First, an Anglican or Episcopalian national Establishment did exist at one time in both the US and the UK. I can speak more clearly to the decline of that Establishment in the US. One key vignette that came to mind as I thought about this was the 1991 opposition of the Rt Rev Edmond Browning, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, to lifelong Episcopalian George H W Bush's policy on the First Gulf War. This reflected a schism in that Episcopalian Establishment that we never would have seen in the days of Episcopalian Franklin Roosevelt.
I think Douglas Bess understood this schism well in Divided We Stand, and he dates it farther back to public leftism in the Establishment that began to emerge even before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Figures like Malcolm Boyd, James Pike, and Paul Moore Jr were using Establishment prestige to advocate a leftist program that was leaving the rank and file behind, and Bess saw this correctly as a cause of "continuing" Anglicanism that dated well before the issues in the 1976 General Convention.
Since Bess was focused on the "continuing" phenomenon, he didn't have much beyond that to say about the fate of The Episcopal Church. But I think it's important to recognize that influential Establishment families, like the Roosevelts, the Harrimans, and the Bushes, as well as Episcopalian figures in key roles, like George Gallup père et fils and Walter Cronkite, were passing on and not being replaced -- and their secularist successors haven't had the same consequence.
I think this is a consequence of what the former Episcopalian bishop Frederick Kinsman recognized as part of his conversion to Cahtolicism, that the Protestant project was in the process of running itself out. Certainly this has been the story of main line Protestantism throughout the century following Kinsman's conversion. But this brings me to the question of why Bernard Law, late in this process, should see any value in trying to make the Catholic Church more appealing to Episcopalians, who were literally dying off no matter what.
There can be no question that Law was the single driving force behind the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus. The lack of any real success for either initiative is, I think, a clear indication of how completely he's misread the culture. There was no substantial faction of Episcopalians who wanted a denomination that wouldn't ordain women and would maintain a heavy-furniture liturgy but otherwise dress in Brooks Bothers suits and foulard ties like Episcopalians of yore. Those folks had no use for any of the old moral theology, they had better things to do on Sunday mornings and better use for the tithe money.
It's worth noting that Ven Fulton Sheen, whose reading of the culture and understanding of media were far more astute than Law's, didn't mess around with Episcopalians. His ecumenical gestures were toward Robert Schuller and Billy Graham, and Schuller's Crystal Cathedral has been a far larger single contribution to the Catholic Church than anything that's come in via Anglicanorum coetibus.
I've got to think Law's misreading goes back at least as far as his time in Adams House at Harvard, but probably even farther back to his parents. I think the visitor who suggests Law's father, Bernard A Law, had a lifetime career in US intelligence has some insight -- the Baptist populist Harry Truman bitterly resisted the persistence of the Establishment intelligence community in the postwar government. Cardinal Law was close for much of his career with the CIA-connected Bush family. Abp Sheen, on the other hand, seems to have had sympathies much closer to US evangelicals and Catholic rank and file.
There's an equivalent continuing struggle in US culture going on as we speak. Trump, highly media-savvy, is campaigning against remnants of the old, intelligence connected, media-based once-Episcopalian (or at least main lime Protestant) Establishment, on behalf of "deplorable" rank and file, including traditional immigrant communities and increasing percentages of minorities. He isn't causing it, and he isn't controlling it. He simply recognizes it.
In these developments, I think the ordinariates are simply irrelevant. They aren't aimed at, and they clearly aren't reaching, the evangelicals who make up the majority of the remaining Protestant movement. Their main current appeal seems to be to muddleheaded cradle Catholics who somehow feel they'll get a dispensation of some sort from the Catholic message if they throw in with snobby ex-Episcopalians. But it just isn't working.
