Clarence Thomas is a Catholic. So is Samuel Alito. So is Ron DeSantis. So are Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, Ross Douthat, and Michael Anton. Rod Dreher used to be one. What else do these men have in common? They are all prominent reactionaries, of course. They are intellectual leaders of the New Right; their opinions will matter to the next Republican president; and they don’t have much respect for American liberal democracy.
Is that a coincidence? It would be absurd to argue that most Catholics are reactionaries, or that most reactionaries are Catholics, but the answer is no. The Catholic Church is authoritarian by design, and has a history of behaving despotically that predates the Declaration and the Constitution by centuries. Its leaders admire Thomas Aquinas, not Thomas Jefferson. Anyone who completely embraces its intellectual traditions and political pretensions is going to have a hard time reconciling them with the checks and balances inherent in liberal democracy.
The practical problem for Catholic reactionary leaders is that only a very small percentage of Americans (including Catholic voters) accept their opinions. They don’t even speak for a majority of reactionaries–the numbers favor right-wing Protestants, whose very different governing style was largely created in opposition to Catholic authoritarianism. As a result, the American Catholic theocracy they really want is never going to happen. The best they can possibly hope for is a loose united front with reactionary evangelical Protestants aimed at suppressing non-believers in which the evangelicals will hold most of the power.