So the nickel may finally be dropping slow as regards the fact that modern American conservatism has taken up residency in a lovely bayside property on the shores of Crazy Lake. From The New Republic:

The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.

The piece begins with former Congressman Allen West being invested in—and I am not good enough to make this up—the Knights Templar. At the heart of this particular cosplay is a revival of triumphalist Catholicism, dress-up games and all, that we aging cradle Catholics remember from our pre-Vatican II youth. My paternal grandfather (for whom I am named) was a muckety-muck in the Knights of Columbus; he even had a cape and a sword which, admittedly, I thought was very cool. One of my father’s priestly brothers and his only sister belonged to some Knights of Malta knockoff that had some classy jewelry. (We were never really sure what was going on there.) Now we have West joining up with an order of monkish warriors that was brutally suppressed in the 13th Century.

On behalf of all cradle Catholics of my generation, I would like to apologize to the American people.

This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.

And what do we get for this? Glad you asked.

The most outwardly visible element of the extremely online weird right is its often nonsensical lifestyle and consumption habits. The subculture has not only embraced vaccine hesitancy—once primarily a creature of the left—but also fringe health and dietary practices that recall the wildest excesses of 1960s new age spiritualism. The claims are varied and, to differing degrees, absurd: Real men don’t eat soybeans; seed oils are dangerous; meat substitutes will turn men into women and also are made from bugs (they aren’t); the best diet is all-meat. This is no mere online phenomenon: Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas has stated that if one eats artificially cultured meat, “you’ll turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”

Also, it seems to have taken a radical turn against simple humanity, especially when it comes to the interactions between human beings.

Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in.

Back in those days, of course, Roman Catholicism had armies and its temporal power was unsurpassed. Theological disputes were conducted at the point of a sword. The crusade against the Cathars in the south of France killed more than a million people, many of whom died simply because of where they lived. It was this latter sanctified savagery that gave us the infamous battle plan explained by Arnaud Amalric, a Cistercian monk and the official ambassador from Rome to the armies arrayed against the Cathars. Before the crusaders massacred almost everyone in the town of Beziers, Amalric is reputed to have said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

If it’s all the same to everyone, I’d just as soon not go back to that kind of energetic Catholicism, especially as led by Allen West, who, it should be noted, left the Army after going all Beziers on a prisoner in Iraq.