The Cathedral meets TrussVision
The Prime Minister is dead long live the Prime Minister.
The concept of The Cathedral is one I have tried to integrate into my political thinking over the last few years after stumbling over Mencius Moldbug's writings and being helpfully pointed towards several YouTubers by Simon Roberts. We are not talking about the Cathedral powerhouses of prayer and governance at the peak of western Christendom; sadly, this is very much in the past.
But in this context, the Cathedral refers to the combination of the University system consensus - and the mainstream media that integrates the former’s concepts, values and policies into everyday cultural life and how these are manifest in the bureaucratic, unelected, and permanent government that manages its interests in the shadows.
And against the backdrop of unstable, tectonic movements in the globalised economy, Whitehall herds the political sheep on-side of the global factions, corporations, and billionaire movers and shakers that control social media and news corp. To this end, the illusion of elected governments comforts the naive. Politicians become popular agents of the Cathedral consensus or the whipping boys when things go awry, or the voters vote the wrong way.
The coterie of politicians that were instrumental in implementing the policies that have undermined our currency and public finances; and threatened our energy security and geopolitical position: Cameron, Osbourne, May, Sunak, Gove, Johnson, Starmer, Sturgeon, Drakeford - and so many others that cheered on and demanded more Covid lockdowns, mRNA roll-outs, compulsory vaccine passports, regulation and deregulation, the sacking of non-vaccine compliant low paid care workers, furlough schemes, Zero carbon deadlines, and Ukrainian sanctions - these politicians, created a veritable spiral of spending incontinence, that Truss now finds herself, through her political ineptitude, being accused of causing.
The year-long recession, predicted before she even came to power, is now pinned on Truss, and her departure will not change that. This political pantomime is public entertainment. Those responsible for every stage of the catalogue of ineptitude, hubris and master-of-the-universe megalomania will go without sanction: Sir Philip Rutnam, Professor Chris Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance, Sue Grey, and Tom Scholars; whom senior politicians cross at their peril. The bureaucrats are beyond accountability or sustained journalistic scrutiny.
All the thinking, strategies, policymaking and governance are determined by these figures and those that educated them. Strategic trends across nations can often be traced back to their discussion papers, think tanks, university seminars, and global junkets, run by and under the direction of these bureaucrats and their benefactors. As with New Labour, key policies are trialled in New Zealand, Australia, Canada or Maine, Chicago, New York or Massachusetts.
The Trump campaign and administration were not simply undermined by a few bad-un’s on the top floors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rogue actors in the Department of Justice, or Christopher Steel's creative freelancing. Even the Peter Strock's, exposed as performing poorly at House of Representatives hearings, knew they had nothing to fear; the whole system had their back; there was never any jeopardy.
The Cathedral of the American Republic is not accountable to congress, the people, its representatives, or committees. It is responsible to itself, for it contains congress and the political and social culture - it is the goldfish bowl within which modern life operates. You either dismantle that system, shatter the bowl, or face co-option, cancellation or incarceration.
Back in the UK, the conservative ideas of limited tax, entrepreneurial spirit, actual free markets and customer-orientated services, agile, small government, well-regulated public services, and balance budgets are relevant only to a section of the voters. They were temporarily partly expropriated by New Labour but primarily served to delude the Tory membership and the politically dispossessed that float around the micro parties of UKIP, Reclaim, Reform and the Heritage party.
The British Cathedral is indifferent to these trifles in the same way as it is indifferent to party differences, left or right. Politicians are in charge when things go right or are held accountable and disposed of when things go wrong. Still, they are not in control when the bond markets, pension industries, Investment banks, Bank of England and the Whitehall mandarins decide times up.
Those of you who persevered with the Marvel TV series Wandavision, and worked out what was going on will be able to see a parallel with the experience of Prime Minister Liz Truss. Season one is over, of course, as Truss has just resigned.
Spoiler alert: In Wandavision (and do not read on if you think it might be worth watching), superhero Wanda Maximoff has had a mental breakdown because she was required to kill the man she loved, on his instruction, to prevent the evil Demi-God, Thanos, from destroying half the universe's population. Sound familiar?
It was a source of immense power, integrated into her husband's body, that Thanos needed to complete his monomaniacal plan. Using her magical superpowers, Wanda gradually regresses into a conjured world that appears like a series of soap-opera family tv shows. Unfolding through each episode is each decade's style: from the black and white sixties to the nineties.
The world Wanda conjures up is a suburban, secure, picket-fenced community where her husband is alive; they have two children. Thanos is a distant memory, and the economy and reality are stable.
A critical factor in the story is that Wanda has selected an actual town with an existing community living in it. They all are captured by her underlying anguish and veneer of domestic bliss. This created reality, and the tension between the world that Wanda magics and needs to hold her grief at bay, and the lived experience of the residents of the small, nondescript town she has descended upon, plays out throughout the series.
So now, having ruined your chance of watching the show, I want to leap to Liz Truss. Britain has spent a month in the unfolding of season one of Trussvision, which involves our Liz’s regression back to a mythic 1980s Thatcher revolution. We even got the real Patrick Minford, Thatcher's old economic advisor and champion, wandering dazed and confused in her retro-political soap opera.
We were all tempted by her summoning up of the lore of Margaret Thatcher, clichés and imagery, supply-side economics minus the pain of gestation, and geopolitical dominance that helped, in the real world, to bring down the Soviets, and in Trussvision and its predecessor Borisworld, is going to bring down Vladimir Putin.
In the wake of the massive Johnson-Sunak money printing splurge and the inevitable inflation and recession that is now having its way, the myth of Thatcher did not conform with reality. And as Wanda had to kill her husband, Truss had to disembowel her loyal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, only to find that the forces this was supposed to dispel, the demonic "markets" continued to feast upon her.
The Thanos-like Jeremy Hunt replaced Kwarteng and, with a click of his fingers, destroyed all of her policies and transported us back in time to before the 2016 Brexit vote and into the middle of the Austerity cuts programme, albeit this time with no money-printing to ease the way. The inevitable unravelling of the Conservative party - and the banishment of its right-wing back to the sanctioned oppositional back benches where it belongs - will play out minus Truss' mental decapitation.
We can become too focused on the machinations of the coup, which has destroyed Truss within weeks and is now poised to impose a new leader; Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, or even Jeremy Hunt himself. All a likely prelude for a landslide win for the Cathedral's preferred candidate, Sir Keir Starmer.
It is increasingly apparent that without a semi-Bonapartist with a popularist base, a clinical analysis of the challenges of the Cathedrals power, and the ability to negotiate with the Cathedral from some position of strength and mutual dependency, the pantomime of British politics will continue.
Few things have stood me in as good stead as a healthy scepticism toward the modern cathedral you describe. I haven't trusted the MSM since 1980. My faith in some institutions lasted a bit longer, but even they have gone by the way. It seems to me, whether in the UK or the US, the political answer is some blending of the paleo-conservative and the populist. I do not despair, for I have seen decades old battles recently result in victory (e.g., SCOTUS decisions). The main reason, though, is that the victory has already been won.