While the ‘spell of Nixon Nostalgia’ lasts, the reader should consider this:
Headline: Edward M. Kennedy: The Man Who Killed Health Care Reform
Sub-headline: Don’t cry for me, Martha’s Vineyard. …
Nixon strongly believed that a national health insurance plan was crucial. In that 1974 State of the Union Address, he declared that “the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American”. Actually, this statement is not surprising considering Nixon’s personal history of poverty and family illness. (He lost two brothers to tuberculosis, the illnesses dealing a heavy blow to the family finances, and in fact proposed a national health insurance bill when he arrived in Congress in 1947.) Nixon sounds very much like Obama, when he said in 1974 that he did not want to see “other families of modest means…driven …to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type”.
However, the “liberal” opposition, spearheaded by the lobbying of the then-powerful AFL-CIO and United Autowokers, proved too much for an administration spending significant energy on defending against the rising tide of the Watergate affair.
Kennedy did begin secret negotiations with the Nixon White House, but he fell prey to the pressures of the unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payor system which they felt would be rather easily achieved once a Democrat was elected to the presidency in the face of the Watergate scandal. Many felt that Kennedy would be that Democrat, and therefore he had no business throwing a lifeline to the sinking Nixon administration. … https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/overcoming-pain/201002/edward-m-kennedy-the-man-who-killed-health-care-reform
This probably not what political technocrat Jeffrey Garten, nor his enthusiast Ms. Foroohar, had in mind but it is an object lesson in American political hypocrisy ,manifested by both Parties!
It used to be at least interesting to read Mr. Ganesh! His latest essay posits the ‘as if’ the Pandemic, and its effects on working people, at all levels of employment is a mystery, that Mr. Ganesh ‘solves’ with a sentence that starts here ‘A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output;’ ! Not to forget the Headline writers contribution to his political yarn:
Headline: America’s economic boom and civic bust
Sub-headline: The story is not that a rich country is so politically broken but that a politically broken country is so rich
Here follow pairs of facts about the contemporary US. The economy added 850,000 jobs in one month; a third of voters believe the last presidential election was stolen. A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output; states as large as Georgia are curbing the independence of election officials. At 7 per cent, anticipated economic growth this year is that of mid-2000s China; a twice-impeached president is near-favourite to clinch the next Republican nomination.
On the vexing question of ‘civic bust’ : I recall 1968: the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed, the assassination of Robert Kennedy , The Democratic Convention, Mayor Dailey, and its Police Riot, the fact that George Wallace received 9 million votes in the Presidential election. All of this framed by the Vietnam War, the The Best and the Brightest’s murderous neo-colonialism.
Mr. Ganesh can’t address his own ignorance of American history, but marvel at his cast of rhetorical players:
A Tale of Two Cities, The End of History and the Last Man, Weimar Germany, pre-Caesar Rome, “Glorious Thirty”, Algerian war, the Fourth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, May ‘68, The Sorrow and The Pity.
The three final paragraphs of his essay are framed by this pronouncement:
The lesson here is consoling or chilling, according to taste. A nation can prosper despite its politics.
Out of the thicket of chatter, this stands in higher relief :
Viewed from this angle, California is not a world unto itself but the nation in miniature: a place where woeful politics and scarcely believable dynamism cohabit.
Here is a sobering report from Equal Times:
Headline: Homeless in Silicon Valley: how the heartland of global tech became the epicentre of a housing crisis
If California was a country it would have the sixth largest GDP in the world, directly behind the United Kingdom and slightly ahead of France. However, as the economy has grown, so has income inequality. According to the most recentAnnual Homeless Assessment Report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, California accounts for nearly half of all unsheltered people in the country.
For Amie Fishman, the executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California (NPH), it is the “Ground Zero” of America’s housing crisis. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the San Francisco Bay Area, which as well as being home to Silicon Valley and some of the world’s richest companies is also home to a population of service workers who can barely afford to live there.
“We are facing the gravest crisis in housing unaffordability and inequity in recent history,” says Fishman. “We are in a new period where housing has become a commodity and private consumer good bought and sold by institutional investors,” she says.
The ‘Conservative Hysteria’ about CRT has reached such a pitch Ross Douthat has, for the moment, stopped pitching his ‘The Decadent Society’ & minding the sexual/reproductive business of Women, to sounding the alarm about this ‘crisis’. The headline writers @NYT have titled his essay ‘The Excesses of Antiracist Education’. Douthat addresses his readers as if he were a disinterested pedagogue in his opening paragraphs:
In my last column I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education — the part that turns on whether it’s possible to tell a fuller historical story about slavery and segregation while also retaining a broadly patriotic understanding of America’s founding and development.
In this column I will try to describe the part of the controversy that concerns how we teach about racism today. It’s probably the more intense debate, driving both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.
Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.
In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.
The patient reader finally arrives after, what to call it ‘positional equivocation’ on the subject of the excesses of CRT.
…
What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.
First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.
Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.
…
Later in his essay Douthat links to an essay by David Frum:
The Left’s War on Gifted Kids
Local progressive activists have found a cause even more unpopular than “Defund the police,” and are pushing it with even greater vigor.
Mr. Frum and Mr. Douthat are fellow travelers, Frum in this case writes a screeching polemic, that links ‘Defund The Police’ with ‘blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms.’ In sum there are no ‘Standards’ for admission, that becomes ‘The Left’s War on Gifted Kids’.
Douthat continues his essay, that descends from a pose of ersatz pedagogy, to poorly stage managed historical analogies:
Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.
That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.
I’m on page 55 of ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction’ by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Third Edition. What strikes me is that CRT, as argued, embraces the ‘Conservatism’ of the American Academy, and the zeal of a ‘Rhetorical/Historical Reconstruction’, to express it as succinctly as possible.
Neither Douthat nor Frum, uses the History of Conservative Thought, that is readily available, to frame their arguments. Both these critiques moored in a perennial Political Present. The reader might think that ‘Soulcraft’ and Douthat are perfect companions.
Here is Michael J. Sandel reviewing George F. Will’s ‘Statecraft As Soulcraft: What Government Does.’ From 1983:
If Ronald Reagan is the leading practitioner of American conservatism, George Will is its high priest. A political commentator with a reflective bent, Mr. Will stands out among columnists as the most elegant voice of contemporary conservative political philosophy. But Mr. Reagan does not practice what Mr. Will preaches. In ”Statecraft as Soulcraft,” his first book-length work, Mr. Will laments the lack of genuine conservatives in American politics and shows how the best conservative thought is lost even on the most conservative President in decades. ”I will do many things for my country,” writes Mr. Will, ”but I will not pretend that the careers of, say, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involve serious philosophical differences.”
Conservatives like Mr. Reagan attack ”big government,” but Mr. Will is more concerned with the reluctance of modern government to cultivate the moral character of its citizens. He faults conservatives for agreeing with liberals that the ”inner life” of citizens – our ”sentiments, manners and moral opinions” -is none of the government’s business. Mr. Will insists that ”statecraft is soulcraft.” Government cannot be neutral on major moral issues and shouldn’t try. ”Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.”
…
This might have been a better choice, a more historically aware choice, by which to frame a critique of CRT, by Douthat, and the end of testing of students, in blue states, as pronounced by Frum. This expresses the poverty of the historical awareness, and imagination of both these propagandists!
When will the political romance with Joe Biden come to an end? The alliance between the Neo-Liberals, masquerading as New Democrats, and The Neo-Cons, is sure to suffer unbridgeable policy disputes. The Neo-Cons are by nature – their Founder Leo Strauss’s philosophical mendacity is founded upon internecine philosophical quarrels, with an actual History of Western Philosophy abandoned to a toxic, self-serving Mythology. Imagine the power of Strauss! It almost resembles the power of Heidegger, before the publication of the now notorious ‘Black Notebooks’. I’ve wandered a bit. the
Let me focus on this Ganesh paragraph:
America’s knack for great-power politics is as consistent as its fumbles against insurgencies. The fledging republic saw off British menaces, kept Europe out of its civil war, beat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany before nursing both to pacifist democracy and waged a cold war of immense craft and patience against the Soviet Union. US failures, whether in south-east Asia, the Middle East or the Horn of Africa, have come mostly against non-sovereign enemies in irregular conflicts.,
This paragraph, takes the practice of History Made To Measure, that renders the attempt to be succinct, into nearly illegible shorthand. While demonstrating a kind of historical grasp, resembling a Walt Disney cartoon, expressed in the quick flashes of montage. The ‘stills’ run at high speed of montage, defines this essay. A revelatory selection:
the innate difficulty of counter-insurgency, America’s weird history as a superpower, Having had few colonies in the formal sense, the nation’s political, military and even journalistic elites tend to view conflict as that which takes place between states., A superpower tussle is a beguiling return to the familiar. ,It is the relief of a governing class finding its métier again. The change goes beyond the conceptual to the guts and grease of US power. , Heroic financial and intellectual resources went into refitting history’s mightiest armed forces for the nimbler work of the terror age, Great-power strategy will be a kind of liberation., What really sets the new era over the old one is its potential for some semblance of domestic unity., What stands out about the US ordeal in Afghanistan is not the death toll, which roughly equals the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The reader just needs to steel herself for the final paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s collection of ‘stills’ run at high speed , that might be suggestive of a possible set of arguments, but does not constitute such.
No, the grim distinction of the past 20 years is the collapse of the national cohesion after 9/11. For all its heinous violence, terrorism was too diffuse a threat to give Americans that sense of besieged togetherness that past eras conferred. A conventional superpower, with four times their population, just might. A nation that has often defined its identity against an Other was never going to find it in Afghanistan.
America is still the Occupier of Iraq, an Embassy that is a fortress of American Power- the reader should treat the notion, that somehow America will leave Afghanistan, as the purest kind of fiction!
Always be aware when reading @RColvile that he is a Thatcherite in the 21st Century: think of this as a manifestation of Political Fiction, akin to Science Fiction, or a variation on that once genre of ‘Futurism’? Or have I gone too far?
The ‘as if’ of his political existence, as apologist/propagandist for that misbegotten Austrian Economic Theology, still enjoys popular enthusiasm. Recall Mrs. Thatcher passing out ‘Road to Serfdom’ like party favors? What escapes Mr. Covile’s apprehension is the 2008 Economic Collapse! A delusion, not worth considering in the political present? Mr. Colvile’s paranoia about the ‘Left’, manifests itself in real & conjured political occasions: noting that Thatcher-Speak’s newest iteration attempts to be more circumspect or more …
Given all this, a critical reading Mr. Colvile’ essay of June 27, 2021 can offer some valuable insights, while carefully navigating through the obligatory ideological chatter!
Headline: Brexit was meant to give us back control of our borders. They feel more porous than ever
The critical reader of Andy Divine’s latest essay, confronts his title and sub-title:
Our Very Catholic President
The strange miracle of Joe Biden
The first question is how long will Andy be so smitten with Joe Biden? But the second more complex question, that arises concerns the presidents attending mass at an Irish church, without fuss or fanfare. That produces this:
The anonymity was part of the point. At Mass, we are all equal; we are all sinners; there is no hierarchy among communicants; an American president has no more standing here than the old lady in a veil who has been coming for decades, or the homeless person who has wandered in, or the baby bawling in someone’s arms. Biden gets this in his bones, which accounts for this quiet but total adherence to Catholic norms. In this, his Catholicism is deep, even structural to his worldview. And, in my view, it helps explain a lot about him and his priorities — perhaps more acutely than any other lens.
He is immediately recognizable to many of us: the grandfather who carries a Rosary in his pocket, who prays sincerely and undemonstratively, and who has a big, open and warm heart, and a not-terribly-consistent mind. He is not pious outside of church: “I’m as much as a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic. My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion.”
‘At Mass, we are all equal; we are all sinners; there is no hierarchy among communicants…’
Here is what the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has to offer on the question of ‘We are all equal’ :
Homosexuality
“The Church seeks to enable every person to live out the universal call to holiness. Persons with a homosexual inclination ought to receive every aid and encouragement to embrace this call personally and fully. This will unavoidably involve much struggle and self-mastery, for following Jesus always means following the way of the Cross…The Sacraments of the Eucharist and of Penance are essential sources of consolation and aid on this path.” – USCCB, Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination (2006), p. 13
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” – Matthew 11:28-30
Not content with just the three paragraphs I have quoted , Andy rambles but can’t help himself from speaking his Catholic conscious, to the neo-Marxism of Biden’s policies, while wishing for a ‘compassionate center’ as an alternative. What Andy defends is the status quo in theological finery, fueled by his careful, but maladroitly reconstructed, politics.
But I wish Biden could see more clearly that it is his Catholicism that could unite a political party around a compassionate center, rather than the neo-Marxism he has partly enabled. It offers a defense of greater support for the poor as a moral and not an ideological position; it provides a defense of environmentalism that could better appeal to non-leftists; it advocates inclusion not to undermine the fiction of “white supremacy” in the US in 2021, but to bring out the full capacities of every person, regardless of identity; it embraces sexual minorities by focusing on individual dignity rather than reducing them to sexual practices; it can make redistribution of wealth not a means to punish the rich but to enhance opportunity and dignity for the struggling; it can defend the police as essential to order, while tackling the abuse of some; and it can restrict immigration to better help integration of new Americans, while avoiding the cruelty that Trump deployed to such nefarious ends. Presenting policies in this rubric, without any theological language, also has the benefit of being far more consonant with Biden’s actual soul than his awkward adoption of woke mantras.
Andy Divine speculation on ‘Biden’s actual soul ‘ leaves the reader in awe of his powers of perception, or just an exercise in a would be Metaphysics Made to Measure, transmogrified into a Politics.
‘Presenting policies in this rubric, without any theological language, also has the benefit of being far more consonant with Biden’s actual soul than his awkward adoption of woke mantras.’
Queer Atheist
* On the question of ‘Paul’ read Karl Barth’s ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ page 51 vv. 25-7 on homosexuality. The usual hysteria!
What can an ordinary person, of whatever age or other demographic indicators, or even race, think of Bill Gates’ operation to circumcise the whole of African males, as the in order too of AIDS prevention. Along with his allies:
Institutionalized Sexual Violence is the New Colonialism: all performed under the banner of ‘greater knowledge’ by Western Political Actors, who want to ‘rescue indigenous populations’ from their own ignorance. Does this sound a familiar note?
Bill Gates attacks the foreskin as the enemy, and he and his religiously hysterical allies, will liberate the ignorant from their lack of knowledge, by coercion. ‘Africans’ are by definition, provided by Gates and his allies, will not engage in ‘responsible self-management’, to speak plainly, ‘they’ will engage in unsafe promiscuous sexual activity. This whole project is another form of Colonialism, that renders ‘personal agency’ null. In sum, ‘you can’t be trusted to make the right choices‘!
Headline: What the parable of Obamacare teaches Republicans
Sub-headline: The party can win a culture war but not a class war
The headline and sub-headline are the utterly preposterous recitations of political catch phrases!
The political hypocrisy, that both The New Democrats and Republicans have displayed , on the issue of ‘Healthcare’ over generations should not surprise. Does any other reader recall this?
Headline: Edward M. Kennedy: The Man Who Killed Health Care Reform
Sub-headline: Don’t cry for me, Martha’s Vineyard.
…
Over 35 years ago, none other than Richard Nixon proposed a form of “universal health care”. His final State of the Union address called for universal access to health insurance: His plan would have provided government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses, and build on existing employer-sponsored insurance plans. However, as one might expect, partisan politics provided the usual obstacles: It was difficult for Democrats to concede that the anti-communist Nixon had become a supporter of “socialized medicine”. Teddy Kennedy declared that the plan was designed to benefit the insurance companies; however, the reality was that the insurance companies were in for more regulation.
Nixon strongly believed that a national health insurance plan was crucial. In that 1974 State of the Union Address, he declared that “the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American”. Actually, this statement is not surprising considering Nixon’s personal history of poverty and family illness. (He lost two brothers to tuberculosis, the illnesses dealing a heavy blow to the family finances, and in fact proposed a national health insurance bill when he arrived in Congress in 1947.) Nixon sounds very much like Obama, when he said in 1974 that he did not want to see “other families of modest means…driven …to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type”.
However, the “liberal” opposition, spearheaded by the lobbying of the then-powerful AFL-CIO and United Autowokers, proved too much for an administration spending significant energy on defending against the rising tide of the Watergate affair.
Kennedy did begin secret negotiations with the Nixon White House, but he fell prey to the pressures of the unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payor system which they felt would be rather easily achieved once a Democrat was elected to the presidency in the face of the Watergate scandal. Many felt that Kennedy would be that Democrat, and therefore he had no business throwing a lifeline to the sinking Nixon administration.
Or this on The Heritage Foundation Healthcare, that Neo-Liberal Hillary Clinton used as ‘her plan’. Read this Forbes essay:
Headline: How the Heritage Foundation, a Conservative Think Tank, Promoted the Individual Mandate
James Taranto, who writes the Wall Street Journal’s excellent “Best of the Web” column, put forth a lengthy and informative discussion yesterday on the conservative origins of the individual mandate, whose inclusion in Obamacare is today its most controversial feature on the Right.
This came up at Tuesday’s Western Republican Leadership Conference Debate, where Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich tussled on the question:
‘Obama Care’ began its political life as ‘Heritage Foundation Healthcare’ ,in all its Free Market finery, that made it so popular with Neo-Liberals, like Hillary Clinton and eventually Barack Obama. It was an ‘evolution’ over time, like Obama’s ‘evolution’ on Gay Marriage. The Republicans opposed both plans because it was part of The Democrats surrender to the toxin of Neo-Liberalism by the Clintons, whose political opportunism was awash in Reaganite sloganeering e.g. ‘that government is the problem’. The Democratic Party’s Liberals surrendered en mass, after the Clinton victory: the acquisition and eventual care and maintenance of that power was primary. This was favored by Obama because it resembled a ‘kind of reform’, that his Wall Street Financers could see, as still based on the primacy of the profit over people, and almost but not quite canny public relations. That is why ‘Medicare for All’ was never a choice in a Party controlled by The Clintons, and the eventual successor of Trump, Joe Biden
Its regrettable, that Mr. Ganesh lacks the necessary historical knowledge, and or just journalistic curiosity to make anything resembling a valuable contribution to the Healthcare question! Medicare For All just won’t go away!
This has all the appeal of thick slice of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake! Macron did not ‘He proved it by winning the presidency convincingly in 2017.’ This is the Financial Times Party Line, endlessly repeated as ‘political truth’! According to CNN the ‘white’ and ‘spoiled ballots’ amounted to 33.4 % of the votes cast!
‘Presenting himself as the best-placed politician to defeat the far-right has been a core part of Macron’s political strategy from the outset. He proved it by winning the presidency convincingly in 2017. But after four turbulent years at the Elysée, and with French politics in a febrile state over perceived threats from lawlessness and Islamist terrorism, the menace from Le Pen is as strong as ever. Opinion polls consistently suggest she will win the first round of the presidential election in April next year and run Macron uncomfortably close in the second. They also suggest that Bertrand, a former conservative health and labour minister, would defeat her more easily than Macron.’
The “gilets jaunes” continue to demonstrate every Saturday: See twitter for the latest video of French Police abusing their authority. Of course un-reported in this Corporate Newspaper. The “gilets jaunes” plays their part in Mr. Hall’s melodrama: ‘…with French politics in a febrile state over perceived threats from lawlessness’… . The Financial Times’ writers view Macron as the beginning of the end of French Socialism: that has coddled the French People for too long. A strong dose of ‘Market Discipline’ is in order. The prescriptions of Neo -Liberalism never change! Look how well it worked in Russia, Poland and Hungary!
Note that the man who attacked Macron, from a crowd of people, slapped his face, an attack on the masculinity, of this clueless enarque. And also a measure of contempt for his long discarded ‘Jupertarian Politics’, the code language for Neo-Liberal Authoritarianism.
Mr. Hall continues his tedious political handicapping, as coda to his informative essay, if carefully and critically read. Call Mr. Hall’s essay Premature Political Prognostication? While reminding the reader that the political contest, looming in the future, might be a three way race between Macron, Le Pen and the ‘Center Right’ Xavier Bertrand.
How appropriate that my favorite Thatcherite @RColvile, in his latest essay, his reportage awash in self-infatuated political bathos, if that describes his retrograde politics: so fascinating is his self-presentation in its game of reporter/ideologue. His careful, and to speak hyperbolically, ‘loving reconstruction‘ of British politics, in situ. Mr. Colvile, while not like @JGaneshEsq in the use of almost breathtaking apercus, to garnish his political commentary. And sometimes rescue his political banalities from it’s poverty of imagination, in deference to following an ideology…
Read Mr. Colvile’s informative essay, while keeping your critical attention focused, and then look to Chris Hudson reply that enunciates a reply to a Technocrat’s Intervention.
Chris Hudson
There’s a lot of wishful thinking in the commentariat that this was about HS2 or nimbyism. Or Brexit. But it runs much deeper. My mother lives in the area, voted for brexit and has the Daily Mail and Telegraph hard wired into her psyche. She loathes HS2 and the new planning laws, but she’s as disappointed that the conservatives wanted to close the desk at the local police station. And that they have made such a mess of the pandemic (her dear friend died after being released into a care home). And in an area proud of its schools, that the conservatives have ruined the education of so many children with the ongoing exams fiasco, and her granddaughter’s university learning (9k per annum for the last 18 months for the privilege of having zoom lectures). She is also furious that the government is so incompetent and corrupt that they have turned us into a ‘ banana republic’ of cronyism. But most of all, as a regular churchgoer, she is simply appalled that the PM and his ministers lie with such impunity. As she said today at lunch ‘This is not who we are.’
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