Go West

If you need to, then it is time to get over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is obviously not going to be the nominee, and his name recognition is the recognition of someone else's name. In any case, what was so Golden about the Golden Age of American Liberalism? Its domestic policies were not that bad, and occasionally even quite good, but that is setting a very low bar, and its foreign policies were atrocious. 

You can project anything you liked onto the Bobby Kennedy Presidency that never was, while the ethnically and generationally sentimental attempts to whitewash his brother's Administration are unworthy of those who are making them. And it bears repetition that even if they were right, then that would say nothing about this Kennedy.

Faithful to his forebears, however, this Kennedy supports the regime that does this, which is of a piece with its close allies' sexual violence against Christian women in Manipur. For six years, I have been under a death sentence imposed by that Axis of Evil. Smell my fear. And pick a side, brothers and sisters. Pick a side.

Yes, I do support economic realignment with the BRICS. But they all have appalling governments. If any of them launched a terrorist attack on Britain, then my regretfully realistic attitude towards that one, at least, might change. As it is, though, reorientation towards them via Iran, of which it may also be said that at least it does not attack us, is moving Saudi Arabia away from being our active enemy and towards being one of many horrendous governments in the world, to be called such without hesitation. Another of those governments is in India. And another is in Israel, fully supported by Kennedy. Abroad as at home, there is already a liberal Catholic President of the United States, and how is that working out?

Imagine instead a viable Presidential candidate, already polling around six per cent, who was a roaring critic of cancel culture, not that some of us have ever not been cancelled, and of identity politics by reference to class politics. Imagine that he sat on the Board of Academic Advisors of the Classic Learning Test, which clearly did not object to his foreign policy positions. Imagine that his answer to why he was not a Marxist, since his views and alliances invited the question, was that dialectical materialism was incompatible with incarnational theology.

Cornel West bases it all on the glorious Matthew 25, which it is fashionable to stop reading at verse 40. But there are six more verses after that. You have to believe in Hell. You have to hold the orthodox Christology that alone upholds the authority of Jesus to send anyone there. That contains the seeds of the correction of the points on which West is wrong, though no more so than any other candidate, sometimes in different ways and sometimes not.

Abortion has been sent back to the states, which was all that the Supreme Court could ever have done. If it had been left to the Republican Establishment, then that would never have happened. Having made it happen, then what is Donald Trump for? If West is the successor to Ralph Nader and Jill Stein, then what of it? Would Al Gore or Hillary Clinton have delivered economic justice or international peace? Would a second term of Joe Biden? Would Kamala Harris? Biden is the self-indulgent spoiler. It is pure vanity to wish to remain President of the United States until the age of 86.

Undeniably, West's decision to go Green is disappointing. Ballot access is a problem in the United States, but Greens are or have been in government in 11 European countries and in New Zealand. They are currently in office there and in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Montenegro. It is not a happy tale. The Greens are in coalition with neoliberals and neoconservatives in every case. In Germany, they are major drivers of Boris Johnson's war in Ukraine. In Ireland, they are keeping both halves of the old duopoly in office while it formalised an end to the pretence that Ireland was not a member of NATO. And so on. The Greens are crucial to the collapsing, privatising, austerity-imposing, warmongering, liberty-destroying devolved administration in Scotland.

Everything that the Court Left did not like about the People's Party was what was good about it, and either made it a good fit for West, or, occasionally, a useful corrective to his previous positions. He knows the dangers of anti-industrial Malthusianism. If "there are too many people in the world", then he knows which people are meant by that. But I suppose that he does have to do what he has to do. If that ended in a Trump restoration, then not only could worse things happen, but worse things are happening right now.

Nor need that be the result. West's candidacy opens the way, as his Presidency would open it even more clearly, for a successor who recognised that Christological orthodoxy, West's protection against dialectical materialism, could not be separated from fidelity to the Petrine Office, with implications that were far more radical than anything that Marxism could ever formulate, much less deliver.