Communique from a left-allied Catholic on a bad idea.
The recent defeats of Bernie Sanders in the United States
and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, as well as the ongoing neoliberal resistance
to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom have led many of the
left’s guardedly hopeful into premature despair. Elections are like sporting
events. When the clock stops, whoever is ahead wins. But politics is not a
sport, and our tendency to think of it that way has blinded many to the
tectonic shift represented by this abrupt—in political time—emergence of a
strong social democratic pole in the bourgeois democracies after being
ratcheted to the right for decades via the formerly hegemonic Washington
Consensus.
