Mr. Luce’s utter misreading of American history, past, present and political, framed by a title that can only be called what it is, a breath taking malapropism, ‘America’s clash of civilisations’. That leaves the reader fully convinced that David Brooks and Mr. Luce are of like minds. The Luce/Brooks view of American politics and history is marked by familiar events and persons, except that all is transmogrified into an incomprehensible but ideologically self-serving muddle. Which these thinkers attempt to unravel and explicate within that frame of the politically self-serving. Here is one example of the Luce iteration of that method:
‘Mr Obama has never been forgiven for saying poor white Americans are suffering from Marxian false consciousness:’
The ‘Marxian false consciousness’ is the purest form of pandering to the conservative reader of the FT, who is posited as anti-intellectual, that translates quite conveniently into anti-Marxist, and most probably Republican. The rhetorical framing is all important to winning what passes for argument, but is in fact a straw man.
Political Reporter
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f49b83dc-a59b-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58.html#axzz3usCXbRmf
