When you think that America’s ‘Academic Intellectual Class’, has hit rock- bottom- think of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ , a more sophisticated version of what that officious Neo-Con, not to speak of self-appointed wise Platonic Guardian,  Alan Bloom offered in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’. The recycling, of not just riffing on the title of Bloom’s hysterical polemic, with the added intellectual ballast at the level of Moral Psychology, aided by the experience of a practitioner of manufactured political propaganda, makes for a more convincing narrative, about the inherent apostasy of The Student, as nefarious political actor! It has been a very useful political device used by authoritarians, no matter their politics. The ‘Center’ of American politics now defined as the alliance between the Neo-Cons and the Neo-Liberals.

Prof. Cowen begins his essay, with the help of the headline writers of Bloomberg:

Headline: Macron Just Doesn’t Get It

Sub-headline:He and others on the left are being swept along by world-historical forces they do not fully understand.

The sorry truth is that both progressives and neoliberals still don’t get it, and that seems true in France most of all.

Since the election of President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, I have read or heard that he is the leader of the free world, the hope for Europe, and a model for the U.S. Instead, he increasingly seems to be a well-meaning guy elected in the wrong historical era.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-12/macron-is-the-wrong-man-for-france-right-now

Prof. Cowen provides a map of misreadings of Macron:‘a well-meaning guy’  does not cover the territory! 36.5 % of voters, in the final round, rendered their ballots ‘spoiled’ or in some way un-countable. That looks like beginning of the current French Crisis, if you were actually in search of the reasons for the current ‘Revolt’. That startling, yet utterly ignored fact, by Prof. Cowen, and other other pressing questions,  puts these other two propagandists, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt,to shame!

Neo-Liberalism is not and cannot be ‘of the Left’ ! Neo-Liberalism seeks not just to supplant the Republican Tradition, that Tradition’s history as presented in The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock, but to destroy it completely, and replace it with the ‘Value of the Market’ . Such is Prof. Cowen’s demonstration, of not just utter political ignorance, but the self-serving political myopia, of the Corporatist hireling, who writes respectable bourgeois propaganda for Bloomberg Opinion!

To take just one glaring example, of the Refugee Crisis facing Europe, is that Prof Cowen ignores America’s Wars of Empire in the ‘Middle East’! and its seemingly ever expanding theaters of war. That has created this overwhelming flood of desperate refugees fleeing America’s ‘War on Terror’. There is no excuse for this, no mitigation can relieve Prof.Cowen from the moral responsibility of speaking about the reality of this crisis!

Old Socialist

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-12/macron-is-the-wrong-man-for-france-right-now