StephenKMackSD's Blog

Bret Stephens January 6, 2021  

These paragraphs of Mr. Stephens’ essay of January 6, 2021 exemplify his Anti-Trump polemic. Neo-Conservatism shares an equal toxic politics, but achieved by a stealth attack on American Institutions , by political actors, that cultivate a scrupulous, if utterly mendacious adherence, to the ‘norms‘ of bourgeoise political respectability.  The reader need only look the Fukuyama’s The Decay of American Political Institutions .

Headline: Impeach and Convict. Right Now. 

Sub-headline: Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute. 

It wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic. 

The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate is to reconvene immediately to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again. 

To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president. 

From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics. 

He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too. 

Mr. Stephens’ essay begins with the self-serving assumption that Trump appeared out the unknown depths of American political irrationalism. Instead of being the monster, that forty years of the ascent and victory, of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its toxic effects on the Middle and Working Classes. Mr. Stephens being one of peddlers of that political/economic snake oil.Reading all of Mr. Stephens’ essay, or more appropriately a riff on The Bill of Attainder, as he adds to his cast of mendacious actors, and the politically virtuous, that veers into Political Melodrama. Tinged with echoes of Saints and Sinners: Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, the precursors of American Moralizing. With the bit between his teeth, Stephens is at full gallop! 

Andrew Sullivan January 8, 2021 

Headline: This Is The Face Of The GOP Now 

Sub-headline: The descent from conservatism to nihilism is now complete. 

For anyone with eyes not blinded by tribalism or ears deafened by denial, what happened in Washington this week was always going to happen.  

Trump’s character and profound psychological deformation always, always meant he would not relinquish power without an almighty struggle. We elected an instinctual tyrant, preternaturally incapable of understanding the give and take of democratic politics, for whom losing in any contest threatens the core of his very being, and who has no effective control over the roiling emotions that course through his thickened arteries. 

Some of us were ridiculed for saying from the very beginning that there would have to be some kind of violence to remove him, if he were to lose the next election. We still are. We’re called victims of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, as if this were not the only sane position when a delusional, malignant, tyrant-wannabe has an entire political party in his grip, aided and abetted by tribal media tools. For myself, from the very beginning, having examined Trump’s past and observed his plain-as-day pathology, I just couldn’t envision how this figure could psychologically, voluntarily ever leave the Oval Office. Every single day of his presidency has confirmed this. He has blown through every guardrail against presidential abuse that exists. 

Trump is now and always has been delusional. He lives in an imaginary world. His insistence that he won the last election in a “landslide” is psychologically indistinguishable from his declaration on his first day that his Inaugural crowd was larger than his predecessor’s. For four years, the actual evidence did not matter. It still doesn’t. Any rumor that helps him, however ludicrous, is true; every cold fact that hurts him, however trivial or banal, doesn’t exist. For four years as president, any advisor who told him the truth, rather than perpetuating his delusions, had an immediate expiration date. For four years, an army of volunteer propagandists knowingly disseminated his insane, cascading torrent of lies. 

… 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/this-the-face-of-the-gop-now

Unlike Mr. Stephens, Mr. Sullivan is at immediate full gallop,  as if the reader were a rider on a runaway horse, such is Sullivan’s polemical screech, at full celerity. Note that further on in his essay, he presents himself as the victim of doubters, it is, and has been a nearly formulaic rhetorical stance!  

The reader is presented with a mere 1830 words, for the subscriber to his blog. The succinct is utterly foreign territory to this writer.  I’ll just quote his two concluding paragraphs stepped, if not marinated in the moralizing rhetoric of Johnathan Edwards, as it has evolved in American political/religious discourse, carefully manicured for the political present. 

I can’t see this happening without a split, or an open internecine struggle. If the result is a deeper commitment to an ideology of stab-in-the-back neo-fascism inspired by a seditionist president-in-exile, then the GOP needs to be burned to the ground. But if someone can emerge who can marshal the ideas that helped the GOP make gains in the House last year, and excommunicate the seditionists and bigots and fanatics, then we have something to build on.

Joe Biden has a massive task ahead of him, but this week may help him find common ground with those Republican Senators who have begun to understand that the forces they have unleashed and enabled are deeply dangerous to the entire project of self-government in America. Since his election victory, Biden has struck the right note every time the country has needed him to. Steer us back toward a sane center, Mr President-elect. Save the soul of this teetering, torn remnant of a republic, before we lose it for good.

Rod Dreher January 8, 2021

Headline: The Left’s Reichstag Fire

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler took power, a Dutch communist allegedly started a fire in the German Reichstag building. Hitler used this act as a pretext to begin seizing dictatorial powers. The term “Reichstag fire” in popular culture refers to an event, possibly a false flag (historians can’t agree on whether or not the Reichstag fire was started by a lone communist, a communist acting with others, or was a false flag by the Nazis) that serves as a pretext for repression.

If you are only just now coming to this blog via social media, you should know that I have been a sharp critic of the Stop The Steal movement from the beginning — you can look it up on this site — and that I am disgusted and appalled by what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. Yesterday, I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the failed Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/left-reichstag-fire-soft-totalitarianism-social-credit-system-live-not-by-lies/

Mr. Dreher resorts to the Reichstag Fire, Oliver D’Arcy, BLM, Glenn Greenwald and other cast members, that swells into an even longer essay, than Sullivan’s with ‘updates’ that exhausts the hyperbolic, and the readers patience !

Political Cynic

On January 03, 2021 Mr. Luce issued a stern warning about the Fed, and its toxic effects, the exacerbation ‘inequality’, a la Piketty?

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

Late yesterday Mr. Luce faced the grim reality of that ‘inequality’ , and its toxic effects, on large segment of an American population? Anarchy abetted by the D.C. Police, as the video on Social Media makes abundantly clear. Where were the Armed Troops of the BLM demonstrations in D.C. ? Even Mr. Luce manages to make that same inquiry.

Mr. Luce’s scolding of these ‘deplorables’, and its leader Trump, in which he conveniently elides the transgenerational effects of the Neo-Liberalism, he and his newspaper have championed, since the rise of Thatcher/Reagan. The rhetorical strategy that Luce adopts is to focus on the ‘Evils of Trump’ as the root cause, attempting to confront the effects of a more than forty year attachment, to the Hayek/Mises/Friedman amalgam of Neo-Liberalism, is simply an impossible thought, to even entertain. The immerseration of both the Working Class and the Middle Class is the result of this forty year Social/Political Engineering. The ‘as if ‘: Trump just appeared out of the American Political Swamp sui generis , instead being a product of this economic/political collapse.

The Whole of America’s Political Class birthed Trump, with the help of political scribblers like Mr. Luce and his newspaper.

The patient reader, will confront, at the end of Mr. Luce’s essay, Mitt Romney, Mr. 47% , as the paradigmatic Political Hero, made by Mattel.

As senators were being hurried to safety by Capitol Hill police, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, who has been a rare Republican voice warning of Mr Trump’s authoritarianism, yelled to GOP colleagues: “This is what you’ve gotten.” He was right.

Agree with him or not, Mr Romney speaks for the party that used to care about the US constitution, law and order, America’s standing in the world, and civility in politics. Those who have thrown their lot in with Mr Trump are now tied to his mob. They may not have expected events to turn quite so dark. But that was the gamble they took. As John F Kennedy said in his own inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”

https://www.ft.com/content/e40c82d5-491c-40a9-9b85-5060becdba26

Political Skeptic

How can the reader resist Mr. Ganesh’s adoration of the literary capon, and American Dandy, as conceived by Walt Disney, Tom Wolfe? I received a copy of ‘A Man in Full’ from a friend, who missed sending in her reply card to The Book of the Month Club. This book had the page count and heft of my copy of ‘War and Peace’ .
It was a better sleep inducer than Lunesta or Kubrick’s ‘2001’! Yet Mr. Ganesh thinks it a document about Mr. Wolfe’s prescience, his narration of Wolfe as seer, or perhaps Prophet?

A Man in Full considered the city, and the state that it anchors, as America’s potential future. Some 23 years on, Georgia continues to grow in population as several other states shrink. Once uncompetitively Republican, it is now the nation’s political schism in miniature.

Nowhere was closer-fought in the US presidential election two months ago. If the Democrats take both of its Senate seats on Tuesday, to go with Joe Biden’s win there, imagine the symbolism. Here is a party going with the grain of the nation’s evolution.

This ‘evolution’ is in fact a question of demographics, not of an imagined or fictional state of ‘going with the grain’ . One of the facts of American life is that regions of the country experience the boom and bust of growth and decline, that are dependent on economic factors: Manufacturing was once ascendant, now its is Silicone Valley, Georgia has become the home of Movie Studios :

https://euescreengems.com/five-georgia-movie-television-studios-partner-form-georgia-studio-alliance/

This provides mere backdrop to Mr. Ganesh political insight on a ‘divided politics‘. The ‘as if’ here, is that it were not the case in an inconvenient ‘past’, as viewed in the political present!

But not, it is worth saying, a party with a suddenly free hand. A split Senate, with the vice-president casting decisive votes, does not assure Mr Biden a radical presidency. His chances of that waned when the “blue wave” of Congressional gains failed to materialise in November. His subsequent nominations to the executive — their mildness, their familiarity — admit as much. His flirtations with the left are just a few months old but feel a century ago. 

The usual Ganesh ‘maps of misreading’s’ topped with the political fiction of Biden’s ‘flirtations with the left’. As yet the ‘Progressive Wing of the Party’ is not represented in any of the Biden choices!

I was wrong about the ‘flirtations with the left’ ? but note this is contingent on whether the Democrats win in Georgia!

Headline: Joe Biden Was Against $2,000 Checks. After Enormous Pressure, He’s Reluctantly Changing His Tune.

Sub-headline: Joe Biden is no friend to progressive politics of any kind. But after constant pressure, the president-elect has changed his stance on $2,000 survival checks if Georgia Democrats win.

After weeks of progressive pressure, President-elect Joe Biden on Monday promised to immediately deliver $2,000 survival checks to millions of Americans if Georgia Democratic senate candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win their races this week. The comments come a month after Biden reportedly told congressional Democrats to accept stimulus legislation that included no checks.

“One state can chart the course — not just for the next four years, but for the next generation,” Biden said in a speech in Atlanta on Monday night. “By electing Jon and the Reverend you can make an immediate difference in your own lives, the lives of people all across this country because their election will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately to people who are in real trouble.”

Biden’s shift comes only a month after he helped convince congressional Democrats to support stimulus legislation that did not include the checks, according to the New York Times. At the time, Biden suggested he did not oppose checks, but he pushed Democrats to accept a deal without them, raising concerns that he may revert to his past support for budget austerity.

…

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/joe-biden-survival-checks-covid-19-georgia-elections

What follows in the next 642 words is nothing akin to Mr. Ganesh’s literary hero Mr. Wolfe- no Pop Fizz! The recitation of political possibilities, impediments to action, time, and the persons, and political factions that might impede the Biden Politics of Redemption, rather than Mr. Ganesh’s ‘Mr. Biden a radical presidency’, in the wake of the overheated actions and rhetoric of the 2020 election campaigns. The reader can’t deny Mr. Ganesh talent as an evocative stylist, but note the final two paragraphs of his essay are striking both in argument and style. Perhaps he is riffing on the good grey Walter Lippmann?

America’s bifurcation, once it feeds into legislative numbers and conduct, puts paid to grand schemes. Voters in the middle find themselves in the oddest of predicaments: scandalised by the viciousness of politics and yet served by its results.

“Moderate”, to be clear, is not a synonym for “good”. This time last year, immoderate measures against the coronavirus pandemic would have saved lives. Splitting the difference on Mr Trump’s attempt to stay in office would be a nonsense. Equidistance from opposing arguments is no guarantor of sound policy. It is with surprise, then, not elation, that we should record this oddity of modern politics. Our era is one of extreme sentiments and loyalties. It is not always one of extreme outcomes.

https://www.ft.com/content/d12d2c97-4afa-485b-8fe1-0f2383985160

Political Reporter

‘Its the Fed stupid’ complete with a ‘Formula’, a la Piketty? Mr. Luce lives in the Financial Times bubble, in which the earthquake and devastation of the Crash of 2008 didn’t even register. His appointed task, being one of the barkers selling the ‘snake oil’ of Neo-Liberalism. 

The History that Mr. Luce attempts to white wash the rise of Thatcher/Reagan and their successors New Labour and New Democrats: the harbingers of a disaster that continues in waves of political/cultural despair that produced the Populists, that is at the root of Mr. Luce’s exercise in self-serving misdirection. The reader will recall that the Randian Fundamentalist Greenspan ran the Fed, wreathed in laurel.

So Mr. Luce pointing to the Fed as the culprit is misdirection employed by the salesmen whose ‘product’ turned to shit! 

Sincerely,

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

(Added January 4, 2021)

Mr. Luce’s sudden concern for ‘wealth inequality’ is here linked to threat to ‘American political stability’ : more of the shadow of Piketty ?

The response to critics is the same today as it was after the 2008 crisis: that the Fed is doing whatever it takes to prevent a depression. But the risk is that each new chapter tightens a doom loop in which the US sovereign must eventually reckon with the ever-widening class of risk it is underwriting. America’s national debt is already past 100 per cent of gross domestic product for the first time since the second world war. It nearly doubled after 2008 and is rising sharply again. As Japan has shown, high indebtedness need not trigger a crisis. Its national debt is well over 200 per cent cent of GDP. But as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the US must guard its role carefully.

The most visible threat, however, is to US political stability. The Fed’s quantitative easing boosts wealth inequality by increasing the net worth of those who own financial assets, chiefly of stocks and bonds. The top 10 per cent of Americans own 84 per cent of the country’s shares. The top 1 per cent own about half. The bottom half of Americans — the ones who have chiefly been on the frontline during the pandemic — say they own almost no stocks at all.

The final two paragraphs, completed, by his numerical rhetoric of a ‘Formula’, that equals ‘Populism‘, is representative of a particular kind of maladroit reductivism. Yet within his essay, it reads as a kind of desperation to demonstrate his expertise. It is comic, at best!

Here are the potential seeds of America’s next populist crisis. The Fed is pledging to do what it takes, while America’s elected officials seem unlikely to agree on fiscal policy. The right emphasis, as Mr Powell keeps reminding Congress, would be the other way round. Monetary policy is a blunt tool. Spending by contrast can be targeted at those who need it and help lift America’s growth potential.

Alas, the chances are that the Fed will remain “the only game in town”. This would be both a missed opportunity and pose a severe danger. The opportunity is for the US government to borrow long term funds at near zero rates and invest it in productive capacity. The danger of not doing that can be expressed in a simple equation: QE — F = P. Quantitative easing minus fiscal action equals populism.

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

Almost Marx

Mr. Frum, in this political instance, has discarded, for the moment, his pose as Wise Republican Elder, to embrace the garb of the Conspiracy Theorist, embraced by such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, her New Democratic allies, the Corporate News Media and its reporters, editors and its long-winded pundits. Not forgetting Television and the Internet, as the point of confluence of these Media Giants. The reader is confronted with a Frum not seen, or perhaps even remembered, by his current readership?

Mr. Frum was once the man behind the ‘Axis of Evil’ catch phrase that was the cornerstone of the Public Relations sales pitch of Bush The Younger’s ‘War on Terror’ (not to forget Cheney, Rumsfeld and ‘The Architect’ Karl Rove!) That ‘War’ has metastasized into a political cancer, that has rendered the once Republic null and void.

In Frum’s narrative the presidential power of The Pardon, has now been perverted as a tool of Trump’s political nihilism. Yet compare and contrast the pardons of Trump with those of George W. Bush:

Donald Trump:

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-donald-trump

George W. Bush:

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/gwbush-pardons

Trump’s term of office is almost at its end, and the pardons that have gained attention are:

Joseph M. Arpaio

Lewis Libby, aka Scooter Libby,

Dinesh D’Souza

Michael Robert Milken

Bernard Bailey Kerik

Michael T. Flynn

George Papadopoulos

Roger Joseph Stone Jr.

Paul J. Manafort

Charles Kushner

The power of the pardon is at the president’s discretion, according to Article 72.

Mr. Frum has forgotten about George H.W. Bush’s notorious pardons:

December 25, 1992

Headline: Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up’

Lawrence E. Walsh’s Statement on the Pardons

Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.

In one remaining facet of the inquiry, the independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush. Mr. Walsh has characterized the President’s failure to turn over the diary until now as misconduct.

Decapitated Walsh Efforts

But in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986. Mr. Bush’s decision was announced by the White House in a printed statement after the President left for Camp David, where he will spend the Christmas holiday.

Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that “the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.”

Mr. Walsh directed his heaviest fire at Mr. Bush over the pardon of Mr. Weinberger, whose trial would have given the prosecutor a last chance to explore the role in the affair of senior Reagan officials, including Mr. Bush’s actions as Vice President.

‘Evidence of Conspiracy’

Mr. Walsh hinted that Mr. Bush’s pardon of Mr. Weinberger and the President’s own role in the affair could be related. For the first time, he

charged that Mr. Weinberger’s notes about the secret decision to sell arms to Iran, a central piece of evidence in the case against the former Pentagon chief, included “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The prosecutor charged that Mr. Weinberger’s efforts to hide his notes may have “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” and formed part of a pattern of “deception and obstruction.” On Dec. 11, Mr. Walsh said he discovered “misconduct” in Mr. Bush’s failure to turn over what the prosecutor said were the President’s own “highly relevant contemporaneous notes, despite repeated requests for such documents.”

The notes, in the form of a campaign diary that Mr. Bush compiled after the elections in November 1986, are in the process of being turned over to Mr. Walsh, who said, “In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.”

In an interview on the “McNeil-Lehrer Newshour” tonight, Mr. Walsh said for the first time that Mr. Bush was a subject of his investigation. The term “subject,” as it has been used by Mr. Walsh’s prosecutors, is broadly defined as someone involved in events under scrutiny, but who falls short of being a target, or a person likely to be charged with a crime. In the inquiry into the entire Iran-contra affair, a number of Government officials have been identified as subjects who were never charged with wrongdoing.

…

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html#1

Mr. Frum prides himself on his veracity and political uprightness, yet his essay of December 24, 2020 treats the Mueller Report as ‘Gospel’, even as Frum asks a series of what he considers to be the most pertinent questions.

The Mueller Report can take its place beside The Warren Commission, as a demonstration of the utter failure of the FBI, to do anything but engage in mythmaking fantasies, about its mastery over the forces of lawlessness. Frum acts the part that Edward Jay Epstein played in the defense of the Warren Report : his book ‘Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth’ was an apologetic, that was answered by Mark Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgement’, and signaled the demise of Arlen Specter’s preposterous ‘Magic Bullet Theory’ !

Mueller and Comey resemble characters in a Max Senate comedy, at the wrong shutter speed. Mr. Frum’s attempts to mitigate the mendacity of Trump, via Mueller, whose performance in front of the camera only emphasized that he was just a figurehead, a front man for an investigation, that had/has been eroded by its own incompetence.

Both Clinton and Trump share a delusion: Clinton, that she lost in 2016 because of ‘Russian Interference’ in the election. Trump, that he lost in 2020 due to massive voter fraud, and the destruction of ballots, by poll workers, and other nefarious actors. Note that both of these candidates are ego maniacs on a scale that is hard to imagine for we ordinary mortals. Mr. Frum’s essay helps to explain to his readers…

Political Reporter

A collection of Mr. Rachman’s geo-political speculations are instructive:

In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence. 

…

The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China.

…

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19.

…

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19. And by helping to remove an erratic isolationist from the White House, the pandemic has also given the US a much better chance of preserving its status as the world’s most powerful nation.

… 

Covid-19 has also taken a terrible human and economic toll in Europe. But, in political terms, the EU followed a similar arc to the US — with near disaster giving way to an unexpected upside.

…

These paragraphs act as mere preamble to Mr. Rachman’s manufacture of a weak set of arguments , accomplished by the use of a self-serving history. With its stars, the EU and China, President Xi Jinping, assisted by walk-ons by other minor players, who add dimension to his narrative, at least that is Mr. Rachman’s hope!

Note that China is the Bad Actor in Rachman’s ‘history made to measure’ that is in fact a New Cold War Melodrama. The reader of this ‘essay’ is thought, by Rachman, not to be cognizant, of the flood of Yellow Peril propaganda, that the Corporate Press never tires of printing. These two paragraphs describe the effects of Corporate Media saturation of Yellow Peril propaganda ,and an injudicious speculation of how Chinese Geopolitical Strategists might seek comfort in Western incompetence, in its various iterations: dehumanizing these technocrats is a more sophisticated version of that Yellow Peril toxin.

…

This slump in Chinese soft power suggests that people in the countries polled are more impressed by the fact that the virus originated in China, than by Beijing’s subsequent success in stopping its spread. China’s aggressive response to any hint of international criticism — through its so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy — has also probably been counter-productive.

Geopolitical strategists in Beijing may comfort themselves with the thought that, whatever the collateral damage Covid-19 has inflicted on China, the damage to western standing has been worse. But if the US and the EU now roll out vaccine programmes with reasonable speed and efficiency, they will begin to repair some of the economic and reputational damage they have suffered because of their handling of Covid-19.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f

Rachman’s final thoughts/speculations are more of the same Geostrategic chatter, with Biden as his central actor. Is this essay, in lieu, of the usual Year’s End pundit’s summation of 2020?

American Writer

A ‘news story’ so damaging to Joe Biden, that Twitter censored the New York Post’s tweets, of their actual news story. Jack Dorsey’s minions vainly tried to ‘kill’ this! Glenn Greenwald offers the sordid details of the censorship, and the fellow travelers. The utterly reactionary Sunday Times finds this worthy of its frontpage, post election, even post Christmas, a sample :

Headline: Spectre of son’s scandal to haunt Joe Biden presidency

‘At the high point of Joe Biden’s presidential election campaign in October, a blockbuster story emerged about his son, Hunter, and explosive material from Hunter’s laptop, allegedly left at a repair shop in Delaware. The leak, it was claimed, gave the lie to his father’s oft-repeated claim that he had no knowledge of the 50-year-old’s eyebrow-raising business activities.
Emails showed Hunter being thanked for introducing an associate from a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to his father. They even appeared to show Hunter putting aside money from a business deal with China for “the big guy”, who was alleged to be his father.
It was a story with incendiary potential, yet outside the confines of conservative media, Hunter remained an unexploded bomb. Most media outlets all but ignored it. Social media went even further, with Twitter suspending The New York Post’s account and blocking access to the story. Many Biden supporters claimed the laptop leak was Russian disinformation, though the veracity of its contents has never been denied.
Yet after the election, it was revealed that Hunter is the subject of a justice department investigation into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, and the story is rolling downhill fast, with the potential to disrupt Biden’s presidency significantly. In his statement acknowledging the investigation, Hunter insisted that his affairs were handled “legally and appropriately”, and there was no indication that his father was caught up in the inquiry.’
…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/spectre-of-sons-scandal-to-haunt-joe-biden-presidency-r0tb9x5r5

The possibilities that ‘if’ the Republicans keep control of the Senate, in sum, the New Democrats can’t get Neo-Liberal Ossoff elected: there will be an Inquiry that will put the incompetent dullard Muller, and the deranged political hysterics of Schiff …
Consider that Joe, who cut $1200 to $600, call it ‘long division Neo-Liberal style’, so as not to coddle we lesser beings, of the disappeared Republic. Austerity for the hoi polloi and Billions for a rapacious Capital. The Property Party has ‘two wings‘: The Republicans & New Democrats!

Happy New Year,

Almost Marx

The opening paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay relies on two instances of potted history of 1979, with the appropriate links to a report in the Financial Times on The Hostage Crisis and a 2011 John Dickerson commentary on Carter’s ‘Malaise’ speech. And a comment on ‘The Deer Hunter’ as the low point of Hollywood ‘Mythmaking Power’: gone were the days of William Wyler’s ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’, script by Sherwood Anderson and MacKinlay Kantor , cinematography by Gregg Toland. This Movie was unafraid to focus on Post-War America’s problems.

In 1979, the US suffered the twin ignominies of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet capture of Afghanistan. Inflation took off as the helpless president evoked (without saying the word) a malaise. In garlanding The Deer Hunter, the bleakest film of Hollywood’s bleakest decade, the Oscar judges met the national mood.

The political answer to this ‘malaise’ was Ronald Reagan and his ‘Morning in America’ , ‘I believe in States Rights’ of the opening of 1980 campaign speech, and his repetition of of the racist canard of ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’. And his secret negotiations with the Iranian Revolution Leaders, undercutting Jimmy Carter’s attempts at negotiation.

What follows this opening paragraph is a Ganesh Political Melodrama, in all its breathlessness narrative power. A selection from this mock- epic retelling, of the political moments ‘we’ have recently experienced, in situ:

…

To salvage the positives from such a year will strain credulity. To suggest that Americans can end it with enhanced confidence in their republic will test the boundaries of good taste. And still the case is there to be made.

…

In March, an allegedly irredeemable political class brokered the largest programme of fiscal relief in US history. It has been fitfully topped up ever since and a deal to the tune of $900bn passed Congress on Monday. Those who had hoped for more and better should concede that Washington has already outperformed dismal expectations.

…

It is one thing for China, or even a democracy as centralised as the UK, to take big and swift action in a crisis. For the US to do the same implies something good about its political model and the individuals who people it. To say so should not feel as subversive as it does.

…

It is customary at this juncture to say that a cannier populist might one day succeed where Mr Trump failed. But the idea that an autocratic nearly-man must prefigure the real thing is too often written up as a teleological inevitability. The Republicans who succeeded Richard Nixon were Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, not a gallery of sublime rogues.

If this collection of apologetics for the now ascendant ‘Centrism’, post election 2020 – that ‘Centrism’ being the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives, in all its moral/political toxicity. Yet Mr. Ganesh celebrates ‘a grudging baton exchange’ as important to the ’cause of liberalism‘. On that ’cause’ , in all its malign iterations look to ‘Liberalism A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo.

As China avoids recession, it was prudent to cite 2020 as a grudging baton exchange from an ailing superpower to a rampant one. And perhaps even from multi-party democracy to more hierarchical modes of government. It matters to the cause of liberalism, then, not just to American pride, to hail the US system’s quiet resilience. The alternative is to do down the institutions that made a potentially terminal year merely dreadful. The trouble with pessimism is that it can be self-fulfilling.

https://www.ft.com/content/f4a5ce0f-3ca5-4eb1-b71d-5305beed156e

Almost Marx

The Financial Times offers its readership an early roasted Christmas goose, in the person of Oren Cass- let me offer a suggestion as to where that Yuletide sprig of holly might be placed!

Mr. Cass inauspicious opening paragraphs gives the game away in his vulgarity, which he attempts to soften in the next paragraph:  

The push by American progressives to have Joe Biden’s incoming administration forgive $50,000 of student debt per borrower is deeply stupid, but at least clarifyingly so.

More polite language fails to capture the absurdity of singling out college attendees for an unprecedented $1tn transfer of wealth — equivalent to the total spent on cash welfare in the last 40 years. The top sources of US student debt are professional business and law degrees.

‘American Progressives’, ‘Transfer of wealth’ and ‘cash welfare’ are the catch-phrases of his particular iteration of ‘Conservatism’. Yet read what that bastion of Conservatism, the Washington Examiner, in an editorial by Brad Polumbo, has to say about Mr. Cass and ‘American Compass’ :

A new group, American Compass, launched on Tuesday to much fanfare. The group’s mission is reportedly “going back and finding things that always were part of the American tradition that have been important to conservative thinkers but that seem to have gotten lost in the more market-fundamentalist mode of, especially, the last 20 to 30 years.”

Led by former Manhattan Institute scholar Oren Cass, the group has drawn impressive names to its nascent effort to charter an intellectual course for the nationalist Right.

There’s just one problem: The “market-skeptical” conservative movement is railing against an imaginary libertarian GOP orthodoxy that does not and, frankly, never really has existed. The idea motivating this entire project is completely detached from reality and all recent political history.

Cass posits that the GOP has “outsourc[ed] economic policymaking to libertarian ‘fundamentalists’ who see the free market as an end unto itself.” In this, he and his ideological allies are waging war on a straw man.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/oren-casss-new-anti-market-conservative-group-american-compass-wages-war-on-a-straw-man

The undeserving actors in Mr. Cass’ political melodrama are the utterly undeserving ‘students’ are those who hold ‘professional business and law degrees’. These very actors, who are, or will become the business, political and jurisprudential actors in the present and future of this country! Mr. Cass has a B.A. in Political Economy from Williams College, yet he just doesn’t campaigns against ‘Big Ed’, as he dubs it, he fulminates against it:

Perhaps this debt-forgiveness nonsense will shake the US from its complacency about higher education. Comprising the thousands of colleges and universities that together receive more than $150bn a year in public subsidies, Big Ed is among the nation’s most powerful but toxic forces. It thrives on the carefully cultivated myth of campuses as citadels of learning and on the mistaken notion that enrolment is the sine qua non of a successful life — that college, as Barack Obama was fond of saying, is the “ticket to the middle class”. Debt acquired in the ivory tower obtains talismanic status.

In fact, Big Ed’s performance is woeful, which is how a student debt crisis emerged to begin with. Its deformation of the cultural expectations and economic incentives facing young people at the formative stage of their adult lives is wreaking havoc. Higher education costs more than $30,000 per student per year in the US, roughly twice as much as in Germany or France. Still, more than 40 per cent of recent graduates land in jobs that do not require them to have degrees. And that’s among those who do finish. At two-year community colleges, barely one-quarter of enrollees complete the programme within six years. University leaders are notably reticent to measure or report whether students learn anything at all. Yet the students continue to pour in.

As Mr. Cass showers scorn on ‘Big Ed’, the reader just might ask where Mr. Cass stands on the question of free college tuition? How might that fit into his support for Mr. 47%, Mitt Romney? Mr. Cass ends his screed with an attack on ‘Progressive’ myopia that ends in a grim prediction of American intolerance.

This is the dynamic that yields “progressives” arguing with a straight face that student debt forgiveness should be a top priority, while making no effort to hold these institutions more accountable in the future. It is not a dynamic the American people are likely to tolerate much longer.

https://www.ft.com/content/bbfbb99e-3d82-47ed-9bcc-b441ffd2d8ce

Old Leftist

I read and commented upon Mr. Garton Ash’s seemingly interminable essay here:

It’s hard to be patient with Timothy Garton-Ash. Old Socialist makes his way through his ‘The future of liberalism’

This section of Mr. Wolf’s essay is instructive :

Demagogic authoritarian capitalism is a hybrid. As in the Chinese system of bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism, the ruler is above the law and democratically unaccountable — elections are a sham. But power is personal, not institutionalised. This is corrupt gangster politics. It rests on the personal loyalty of sycophants and cronies. Often the core consists of the family members, viewed as most trustworthy of all. This is the political system Mr Trump wished to install in the US.

https://www.ft.com/content/47144c85-519a-4e25-9035-c5f8977cf6fd

In the above paragraph ‘demagogic authoritarian capitalism’ is the cornerstone of Chinese capitalist iteration. Yet Werner Bonefeld in his 2010 paper titled ‘Free Economy and the Strong State: Some notes on the state’  offers this:

…

What is needed is … honest and organised coercive force.  (Wolf, 2001)

However distinct the political response to the crisis of 2008, the apparent emergence of neoliberalism during the 1980s did not entail a weak state. It entailed a ‘strong state’. Andrew Gamble’s book on the Thatcher period was thus aptly entitled The Free Economy and the Strong State, which made clear reference to the ordo-liberal conception of the relationship between the national state and the global economy.2 Susan George (1988) characterized the 1980s as a time in which everything was privatized, except the losses, which were socialized by means of debt-bondage and repressive labour market and welfare state reforms. Ernest Mandel (1987) characterized the political economy of the 1980s as ‘military Keynesianism’, a Keynesianism that refinanced a financial system on the brink in the face of the then debtor crisis and bad debt exposure. Its rescue took the form of pro-cyclical global deficit financing based on the US dollar, expansion of the military industrial complex, privatization, and financial deregulation. Military Keynesianism sought to balance the books by taking money out of the pockets of workers, and by attacking conditions. Redistribution of wealth from labour to capital was such that by the early 1990s, ‘about two-thirds of the world’s population have gained little or no substantive advantage from rapid economic growth. In the developed world the lowest quartile of income earners has witnessed a trickle-up rather than a trickle-down’ (Financial Times, 24 December 1993). This one-quarter has since expanded to include more than half the world’s population, creating an unprecedented gap in incomes, domestically and on a global scale (see Glyn, 2006).

‘Military Keynesianism’ sustained capitalism on the basis of an accumulation of potentially fictitious wealth. Debt expanded to such a degree that, according to the Financial Times (27September 1993), the IMF feared in the early 1990s ‘that the debt threat is moving north. These days it is the build-up of first-world debt, not Africa’s lingering crisis, that haunts the sleep of the IMF official’. In the face of recurrent crises since 1987,3 and various stock market fears, the USA emerged as the biggest debtor country. Magdoff et al. (2002) argued that, by 2002, outstanding private debt was two-and-a-quarter times GDP, while total outstanding debt—private plus government—approached three times the GDP. Deficit spending sustained a global economy that became completely dependent upon a mountain of debt. Throughout the last thirty years, the accumulation of potentially fictitious wealth in the form of money, M…M’, and the coercive control of labour, from debt bondage to new enclosures, and from the deregulation of conditions to the privatization of risk, have belonged together. In the context of a global economy plagued by debt and threatened by the collapse of debt, Martin Wolf argued that the guarantee of global capital required stronger states. As he put it in relation to the so-called Third World, ‘what is needed is not pious aspirations but an honest and organized coercive force’ (Wolf, 2001).

In relation to the so-called developed world, Soros (2003) argued, rightly, that terrorism provided not only the ideal legitimation but also the ideal enemy for the unfettered coercive protection of debt-ridden free market relations ‘because it is invisible and never disappears’. The premise of a politics of debt is the ongoing accumulation of ‘human machines’ on the pyramids of accumulation. Its blind eagerness for plunder requires organized coercive force to sustain the huge mortgage on future income in the present. Wolf’s demand for the strong state does not belie neoliberalism. Neoliberalism does not demand weakness from the state. Laissez-faire is no ‘answer to riots’ (Willgerodt and Peacock, 1989: 6). Indeed, laissez-faire is ‘a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based’ (Hayek, 1976: 84). That is, the neoliberal state is ‘planning for competition’ (1976: 31), and there can therefore be no market freedom without ‘market police’ (Rüstow, 1942: 289). For the neoliberals, there is thus an ‘innate connection between economics and politics’ (Friedman,1962: 8): not only does the free market require the strong, market-facilitating state, but it is also dependent on the state as the coercive force of that freedom.

…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247788715_Free_economy_and_the_strong_state_Some_notes_on_the_state

Almost Marx