Old Socialist attempts to to untie the knot?

Headline: The UK is becoming a pragmatic country again.

Sub-heading: Britain has turned against radical politics faster than other rich nations because it has lost more from it.

https://www.ft.com/content/f8293796-aea7-4157-878e-fc535a6f4a22

Note Mr. Ganesh’s highfalutin, almost beguiling framing, of his latest apologetic for ‘a pragmatism reborn’? Confront his first 155 words with the caution of a sceptic. Architecture and its practitioners, are the natural allies of a portion British Politics of as valid measure of the Zeitgeist? Not just about the power of The Rich to build monuments to their egoism. As an antidote to this chatter, read the Architectural Criticism of Ada Louise Huxtable.

You can tell a Zaha Hadid building from the absence of right angles. You can tell a Frank Gehry one because it seems to have been frozen midway through an explosion. Herzog & de Meuron, the great architectural pragmatists, leave no such calling card.  

No big idea links the Bordeaux stadium (the airiest and most human venue in which I have watched elite sport) to 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami (the only multistorey car park in which I have passed an afternoon) to the Dominus winery in California. Sure enough, when the firm rose to world acclaim, it was in the era of undogmatic politics either side of the millennium. Its winning proposal for Tate Modern in London was architectural Blairism, tweaking an existing structure instead of attempting a revolution. 

The Herzog & de Meuron show at the Royal Academy is one of those exhibitions that, without trying to, captures the spirit of the times

…

This exercise in hyperbole is -what else to name it? ‘His Saint Paul’

Britain is a nation re-embracing pragmatism. Boris Johnson is out of parliament. So is Nadine Dorries, his Saint Paul. The Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer is elevating politicians of the centre-ground in his cabinet-in-waiting.

For the moment political speculation is the focus of Mr. Ganesh. Let me engage in a bit of rhetorical pruning: The Reader might accuse me of being self-servingly selective in my choices, yet Mr. Ganesh writes completely obvious propaganda, for a British Politics, and its allies in the defamation of Corbyn, as not just toxic, but representative of Political Catastrophe. Yet the Object lesson of Johnson, May and now Sunak, has not dimmed Mr. Ganesh’s enthusiasm for the Age of Sunak/Starmer pragmatism, in sum Neo-Liberalism with a pallid impasto, to hide the immiseration of millions!

In 2019, Britain had to choose between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. Next time, voters will have their pick of adenoidal but meticulous technocrats in Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir. When the principal complaint about its leaders is a lack of charisma and grand vision, a country is normalizing.

With this sentence, in bold font, Ganesh demonstrates political cynicism, it lacks the beguiling luster, that used to be a Ganesh trade-mark, at least to those who used to read him, not too many years ago.

What can the world learn from the UK’s political cleansing? First, parliamentary systems fail fast.

Second, don’t be choosy about your saviors.

Editor: Mr. Ganesh then dons the robes of a Stogey Pedagogue: He is not Ronald Coleman in The Halls of Ivy !

The most important lesson, however, is almost too distressing to state baldly. In order to turn against radical politics, a nation has to suffer quite tangibly from it. Britain is unique in that it didn’t just vote for an unconventional individual but for an unconventional project. In the form of Brexit, it has put post-liberal politics into direct effect to a degree that is rare among mature democracies.

Editor : Some instructive sentences and sentence fragments:

The far-right forever stalks the French Fifth Republic…

Trump, too, though he became president, was stymied by a Democratic House of Representatives…

Even the populists who govern Italy have to reckon with that polity’s fragmented nature.

Editor: Brexit

Brexit is different: a specific, discrete venture, enacted in full. One in three voters now think it was a good idea. I don’t suggest the disillusioned majority will reverse the decision any time soon. (That wouldn’t be pragmatic.) But they are inoculated against anything — leftist, rightist or hard-to-place — that smells of grand visions, easy answers, personality-led demagoguery. Even on the airwaves, the faux men-of-the-people and undergraduate communists who grifted so well in the Johnson-Corbyn years are less and less heard from. No, a nation is adamant: we’re not doing this anymore.

Editor: The end of Ganesh’s essay quotes Herzog & de Meuron, in a weak attempt to provide a convincing frame to this essay that meanders into …?

“You cannot always start from scratch,” said Herzog & de Meuron at the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. For a pragmatic nation at maybe its most pragmatic ever point, that was a statement of the obvious. A generation on, it stands out as a warning, and one being absorbed too late.

Old Socialists