Author Archives: stephenkmacksd

One only confronts this kind of exercise in self-congratulation in the pronouncements of Donald Trump. Or his predecessors like Mitt Romney, John McCain or Bush the Younger. Not a James Russell Lowell to be found! In either the Democratic or … Continue reading →

Mr.Meyerson joins the ranks of Tomasky,Krugman, Conason and the other ‘white liberal’ males, whose non-stop shaming of the dissenters in their ranks, is reduced to the public shaming of the young (millennials): echoing the paranoia of Allen Bloom and the … Continue reading →

The New Conservatism Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate By Jürgen Habermas Edited by Shierry Weber Nicholsen Introduction by Richard Wolin, pages xxii-xxiv Valuable Insight on Carl Schmitt’s theory of the friend/enemy distinction on page 34:  

A fascinating interview with you at the Economist! But the questioner Anne McElvoy gets it right when she calls your politics almost oligarchic.  Too close for comfort? Like Lippmann, in the American context, and his epigones, at least in this, … Continue reading →

Notice that Mr. Ganesh gives a kind of testimonial to the notion of ‘prudent capitulation’ in his opening paragraph, awash in the hyperbolic, and then claims for the New Labour loyalists the role of a McCarthyite victim of ‘Socialist Vigilantes’. … Continue reading →

Never fear, Mr. Sarkozy’s resort to the neo-fascist trope “your ancestors are the Gauls.” : the autochthonous tribe, a distant echo of Heidegger’s volk! This, an example of a usable political nostalgia, all scrubbed clean of any taint, making it more … Continue reading →

Headline: How the west might soon be lost Sub-headline: Under a President Trump, democracy would lose credibility as a model for a civilised political life   Mr. Wolf’s intervention is too little too late! Awash in the misplaced self-congratulation of … Continue reading →

In sum, Mr. Eaton’s essay expresses his contempt for Corbyn and his followers, the favored target of the respectable bourgeois press. See the Financial Times in its continuing assault on the ‘Rebellion Against The Elites’ i.e. the evil of ‘Populism’, … Continue reading →

Headline: We are all Stalinists on Syria From this utterly preposterous headline, then Mr. Rachman reduces the War raging across ‘The Middle East’ to a public relations problem: A Hideous Black Comedy! Western politicians must somehow try to frame a … Continue reading →

In law and economics, the Coase theorem (pronounced /ˈkoʊs/) describes the economic efficiency of an economic allocation or outcome in the presence of externalities. The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low … Continue reading →