In the shadow of the Caudillo
The Tradcaths and the New Right
Even recent fads can turn out to have ancient histories. Always searching for the ultimate confrontation show, the US YouTube production company Jubilee has devised a programme in which one protagonist is surrounded by a circle of 20 antagonists, who take it in turns to come to the table in the middle of the studio and score as many debating points as possible before it is someone else’s turn. The programme is called Surrounded.
A couple of weeks ago the lion in Daniel’s den was the left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan and the show was billed as “One Progressive versus 20 Far Right Conservatives”. Hasan, who I used to debate with over a decade ago, is a hugely articulate, clever and occasionally unscrupulous debater and he couldn’t have asked for a more helpful line up. In fact knowing Mehdi he probably did ask for it.
I don’t watch these things. What are you going to learn? But immediately after it was aired clips of the programme achieved the kind of virality that clogs up your social media whether you’ve asked for it or not. Because all of Hasan’s prayers had been answered in the shape of a 24-year-old Coloradan called Connor Estelle. Before Connor stepped up to the table Hasan had, by all accounts, already dealt with that quotidian 2020s racism that called into question his Americanness (he took out citizenship a few years ago) and which I get daily on X.
But Connor, clearly excited by the atmosphere, went that little bit further. He told Hasan that he would like to see an authoritarian state run in accordance with traditional Catholic values. Hasan pointed out that this was a bit fascist, and Connor, flushed, embraced the label (to some applause from the other 19). And said yes, he would defend the Spanish Catholic autocrat, Francisco Franco. Franco was his kind of guy.
On some news sites afterwards, Connor was described a Catholic commentator, which will have dismayed many of his fellow-believers, and which seemed on the face of it very unlikely. But his Instagram account did indeed contain a fair bit of quasi-theological material, including videos about Opus Dei and its Spanish founder (Saint) Josemaría Escrivá, and concerning the ructions inside SSPX – the Society of St Pius X - an organisation founded in 1970 by the traditionalist French prelate, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. And if you’re wondering why on earth I’m telling you about him, stick with it. All will be revealed.
For the moment the point is this: today in the US far right conservatives include young men who claim to be traditionalist Catholics and even know about and approve of Franco – a European leader who died half a century ago.
Enter the tradcaths
In the last year or so magazines and newspapers have been full of pieces proclaiming the rebirth of Christianity in the West (I’ve written about it on this site). Almost all these pieces contain the same assertion, that young people – and especially young men – have the hots for the Old Ways. They want their religions “deeper, ancient and more rich” as one recent convert put it. They value the ritual, the hierarchy and the certainty. And you can stick your tambourine where the sun don’t shine.
Search for this stuff online and there is a cornucopia of sites proclaiming the virtues of traditional Catholicism and expressing the author’s delighted and almost competitive piety. It starts with incense and ends in women being FOMO’ed into wearing a lacy mantilla to church. Catholic collectibles are doing a roaring merch-trade.
Naturally the mass in Latin, largely replaced by the vernacular in Catholic churches since the late 60s, is making a reversio triumphalis. It is the big badge of true faith.
Depending on your prejudices this is either a cry for spiritual nourishment – proclaiming the heart in a heartless world (thank you Karl) – or is yet another way in which a generation addicted to self-regard performs for itself in the endless mirrors of the 21st century.
Either way, each to his own. As long as you leave the rest of us out of it, who could possibly object? Except that all this born-again-again religion turns out not to be apolitical. It has designs on us all. As we shall see.
Caroline visits Oxford Street
A few weeks ago the Muskian malgorithm, reposted into my X timeline yet another assault on London as a modern Sodom. On June 12th a home counties woman called Caroline Farrow (who I had never heard of) posted a sequence following a trip from her native Surrey up to the Smoke.