Conclave, and the liberal abyss

making a virtue out of a vacuum

I watched Conclave last night (spoiler alert). It is unintentionally illustrative of why the liberal establishment is proving so impotent against the allure of the disaster-nationalist right.

It is an uncurious film, made for an uncurious crowd. It dramatizes a debate amongst Cardinals over who should be pope, whilst teaching us literally nothing about the theology that motivates them. The competing perspectives of "Liberal" and "Conservative" Cardinals are detextured to the point that they become almost indistinguishable from secular political debate.

Representing the "right" is Cardinal Tedesco, who is less like a real life reactionary cardinal and more like a very online trad cath, or some cyber-Sedavacantist. He gets through the entire film without referencing any doctrine laid down by his predecessors, but does make a rousing speech calling for Holy War against Muslims.

Representing the African contribution to Catholicism is a single Nigerian cardinal whose only distinguishing features are that he secretly knocked up a 19-year-old and that he wants to imprison the gays.

The dramatic brilliance of the film comes through in the more contradictory characters who oppose the Conservatives. In the age of Hunter Biden's pardon, there is something rather apt about a story of liberals who are willing let their ethics slide and to overlook improprieties amongst their allies, in the name of beating back the monsters of the right.

Meanwhile a decent English Cardinal, portrayed brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes, makes it his business to hunt out impropriety even amongst his strategic allies, and yet this turns into a zealotry in itself, with flaws and unintended consequences.

The solution to all this comes in the form of an outsider Cardinal who tells everyone that they've all been too judgey, and scheming, and above all too certain. What is needed is humility and doubt. He tells them that "the church is not about the past" (a rather ridiculous statement from somebody who is literally participating in the apostolic succession), but about the future. The church has to change, he says, but who knows what to. Out with the old, but what should the new strive towards? He doesn't elaborate but apparently this is enough to convince the college of Cardinals that they should elect him pope.

Thus in the end both the scheming liberalism of the Americans, and the inquisitorial, moralizing Liberalism of the English Cardinal, is superseded by a deeper, meeker liberalism, that is too beautifully pluralistic to even proclaim what it stands for.

And so we have a film that portrays liberalism's adversaries as one-dimensional wrong'uns, but whose hero is not so gauche as to proclaim "I am right!". This is the politics of Kamala Harris not bothering to tell the electorate what she plans to do, let alone why, but insisting that voters must not be so deplorable as to vote for Trump (although of course there is in actuality nothing all that meek about the genocide in Gaza).

In one scene, the reactionary Cardinal Tedesco tells his allies that the abyss is calling. It's meant to portray his absurdity. But it must be said that there is a certain cavenous nothingness about the kind of liberalism that the movie enthrones as his antidote.

All of this matters because the growing, ultra-reactionary right keep coming down from the mountain with various newly minted tablets. They're made of plastic, but their stone veneers look impressive against the backdrop of sludge. The bulwark against this cannot be, say, some annoying television liberal mocking the "nostalgia" of "the boomers", whilst lacking any serious perspective on what's got better and what's got worse over the past half century. It cannot be treating the concepts of "old" and "new" as serviceable alternatives to moral and political values. It cannot be Keir Starmer. And it certainly cannot be Hollywood's idea of a good Cardinal.