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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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
This duo in tharl to Star Wars and Tron, and its penchant for Futuristic Drag: Helmets. I watched their final video, that evoked something like Kubrick’s 2001 opening sequence, featuring a barren landscape. This video expressed in its way a kind of nihilism, as both of them blew themselves up. Fin, The End . How will they manage a possible Farewell Tour? Or form a Reunion Tour ? ‘Daft Punk’ is about the long forgotten Harold Rosenberg’s ‘The Tradition of the New’ , published in 1959. Action Painting and Techno are connected!?
Here Mr. Ganesh comments on a ‘political fact’
Headline: Joe Biden’s popular stimulus reveals a changed America
Sub-headline: In attitude, if not reality, the US has become a social democratic country
Its ‘as if’ The New Deal never happened: Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System in 1956 and a Tax Rate of 90%. Or that Kennedy and Roger Blough had a ‘disagreement’? Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been elided for American History. Nixon’s EPA of 1970 and his Health Care Plan of 1974. More examples of America’s Social Democratic Tradition, present themselves, as I just recall what comes to my memory!
The rise and triumph of Neo- Liberalism, Reagan’s catch-phrase of ‘Government is the problem’ & ‘I believe in State’s Rights’ , Bush The Elder of ‘a thousand points of light’ and Lee Atwater’s contribution to these ‘lights’, Willie Horton, The New Democrats, Bill Clinton of the willful destruction of Welfare & Aid to Dependent Children, and the economic catastrophe of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Bush The Younger who institutionalised Permanent War, built upon lies, and Obama and his adoption of Heritage Foundation Healthcare as his own, instead of Medicare for All. This is a partial history of the Neo-Liberal War against the Social Democratic Tradition, that now, in the face of The Pandemic, and its short and long term economic consequences, is reviving and remaking America, via one of its most valuable traditions.
One of the virtues of being Mr. Ganesh is that he needn’t worry about paying his rent, and the other imperatives, that bedevil tens of millions of Americans, in the face of The Pandemic: awaiting their $2,000 checks reduced to $1,400, Unemployment even after the ‘end’ of the pandemic, feeding themselves and their children, and awaiting vaccination, and the looming question of eviction or Foreclosure. Oh, I forgot School! All this while Mr. Ganesh address the hard problems!
Mr. Jones, you are the master of political equivocation, not to speak of political conformity. That the Blairite Coterie manufactured the ‘Anti-Semitism of Corbyn’ as the political wager to ensure what? That Labour would lose to Boris? It was a political dispute between New Labour, and what is/was the actual Labour Party of Democratic Socialism.
The henchman for this were Jonathan Freedland, political fiction writer, Anthony Julius: both at full Tribalist Cry! In the ‘Left’ Guardian. With help of perennial Jewish Victim Margaret Hodge: Apartheid Profiteer! What is of most interest is that Corbyn has formed the Project for Peace and Justice. The Institutionalization of Corbanism?
Jeremy Corbyn: Why I’m Launching a Project for Peace and Justice
Under the ‘leadership‘ of Starmer, Labour is hemorrhaging memberships at an alarming rate! Even Starmer’s call for a re-invigorated Patriotism, an echo of Posh Boy Cameron’s attack on Corbyn’s lack of ‘Patriotism’? has fallen flat!
Your wan attempt to steer the ‘middle course’ is hopeless! Yet you persist in an attempt to take the political temperature of the Jewish members of Labour, who are, if fact, the Blairite Neo-Liberals who long for a Restoration of this political toxin.
What can the reader make of this paragraph of Mr. Robson’s interview with Josh Cohen?
“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?” Cohen asked me recently, during a two-hour amble around Kensal Rise, near where he lives in north-west London. “She would think that it was both an absurd confection and so obvious that it’s not even worth remarking.” Cohen, who turned 50 last year, is compact and subtly scruffy. He has a boyish central parting, a salt-and-pepper beard, a serious mouth with mild guppy tendencies, and small dark eyes that project a tickled gleam from behind his black-rimmed glasses. His conversational style is at once forthright and soothingly sibilant as he expounds on the subjects to which he has devoted his life: post-romantic literature, 20th-century theory, the human mind. At times, he is reminiscent of his contemporary Louis Theroux, though he comes armed with a different sort of question, more searching, perhaps, or less confident about what it wants to provoke.’
On the question, rather conjecture, of what Jane Austen might think of Freud, is a rhetorical prop for Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative project. On the vexing question of ‘what’ Jane Austen may have thought? in her time and political circumstance, is offered by Marilyn Butler’s invaluable ‘Jane Austen And The War of Ideas’.
Psychoanalysis was declared a ‘Science’ by Freud, that has been the subject to attempts at revisionism and rehabilitation: the Neo-Freudians, Psychoanalysis as Metaphysic, Jewish Emancipation, Jewish Story Telling. The whole of the rehabilitative project, sacrifices the rich vocabulary of The Master: Id, Ego,Super-Ego, The Oedipus Complex, Libido, Cathexis, Transference, Latent Homosexality,etc.. Trying to master this vocabulary was part of my young adult life, reading The New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-analysis , The Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo. When fist reading ‘The Lectures’, in the early 1970’s, I thought it was full of holes, yet I just kept that realization to myself.
For an example of the modish character of psycho-analysis on literary criticism, in an oblique, even almost a latent expression:
What is of interest in Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative exercise, is that the ‘Literary’ is simply a garnish to his particular form of Freudianism, that remains out of reach of the reader, except for its Public Relations guise: the very point of this interview/review.
One final point: Frederick Crews of ‘The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute’ was published in 1995 as a New York Review Book, and subsequent essays on Freud in the tabloid itself ,and his biography of Freud was published in 2017: Freud:The Making of an Illusion. I read the TLS and New Statesman regularly, yet it appears that one of America’s important literary/political tabloids has not reached British readers?
Headline:Joe Biden can save global migration from the deep freeze
Sub-headline: Through example and sheer numbers, an open US could bring an open world
…
‘This criminally undersells it. Whatever their content, previous reforms were of national or perhaps regional interest. This one, by dint of timing, could nudge the world into openness at a hinge moment in history.’
…
What can be wrong with this paragraph? Has Mr. Ganesh started reading John F. Kennedy’s ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ , probably ghosted by one of his Camelot Coterie? Recall ‘No Irish Need Apply’ ? Ganesh should read Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ in which the Mestizo Hordes are about to engulf ‘American Protestant Virtue‘. It’s focused his hysterical xenophobia.
Should the reader look to how America treated the Braceros, that picked crops beginning in WWII till 1964, as factual evidence of bad faith and mendacity. America still owes these workers $500 Million , not updated to reflect today’s accumulation of interest. Most of these Guest Workers are dead, or near it, such is/are the quioxitic nature of America’s Legal/Moral obligations?
Trump campaigned on the ‘fact’ that Mexico would pay the cost of The Wall, the realization of Fortress America, on the Southern Border. No Wall for the Northern Border, because Canadians are not Mestizos. Slavery, the Concentration Camps for Japanese citizens, the Supreme Court decisions in Korematsu v. United States, and Hirabayashi v. United States- this an historical record that demonstrates xenophobia even against its own citizens, of different ethnicities/races.
What sense can the reader make of this New York Times report?
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.
That American Wars of Empire has produced a Refugee Crisis of World Historical proportions, in the last two decades, demonstrates what ‘Values’? Mr. Ganesh political intervention featuring Joe Biden as Political Redeemer will not do!
Thank you for your comment. Xenophobia is about Tribalism in its many iterations, permutations. The Reader need only look to Trump and Trumpism, and the Wall that never got built! Or in the world of respectable academia Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash’ and his ‘Who Are We’ are just examples of the toxic American Exceptionalism in extremis. ‘Often it is very rational and you ignore it at your peril.’ The fear and hatred of ‘The Other’ is the murderous toxin, that has infected ‘Western Civilization’ since the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle and his defense of Slavery: The Politics Chapter 4 Slavery under the rubric of the Association of the Household. Cicero and his xenophobia: ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ by Ann Vasaly and ‘ Romans and Aliens‘ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon Chapters 2 through 4
Read Mr. Colvile’s C.V. as posted at the Center for Policy Studies web site:
Robert Colvile is Director of the CPS and Editor-in-Chief of CapX, as well as a columnist for The Sunday Times. In December 2019 he took a leave of absence to work as one of the authors of the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, which also contained a range of policies advocated by the CPS. He was previously head of comment at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and news director at BuzzFeed UK, as well as an editor, columnist and leader writer with the Telegraph. His critically acclaimed book ‘The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster’ was published by Bloomsbury in 2016, and he was for many years a Research Fellow at the CPS alongside his journalism work.
This, just prologue to my comment to his latest essay at The Times of February 21, 2021:
Headline: Keir Starmer has every chance of becoming PM. There’s just one obstacle — the Labour Party
Mr. Colvile in given to self-congratulatory Oxbridger-isms. The first two paragraphs awash in that very patois, garnished with a miniscule witticism-he knows his readership!
When I was just starting out in Fleet Street, a veteran journalist explained how to write political analysis. Spend most of your word count on the government (usually, in those days, the exhaustingly pointless rows between Blair and Brown). Throw in a few hundred words on the opposition. And if you were running short, add a couple of paragraphs starting: “And what of the Lib Dems?”
Today, the priority list looks rather different. The pandemic is utterly dominant, and the government’s response to it crucial. The wider Tory party is newsworthy because its internal arguments feed into ministers’ decisions on the virus. Labour maybe gets those two final paragraphs. And the Lib Dems are completely off the page. (Pop quiz: name the party’s new leader. If you got that, name a single thing he’s said since being elected. I’ll wait.)
The point, of course, is that his leadership was never going to cut through. It’s not just that Starmer can’t do all the things a politician wants to: hold rallies, meet voters, be in the same room as his MPs. It’s that voters don’t care about politics in the pandemic, don’t see the pandemic as a party political issue and don’t like people who try to make it one.
Even when the virus recedes, getting a hearing will be hard. Outside elections, voters rarely notice the opposition. That gets worse when the government has a big majority — because, as the Blair-Brown years showed, what happens inside the ruling party matters far more.
This perhaps explains why, in an attempt to draw attention to his speech, Starmer’s team wildly oversold it. We were promised a “policy blitz”, even a “Beveridge moment”. As it was, an address entitled A New Chapter for Britain was barely a footnote. There were a couple of solid policy ideas — one, pleasingly, filched from the think tank I run. Yet even without Starmer’s adenoidal monotone, the contents would have rapidly drifted from the memory.
And the point of arrival for the reader, after the above, is this paragraph:
But then the boring truth is that Starmer is actually doing fine, especially given the depths to which Labour had sunk. There is a concept in sport called “value over replacement player”, to measure the worth of, say, Lionel Messi against that of a perfectly average striker. Starmer is the replacement politician, the perfectly generic leader. He thrills no one, and repels no one.
…
In short, Starmer’s problem is not that he is lacking in charisma — after all, John Major won more votes in 1992 than any British politician before or since. It is the party he leads.
The reader can quite easily identify ‘the depths that Labour had sunk’ as the leadership of Corbyn. Under attack from with the ranks of New Labour, by political fiction writer Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. Aided by another Zionist Anthony Julius and a cast dominated by Labour Friends of Israel. Not to forget the Anti-Corbyn campaigns in The Financial Times, The Economist and The Times. An image from The Economist is illustrative of the nature of the campaign of defamation:
Just as the reader escapes from one rhetorical thicket, she enters into the one that tells the tale of one David Shor. The proqunquity of one Political Technocrat for another? Here is a link and a excerpt from an interview with Mr. Shor of the July 17, 2020 issue of New York Magazine by Eric Levitz. That offers some valuable insights as to who Mr. Shor is, and what he believes. That might just offer some clues as to his theory and practice of politics.
David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain undisclosed).
But before Shor’s improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20, served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really stood.
This idiosyncratic combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S. politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three peer-reviewed studies.
Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be reelected, among other things.
What is a Second Generation Thatcherite doing consorting with a fellow Technocrat, who is a ‘an adherent of Leninist vanguardism‘? How is it that such a canny Oxbridger made such a blunder, after demonstrating his political savvy, with almost clever rhetorical questions? Mr. Colvile offers the wan ‘insight’ that the problem with Labour is with the ‘Corbyn Loyalists’.
Tony Blair makes a strategic walk-on, and so does the mythical, or should the reader call it fictional, or just a lie? : ‘Starmer has indeed accepted that the public were right to reject Corbyn and his poisonous dalliance with antisemitism.’ Mr. Colvile has ignored the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has launched his ‘Project for Peace and Justice’ . Corbyn plans to be a force in British Politics for some time, in or out of office. He managed to inspire hope in a generation tired of failed Neo-Liberalism, and its coterie of political zombies. Those Corbyn loyalists now have somewhere to go. Here is a link to a Jacobin interview with Jeremy Corbyn:
In California Uber, and its political allies, spent 22 Million Dollars to ‘invent’ a new class of Workers dubbed ‘Independent Contractors’. This via a Proposition on the 2020 Ballot. How can Uber, in Great Britain, replicate this feat of nomenclature, and Tax Bracket ? The burning question in the Age of The Pandemic. Uber is a Taxi Service, not a ‘Ride-hailing app’ , as this newspaper follows the Neo-Liberal Party Line.
StephenKMackSD
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In reply to MarkwasmydisplaynameuntilFTmademechange:
There must be some way, the chisling Capitalist Class, can maintain their stranglehold on Workers, still caught in the wake of the 2008 collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle? Regards, StephenKMackSD
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