An Obtuse Take On The Class Conflict

I ran into a remarkably obtuse essay by Joel Kotkin at Real Clear Politics this morning, Donald Trump has scrambled the old class allegiances. I don't follow Kotkin, but according to Wikipedia,

Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class.

So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins,

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

This began long before Donald Trump. Labor leader Goerge Meany's refusal to endorse George McGovern in 1972 was much more significant. According to the New York Times on July 17, 1972,

The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.

Labor leaders questioned since the close of last week's Democratic convention said that Mr. Meany was likely to have his way if he asks the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations at its Wednesday meeting to withhold endorsement of Senator McGovern.

. . . Meanwhile, in Rancho La Costa, Calif., the executive board of International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted today to support the re‐election of President Nixon. The leadership of the union has been close to the Nixon Administration, and the endorsement had been expected.

Nixon did a great deal to reshape the Republican alignment, including the Southern strategy and the overtures to labor. He carried 49 states in the 1972 election. Trump and Reagan simply continued strategies originated by Nixon. Kotkin goes on,

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Kotkin invokes Marx, but only to say that Marx is irrelevant, things are much more complicated. But if we recognize that Trump is basically following Nixon's paradigm, exploiting an existing Republican alliance between the proletariat and the lower bourgeoisie, things actually become simpler. The working class broadly defined, a work force made up of both blue and white collar, forms a consensus at the center, pretty much the same thing Nixon called the "silent majority", except that beginning to recognize its power, it's become vocal as MAGA.

And in invoking Marx, Kotkin ignores Marx's insight that the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal and idle underclass, is the enemy of the proletariat. What's actually been taking place -- and this is a trend that also began generations ago -- is an alliance between the elites and the criminal-idle underclass. Think of Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s":

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.”

These are clearly the seeds of George Floyd in 2020, the canonization of a street addict by the elites, the social tensions surrounding which were a simmering factor that led to Trump's vindication in 2024. Kotkin does seem to sense one change:

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

. . . Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media.

Except that Sanders and AOC are generally regarded as jokes -- both have been called out for flying in private jets on that same "fighting oligrchy" tour. They're the same thing as the Black Panthers in Leonard Bernstein's 1970 party, absolutely nothing new. Kotkin seems to miss this. He also begins to contradict himself. Of the college-educated bourgeoisie, he says,

Their numbers have expanded globally with the massive increase in college enrollment, which grew almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010. People who work as lawyers, environmental consultants and teachers are now reliably Democratic. This slice of the middle class often considers itself both enlightened and fit to lead, thanks to their high test scores and degrees. They tend to have little use for patriotism, family or religion, in comparison with working-class voters.

Yet a few paragraphs later, he says,

Many educated millennials face a world where the ‘good’ jobs are disappearing, while they have to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition payments. In the US, some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning they work in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless.

. . . Increasingly, many with college educations (once seen as the ticket to a middle-class life) consider university a waste of time, with more seeking careers in the trades instead.

This has actually become a new feature of Trumpism, but Kotkin doesn't recognize it: the working class broadly conmsidered has come to recognize that college degrees don't pay off, and Trump is taking revenge by cutting federal grants, and likely tax exemptions, to prestige universities. He concludes,

The new class conflict is far more complex than the favoured narrative of the oligarchs vs the people, or the old Marxist battle between industrial workers and the bourgeois merchant class. The only way to address the shift to an increasingly extreme politics comes from finding ways to provide greater opportunities for income and ownership. If we fail in this, the results won’t be pretty.

I think the answer is simpler: the elites have followed the "radical chic" pattern that began in the 1960s and allied themselves with the Lumpenproletariat. Part of this alliance is performance art, as it was in the 1960s. Another part is much more serious, embodied in the Great Replacement theory behind the Biden administration's mass migration policies that appear to have favored deliberately resettling third-world gang members into the US heartland.

These aren't fringe conflicts. Kotkin seems to miss this, as he seems to miss what the actual majority is, and its history.

New Conspiracy Theories!

I'm not sure what this signifies, but I'm belatedly learning that between the death of Benedict XVI and the election of Leo XIV, several related conspiracy theories have emerged. Since I'm a Catholic convert, I should point out that if I thought there was a grain of truth to any of them, I would have to revert to my childhood Presbyterianism, but so far, that hasn't happened.

The most recent elaboration of this set of theories is contained in the hour-long YouTube post embedded above, in which Michael Lebron, who posts on the YouTube channel Lionel Nation, interviews Erik Thaddeus Walters, an adjunct associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome, which caters to English-speaking students who for whatever reason find themselves there. His D Phil is from the University of Vienna. Mr Lebron, who jokingly says he's not a conspiracy theorist but a conspiracy analyst, has had several interviews like this with Dr Walters in the runup to the just-concluded conclave.

The overall takeaway is a happy one, reflected in the title of the post: "Secret Move by Pope Leo XIV Restores True Papacy -- Why No One Is Talking About It". The underlying basis of the theory as it's reached its present stage of development is a version of sedevacantism:

Sedevacantism is a traditionalist Catholic movement which holds that since the 1958 death of Pius XII the occupiers of the Holy See are not valid popes due to their espousal of one or more heresies and that, for lack of a valid pope, the See of Rome is vacant. Sedevacantism owes its origins to the rejection of the theological and disciplinary changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

This particular variant is more recent, and it doesn't appear to be unique to, or have been originated by, Dr Walters. In this version, the see has been vacant, or at least its true occupant has been unclear, only since the resignation of Benedict XVI:

His announcement of this plan to resign, just shy of a decade ago, shocked the world. In fact, in the aftermath of Benedict’s resignation came a strange phenomenon: Catholics claiming that he hadn’t really resigned.

Patrick Coffin, former host of Catholic Answers Live, suggested that Benedict’s “resignation” was some kind of elaborate sting operation, in which Benedict merely pretended not to be the pope to expose corruption in the Church. In Coffin’s words, “if his abdication was intentionally false, it was a masterstroke, pure genius, because it revealed all the corruption that he knew was simmering just below the surface of the Church’s life, but he was too weak to confront it.”

The death of Benedict in 2022, nine years after his resignation in 2013, simplified the problem, at least somewhat: if Benedict had been the true pope all along, the see was in fact vacant upon his death. The link just above calls this "Benevacantism". The putative remedy at this point should have been to call a conclave to replace Francis in early 2023. Again at the link:

Upon hearing of Benedict’s death, Coffin announced that he had become a sedevacantist, saying, “The pope has entered eternity, RIP. The impeded See is now vacant. May the pre-2013 cardinals do the right thing, and avoid yet another antipope.” Why is that so alarming? Because this line of reasoning makes for a clear collision course for schism and heresy. Here’s why.

Only cardinals under the age of eighty can vote, and Benevacantists don’t accept the legitimacy of the cardinals created by Pope Francis, since they don’t accept the legitimacy of Pope Francis. That leaves only forty-four of the 224 cardinals in the College of Cardinals who are old enough to have been made a cardinal by John Paul II or Benedict, but young enough still to be voting age.

Dr Walters, as far as I can tell, agrees that Benedict's papacy post-resignation was valid but impeded, but in his view, it was impeded because Benedict had resigned under some type of pressure and was being held prisoner. In any case, his conclusion is the same, that the cardinals created by Francis remain invalid and should not have voted in the conclave just concluded. But this leaves the problem that the conclave appears to have settled rather quickly on a seeming moderate consensus candidate in Cardinal Prevost.

If Francis had created such a majority of electors in his image, why didn't they just elect a straight-out Francis clone, like Cardinal Tagle? As best I can determine -- the discussion on YouTube is by no means clear -- Dr Walters feels that Cardinal Prevost, before he was elected, somehow convinced the Francis-created cardinals not to vote in the conclave, or the vote was secretly held before the Francis-created cardinals returned from a long lunch break, or something like that.

If this is the case, Prevost would have had to get this scheme past the camarlengo, who runs the conclave, Cardinal Kevin Farrell. Prevost would have had no special authority to do anything until he was elected pope, after all. Neither Mr Lebron nor Dr Walters explains how this could happen, but they seem more of less satisfied with the overall outcome, viz, the see is filled, and Leo XIV is a valid pope.

But this leaves open the question of why this would be a valid conclave, if, under the overall sedevacantist outlook, no cardinals created since Pius XII have been valid. We must assume that the last cardinal created by Pius passed away generations ago, so no conclave since then is valid, snd if the See of Rome is as vacant as it was before Francis or Benedict, what restored the legitimacy of the see after John XXIII?

Even so, there's yet another theory on the new Pope Leo: that he at least appears to be validly elected, but he will wear traditional garb and pray in Latin only to distract from his Francis-loyalist agenda, he is actually a heretic and can't be elected pope, and Cardinal Burke must call a new conclave made up only of John Paul II- and Benedict-created cardinals.

Tim reads his letter to Cardinal Burke live on air https://t.co/hOcD2WvnGH

— Timothy Gordon (Rules for Retrogrades Show) (@timotheeology) May 1, 2025

But that view must be argued with Dr Walters, who feels that this very election without Francis-created cardinals has already taken place. As I say, if I believed any of this, it would be back to the Westminster Confession for me.

In the real world, what seems to have become a general sigh of relief over Leo XIV leaves this sort of disgruntlement to the lunatic fringe, which strikes me as a very good sign.

An Omen?

When I learned that Robert Francis Prevost had been named the new pope, I was convinced I'd seen the name somewhere before. As my wife and I drove to mass yesterday morning, it was confirmed: we found ourselves right behind a Prevost bus on city streets that led us almost all the way to the parish. From Wikipedia,

Prevost . . . formally known as Prevost Car, is a Canadian manufacturer of touring coaches and bus shells for high-end motorhomes and specialty conversions. The company is a subsidiary of the Volvo Buses division of the Volvo Group.

Even before that, once I saw photos of Leo XIV, I decided I liked any pope who wears glasses, as Pius XII did in my childhood. In fact, at that time, both President Truman and the pope wore glasses. Something basic has been restored.

As I've begun to feel reassured, The Guardian is not so much:

After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile remarks made more than a decade ago by Father Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, in which he condemned what he called the “homosexual lifestyle” and “the redefinition of marriage” as “at odds with the Gospel”.

In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia”.

. . . The cleric also called for a “new evangelization to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality”.

At Just the News, New pope, Leo XIV, in early days [of] papacy, appears to be winning over church's wary traditionalists

When the new pope appeared last week for the first time on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, the historic moment looked like a worst-case scenario for Catholic traditionalists.

A close adviser to predecessor Pope Francis, Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was seen as the “least American of the American cardinals – a figure deeply rooted in the Francis era. He was a critic of Vice-President JDVance and to the extent he was known, he was seen as a progressive, raising fears his papacy would continue the previous papacy’s trajectory.

. . . But instead, the first days of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy have – at least temporarily – assuaged traditionalists’ fears.

“Originally you had people saying conservatives’ heads are going to blow up, that this was Francis’ papacy, part two,” Thomas Williams, a conservative author and theologian, told Just the News. “I was worried, too.”

But that began to change, Williams said, as the new pope began to speak.

He told cardinals – who had come from around the world to Rome after Francis's death last month to decide among themselves who would be the next pope – to stay long and to give him counsel. The request was in sharp contrast to Francis’ often unilateral decision-making. He also prayed multiple times in Latin, a meaningful gesture for traditionalists.

In another development that could wind up an early problem for Leo to overcome, his brother has turned out to have a high social media profile:

The far-left media and their allies in the Democrat Party are in full panic mode after it was revealed that Lou Prevost, the straight-shooting Floridian brother of the newly elected American Pope Leo XIV, isn’t just Catholic — he’s unapologetically MAGA.

Prevost, a Port Charlotte, Florida native, proudly lives his life like many forgotten Americans—with faith, freedom, and the First Amendment.

But now, after his younger brother ascended to the papacy as Pope Leo XIV, the leftist media mob is frantically digging through Lou’s Facebook page looking for anything to “cancel” him over. And they think they found gold.

. . . On April 4, Prevost reposted a video of a younger Pelosi arguing for tariffs on China, exposing the radical 180-degree flip-flop that Pelosi and her Democrat cronies have pulled to appease the globalist agenda.

The original post didn’t hold back, “These fing liberals crying about tariffs is just unreal. Do they not know that there is a thing called video? Just listen to what this drunk c has to say in the mid 90s long before her husband had Grindr dates.”

Elsewhere,

Prevost told Newsmax in an interview over the weekend that his brother’s new role will force him to change some of his behavior.

“I’ve had to modify my activities and what I do, what I say, what I write in public spaces or say in public spaces. I’ve seen a couple already,” the Pope’s brother said. “I don’t want to get him in trouble or raise any grief or cause problems.”

The elder Prevost also confirmed that he has had political discussions with his brother in the past.

“When he was bishop or cardinal, we’d occasionally have discussions. He knows where I stand, I know where he stands, and now as Pope, there are going to be some differences there.”

This sounds like the Vatican will end up handling things the right way. I'm convinced Leo is off to a good start.

What Realy Ails Sen Fetterman?

Ed Driscoll, one of the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit, links to a piece at American Greatness that compares Sen Fetterman to, of all people, the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov:

Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. . . . He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.”

. . . Sakharov had been diagnosed in absentia with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a condition identified and articulated (i.e. “made up”) by the founding father of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky. Like countless others in the Soviet Union, Sakharov ran afoul of the regime, and, as a result, was labeled “mentally unfit” by that regime.

. . . The Soviet Union was a monstrous place that did monstrous things to nonconformists and called it “concern” for their mental health.

Enter Senator John Fetterman.

The piece goes on to insist that the media reports of Fetterman's mental decline are all anonymous, at second- or third-hand, and aren't medical diagnoses. Instead, they stem entirely from the Democrat left that finds his pro-Israel, anti-Hamas stance inconvenient. But this neglects a key piece of evidence:

Video from earlier this year shows Sen. John Fetterman getting in an argument with an airline crew over the proper way to wear his seatbelt on a flight to Pittsburgh.

. . . The video, which has gone viral, shows an airline crew member asking Fetterman to make sure his seatbelt is visible to the flight crew, citing federal regulations. What ensued was what appeared to be a back-and-forth between the senator and the airline crew member, though many of Fetterman’s responses are inaudible, occasionally raising his hands.

Some of his responses include: “I put my seatbelt on” and “Yes, it is” in regards to his seat belt being fastened.

“If you want to go to Pittsburgh, it’s simple, you have to follow our instructions or be asked to get off the airplane. We’re not asking much,” the airline crew member said at one point. The crew member had also offered Fetterman a seatbelt extender so it could more comfortably fit around his sweatshirt.

While Fetterman's conduct may be subject to interpretation, it's nevertheless reasonable to assume he's a traveler experienced and sophisticated enough to realize that refusal to cooperate with airline personnel enforcing safety regulations will lead to nothing but delay in his own travel plans and possible removal from the flight, all for the sake of a very minor inconvenience, not to mention bad publicity. This is clearly more than just a whispering campaign.

There have been questions about Fetterman's health and judgment throughout his career. According to Wikipedia,

Fetterman was criticized for an incident in North Braddock in January 2013 when he heard a sound he thought was gunfire and followed an unarmed jogger, whom he detained with a shotgun. The jogger, Chris Miyares, a Black American, said that what Fetterman thought were gunshots were kids shooting bottle rockets. , , , Miyares claimed that Fetterman pointed the shotgun at his chest while he loaded the gun and then aimed the gun at his face.

His health history is complex:

According to Fetterman's chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, Fetterman has struggled with depression throughout his life.

In 2017, Fetterman's feet suddenly began to swell and he was subsequently hospitalized for testing. At that time, he was diagnosed by cardiologist Ramesh Chandra with "atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump", although this diagnosis was not known publicly until Fetterman's stroke in May 2022.

. . . On June 4, 2019, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Fetterman "collapsed" while presiding over the State Senate; he became wobbly and grabbed the lectern to prevent himself from falling over, and a member of the Capitol's nursing staff came to examine him. Afterward, Fetterman's spokesperson said he had become overheated and was "back to normal".

On May 13, 2022 [at age 52], Fetterman had an ischemic stroke and was hospitalized. The stroke was induced by a clot caused by atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm). Because Fetterman also had cardiomyopathy, his doctors implanted a pacemaker and defibrillator. He was discharged from the hospital on May 22, 2022.

What nobody but nobody has mentioned is something I've suspected ever since I learned about Fetterman's stroke at the time: the guy was a cokehead. This is nothing but a medical truism:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), a disease typically associated with aging and the definitive leading cause of death worldwide, now threatens young and middle-aged populations. Recreational abuse of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamine-type stimulants has been an escalating public health problem for decades, but now use of these substances has become a significant contributor to early-onset CVD.

It appears that there have beern troubling patterns in Fetterman's life for the past year. At the Wikipedia link,

On June 9, 2024, Fetterman and his wife were involved in a two-car crash in Maryland. They were hospitalized but quickly released. Fetterman was found to be at fault for the crash after rear-ending another vehicle while speeding.

In a CBS followup on the more recent reports,

In the 2024 letter to [Walter Reed] Dr. David Williamson, [former chief of staff Adam] Jentleson warned that Fetterman was not seeing his doctors, had pushed out the people who were supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan and might not be taking his prescribed medications. Jentleson also said Fetterman had been driving recklessly and exhibiting paranoia, isolating him from colleagues.

Grandiose behavior, like that reflected in his dispute with the airline crew, depression, and paranoia are all associated with cocaine use, which in fact is common among celebrities and others at Fetterman's level of society. This would certainly make any prudent person hesitant to associate very closely with someone like that, and it does appear that Trump, while happy enough to have Fetterman say good things about him now and then, is steering a generally safe course and avoiding Fetterman overall.

But there can be little question that anyone in Fetterman's medical condition, if he continues to ignore medical advice, and especially if he's resumed cocaine use, is unlikely to live a whole lot longer in any case. I have a hard time understanding why some on the right feel they need to defend him.

UPDATE: Mark Halperin says reporters know more than they can say:

The Last Credible Democrat?

Weird: Man Becomes More Conservative As He Regains Brain Function https://t.co/6nesG1N1WN pic.twitter.com/TcQ2n21Rx7

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 6, 2023

A piece by Christopher Nicholas at Real Clear Politics raises an insightful poimt:

Is there any Democrat around today who even comes close to Trump’s dominance in the attention economy? To me, there’s just one: John Fetterman. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are a distant second.

Fetterman is a walking “look at me” sign – given the contrast between his appearance and his diction and his education pedigree.

In the course of nominating Sen Fetterman for Loser of the Week on Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting program yesterday, Sean Spicer noted,

. . . the John Fetterman phenomenon. and so I'll say it less about the person and more of this "oh, he's the second coming" and "he's gonna be our savior", a guy who's running around in a Carhartt and shorts, is somehow the future of the Democratic party, I never thought that that would fly, and I think that we finally popped the bubble.

Dan Turrentine simply agreees,

He's not well.

So the conclusion seems to be, as Voltaire said of God, if John Fetterman did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, but the problem in this case is that the Fetterman we thought we'd seen has turned out not to exist.

One particularly head-scratching video of Fetterman emerged earlier this year in which he was on a flight to Pittsburgh apparently arguing with a pilot over his seatbelt.

Despite fallout with progressives over his staunch support of Israel in its war in Gaza, Fetterman was still an in-demand personality last year to campaign in the battleground state of Pennsylvania for Biden and, after Biden dropped his reelection bid, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since Trump won November’s election — and Pennsylvania — things have changed. Many one-time supporters have turned on Fetterman over his softer approach to Trump and his willingness to criticize fellow Democrats for raising alarm bells.

It nevertheless brought Fetterman plaudits.

Bill Maher, host of the political talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher,” suggested that Fetterman should run for president in 2028. Conservatives — who had long made Fetterman a target for his progressive politics — have sprung to Fetterman’s defense.

Up to now, more centrist Democrats have been reassured, if nothing else, by Fetterman's ability to get attention. Nevertheless, it looks as if his current erratic behavior is not without past context. Christopher Nicholas points out in the first link,

[H]e lives poor but has a multi-million trust fund at his disposal.

Who had access to world class health care but ignored his doctors for five years and then lied to his boss, then Gov. Tom Wolf, about it.

Who later suffered a bad stroke and then lied to the state about it and his recovery as he campaigned for higher office while, of course, serving as the state’s lieutenant governor.

A true renaissance Yinzer … who of course, grew up in south-central Pennsylvania’s York.

I had to look up Yinzer, which is not Yiddish, but a Scotch-Irish name for residents of the Pittsburgh area. Nicholas seems to be concluding that Fetterman has always been something of a phony, even before his rise to national prominence, and current developments should maybe not be a surprise, except to people who thought Fetterman was something he never was.

But this brings us back to a point of yesterday's post, that mainstream Democrats have become an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat, not the working class, but the criminal underclass. Nicholas in his essaay cites Sen Sanders and AOC as distant seconds in a Democrat contest for attention, but even this is problematic -- Sanders is a putatively doctrinaire red diaper baby who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, yet he clearly has no problem with his party's deviationism in embracing the Lumpenproles. But his time is nearly up in any case.

The future of the party lies with AOC. This looks like the lesson of trhe Fetterman story.

Leo XIV

I've been hesitant to post about the new pontiff, not least because just about everything that's come out of Rome since the passing of Francis has been hackneyed and unreliable. Cardinal Parolin, for example, was the sure front runner. But just as important, I'm a Catholic convert of about a dozen years standing, and the one thing I want to avoid is taking the attitude that Rome has gotten it all wrong, and I know how to straighten things out. With that preface, the big hackneyed headline I've seen for the paat 24 hours has been AMERICAN POPE!

But as best I can tell, although he grew up and went to Catholic schools in the Chicago area, then Villanova University, and then an MDiv from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in 1982, after this, at age 27, he appears to have spent nearly all of his career in either Rome or Peru. He is a US citizen by birth but also a naturalized Peruvian citizen. It's difficult to know if he's been in touch with US life for the 40-plus years he's been a high-level church administrator on the fast track, and so far, little concrete has been said.

But here is the expectation from The Guardian:

What’s in a name? When it comes to a pope – everything. The white smoke from the Sistine Chapel earlier this evening told the world that a new pope to succeed Francis had been elected – and for the first time the pontiff is from the US.

But if Donald Trump and his Catholic convert Veep, JD Vance, are ready to cheer, then they should think again. Cardinal Robert Prevost has chosen the name Leo XIV – and if you’re a papal Leo, you tend to be a reformer at the progressive end of Catholicism. That Prevost has decided to become Leo XIV will make Catholics think immediately of the last Leo – Leo XIII – and his 1891 encyclical or teaching document, Rerum Novarum, which outlined workers’ rights to a fair wage, safe working conditions and the rights of workers to belong to trade unions. If Pope Francis was the People’s Pope, then Leo XIV is all set to be the Workers’ Pope.

The writer here gets one big thing wrong, as quite possibly Francis did as well: the migrants who entered the US during the Biden years weren't workers. They appear to have been, by and large, Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal underclass. Per Wikipedia,

In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat . . . is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

Legacy media has struggled to portray the migrants who repeatedly reach the haadlines as something other than gang members, murderers, sex offenders, addicts, and so forth, instead trying to turn them into devoted fathers and husbands, but oddly enough, almost never as competent and socially aware workers eager for a just wage. Nor do they ever turn out to be good Catholics or good Christians of any sort. But then, thieves don't fare well in the Decalogue, nor in the gospels, with the exception of the penitent next to Christ on the cross. As St Paul puts it in I Corintians 6: 9-10:

9 Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Not only will these people not go to heaven unless they repent, they will not form a working class with reliable revolutionary consciousness. By and large, it's a mistake, whatever the political alignment, to confuse the Lumpenproletariat with either the working class or the kingdom of heaven. But here's an early interpretation of Leo from the right:

Why pick the first American Pope now? Robert Prevost was made Pope Leo XIV as a counterweight to President Trump.

There’s been little ambiguity about the new pope’s politics and less about the overall agenda.

Pope Francis had all but rigged the process to assure another radical successor.

President Trump’s return represents an ongoing institutional crisis. The ideological battleground is going to be the border and Prevost has been chosen to lead the response in the largest sense possible.

Choosing an American Pope is supposed to raise the stakes and elevate a leader with the stature to rally opposition to Trump and more specifically to his immigration policies by invoking the familiar tropes about the need for welcoming in every single migrant.

That’s what this is about.

If this is the case -- I'm anything but convinced it is -- it involves a misreading of the populist movement. What we saw in the 2024 election in particular was a recognition by organized labor that their interests lay more with the traditional Republican middle class than with the Democrats, who had by and large abandoned the workers, as traditionally defined, in favor of an alliance betwen the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat. This was never so clear as with the presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who dressed like an upper-class white woman, was married to a wealthy white attorney, but struggled to speak in black street argot.

In effect, Trump represents a consolidation of interests between the traditional working class and the lower bourgeoisie. As one result of this, a majority of US Catholics voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. At the same time, US Catholic priests are becoming more conservative:

The results of a national survey of Catholic priests released by The Catholic Project on Nov. 7 [2023] revealed an interesting dynamic in U.S. Catholic life. In the terminology used in the survey questions, young U.S. Catholic priests tend to be theologically traditional and politically conservative, particularly compared to older priests.

I see this in our own parish: new associates passing through are more inclined to wear cassocks, while our current pastor, who also wears a cassock, is friendly to reception of the Sacrament kneeling or on the tongue. Francis appears to have viewed this trend with alarm:

Pope Francis blasted what he described as groups of "very strong, reactionary" American Catholics, warning against becoming "backwardists" who oppose change in the Catholic Church.

"The situation in the United States is not easy: There is a very strong, reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally," said the pope. "I want to remind these people that backwardism is useless, and it is necessary to understand that there is a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals."

It's hard to tell if Leo thinks his task is to bring the American Church to heel, and with it, Trump and Vance. If it is, I've got to think this is a profound misunderstanding of his native country and the populist movement. It's a misunderatanding even of Marxism, and probably as well Leo XIII, who had a lot to do with modern Catholic social teaching. But we'll have to see. And as a famous workers' advocate once asked, "How many divisions has the pope?"

Bringing Back Joe? Why?

There seems to be a high-level campaign to put Joe Biden back on the public stage:

Former President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will join ABC's "The View" on Thursday for their first joint interview post-presidency.

The couple will join the show live in-studio to discuss life after the White House, the Democratic Party's election losses in 2024, and the current political landscape following President Donald Trump's first 100 days, ABC News reported.

The former president had his first post-White House interview with the BBC on Wednesday, in which he criticized President Trump's foreign policy, saying his peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would be "modern-day appeasement," and slammed the Republican president's threats to obtain Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.

Via Politico this morning,

In a sign of Biden’s intent to remain engaged publicly, his inner circle tapped Chris Meagher, a former Biden deputy press secretary and Defense Department spokesperson, to help him transition past the first 100 days of the Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the hire and granted anonymity to speak freely.

Meagher, who has worked for former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, played an instrumental role in booking Biden’s appearance on The View on Thursday, the people said, his first live interview since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

According to CNN last month,

Joe Biden has been hankering to do more. Many leading Democrats across the country — including some former top aides and close allies, who note they’re sad to say it — are desperate for the former president to stick to a quiet retirement.

But Tuesday in Chicago, Biden waded into one of the most charged political fights set off by President Donald Trump. The first big public speech of Biden’s post-presidency focused on protecting Social Security and comes as many Democrats stage a national day of action against feared cuts to the program, with protests planned across the country.

. . . Asked by CNN about hearing from the former president since January 20, one longtime supporter and donor said only this: “No. Thank God.”

. . . Only a few of Biden’s most loyal aides stayed with him, mainly those who were the last fighting for him to stay in the presidential race. He’s been mostly at home in Delaware, coming back to an office in Washington about once a week, often via his beloved Amtrak. He’ll occasionally get spotted around Wilmington, but his public appearances have been limited to a Model United Nations conference in New York, a St. Patrick’s Day brunch in Delaware and accepting a lifetime achievement award from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers at the union’s convention in Washington this month.

Apparently this is about to change, although the big question is whether anything will change with Joe.

Biden’s BBC interview bucked the longstanding tradition of presidents keeping their counsel about their successors. In it, he condemned Trump’s expansionist fantasies and expressed his contempt for the Trump White House’s treatment of America’s traditional allies.

“What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that?” Biden asked. “That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.”

Reaction from the White House after the interview suggested there's nothing new:

Joe Biden is a complete disgrace to this country and the office he occupied. He has clearly lost all mental faculties and his handlers thought it'd be a good idea for him to do an interview and incoherently mumble his way through every answer.

Sadly, this feels like abuse. https://t.co/UKkysv1lKs

— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) May 7, 2025

This has actually been in the works for some time. According to NBC News bzck in March,

Former President Joe Biden has told some Democratic leaders he’ll raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground as the Trump administration rolls back programs the party helped design, according to people close to him.

Biden privately met last month with the new Democratic National Committee chairman, Ken Martin, and offered to help as the party struggles to regain its viability amid polling that shows its popularity has been sinking, the people said.

So far, Biden's overture seems to have fallen flat. Democrats find themselves adrift, casting about for a compelling messenger.

Whoever that is, it's not Biden, many party activists and donors contend. He's tethered to the 2024 defeat and, at 82, is a symbol more of the party's past than its future, they argue.

“Who’s going to want Joe Biden back in the game?” said a major Biden supporter, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about him.

The problem for the Democrats is that each time either Joe or Kamala reappears, it only serves as a reminder that the country made the right choice last November. It appears that the White House has contingency plans in case there are further recurrences:

The Trump administration is making plans to release the audio of former President Joe Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and raised questions about his mental acuity, according to two Republicans briefed by top Trump officials.

The details of the plan are in flux and it is not clear whether President Donald Trump and his advisers have made a final decision to make the audio public.

Biden’s camp is girding for the possible release, said two people familiar with the former president’s preparations and granted anonymity to speak freely.

A deadline of sorts is approaching on May 20: In separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by conservative groups like Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation and various news organizations, the Justice Department has been ordered by a judge to say whether it will stand by Biden’s assertion of executive privilege to block the release of the tapes. Last May, Biden and his Justice Department claimed releasing the tapes would have a chilling effect on witnesses cooperating in high-profile investigations.

John Nolte comments at Breitbart,

The Trump White House might be hedging on the public release of the Hur interview, fearing the release might set a precedent that could undermine executive privilege in the future.

I suspect Trump's instinct will be to release the interview. On one hand, it's hard not to think the idea of keeping Joe in the public eye is the brainchild of Dr Jill, with Hunter possibly pushing it as well. On the other, it doesn't sound as if anyone on the Democrat side is powerful enough to stop it. Mark Halperin, though, has possibly the most insightful take:

I talked to someone very familiar with the Bidens, and I think they've pointed out something that I'm gonna say now that to me is the explanation, or at least part of the explanation, which is Biden Inc has collapsed. All those Biden grandkids had a lavish lifestyle which they very much liked. Hunter made hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. Joe as a former president is not in a position to get the kinds of paid speeches, corporate boards, book deal. Biden Inc needs a source of revenue. . . . Hunter does not have great earning capacity.

This may be true, but we should also keep in mind that Biden Inc was never more than smoke and mirrors. Joe likely owes many millions at this point, especially after he seems to have funded Hunter's lifestyle and many of his legal bills throughout his presidency. How can Joe possibly make this up now?