Adrian Vermeule Published a Blueprint for Transforming Government From Within

The postliberal movement is often discussed as though it were merely an intellectual reaction to the failures of modern liberalism. Its advocates criticize social fragmentation, cultural decadence, radical individualism, weakened institutions, and the fiction that government can ever be morally neutral. Some of those criticisms identify real problems. Liberal societies do struggle to sustain the moral foundations upon which ordered liberty depends.

But diagnosing a real problem does not make every proposed remedy legitimate.

The deeper question is not whether liberalism has failed to preserve virtue. It is what postliberals intend to place in its stead, how they intend to acquire the power necessary to do it, and whether the American people will ever be asked to consent openly to the resulting political order.

Adrian Vermeule supplied one answer in his 2018 American Affairs essay, “Integration from Within.” He called the strategy ralliement, borrowing an older Catholic term, but its political logic is recognizable as entryism: committed actors enter the institutions of an existing order, acquire influence within them, and redirect their power toward the construction of a different regime.

Vermeule was not calling for traditional Christians to retreat into isolated communities while waiting for liberalism to collapse. He considered that approach insufficient because families, churches, schools, and local communities would remain vulnerable to the power of the liberal state. His alternative was to place nonliberal actors inside liberal institutions, particularly within the administrative apparatus, where they could occupy influential positions and use the existing machinery of government to advance a substantive vision of the common good.

He envisioned “elite administrators” occupying the “commanding heights of the administrative state.” The institutions created under liberalism would not need to be destroyed. They could be redirected. The new political order could emerge from inside the structure of the old one.

That is not an interpretation imposed upon Vermeule by hostile critics. It is the strategy he published.

Service Within a Regime or Transformation of It?

Vermeule gives his argument biblical legitimacy by invoking Joseph, Mordecai, Esther, and Daniel. Each served within a foreign political order without accepting its ultimate claims. They gained access to rulers, exercised administrative authority, and used their positions to protect their people.

The comparison is rhetorically powerful because it presents the postliberal administrator as a faithful servant rather than an ideological operative. He becomes a modern Daniel in Babylon, working competently within a regime he does not fully endorse while remaining obedient to a higher law.

But the analogy contains a serious limitation.

Joseph, Esther, Mordecai, and Daniel did not enter pagan governments in order to capture their institutions and convert them into new regimes. They protected lives, restrained injustice, preserved their people, and refused to violate their obligations to God. They did not treat administrative authority as a means of reshaping the population’s conscience or quietly replacing the political order from within.

Vermeule’s project goes beyond faithful service under an imperfect government. His objective is institutional transformation. The administrator does not merely serve within the existing constitutional framework while advocating openly for change. He uses his position inside that framework to help create the conditions for a successor regime.

That distinction separates legitimate public service from entryism.

Every administration appoints people who share its governing philosophy. Every political movement encourages talented supporters to enter public service. There is nothing improper about officials implementing policies that voters knowingly authorized through elections.

The problem arises when public office is treated not as a trust held within a constitutional order but as leverage for replacing that order without first obtaining public consent.

The Postliberal Answer to the Administrative State

For decades, constitutional conservatives have criticized the growth of the administrative state. Their objection has not merely been partisan. It has been structural.

Administrative agencies possess enormous power to write rules, interpret broad statutes, distribute benefits, impose costs, restrict conduct, and shape national policy. Much of that power is exercised by officials whom voters cannot directly remove and whose decisions are difficult for ordinary citizens to understand or challenge.

The traditional conservative response was to limit this authority, restore responsibility to elected lawmakers, strengthen constitutional boundaries, and prevent unelected officials from exercising legislative power under another name.

Vermeule offers a fundamentally different answer.

He does not principally object to the administrative state because its power is too concentrated or too distant from electoral control. He sees that concentration of power as potentially useful. The problem is that the administrative state has been directed toward liberal ends. In the right hands, the same machinery could become an instrument for advancing a substantive conception of morality, dignity, solidarity, and the common good.

The postliberal administrator therefore does not dismantle the weapon. He takes possession of it.

This exposes a central contradiction within the postliberal critique of modern government. Postliberals rightly condemn progressive administrators when they use unelected institutions to impose contested moral judgments upon the public. Yet Vermeule’s solution preserves the structure that made such imposition possible. The personnel change, and the moral program changes, but the concentration of power remains.

The argument is no longer that unelected officials should not govern the country through expansive interpretations of administrative authority. It is that better officials, armed with the correct vision of the good, should exercise that authority instead.

That is not a restoration of constitutional government. It is a competition for control of the machinery that displaced it.

The Significance of the “Nudge”

Vermeule’s interest in behavioral economics makes the problem clearer. A government does not need to issue a direct command to shape human conduct. It can alter default rules, distribute incentives, impose indirect penalties, narrow available choices, or structure institutions so that one course of action becomes easier and another more difficult.

The public remains formally free, but officials design the environment in which that freedom is exercised. They determine which conduct will be encouraged, discouraged, rewarded, stigmatized, normalized, or burdened.

This is why the administrative “nudge” is so politically valuable. It directs behavior while avoiding the appearance of coercion.

Some nudges are mundane and defensible. No functioning government can avoid structuring choices altogether. The danger lies in transforming this limited administrative tool into a theory of political formation. Once officials claim authority to guide the population toward a comprehensive vision of human flourishing, the state ceases merely to govern conduct within its jurisdiction. It begins to form the citizen according to the administrator’s understanding of the good.

The administrator no longer asks only what the law permits him to do. He asks how public power can produce the kind of person and society he believes ought to exist.

That is an extraordinary claim of jurisdiction.

Consent After Power

Vermeule does not explicitly say that postliberals are incapable of winning elections, nor does he announce that democracy should simply be discarded. The criticism must therefore be stated precisely.

His strategy does not require postliberals to obtain a clear, informed and constitutionally expressed public mandate before beginning the work of transforming the regime.

The emphasis falls instead on strategic personnel, administrative discretion, institutional position and gradual change from within. A movement that lacks broad numerical support may still exercise significant influence if its adherents control sufficiently important institutions. Administrative power is concentrated, technical and often insulated from sustained public scrutiny. A relatively small number of officials can therefore shape policy far beyond their proportion of the electorate.

This does not prove that every postliberal intends to deceive the public. It does mean that the method Vermeule describes can function without first persuading most Americans to embrace the political order toward which they are being directed.

That reverses the proper sequence of republican government.

In a constitutional republic, political leaders make their case to the public, win elections, enact laws through representative institutions, and remain answerable to the electorate. Persuasion precedes legitimate political authority. The people may choose badly, but they must at least be given the opportunity to understand and judge the proposed use of power.

Under a strategy of integration from within, institutional power can be acquired before the larger argument has been won. That power can then be used to influence the social conditions under which future consent is formed.

The public does not knowingly authorize the destination and then empower government to pursue it. Government begins steering the public toward the destination before the choice has been clearly presented.

Why “Entryism” Is the Right Word

Calling this entryism does not require alleging a secret society, an unlawful conspiracy, or a hidden chain of command. It does not mean that every Catholic conservative, every critic of liberalism, or every religious person working in government is participating in an organized campaign.

The term describes a political method, not a religious identity.

Entryism occurs when members of an ideological movement enter the institutions of an existing order and use positions acquired within those institutions to redirect them toward a different political project. Vermeule’s essay advocates precisely that combination of institutional placement, administrative influence and transformation from within.

The argument should not be exaggerated beyond the evidence because exaggeration would make the real evidence easier to dismiss. There is no need to invent covert meetings, personal handlers or direct orders. The published theory is serious enough.

Ideas move through journals, conferences, universities, foundations, professional relationships, religious networks and political organizations. People need not receive instructions from a single leader to arrive at a shared understanding of what power is for. A movement can develop a common vocabulary, a common diagnosis of the existing order, and a common strategy for using institutions without operating through centralized command.

No conspiracy is necessary when a doctrine is taught openly.

The Vance Question Must Remain Open

J.D. Vance’s proximity to the postliberal intellectual world makes him relevant to this discussion, but relevance is not proof.

He has appeared in settings that included leading postliberal thinkers. He has engaged publicly with figures associated with the movement, including Patrick Deneen. He has spoken about the importance of placing capable people inside the functioning state. He is also routinely described as part of the broader postliberal or national-conservative realignment within the American right.

Those facts justify scrutiny. They do not establish that Vance has adopted Vermeule’s program in full, that he is implementing “Integration from Within,” or that Vermeule exercises any personal influence over him.

The phrase “good people” entering government is not, standing alone, evidence of entryism. Every political administration needs personnel who can carry out its lawful program. The meaning depends upon what those officials are being asked to do, what limits they recognize, and whether they view their office as service within the constitutional order or as an instrument for transforming that order from inside.

The responsible question is therefore not whether Vance can be declared the political executor of Vermeule’s blueprint. The public record does not yet justify that conclusion.

The question is whether Vance shares Vermeule’s understanding of administrative power, institutional transformation and the relationship between public consent and the common good.

That question remains open, and it should be answered by examining policy, appointments, public statements and governing conduct rather than by assuming guilt through intellectual association.

Does Vance believe the administrative state should be constrained, or merely redirected? Does he regard the Constitution as the governing framework within which policy must operate, or as a provisional order that may be repurposed toward a postliberal successor? Does he believe government should protect the conditions in which virtue can flourish, or that administrators may actively form citizens according to a comprehensive moral vision? Does he intend to persuade the American people, or does he believe the state may guide them toward ends they have not expressly chosen?

Those are fair questions because Vermeule and other postliberal thinkers have made the underlying theory part of the public debate. They are not accusations, and they should not be answered in advance.

Association establishes a reason to investigate. It does not establish adoption.

The Real Conflict Is About Jurisdiction

The central objection to Vermeule’s program is not that it is Catholic, traditionalist or morally serious. Reducing the debate to religious identity would obscure the constitutional issue and unfairly implicate millions of Catholics who do not share his political theory.

The conflict is about jurisdiction.

Who has the authority to define the common good for an entire country? Who decides which forms of human flourishing government may promote? What means may officials use to move citizens toward those ends? What limits bind administrators who believe their objectives are not merely preferable but objectively true?

Vermeule’s framework places enormous confidence in the judgment of officials who claim to possess the correct understanding of the good. Constitutional government begins with less confidence in the righteousness of those who hold power.

Human beings remain fallible even when their principles are sincere. Political officials are not freed from ambition, pride, error, factional interest or self-deception because they invoke virtue rather than liberty. A movement’s certainty about its own moral purposes is not a substitute for limits upon its authority.

The American constitutional system does not assume that morality is irrelevant to law. It assumes that human power is dangerous, even when exercised in the name of morality. It therefore divides authority, limits jurisdiction, requires public deliberation, and protects areas of life that do not belong to the state.

Government may punish violence without possessing authority over belief. It may prohibit theft without claiming jurisdiction over the soul. It may preserve public order without treating citizens as material to be formed according to an administrator’s comprehensive theology or philosophy.

The distinction is not between moral government and moral neutrality. No political order is neutral in every respect.

The distinction is between legitimate public authority and power that exceeds its proper bounds.

Persuasion Is the Dividing Line

A free political order depends upon the distinction between persuasion and coercion.

Persuasion recognizes the moral agency of the person being addressed. It offers an argument, presents evidence, appeals to conscience and accepts that conviction cannot be manufactured through force.

Government necessarily uses coercion within a limited jurisdiction. Laws against murder, fraud, theft and violence are not optional suggestions. The question is not whether the state may ever compel conduct. The question is what conduct falls within its authority and whether the state may use that authority to shape convictions and manufacture consent.

Administrative formation occupies a dangerous space between open argument and direct command. It works through defaults, incentives, professional requirements, access to institutions, regulatory burdens and dependence upon government benefits. It may leave a formal choice intact while arranging the consequences so heavily that the desired outcome becomes difficult to resist.

Once officials erase the distinction between persuasion and coercion, nearly any exercise of pressure can be described as guidance toward the citizen’s true good. Dissent becomes a failure of understanding. Resistance becomes evidence that further formation is required. The administrator assumes the authority not merely to govern what people do to one another, but to determine what they ought to desire.

That is not republican persuasion.

It is moral management from above.

The Blueprint Is Public

The significance of “Integration from Within” does not depend upon proving that any particular politician is secretly implementing it. The essay matters because it reveals how one of postliberalism’s most influential legal thinkers understands institutional power.

Vermeule did not merely criticize liberalism. He described a means of moving beyond it. He called for strategically placed nonliberal actors, elite administrative control, the use of existing governmental machinery, and the gradual emergence of a new order from within the old.

The theory is public. The constitutional questions it raises are unavoidable.

Will political change occur through persuasion, elections and open constitutional argument, or through the strategic use of administrative institutions by a committed minority? Will the state remain limited by defined jurisdiction, or become an instrument for forming citizens according to an official conception of the good? Will those who condemn progressive bureaucratic rule restore constitutional limits, or simply seize the same machinery and turn it toward different ends?

These questions should be asked of every political leader influenced by postliberal thought, including J.D. Vance. But they should remain questions until evidence supplies the answers.

There is no need for claims of secret control. There is no need to confuse intellectual proximity with proven allegiance. There is no need to declare that a politician has adopted a blueprint before his conduct establishes it.

The published strategy is enough to warrant scrutiny.

Adrian Vermeule explained how a postliberal order could grow from inside the institutions of a liberal one. Americans now have an obligation to understand that argument, watch how it travels into government, and insist that anyone seeking to transform the constitutional order make the case openly before the people whose consent gives government its legitimacy.

A movement confident in the truth of its vision should be willing to persuade.

When it chooses institutional leverage before public consent, that choice tells us something important about both its strategy and its understanding of power.