The Dark Empire Coalesces

2020, a historically momentous year: global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the demise of Trump and ascension of the Democrats in the executive and legislative branches, a Republican party traumatized and unhinged by the Trump phenominon, imperialist aggression from Communism out of China, and a Catholic hierarchy polarized, incoherent, emasculated and subservient to the expansive totalitarianism of Communism in China and Cultural Liberalism in the West. The most ominous development may prove to be the radicalization of global capitialism: its embrace of Cultural Liberalism. Capitalism has always been deeply ambiguous morally to my mind. Positively, it means free markets, initiative, rule of law, industriousness, and all the associated freedoms. On the negative side, it inflames greed, materialism, consumerism, addictions to work and buying, meritocracy, and marginalization of the weak and incompetent. In its later stages it dissolves communities of locality, family, and Church. Back to the positive: Reagan Conservatism represented a fairly harmonious marriage of business and late-Calvinist Christianity in "the American Way." Personally I worked as a supervisor for UPS in those years and found my career in an iconic capitalistic enterpise to be mostly (but not entirely) congenial to my family and religious values. As a Catholic, however, this synthesis seemed to me to be interiorly conflicted. In 2020 the deeper reality of large scale capitalism is presenting itself: materialistic, individualitic and deeply coherent with the hedonism and secularism of Cultural Liberalism. And so we are witnessing the alignment of the dominant powers and principalities of the West: all the cultural elites (academia, media, entertainment, sports, etc.), big government and now big business. We might add big unions especially in the face of the shameless selfishness of the teacher's unions in the pandmic. We are living under a soft totalitarianism, as Rod Dreher suggests. The pushback from the right is fragmented and impotent. A thoughtful, promising minority (Douthat, Levin, Reno etc.) of intellectuals advocate a Catholic-friendly combination of cultural conservatism and economic populism. But theirs is a weak third voice, drowned out by the Trumpian rage and a residual "low-tax" Republical establishment that will be energized by the coming Biden tax increases. Meanwhile the American episcopacy, betrayed from within by the Cupich-Tobin forces, is incapable of speaking with a clear, firm voice. I find myself newly bereft of my customary optimism. But I am not without Hope...and hopes. The path ahead, it seems to me, is to go small, hidden, humble. To go into hiding like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda when the Empire took control. To go the way proposed by St. Benedict and Pope Benedict and Rod Dreher. To go the hidden way of Nazareth with St. Joseph. That will be my next blog.