Headline: Generation Balls in UK politics already reeks of yesterday
Sub-headline: Picture them roaming public life like ghosts, helping out without ever being central to anything
Mr. Ganesh’s essay of September 23, 2016 is awash in bile and contempt for Mr. Balls and his ‘generation’ of politicians. Mr. Ganesh’s one salient talent as writer is stinging polemic. Nothing new, yet instead of a clear thoughtful analysis of Mr. Ball’s book, and its reason d’etre, or even its arguments, the reader is confronted by that aforementioned bile and contempt. And a collection of cliches as a rhetorical place holder for rational thoughtful criticism:
a zero-sum view of the world, post-national, strategic primacy, stink of yesterday, materialists and technocrats, conscientious social-science graduates, incremental refinement, intangibles of politics, Old Think, Generation X, Euroscepticism, globalisation
The smartest of the bunch, he tends to see the world as a web of economic problems waiting to be neutralised by the application of reason. His generational peers in Westminster were, like him, materialists and technocrats.
Mr. Ganesh provides in a highly foreshortened pragmatic way, a working definition of Politics, in his characterization of Mr. Balls’ thought/practice : ‘he tends to see the world as a web of economic problems waiting to be neutralised by the application of reason.’ How better, in such limited space, to define politics? Mr. Ganesh is now the victim of his own nihilism, as expressed in his polemic: his ideological myopia is his undoing. All of this leaving the argued ‘centrality’ where? Does a political actor need to hold a position of power to wield influence? The questions abound.
Political Observer
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3241b5a4-800b-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4.html#axzz4LBba1GMP
