On the political stalemate of corporate liberalism vs. populist reaction

(Comment published in New York Times online, reply to: “Angela Merkel’s failure may be just what Europe needs,” by Ross Douthat, November 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/opinion/angela-merkel-germany-liberalism.html?comments)

Mr. Douthat seems to recognize that government in the West is now being fought over between advocates of a corporate bureaucratism that does not have to answer to the ordinary people who are merely to be managed, and legitimates itself in terms of inevitably rather empty invocations of liberal and parliamentary values, and as the sole possible opposition to the extreme right, or some kind of populist anti-liberalism, grounded in religion, which he mentions favorably, nationalism (inevitably), and other attempts to limit the fallout from forms of modernism and (neo-)liberalism that seem to have been thrown into such crisis in recent years, but which are reactionary, and among other things opposed to immigration, whose willingness to welcome is surely one of the singularly great achievements of Merkel's rule. 

This is what in this country is the stale argument between "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans: two different styles, and rhetorics, of corporate domination, both of which derive their main appeal from opposition to the other. When what we need most is to explore true alternatives. They might well lie in that undiscovered territory which historically was called the "left." It is worth noting that Stalin claimed to belong to it and was a liar; Hilary Clinton does not belong to it, though she would liberate a small number of women to join the world's ruling elite; and Sanders drunk slightly from its well; but truly that is the absent presence to seek.