StephenKMackSD's Blog

From the same people that brought ‘you’ George Deukmejian , Pete Wilson of Prop 187 infamy, ‘Hollywood Republicans’ who advanced the political career of another washed-up ‘actor’ Arnold. Newsom, a NeoLiberal and of Old Money with the wrong pedigree! Howard Jarvis’ Prop 13 invigorated the Recall as the instrument of political reaction, followed by Prop 187 and Prop 22.

Ronald Reagan & his collection of racist whites, who, like Reagan, hated student ‘radicals’ like Mario Savio, who call themselves ‘natives’. And the daughters, sons and grand, great-grandchildren of the Oakies and Arkies, that came West during the Depression. And became integral parts of the Cold War munitions industries, and announced themselves as ‘Entrepreneurs’ instead of cogs in the ‘Defense Industries‘. 

Now the Trump coterie and its even more radical political agenda, steeped in nihilism, now profit from the lessons taught to them by their more politically respectable precursors. All those respectable Bush Republicans, and the Neo-Cons, now wonder at the ‘why’ of Trump and Trumpism. Unable to face reality that the Party has slipped out of their control. Mitt Romney and his allies are mere befuddled onlookers. 

After the successful recall of Newsom, who might be the candidate be? 

Political Observer 

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/17/gavin-newsom-california-recall-legacy-476618

The opening paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is suffused with humility, of a very special kind , only realized in hindsight. This followed by his announcing that his eyes have been opened by his realization, and in this political moment his vision is unimpeded.  

It is possible that something similar is going on with President Joe Biden and his $1.9tn fiscal relief bill. For anyone willing to see, America’s social democratic turn has been in the works for decades now. The one Republican to win the popular vote in a White House race since 1988, George W Bush in 2004, had widened Medicare the year before. Quietly, voters have grown to like Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Public surveys disclose a culture that is no longer one of masochistic self-reliance, if it ever was.

But then nor is today’s progressive moment quite as resounding as currently billed. The test is not whether voters like cash that is time-limited, crisis-enforced and financed by the awesome borrowing power of the US government. Of course they do. The test is whether they will accept higher taxes to make it sustainable in the long term. The Biden administration has not even begun to confront them with the choice.

All of this analysis as the in-order-too of demonstrating his current ‘political wokeness’, on the Biden Question: whether he is an actual ‘Progressive’ or not. I’ve not yet arrived in my reading to witness Ganesh’s confronting the devastation of The Pandemic. That like the 2008 Crash called for extraordinary measures: A Bail-Out for all those Crony Capitalists, while the lives of millions collapsed in foreclosures and bankruptcy courts. Obama put ‘the past behind us’ and offered the Austerity of Simpson-Bowles.

On the appointment of Gene Sperling:

Sperling, 62, is well known to Biden. He was a close adviser to Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and then served as director of the National Economic Council at a time of tense negotiations with Republicans in Congress on budgetary issues, including the raising of the US debt limit. Sperling was also NEC director under Bill Clinton.

In between his two stints at the White House, Sperling worked as an advocate for universal education and a consultant for the West Wing television series.

https://www.ft.com/content/775032a9-bf0a-4655-a8e5-eb5ebeaaa01d

Note that Erskine Bowles, Henry M. Paulson, share leadership at the Economic Strategy Group, while Mr. Sperling is a member. Should the reader take these ‘clues’ that Biden is in no sense a ‘Progressive’?

Note this howler from Mr. Ganesh: ‘Roosevelt’s universal pension scheme is the one that exists today.’ Universal Pension Scheme, another name for Social Security, the most successful and completely necessary legacy of the New Deal. It is the object of scorn for Conservatives and the ubiquitous Neo-Liberals. A quote from Dickens is appropriate: ‘Are there no Work-Houses’ is descriptive of this Mentality,this World -View, in its historical context ‘The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin.

More ‘history made to measure’ follows, until the reader reaches the final two paragraphs of his essay :

Yet weirder is the idea that Biden has closed an age of craven Democratic submission to something called “neo-liberalism”. This travesty of the recent past is worth correcting now. The healthcare model for which Biden has increased subsidies had to be created. Obama did it. The child tax credit that Biden has enhanced temporarily had to be introduced in the first place. That was the work of Bill Clinton, who also passed the last sweeping round of federal tax increases in 1993. These alleged sell-outs did a lot for Americans caught up in what Johnson’s father called, with a flourish not given to his son, the “tentacles of circumstance”.

No doubt, they have the scars on their backs to show for it. But then so will Biden if he tries to entrench what is for now a fleeting munificence. A proper welfare state must be paid for. Such is the political Everest that should daunt the Democrats, and the opening that awaits the Republicans.

https://www.ft.com/content/2b3e2c2d-6547-4884-aeb3-199560ba4bf7

Recall the Clinton of : Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Joe Biden drafted the Senate version of this bill.

What reader believes that Biden is a ‘Progressive’ rather than a Neo-Liberal? Call this notion an expression of ‘Counter-History‘, although there are more apt and pointed descriptors. The collection of Clinton and Obama loyalists, that have been appointed by Biden demonstrates his fealty to this- Biden is not an ideologue, but an opportunist and political conformist of a certain generation of American pols. Yet in an Emergency, like Bush The Younger, Biden has taken extraordinary measures.

Political Observer

Never fear the Technocrats praised, in fact enshrined, by Walter Lippmann are now in control of the whole of politics, as practiced around the world.
For reference see the opening page of Karen Horn’s review of ‘The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neoliberalism’ by Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier. And note its defensive tone:

This book fills a gap. Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier provide a fine translation of the transcript of the discussions that took place in the summer of 1938 at the famous“Colloque Walter Lippmann”(CWL) in Paris. The French original of this“essential document in the history of neoliberalism”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 4), as the authors quite appropriately advertise, has been around for a long while. But access to this new and timely English language version, together with the authors’ excellent exhaustive introduction and rich, well-researched and fair background information,is likely to give scholarship on the origins of neoliberalism a fresh impulse, both in the history of economic thought and in political history.Such a boost is much needed and more than welcome at a time when the term“neoliberalism”is commonly being used as a derogatory word not only in much of the public debate, but also in the academic sphere. Neglecting almost everything about its historical roots and its proponents ’major concern with establishing a strong state standing above rent-seeking private interest groups, critics falsely associate neoliber-alism with mere policies of deregulation, privatization and the withdrawal of the state.Scholarly objectivity thus seems wont in much of the new SAGE Handbook on Neoliber-alism (2018), for example, where the editors Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings and David Primrose explain that since neoliberalism’s“persistent contradictions and crises have, at least, re-opened an opportunity for diverse movements to work collectively to delegitimize neoliberalism”, they hope that their volume of almost700pages“will productively contribute to such struggles”(Cahill et al. 2018, p.xxxii).Unlike them, Reinhoudt (Hoover Institution, Stanford University) and Audier(University of Paris-Sorbonne) nowhere give the impression that they aim to wield anew weapon in their hands for a crusade against neoliberalism. One may perhaps guess their political leanings, but these never seem to bias their account. Their aim isto“furnish elements for research and discussion”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 36),not to“settle which interpretation is the best”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p.35).Everybody is invited to form their own opinions. And the authors very pertinently state that,“as historians, political theorists, and philosophers continue to debate the history of the term‘neo-liberalism’and the term’s meaning, it is useful to devote attention to the 1938 colloquium where the movement was formally born.”(Reinhoudt

…

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ordo-2019-0040/html

Prof. Horn’s bio here: https://econjwatch.org/authors/karen-horn

For a revelatory collection of essays- to a more objective analysis of one of Neo-Liberalism’s collection of Messiahs, Hayek:

The above just a preamble to this news story in The Financial Times:

Headline: Joe Biden taps Gene Sperling to implement $1.9tn stimulus package

Sub-headline: Economic adviser to Clinton and Obama hired to manage efficient rollout of Covid-19 aid plan

The ecomiums of praise for Sterling are unsurprising.

“Gene will work with the heads of the White House policy councils and key leaders at federal agencies so we can get funds out the door quickly, maximise its impact and accelerate the work the administration is doing to crush Covid-19 and rescue our economy,” the Biden administration official said.

“There’s no one who knows how the federal government works better than Gene Sperling.”

Mr. Sperling’s qualifications are carefully presented:

Sperling, 62, is well known to Biden. He was a close adviser to Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and then served as director of the National Economic Council at a time of tense negotiations with Republicans in Congress on budgetary issues, including the raising of the US debt limit. Sperling was also NEC director under Bill Clinton.

In between his two stints at the White House, Sperling worked as an advocate for universal education and a consultant for the West Wing television series.

https://www.ft.com/content/775032a9-bf0a-4655-a8e5-eb5ebeaaa01d

Mr. Sperling was available for speaking through:

https://www.wsb.com/speakers/gene-sperling/

And here : https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/members/gene-sperling/

Erskine Bowles, Henry M. Paulson, share leadership at the Economic Strategy Group, while Mr. Sperling is a member. The failed Neo-Liberals are the leaders of the Biden Administration’s Economic resuscitation campaign. Perhaps Larry Summers was thought to be too divisine a figure, for the Biden reiteration of the New Deal, in its 2021 guise?

Old Socialist

Robert Irwin ‘reviews’ Timothy Brennan’s book ‘Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said’

Title :Flawed secular saint

Subtitle: The errors of Edward Said

Timothy Brennan evidently knew Edward Said very well and has conducted numerous interviews with others who knew him well, and he has had access to such fascinating unpublished documents as Said’s unfinished novel. In Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, while providing evidence of Said’s many admirable qualities, such as his courage in speaking and writing for the Palestinian cause, his promotion of Arabic novelists in translation, his enthusiasm for engaging with challenging intellectual theories and his remarkable skill as a musician, Brennan repeatedly takes note of his failings. These include his vanity, his resistance to criticism, his impatience with students and his polemical rages. Yet Said’s proneness to anger does not prevent Brennan from presenting him as a secular saint. (Saint Jerome, who was notoriously ill-tempered, might furnish a precedent.) It is interesting to note that Said had a particular detestation of two other secular saints, George Orwell and Albert Camus.

…

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/places-of-mind-a-life-of-edward-said-timothy-brennan-review-robert-irwin/

The Critics of Said are many:

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism by Ibn Warraq

The lowest cost at Alibris $77.00 US dollars

____________________________________ 

Some Critiques of Edward Said’s Orientalism:

That provides this source, ‘Irwin, Robert. 2008. “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 May 2008.’

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/01/some-critiques-of-edward-saids.html

(I searched the TLS data base for the May 7, 2008 article resulted in this: ‘Your search for ”Irwin, Robert. 2008. “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy,” ‘ returned 0 articles’ )

_______________________________________

Edward Said: Critic decries his “shadowy legacy”

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/50389.html

This provides a link to Mr. Irwin’s May 7, 2008 essay. The reader is taken to the current edition of the TLS.

______________________________________

Here is a link to a collection of essays titled ‘Debating Orientalism’, and Mr. Irwin’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Camel: Said’s Animus’

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137341112_3

This essay is available for $29.95, US currency.

__________________________________________

Campus Watch publishes the whole of the May 7, 2008 TLS essay. No way of checking this.

Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy [incl. Daniel Martin Varisco, Bernard Lewis, et al.]

Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy [incl. Daniel Martin Varisco, Bernard Lewis, et al.]

(The link to the TLS essay again sends the reader to the current edition!)

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/12819/edward-said-shadowy-legacy-incl-daniel-martin

Mr. Irwin needs to cultivate new Academic Enemies! Steven Salaita and his ‘Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine‘ a partial review of this book by Alex Lubin provides … The only problem is that Prof. Salaita is now a school bus driver:

‘Ousted’ From Academe, Steven Salaita Says He’s Driving a School Bus to Make Ends Meet

https://www.chronicle.com/article/ousted-from-academe-steven-salaita-says-hes-driving-a-school-bus-to-make-ends-meet/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

That is how the Resectable Bourgeois Academy handles political dissidents! Said had tenure, but he was the target of rhetorical attacks. But times have changed:

Headline: Harvard Hillel Executive Director Accuses Cornel West, Supporters of Furthering ‘Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory’ In Tenure Controversy

Responding to vigorous campus support for Professor Cornel R. West ’74 — who said last month Harvard declined to consider him for tenure in part due to his outspoken criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, executive director of Harvard Hillel, criticized West for having “egged students on” in “scapegoating and demonizing” Jewish people.

In an email to Hillel affiliates Friday, Steinberg wrote he believes a student petition condemning Harvard’s alleged decision to not consider West for tenure is based on “an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”

The petition cites West’s belief that he was denied tenure consideration due to his opposition to “the settler colonial violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and references Zionism in a list of ideologies it says West has critiqued, alongside “white supremacy, racial capitalism,” and “the military-industrial complex.”

…

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/11/hillel-director-cornel-west/

The specious charge of ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the newest, and most effective solvent, for academic careers of dissidents like Steven Salaita and Cornel West ?

American Writer

___________________________________________________________

Added March 14, 2021

For added perspective on Said, and Mr. Irwin’s animus, for want of a better descriptor, toward Said. And a valid concern about Orientalism, and its evolution in Western Discourse, read Maya Jasanoff’s June 2006 essay titled ‘Before and After Said’ in the London Review of Books. Here is her concluding paragraph, which offers the reader a ‘middle way’ of understanding ,on the question of Orientalism, in both Said and Irwin.

Surely Said’s most enduring legacy has been to embed in a rising generation of Western scholars, many of whom are now contemporaries of Orientalism itself, the awareness that their work has political substance and ramifications, whether or not it might appear to be political a priori. Said wanted to break down what he saw as a false ‘distinction between pure and political knowledge’. Does that mean facts do not exist, or that evidence does not matter? Certainly not. But it does mean that scholars ought to be aware of the circumstances governing the kind of knowledge they produce and circulate. An American tourist of average means can visit the library of Tamegroute, scrutinise the manuscripts and come home with stories and snapshots, while the custodians of such repositories can almost certainly not afford trips abroad, are even less likely to be able to obtain Western visas, and could not under any plausible circumstances participate in Western scholarly discourse. So thank goodness for Orientalists like those profiled by Irwin, who have sought to reach across cultural divides and understand languages, histories and faiths other than their own. But thank goodness too for Orientalism, which has helped make scholars more conscious of the sources of their own perspectives and privileges in the first place.

A. W.

How did this explanation of its funders, posted at Freedom House’s website, escape the attention of Mr. Ganesh?

Freedom House currently has fourteen offices and conducts programs in over thirty countries in all regions of the world. Primary funding for Freedom House’s programs comes in the form of grants from USAID and U.S. State Department, as well as from other democratic governments—Canada, the EU, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—and from private foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

https://freedomhouse.org/programs/regional

Then there is this, what to name it?

The US and the wider west have just one consolation. Most of the crisis is not their fault. It follows that its alleviation is a task beyond them.

If Mr. Ganesh is looking to find ‘Crises’ of America’s making:

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

Ganesh’s essay attacks this government funded Think Tank, that doesn’t quite reach his exacting standards. That has been addressed, in the preceding sentences, of the above quoted paragraph:

Methodological snags abound here. Should “punitive” immigration tactics bring down the US score? And what’s all this about “exacerbated income inequality” in a civic review? Still, to the extent that values are quantifiable, the liberal style of government is in well-charted decline.

https://www.ft.com/content/e5276777-f70f-4f15-80bb-823a8e5e6c9b

The Freedom House essay by Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz is quoted in this Atlantic Council publication:

Who will organize the world? That’s what’s at stake in the Biden-Xi contest.

Inflection Points by Frederick Kempe dated March 7, 2021.

Who is going to organize the world? And what forces and whose interests will shape the global future?

Those were the underlying questions behind two events this past week, one in Washington and the other in Beijing, that set the stage for the geopolitical contest of our times.

The Washington piece was President Joe Biden’s release of the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which is unprecedented at this stage in a new administration. Biden’s purpose was to provide early clarity about how he intends to set and execute priorities in a fast-changing world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out the thinking behind the guidance in his first major speech since entering office. It was a compelling one, underscoring the urgent need to shore up US democracy and revitalize America’s alliances and partnerships.

“Whether we like it or not, the world does not organize itself,” Blinken said. “When the U.S. pulls back, one of two things is likely to happen: either another country tries to take our place, but not in a way that advances our interests and values; or, maybe just as bad, no one steps up, and then we get chaos and all the dangers it creates. Either way, that’s not good for America.”

Relations with China, which Blinken called “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century,” are the wrench in this organizational thinking.

Said Blinken: “China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system—all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”

Biden’s biggest departure from former President Donald Trump’s approach to China is his emphasis on working with partners and allies. This week’s move by the United States and European Union to ease trade tensions, suspending a long list of tariffs related to the Airbus-Boeing dispute over government subsidies, underscores Biden’s seriousness of purpose.

…

Who will organize the world? That’s what’s at stake in the Biden-Xi contest.

From the evidence offered by these sources, the Party Line of the Biden Foreign Policy is taking shape. The Atlantic Council is the propaganda arm of NATO! Also, the reader might be able to detect, in the earliest stages of its evolution, what a Biden Foreign Policy critique will become?

Political Reporter

The Financial Times begins its Anti-Lula Campaign with this collection of the comments of ‘Free Marketeers’ , for want of a better term.

What might the reader think of Mr. Stott’s membership in the ‘Institute of The Americas’ ?

This on the Institute of the Americas web page:

For nearly 40 years, the Institute of the Americas has promoted sound public policy and fostered cooperation between public and private sector stakeholders across the hemisphere.

From the mission statement of this organization :

Our diverse programs emphasize innovation and technological advance as the key to building 21st century economies in the Americas.

To be a catalyst for promoting economic development and integration, emphasizing the role of the private sector, as a means to improve the economic and social well being of the people of the Americas.

…

We build bridges across the Americas — linking business leaders, policymakers, teachers, and students to advance education, share ideas, and facilitate opportunities. We help understand and catalyze innovation in core sectors, including: energy & sustainability, , life sciences & biotech, and the digital economy as it pertains to these core, productive activities.

Here is a selection from Mr. Michael Stott’s essay:

In a decision for which the adjective “surprise” hardly seems adequate, Supreme Court justice Luiz Edson Fachin ruled that the provincial court in southern Brazil which had convicted and imprisoned the leftwing icon on corruption charges in 2017 had no jurisdiction to try the case.

…

The shockwaves from the decision were immense: Lula’s fate has polarised Latin America’s biggest nation for years, bitterly dividing left-wingers who idolised him for his generous welfare policies from those on the right, who saw him and his Workers’ party, or PT, as the embodiment of mismanagement and corruption.

…

Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said she thought the surprise ruling quashing Lula’s convictions was likely to stand, not least because Bolsonaro had made so many enemies among the judiciary with his constant attacks on judges. “What I see happening is a reckoning with the fact that Bolsonaro is a massive threat to institutional stability,” she said. “The calculation thus is: ‘What is least destabilising?’”

https://www.ft.com/content/6d30406a-21d8-4d26-9784-8eabcbcc869f?list=intlhomepage

What might the reader think of this Los Angeles Times essay about Peterson and by extension his ‘Institute’?

Headline Unmasking the most influential billionaire in U.S. politics

Who’s the most influential billionaire business figure in national politics?

If you answered one of the Koch brothers (Charles or David) or George Soros, you’re wearing your partisan blinders. The former are known for their devotion to conservative causes, the latter to liberal. In either case, you’re wrong.

The most influential billionaire in America is Peter G. Peterson. The son of Greek immigrants, Peterson, 86, served as Commerce secretary under President Nixon, then became chairman and chief executive of Lehman Bros. Subsequently, he made his big money as co-founder of the Wall Street private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Peterson doesn’t attract venom from the left like the Koch family or bile from the right like Soros. In Washington, he’s treated with sedulous respect as a serious thinker about public policy willing to support earnest public discussion with cold cash. His money backs a large number of think tanks across the political spectrum; he has started a news outlet churning out articles about fiscal matters and is funding a high school curriculum aimed, according to its creators at Columbia University, at “teaching kids about the national debt.”

…

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-oct-02-la-fi-hiltzik-20121003-story.html

This reader fully understands that here is the central concern of Michael Stott, The Institute of the Americas, The Financial Times and Monica de Bolle.

Investors’ worries reflected not only the risk of a Lula victory but also the concern that, faced with an electoral challenge from his old nemesis, Bolsonaro would abandon any remaining pretence at market-friendly reforms and lean towards even more of the expensive populist giveaways than he has approved so far, straining the country’s dire finances further.

Bolsonaro’s ‘Market -friendly reforms’ are under threat from the possibility, the potentiality of a Lula victory.

Old Socialist

Looking for something else, I saw this essay by Perry Anderson: ‘High Jinks at the Plaza’ a review of three books.

The British Constitution Now 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Heinemann, 289 pp., £18.50, April 1992, 0 434 47994 2Constitutional Reform 
by Robert Brazier.
Oxford, 172 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 876257 7Anatomy of Thatcherism 
by Shirley Letwin.
Fontana, 364 pp., £6.99, October 1992, 0 00 686243 8

‘The New Few’ by Mr. Mount stares at me when I’ve opened my closet door, since 2012. As does his Jem (and Sam) Both ended on the Internet’s remainder shelves. Perry Anderson takes apart Mount’s British Constitution book, and books by Robert Brazier and Shirley Letwin with his wit and historical/political knowledge. That renders Mount and his temporary associates- note that Anderson gives credit where credit is due- yet he renders the intellectual/political poses of these authors null.

Here is a link to Edward B. Foley’s review of Mount’s ‘British Constitution’ of 1993.

Book Review: The British Constitution Now: Recovery or Decline? by Ferdinand Mount.

https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1307&context=concomm

Mr. Foley’s essay is of interest, in that it takes Mount’s book as an exercise of scholarship, rather than as an exercise of politics, in the guise of that scholarship. Anderson provides that indispensable dimension of the politics of Oakeshott and political fellow travelers:

This is, of course, why Michael Oakeshott is the garden god of its intellectual landscape. For his theory of the State was designed precisely to rope off popular government and purposive legislation from the proper conduct of rule. ‘Civil association’, as the framework of order, debarred collective aims or common consent from the structure of government. These were the features of another kind of activity, ‘enterprise association’, which had nothing to do with true governance. The confusion of enterprise association with civil association, when rulers undertook ‘managerial’ tasks – intervening in economic life or meddling in social affairs: in short, any programme for public welfare – was the path to servitude. Mount, closer to day-to-day realities, can see the difficulties of this stark dichotomy for the practical politician, and assures us that the two kinds of association are not mutually exclusive, and were ‘not really intended to be so’. The pious gloss is without consequence. For the burden of Mount’s argument is that the Constitution should indeed be seen, not in the way Bagehot envisaged it – as an ‘engine’ for purposeful government – but as a civil association: a form of living, he writes, as exempt from wilful shape or aim as South Kensington.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n20/perry-anderson/high-jinks-at-the-plaza

Old Socialist

His column takes the reader from Mr. Colvile, as reporter on the state of the NHS five years ago: 

‘When we talk about the NHS collapsing, we think of people being left to die in their homes. But the truth is subtler, and more corrosive. Five years ago I spent a week reporting from one of the country’s leading hospitals, the Queen Elizabeth in Birmingham. I was in A&E on the night the hospital went to the highest alert level for the first time in its history — a scenario the staff dubbed “Armageddon”. I watched as patients lay on wooden beds in the corridors, as ambulances delivered casualty after casualty even though there was no room at the inn.’

To Richard Murray of ‘King’s Fund’: 

At the same time, there are some silver linings from the pandemic. Richard Murray, head of the King’s Fund think tank, points out that it has resulted in a surge of innovation within the health service — consultations held over Zoom, trials for new Covid-19 treatments speeding through the system, greater co-ordination with care homes, an increased willingness to draw on the help of volunteers (including in the vaccination programme). The hope is that these can become permanent features, rather than temporary aberrations. Excess mortality is also likely to be lower in the coming years, because of the awful way Covid-19 picks off the most vulnerable.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/however-the-nhs-weathers-the-covid-hurricane-it-must-then-be-rebuilt-to-withstand-another-crisis-sv5nslb0x

On King’s Fund:

The King’s Fund is an independent think tank, which is involved with work relating to the health system in England. It organises conferences^[1] and other events.^[2]

Since 1997, they have jointly funded a yearly award system with GlaxoSmithKline. They reward small to medium-sized health charities who are improving people’s health.^[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King’s_Fund

I worked in Home Health Care from 1990 to 1999, and attended Patience Conferences for a large Los Angeles Hospital for 5 years: I am not a Doctor or Nurse, but like Colvile I can comment on the politics of HealthCare. He from the perspective of a Thatcherite Think Tank executive, whose self-presentation is about a would be riff on Smith’s Impartial Spectator, when it is,in fact, about Aron’s Committed Observer.

Old Socialist

I printed out this July 2020 interview, conducted by Eric Levitz, of Mr. Shor. Almost a full twenty pages long.  Mr. Levitz excels at soft-ball questions, inquiries. Perhaps in deference to Mr. Shor’s wunderkind status? ‘College Marxist’ is a demonstration of a once youthful flirtation?  

Mr. Shor assumes that his readership’s memory doesn’t go back as far as the Clinton’s ! Mine reaches back to The Kennedy presidency. Not to waste the reades time: Hillary Clinton is was and remains a Neo-Liberal. She was in 1964 a ‘Goldwater Girl’. So as a Party apparatchik, Mr. Shor presumes that the New York  Magazine’s readership meets his own callow historical/political standard. 

But the reader is made aware of Mr. Shor’s status as Political Technocrat.Whose business is the construction of winning  political strategies. His handbook is  Edward L. Bernays ‘Propaganda’ allied with more up to date methodologies of manipulation. Shor is the embodiment of the Lippmann Ideal of ‘Expert’, as a hedge against too much Democracy.

Both Mr. Levitz and Mr. Schor manage to provide a wobbly ‘seminar’ on winning strategies, or at least an attempt to construct them. Yet Mr. Shor is without the ability to construct a set of reasons why a voter would choose a  New Democrat, over a Republican Party, that even expelled their Jacobins, in favor of Trump. To resort to political metaphysics Mr. Shor is without either vision, charisma, or even in the most vulgar terms, dogmas. Neo-Liberalism is steeped in Free Market Dogmas. Even Bernie Sanders’ Left-Wing Social Democracy presents a Program.

Mr. Schor defensiveness about Neo-Liberalism is evident:  

             
…
So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

…

Ah, right. People yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.
…

“Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.”
…

You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill Clinton in 1992.

…

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html#comments

Old Socialist

As always ‘The Rebellion Against the Neo-Liberal Elites’ that takes place regularly, in France, remains unreported, in this newspaper! Its ‘old news’. What takes the place of actual, but inconvenient news, is the ‘Culture War’ French Style: It devours everything else, its very purpose.
Which takes the place of any real commentary on Macron’s abandoned, indeed failed ‘Jupertarian Politics’ . The ‘conviction’ of Sarkozy, home detention, shines a light, not just on a single French pol, but on the whole of Western Democracies problem of utterly corrupt pols, a glaring example: Joe Biden!
Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/479ec0cb-f40d-4544-b78f-3d47f5504b13

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