Latest Dispatch from the Western Front

 

Jill Stein has just announced for the US presidency. This adds to a now-crowded field including Cornell West and RFK Jr. There are rumours of Larry Horan, or Joe Manchin, also coming in. And the Libertarians are always out there too. Stein’s campaign in 2016 was alone significant enough that some say it threw the election to Trump.

Why are we getting so many independent runs in this particular cycle?

It is the latest battle in an ongoing war between the common people and the powerful, the “experts,” those in control of the levers in society. A conflict kicked off in turn by rapidly improving information and communications technology, making the expert class intrinsically less useful and exposing their relative incompetence and venality.

We saw this popular revolt, for example, in the initial election of Trump; in Brexit; in the improbable rise of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party; in the Arab Spring. The general public has for some time now, and increasingly, been in the mood to overthrow whomever was in charge. 

In reaction, the powerful have turned against democracy, and become increasingly authoritarian.

The American system traditionally relied on the primary system to allow all voices and concerns to be aired and voted on. The Democratic Party in the US, has now deliberately abandoned this system. This forces the left, at least, into a European model, in which the variety of viewpoints are represented by different candidates and parties in the general election.

On the Republican side, the common people took control three cycles ago. Without popular support, the old party establishment cannot now get traction by going to the people. Does anybody remember Evan McMullin? So long as Trump looks like an outlaw, support for him is solid.

The Democratic Party came close to being similarly taken over by the left-populists under Bernie Sanders. However, they fell short, and the forces of reaction have seized absolute power in response. Left-populism in intrinsically less compelling than right-populism, because the modern left is already allied with the expert class and the bureaucracy. “Vanguard of the proletariat” and all that. They can never appear as plausibly insurgent. 

In Canada, the Conservative Party, the official and perpetual opposition, at first tried to shut the gate against the rabble, fixing leadership races for Andrew Scheer and then Erin O’Toole as controlled opposition. But then, after repeated failure in the general elections, they wisely fixed the next race for Pierre Poilievre, who at least sounds like a populist. The floodgates have opened.

Meantime, the Liberals, the natural governing party, closely allied with the bureaucracy and the professions, has grown openly authoritarian and paranoid about the people.

In the UK, the Labour Party was actually taken over by left-populists under Jeremy Corbin. However, as left-populism has less steam with the general pubic than populism on the right, that wave receded. On the right, the Conservatives, under intense pressure from third parties, were taken over by populists, kicking and screaming though they were, when Johnson got in on a Brexit platform. 

But the brass were not yet done. Despite an overwhelming election win, they soon forced Johnson out, then forced out his popularly elected successor, not to their liking, and parachuted in they guy, Rishi Sunak.

But of course they greatly fear Nigel Farage and Reform, the third party option; so much so that they are trying to drive him out of the country.

I believe the win by the people is inevitable in the longer run. It is driven by the technology, and the technology cannot be turned back. Not to mention the Divine Will. But there may be much more nastiness between now and then.

A similar struggle is going on in the Catholic Church: a war of the Vatican against the common faithful. This is masked, it is true, by Pope Francis as a war against “clericalism,” on behalf of the laity. But this is the typical dodge: Francis is pope, “vanguard of the proletariat,” not laity. This is the old Marxist trick. He himself gets to select the voices he presents as “the laity”; like the old system of soviets. It is actually a concentration of power in the hands of the Vatican bureaucracy. 

The real wishes of the laity are illustrated by the growing popularity of masses in Latin, of traditionalist YouTube channels, of traditionalist seminaries, and growing voices against corrupt priests, bishops, and cardinals.

Francis seems to have been elected to circle the wagons against these unruly Apaches, the people in the pews. The synodal demands to normalize homosexuality come, surely, from within the hierarchy—there are far more practicing homosexuals, proportionately, within their ranks, than among the general public. There is reputedly, a “gay Mafia” at the Vatican. Those calling out financial corruption in the Vatican, like Pell and Vigano, have been cast into the outer darkness. 

It is harder to see how the conflict within the Catholic Church will end.