Editor: Not this trio of NYT bumkins: Dionne Searcey Stefanos Chen and Urvashi Uberoy!

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Oct 19, 2025

Political Cynic.

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Oct 18, 2025

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Oct 19, 2025

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https://www.versobooks.com/products/752-the-last-neoliberal?srsltid=AfmBOoqAH6H3bXEWT-DK2vldLGOoWwx5HfDHf8kSpFMW2Rg7GiZsgnlw

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Oct 18, 2025

The Last Neoliberal:Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis

by Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini

Why centrist politics in France is bound to fail.

This book analyses the French political crisis, which has entered its most acute phase in more than thirty years with the break-up of traditional left and right social blocs. Governing parties have distanced themselves from the working classes, leaving behind on the one hand craftsmen, shop owners and small entrepreneurs disappointed by the timidity of the reforms of the neoliberal right and, on the other hand, workers and employees hostile to the neoliberal and pro-European integration orientation of the Socialist Party. The presidency of François Hollande was less an anomaly than the definitive failure of attempts to reconcile the social base of the left with the so-called modernisation of the French model. The project, based on the pursuit of neoliberal reforms, did not die with Hollande’s failure; it was taken up and radicalised by his successor, Emmanuel Macron. This project needs a social base, the bourgeois bloc, designed to overcome the right–left divide by a new alliance between the middle and upper classes. But this, as we have seen recently on the streets of Paris and elsewhere, is a precarious process.

Reviews

Praise for Structural Crisis and Institutional Change in Modern Capitalism:

“This book is historical-institutionalist political economy at its best.”

Wolfgang Streeck, ILR Review

In the authors’ view, all the major parties in France have given up on the traditional postwar “social-liberal” compromise that combined moves toward fluid labor markets, external openness, and EU cooperation with continued redistribution, social solidarity, and upward mobility.

Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

Old Socialist & Newspaper Reader

Old Socialist ….

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Oct 17, 2025

Hysterical Zionist David Baddiel writes….

Stephen Fry and Gemma Whelan star in a new FT drama written by David Baddiel, exploring AI, memory and truth. Fry plays a grandfather with dementia who uses AI to fill in gaps in his memory. While reviewing the archive of his life his family makes a shocking discovery. Which memories are really true? And how AI is defining who we are?

Political Observer comments.

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Oct 16, 2025

Starmer must not repeat the Democrats’ mistakes

The American left’s failure to defeat Maga Republicans offers valuable lessons to Labour as it confronts Farage

Josh Freed

Third Way:

Our Mission

Third Way is a national think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas. Our work on the center left acts as a critical bulwark against political extremism.

Our Approach

Our approach brings together rigorous policy research, deep knowledge of the people and places that decide majorities, and sophisticated public opinion and messaging data to create strategic advocacy campaigns designed to persuade elected officials and influencers on the defining issues of our time. We advocate for the vital center across seven programmatic areas: climate and energy, economy, education, foreign policy, health care, politics, and social policy.

As passionate moderates—or “radical centrists” per the New York Times—our work is not about splitting the difference but about standing for a values-driven, reform-oriented politics that can both deliver electoral power and drive meaningful policy change. We believe in building an opportunity economy that rewards hard work, making progress on social issues to uphold our fundamental freedoms, winning the global clean energy technology race, and securing our safety against evolving 21st century threats.

Since our founding in 2005, Third Way has earned a reputation for innovative thinking and high-impact campaigns that shift the national debate, help moderates win elections, and motivate ambitious policy reform. We have been lauded as “the best source of new ideas in public policy” (The Washington Post), “the future of think tanks” (Reuters), and the “North American Think Tank of the Year” (Prospect Magazine).

Our Work:

All of Third Way’s policy and advocacy work is:

Principled. We are motivated by a deep love of country grounded in the mainstream American values of equality of opportunity, security, freedom, and a commitment to democratic capitalism.

Political. We design our work to resonate with the moderate American majority and empower a center-left coalition that is broad and deep enough to both win majorities and govern.

Pragmatic. We value progress over purity tests, pursue solutions that are not only ambitious but affordable and actionable, believe in reform not revolution, insist on results that work in the real world, and take pride in our ability to deftly navigate complex policy and political terrain.

The above photopgraph featuring Nancy Pelosi defines The Third Way: Neo-Liberal !

Newspaper Reader on ‘The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed them.’

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Oct 15, 2025

Editor: Jonathan Freedland joins the other Zionists regulars at the Times: Thomas L. Friedman, David Brooks, Bret Stephens & David French! It can’t surprise the regular reader of this newspaper, that Mr. Freedland is used to embroider on well worn themes! With no mention of The Gaza Genocide, committed by Netanyahu and his Fellow Travelers: Joe Biden, A Cadre of US Senators and House Members, all with monitary support for the utterly Faschist AIPAC! Not to mention Donald Trump purchased by Miriam Adelson, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient! My digression points to Jonathan Freedland’s placement of his history in a usable past, freighted by heroism from various sections of German Life, including Jews! Yet Freedland uses his story as a toxic blind to attemp a political erasure of the Gaza Genocide by Netanyahu and his minions!

Reader recall?

heguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/05/jewish-concern-corbyn-israel-palestine-antisemitism-ihra

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/jeremy-corbyn-blind-antisemitism-hobson

Editor: A selection from the concluding paragraphs of Mr. Freedland’s Public Moralizing:

…

Several key players in the drama were women whose upbringing shared another striking aspect: a close relationship with a strong father. That was true of Ms. von Thadden and both countesses, Maria and Lagi. In all three cases, the women were not just loved by their fathers; they were trusted by them. In a way that was unusual in the era before modern feminism, they were deemed by their fathers to be the equal of any man, capable of taking on any task. Long after their fathers were dead, the women carried that confidence with them. By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had blossomed into courage.

The strength of those women was buttressed by that deeper conviction that is perhaps the key determinant of who defies an oppressive regime and who buckles before it: belief in an authority higher than the government of the day. Most rebels at the tea party also came to understand that such a belief demanded action as well as thought.

For some, that translated into small gestures of defiance, like Lagi Solf and her shopping bags. For others, such as Otto Kiep, it meant acts of audacious resistance, coming within touching distance of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through deeds large and small, they demonstrated — to themselves and one another — that obedience was not the only option.

To be clear, most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler. On the contrary, the German nobility largely fell in line behind the Nazis, drawn in part by the Führer’s pledge to restore titles abolished in the Weimar era. And of course, we cannot neatly read across from that place and that time to our own age.

But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women, it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president.

Newspaper Reader.

Editor: Reader self-emancipate from NYT!!!

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Oct 14, 2025

Queer Atheist.

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Oct 13, 2025

Headline: The antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it’s rearing its head again

Sub-headline: From Silicon Valley to Michigan, the biblical figure is in the headlines. The shift from pulpits to politics is familiar – and dangerous

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/antichrist-peter-thiel-michigan

Editor: Did both The Guardian and Matthew Avery Sutton delay the mention of a notorious Straussian Peter Theil, as the latest figure that trades in “Antichrist” hysteria. How might a Straussian enter this ‘place’ the question hangs in the air like a wild fire that connot be contained?

Let’s recall that Thiel believes:

July 4, 2025 :

Can The New Citizens, like Peter Thiel, associated with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, now present an opportunity to view humanity within another frame? ‘The Straussian Moment’ is now superceded by men who are attached to how their brain functions, as outside ‘the norm’. ?

https://www.ft.com/content/82774b98-965d-4ed8-9876-cd250ed1448c

Political Observer.

Editor: Matthew Avery Sutton is a Guggenheim Fellow, that establishes him as an Expert, in sum a Technocrat that writes newspaper commetaries? He is the Claudius O and Mary Johnson distinguished professor and chair of the department of history at Washington State University. (Editor: This puts me in my place!)

Two scenes from the past two weeks capture something unsettling – and familiar –about American public life. In San Francisco, a tech billionaire delivered a sold‑out, off‑the‑record lecture series on the antichrist. In Michigan, a man rammed his pickup truck into a Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse during Sunday worship, opened fire and set the building ablaze, apparently believing that Mormons are the antichrist.

The antichrist is clearly back. But perhaps he has never really left.

As a historian of American apocalypticism, I’ve traced how this symbol – a protean figure cobbled together from obscure biblical passages – has repeatedly migrated from pulpits to politics and back again.

Almost a century ago, fundamentalists mapped European dictators and New Deal bureaucrats on to biblical prophecy. During the cold war, evangelicals scanned Moscow and Jerusalem for signs of the Beast. In the first Gulf war, some Christians argued that Saddam Hussein was the antichrist who was rebuilding the Tower of Babel.

Whenever American power felt threatened or social change accelerated, antichrist talk surged. Today’s version arrives with AI, deepfakes and venture funding. And with bullets.

…

Editor: In a brief but scintillating 1004 words Matthew Avery Sutton narrates the story that is repeated by other men, and a woman, who are like Peter Thiel: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Bill Ackman, Shari Redstone etc! Thinking about Peter Thiel can be simpified, by thinking about him as a hybred: in sum a cross between Cotton Mather and Leo Strauss!

Queer Atheist.

Political Realist!

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Oct 13, 2025

The Financial Times :

French Politics

Emmanuel Macron

Headline: New French cabinet shows Macron is still calling shots

Sub-headline: Unveiled Sunday night, the new government led by reappointed Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu faces two no-confidence votes this week and must push through a budget before year’s end.

By Mariama Darame Published today at 11:21 am (Paris), updated at 5:48 pm

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/10/13/new-french-cabinet-shows-macron-is-still-calling-shots_6746371_5.html

If further proof were needed that French President Emmanuel Macron retains control over the prime minister’s office, the composition of Sébastien Lecornu’s new cabinet is the ultimate demonstration. After a three-hour meeting at the Elysée on Sunday, October 12, the president and his prime minister unveiled, just before 10 pm and via a statement from the presidency, the 35 ministers who will face, as soon as this week, two votes of no confidence from La France Insoumise (LFI, the radical left) and the Rassemblement National (RN, the far right).

Lecornu presented a revised version of his initial cabinet, which was deemed too Macronist and had led him to resign after just 14 hours, on October 6. This time, he downplayed the political aspect of his lineup, calling it on X “a government with a mission” that transcends “personal and partisan interests” and whose goal is to “give France a budget before the end of the year.”

…

“The government’s political base has shrunk further, both on the left and the right. And these waves of poaching and expulsions do not bode well for smooth relations with the parties,” said Harold Huwart, a centrist in the LIOT group.

The survival of Lecornu’s government now depends more than ever on the Socialists’ goodwill, as the rest of the left has vowed to bring it down. The Socialists are demanding an end to the use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows the government to pass legislation without a vote; measures to lower the cost of living; and the “immediate and complete” suspension of the contested 2023 pension reform. These demands must be included in the prime minister’s government policy statement on Tuesday at 3 pm if the Socialists are to spare the government, the party said.

Lecornu has scheduled a meeting with his ministers on Monday afternoon. He will lay out the marching orders ahead of the presentation of the budget bill at the Council of Ministers on Tuesday morning, after Macron returns from a diplomatic trip to Egypt.

Lecornu’s office has instructed outgoing and incoming ministers to keep the traditional handover ceremonies brief and away from the press. His new government has all the hallmarks of a non-event, even for its main players.

Editor: Macron is addicted to his meeting with various ‘leaders’ as a sign of his importance! Mariama Darame and Le Monde play a shabby Political Game!

Headline: Macron is risking a regime crisis

Sub-headline: After the president refused to acknowledge the results of the 2024 legislative elections that his camp lost, his insistence on retaining control has already led two prime ministers to fail in less than 12 months.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/10/13/macron-is-risking-a-regime-crisis_6746377_23.html

…

Macron refuses to contradict himself or erase part of his record. Yet his most loyal supporters have understood that the Elysée needed to take a step back. Former minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called for the new prime minister to be someone “not from the Macronist camp,” and Gabriel Attal, one of Macron’s former prime ministers, urged the Elysée not to “persist in trying to control everything.” To no avail.

Has Macron realized that he must step back from his own second term, at least regarding domestic policy, to salvage what remains? After refusing to acknowledge the results of the 2024 legislative elections, his insistence on retaining control has already caused two prime ministers to fail in less than 12 months. Another successful no-confidence motion the week of October 13 would almost certainly force him to call snap elections that would solve nothing and plunge all parties of government into an increasingly strange defeat.

Editor: Even Le Monde’s Editorialist finds Macron’s flacid politicking patently absurd!

Political Realist.