Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books on William Barr’s passion for authoritarianism:

There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and [his son] William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is a defining feature of hierarchical institutional Catholicism. The magisterium of the church flows from the pope, who, on matters of faith and morals, may create doctrines that are infallible and therefore unquestionable. These include the bans on contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage. As a devout Catholic with links to the powerful Opus Dei movement, which galvanized the successful reaction against the liberalizing currents within the church, Barr holds to these principles as both articles of religious faith and bulwarks of the social order. In this, he is a central figure in the ever-growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump, demonstrated yet again in his nomination of Barrett to the Supreme Court.

It’s such a fundamentally stupid idea, too. Why should one person – male person, of course – have absolute authority of any kind? Especially universal authority of the type the Catholic church thinks it has?

Oh, you know, it’s because he speaks for god, and god makes sure he stays infallible, and blah blah blah. But none of that is true, and there’s no real reason to think it is true, there is only the fact that lotsa people believed it before so who are we to stop believing it now? Which is stupid, and not a real reason. Popes are just guys, elevated by other guys, and called infallible by their brotherhood of guys, who relieve the misery of celibacy by raping children. Barr’s beliefs are stupid and infantile.

Barr’s understanding of executive authority is no more a matter of constitutional reasoning than a zealous Catholic’s acceptance of papal infallibility is a result of cool biblical analysis. It is a matter of faith.

And faith is another form of absolute authority. There’s a pattern here.

What must be understood about Barr is that he is not a lawyer in the political arena. He is a political ideologue and operative who happens to function through the law.

…

His function in public life, as he has always understood it, is to provide legal justification for the untrammeled exercise of power by Republican presidents. And for all his air of gravity, Barr is utterly shameless in his pursuit of this calling. He is willing to lie to the American people and to flout the very principles he claims to uphold.

I guess the takeaway is that Barr is an absolutist Republican because Republicans are more reliably authoritarian than Democrats.

H/t Tim Harris