The so called ‘transactional’ tactics of the Trump administration have obscured its ideological strategy. Within the Trump coalition there is today a strong and influential illiberal Catholic sector whose ideological and intellectual traditions are much more European than American. What we are witnessing with this New American “post-liberal” Right is not an import of post-war Christian democracy, with its antifascist tradition, but rather a reinvention of the dominant branch of the European Christian democracy in the interwar period, which, as we well know in Southern Europe, had little to do with “democracy” and even less with “political liberalism”. This paper presentation aims to map the roots and the public intellectuals of this new movement of ideas and seeks to anticipate its possible impacts in American (and Western) politics.

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