflect the conservative crusade to claim control of federal courts for the next 30 years. These themes include:

* the intellectual and organizational background to the political success of Culture War Catholics;
* the political influence of leading conservative Catholic intellectuals who use philosophies of natural law to frame their perspectives on politics and society; and
* the political meaning of the originalist and textualist philosophies of the Federalist Society and of the conservative judges whom they have worked to promote to the federal bench.

The effect of these undercurrents have been to shift American jurisprudence from a historically dominant “New England Protestant” legal culture based on traditions of English common law, commitments to legal precedent, and philosophies of positive law and legal realism to an emergent Catholic jurisprudence based on Thomist natural law and a Constitutional fundamentalism derived from the sacred text assumptions of revealed religion. The two most important bridge institutions of this shift toward a Catholic jurisprudence are The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society.

CONTINUES...

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thecreationproject/2019/07/serving-god-mammon-rise-influence-heritage-foundation-federalist-society/

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