Andy opens his essay with this sentence: ‘If there’s one core assumption shared by the two tribes of our culture, it is that America will soon be a “majority-minority” nation.’ The relevant question is glaringly obvious, who are these ‘two tribes’? It’s a trope to frame his speculation on ‘race’. He should be the last person to express any speculation on race, given his publication of an excerpt of The Bell Curve, in the New Republic in 1994 : that caused not just a rebellion within the staff but created a controversy that still resonates in the present.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

This is pure speculation, does Andy ‘think’ that his history of animus toward black people, has been forgotten. Andy’s expression of that animus can be found in his relentless attacks on Black Lives Matter in his regular columns in New York Magazine.

This particular essay should graner the reader’s attention, in that he recognizes what black people face, although not fully emancipated for Andy’s need to engage in hectoring rhetoric, awash in self-congratulatory moralizing. This essay from December 4, 2020 demonstrates his ‘evolution’ on the question?

Headline: Do All Black Lives Matter? Or Just Some?

Sub-headline: On the soaring toll of civilian violence against African-American

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/do-all-black-lives-matter-or-just-79b

Andy’s source, indeed inspiration, is:

One is Richard Alba, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” examines and, I have to say, largely detonates, the majority-minority myth. He does this simply by pointing out how the Census Bureau actually defines “non-white”.

The final paragraph of Andy’s polemic, presents himself as the mean, between two political extremes. Barack Obama of ‘Simpson–Bowles‘, the ever-expanding American Empire, and the extravagant bribery program of the murderous Zionist State, as the exemplars of a ‘mainstream multiracial future‘. Can all this be connected?

Demographics will continue to evolve and shape-shift whatever our understanding of them. But our understanding matters — because it shapes our emotions, our identities, and the policy choices we make. It’s way past time, it seems to me, to leave behind the race fixation of far right and far left, and to move back to a more fluid, multiracial, multicultural American identity that is not the same as the uglier, whiter past, and not some kind of anti-white triumphalism either. I’m referring to the kind of mainstream multiracial future that our first truly biracial president, Barack Obama, once hoped for, and represented. Maybe a little more distance from Trump and a little more understanding of how race in this country is deeply complicated can help. 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-majority-minority-myth?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMyNjIwMjcxLCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MTM4NDUwMDAsImV4cCI6MTYxMzg0ODYwMCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.2ZvSOPWOyJ6K8X_1POqzoA0ZvxhoEs0iyD0Yk4ub6j8

Andy has an intellectual/political propensity for attaching himself to a single book, like ‘The Bell Curve’ and ‘The Great Demographic Illusion’, and treating it ‘as if’ it were descriptive of an ineluctable historical singularity. The ‘two tribe’ frame is a phenomenon of self-serving political transients! Wedded to this is the fact that Andy is part of a toxic Christian Moralist Tradition, that never fails to remind ‘we lesser beings’, that we are in need of their Leadership. Its as if Kant’s ‘self-emancipation from tutelage’ had never been written, or even thought!

____________________

Why is it so hard for Conservatives, and fellow travelers, to come to terms with Rush Limbaugh? Coward, bully, buffoon,bigot and King of AM Radio. He produced a multitude of equally noxious clones. Limbaugh became the unspoken Leader of the Republican Party, after the defeat of John McCain. Here is just a portion of Andy’s Limbaugh comment. Its last paragraph almost lapses into insight.

He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.

Political Observer

P.S. Don’t forget that Limbaugh sent his maid to buy his Oxycontin.

I don’t think that anyone can doubt the failure of the whole of America’s Political Class! Trump is just the symptom. Neo-Liberalism’s Social/Political/Economic Engineering destroyed what was left of The New Deal, and in its place Free Market Utopianism gained powerful friends and allies: Reagan and then The Clintons.Except that in 2008 it Crashed ,with a resounding thud! We have yet to regain prosperity, or anything resembling it.

Eli Zaretsky’s watery emulsion of Freud and Politics, leaves this reader wondering about the time I spent reading its meander. After watching four days of the highlights, of this American Political Melodrama, without witnesses or evidence- it did not restore my confidence in that Political Class. After The Mueller Report, and the first ‘Impeachment Trial’, and this episode, the best I can muster is cynicism.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie

M. 37 % can’t govern his own country, as ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ keeps appearing every Saturday, like clockwork. While unreported in this newspaper! Here is Macron as he addresses the burning question facing the ‘West’:

“It’s an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it’s politically unsustainable too because it’s paving the way for a war of influence over vaccines,” Macron said. “You can see the Chinese strategy, and the Russian strategy too.” 

A Neo-Liberal opines on ‘inequality’-has Macron been reading his Piketty? But quickly he returns to the ‘Free Market’ mainstream with this:

The concept of intellectual property was essential for innovation, but if vaccine manufacturers were not co-operative “inevitably the political question of intellectual property will arise in all our countries,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the right debate, it’s not helpful, but it will arise — this discussion over excess profits based on scarcity of the vaccine.”

Macron offers this caveat:

“It won’t change our vaccination campaigns, but each country should set aside a small number of the doses it has to transfer tens of millions of them, but very fast, so that people on the ground see it happening.”

Macron opines that ‘it’s not a power game’. Yet he announces it as just that, under the highfalutin rubric of ‘multilateralism’.

He said the plan would be a test of the reality of multilateralism. “It’s not about vaccine diplomacy, it’s not a power game — it’s a matter of public health,” Macron said, adding that he welcomed the global provision of Russian and Chinese vaccines provided they were certified by scientists for use against the appropriate variants of the virus.

Macron rambles on, yet, as usual, he fails to makes his case of actual concern for ‘Europe’s neighbors’. The gilet noir and banlieues, the continuing demonstrations against the Security Law and the gilet jeunes. The Financial Times reader is not likely to be ‘on’ Twitter where all this ‘kind of news’ is posted regularly. A surprise? All of these manifestations ,of resistance to Macron’s Neo-Liberal Agenda, unreported in this newspaper. Sometimes ‘Newspapers’ create Political Reality: The New York Times and the ‘War in Iraq’, confected by Judy Miller and fellow travelers.With the help of political naif Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 UN speech!

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/15853717-af6c-4858-87d4-58b1826895a8

____________________________

Added February 20, 2021 :

Headline: China targets rare earth export curbs to hobble US defence industry

Sub-headline: Beijing asks industry executives if proposed restrictions will harm western contractors

China is exploring limiting the export of rare earth minerals that are crucial for the manufacture of American F-35 fighter jets and other sophisticated weaponry, according to people involved in a government consultation.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/d3ed83f4-19bc-4d16-b510-415749c032c1

Su Yu and Demetri Sevastopulo confect a ‘news story’ out of ‘leaks’ ?or should it more properly labeled ‘gossip’? ‘

After the first paragraph its ‘as if ‘ these ‘reporters’ had direct access to information, yet the reader is confronted with more anonymous sources, and surprisingly some actual sources:

‘Industry executives said…’

‘said a Chinese government adviser who asked not to be identified….’ 

Industry executives added 

 A Congressional Research Service report said

In a November report, Zhang Rui, an analyst at Antaike, 

Some executives and officials are, however, 

They argue that

Ellen Lord, the top defence official for acquisitions until last year, told Congress in October 

 said an executive, who asked not to be identified, at Guangdong Rare Earth Group, one of the nation’s largest rare earth groups.

“China’s economic planners have failed to predict the surge in rare earth consumption,” said an executive at Gold Dragon Rare Earth Co in south-eastern Fujian Province.

Industry executives, however, said China’s strength

This is not Journalism, but New Cold War propaganda! The reader need only look to Janan Ganesh’s essay of Tuesday February 16, 2021:

Headline: America’s best hope of hanging together is China

Sub-headline: Without an external foe to rail against, the nation turns on itself

https://www.ft.com/content/de6a5d8d-3745-4b07-96ff-0a0d59380f9e

I called this essay ‘a maladroit pastiche of Machiavelli’s Prince.’

Political Reporter

The New Cold War is already here! The ‘Enemies’ are Russia, China and Iran, with a minor, but pivotal role, for North Korea. Mr. Ganesh writes ‘as if’ this doesn’t constitute the present political reality. Joe Biden’s choices of Blinken, Powers, Wendy Sherman,Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer are, if not the same shopworn technocrats, share the same views of Obama Clinton coterie, who control the New Democratic Party.  

See The Rand Blog: 

https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/01/for-joe-biden-an-experienced-foreign-policy-team.html

I was pondering, over the long holiday weekend,in America, how much I missed Ganesh’s telling aphorisms, that flow from his pen, like the dialogue in the plays of Oscar Wilde: to be savored in the moment, as the play continues its forward momentum. Instead I confronted with a maladroit pastiche of Machiavelli’s Prince.

These shadows of Ganesh’s talent:

None of the other answers to the nation’s disunity is even faintly adequate. Better-regulated social media, more competitive congressional districts: these reforms are sensible on their own terms. But the mismatch between the depth of the problem and the fiddliness of the solutions is the definition of bathos.

…

Because they give up so much to acquire power, politicians tend to overrate how much policy can ever achieve against structural and historical forces. The US did not enter an age of discord because of some technical faults in its political system. It will not escape the mire by fixing them.

https://www.ft.com/content/de6a5d8d-3745-4b07-96ff-0a0d59380f9e

Then he lapses into the prescriptive:how must the Enemy ‘be’ to meet the needs of the Hegemon? The quotation from Georgi Arbatov, almost acts as a compensation for the absent aphoristic Ganesh!

“We are going to do a terrible thing to you,” Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet adviser, is said to have told an American audience in the 1980s. “We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”

For the inquiring reader, look to ‘ Voices of Glasnost: Gorbachev’s Reformers Speak’ by Stephen F. Cohen, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, for an enlightening set of interviews with the reformers.

Old Socialist

Should the regular reader of this newspaper be surprised at this paragraph in this ‘news story’ about Le Pen?

Headline: Marine Le Pen purrs as President Macron’s attack dog scampers round to the right

…

It is Macron himself who is likely to be squaring off against the leader of the National Rally in April 2022 in a rerun of the duel he won so decisively in 2017. Yet it was Darmanin, 38 — whose views on immigration and religious separatism are not far from Le Pen’s own — who was chosen as the attack dog to take on the cat lover.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/marine-le-pen-purrs-as-president-macrons-attack-dog-scampers-round-to-the-right-9p6fnpgcq

This CNN report on the 2017 French election, has escaped the attention of the Times’ reporter, in Paris, Peter Conradi? That details the election results of 2017.

Headline: A record number of French voters cast their ballots for nobody

Emmanuel Macron’s triumph over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election has been hailed as a landslide victory for the centrist candidate and a widespread rejection of his rival’s far-right platform.

But Macron’s mandate may not be as overwhelming as it seems. A record number of French voters were so dismayed by their options that they either skipped the election or cast their ballots for no one at all.

The so-called “ballot blanc,” or white ballot, has a long history as a protest vote in France, going all the way back to the French Revolution. This time around, nearly 9% of voters cast blank or spoiled ballots – the highest ever since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

For now, the votes, which are counted towards the turnout, are largely symbolic. But there is a movement underway for the blank ballots to count as a share of the overall election vote. According to a recent Ifop poll, 40% of French voters said they would cast a blank vote if it were recognized under French law.

…

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/08/europe/french-voters-spoiled-ballots-abstained/index.html

The statistics from 2017:

Macron: 20,257,167

Le Pen: 10,584,454

Abstentions: 11,416,454

White or Spoiled ballots: 4,054,395

More Abstentions that those who cast Le Pen. 832, 000

The total of Abstentions and White or Spoiled Ballots: 15, 461,849

Abstentions and White & Spoiled ballots out number the votes cast for Le Pen by 4,877,440

These statistics demonstrate that Macron’s ‘victory’ was about an electorate deeply divided: 26,046,307 ‘voted against Macron’ , to put it more self-serving terms. The Times just follows the Corporate Party Line on Macron.His ‘Jupertarian Politics’ has been abandoned, in favor of hard-line and unapologetic Neo-Liberalism. In sum he has become Francois Fillon. To see what is actually going on in France, all the reader need do is go to twitter and enter the words ‘gilets jaunes’ !

Old Socialist

This political Melodrama begins with David Brooks in the New York Times of January 28, 2021:

Headline: Children Need to Be Back in School Tomorrow

Sub-headline: Teacher resistance is a disaster for the most vulnerable.

There’s a wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping America. There are people across the country who deny evidence, invent their own facts and live in their own fantasyland. We saw it in the Republicans who denied the reality of the Biden election victory and we see it now in the teachers unions that are shutting down schools and marring children’s lives.

What are the facts when it comes to Covid-19 and schooling?

The first fact is that remote learning is a disaster, especially for disadvantaged students.

…

Its easy to identify who the ‘villain’, of this Brooks Political Melodrama ! It’s not Teachers but ‘Teacher Unions’ who stand in the way of an ‘enlightened’ return to the classroom. The animosity of The Right to Teacher Unions gave birth to the ‘Charter School’ movement, that seeks to not just undermine these unions, but to decimate both Public Education and these powerful Unions. In sum to place Public Education in the hands of for profit Corporations. 

The third fact is that teachers unions don’t seem to have adjusted to the facts. In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, unions have managed to shut down in-class instruction. The Chicago public schools union is on the verge of an illegal strike, even though 130 private schools and 2,000 early learning centers have been open safely since the fall.

Mr. Brooks’ concern for ‘poorer Black and brown students’ is a pose, to understate the matter!

The fourth fact is that this situation is especially devastating to poorer Black and brown students. Many affluent kids have fled the public school disaster for private schools. It’s Black and brown kids who live in cities with progressive mayors and powerful unions, and those are the places where in-school learning has been closed down.

The reader need only look to the title of the Hartney/Finger paper, cited by Brooks, to gain insight into the political/economic stance of this ‘Report’ :

Politics, Markets, and Pandemics: Public Education’s Response to COVID-19

It reeks of a platitudinous Neo-Liberalism! Is this anything like a surprise?

When all else fails attempt to change the subject: the Republican Party is on trial ! Not to forget that Brooks has been a champion of very specific kind of Anti-Intellectualism: he’s like J. Edgar Hoover, a Leftist under every bed. In this case its ‘Teachers Unions’!

The reader wonders, what is the value of one Student’s or Teacher’s life? Not a question that occured to Brooks?

_______________________________________________________________

Rich Lowry’s Politico essay of February 10, 2021

Headline: Reopening Schools Has Become a Bipartisan Issue. Why Isn’t Biden Pushing Harder?

Sub-headline: Biden’s goal should be to exert every ounce of influence that he has to get kids back in the classroom — for their own good and that of the country’s parents.

It’s an old political trick to make an easily achievable goal sound vauntingly ambitious in order to brag about it when it’s inevitably met.

It takes another level of chutzpah, though, to set out as a target something that has already happened.

President Joe Biden sounded pretty resolute about the need to reopen schools on the campaign trail, and the press has portrayed his goal of reopening the majority of K-12 schools in his first 100 days as so far-reaching that the timeline might have to be extended.

Enter White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who explained on Tuesday that the administration defines a school as open if it holds in-classroom instruction at least once a week.

By this metric, the goal isn’t really having more than half of schools open — it’s having more than half of schools still 80 percent closed.

Not only is this a ridiculous standard — four days instead of five of remote instruction wouldn’t be a difference-maker for kids or parents — the country’s schools have already cleared the bar.

According to Burbio, which aggregates event data and runs a school opening tracker, nearly 40 percent of K-12 students are attending in-person schools, and 25 percent are attending hybrid schools. Only about 35 percent are virtual-only.

This goal post moving, from a 25-yard field goal to one that has already cleared the uprights, exemplifies how the Biden team isn’t pushing nearly hard enough on school reopening.

This is an issue that has gone from being something of a red vs. blue battle line last year, with President Donald Trump’s blunderbuss (if correct) advocacy for reopening making it more contentious, to a cross-partisan area of consensus. More and more people realize that on top of a public health and an economic crisis, we have an education crisis with myriad dire consequences, thanks to schools closing or relying on remote instruction.

…

Appealing to a readership of American Football Fans? He frames his comment in references to the game. The foppish Wm. F. Buckley Jr. would recoil! And rest assured, it’s those ‘Teachers Unions’ that appear as the enemy of an enlightened education policy, during the Pandemic. It the evolving Party Line of the ‘Conservatives‘. It is part of changing the subject, or just shifting the focus, away from the Republican Party on trial!

In intellectual and moral terms, the debate over reopening schools has been won, but political progress has been slow, mainly because powerful teachers unions are standing in the way, especially in big cities.

…

Nonetheless, teachers unions have fought reopening and help stymie reopening in cities and blue states around the county. Most schools in California have been remote. Elementary schools reopened in New York, but not middle schools or high schools. Chicago just finally got a deal with its union, which was threatening to strike.

…

After intense lobbying by the unions, most states have put teachers near the front of the line for vaccines (even though Biden’s CDC director has said “vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools”).

…

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/10/reopening-schools-has-become-a-bipartisan-issue-why-isnt-biden-pushing-harder-468475

_______________________________________________________________________

The Economist’s contribution to the question is a 39 minute podcast:

Headline: School’s out—getting America’s children back into class

Our weekly podcast on democracy in America

NEARLY HALF America’s children are yet to return to the classroom a year after the pandemic began. President Biden says it’s a national emergency, but he has already diluted a pledge to reopen the majority of schools in his first 100 days. Why is getting back to school so hard?

We hear from The Economist’s US policy correspondent Tamara Gilkes Borr and Adam Roberts, our Midwest correspondent.

John Prideaux, our US editor, hosts with New York bureau chief Charlotte Howard, and Jon Fasman, US digital editor. Runtime: 39 min

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/02/12/schools-out-getting-americas-children-back-into-class?utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_source=twitter

John Prideaux, at his plummy Oxbridger best, tells the listener about the longest Teachers Strike in American History, to open this podcast. So without delay, we are in the same territory of both Brooks and Lowry! ‘What are the political lessons for the new administration’ is the question Prideaux seeks to consider, with his guests, all Economist employees, and all three Americans. This portion ends at the 15: 45 mark and is succeeded by a commentary on the birth and evolution of the SAT, and its eventual use in college admissions. Mr Priseaux opines ‘The SAT has not solved the problem of equity in in college entry’.

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/02/12/schools-out-getting-americas-children-back-into-class?utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_source=twitter

I will place my faith in the Teachers Unions who have intimate day by day contact with students, and know better than journalistic technocrats, employed by Corporate Media, whose politics reflect the need to follow the Party Line: in sum, the self-serving mendacity of Public Sector Unionism.

Old Socialist

I’ve just finished rereading, the Kant chapter titled ‘Kant’s Critique of Idealism‘,  In  ‘German Idealism:The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801 by Frederick C. Beiser. It took some time, but well worth it. 

I’ve started to reread ‘Prolegomena to any further metaphysics that will be able to come forward as science’. Now finding it familiar, not to speak of amenable territory. Kant, here, is readable and witty.  

My bookshelves contain too many books about Heidegger. My curiosity, interest in Heidegger began with this essay by Thomas Sheehan in the New York Review of Books:  A Normal Nazi. I read from cover to cover, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader edited by Richard Wolin. (Later I would read Wolin’s ‘The Politics of Being’.)  This exchange in The New York Review of Books simply added to my interest, curiosity :

My interest, curiosity has waned,  Heidegger demands patience in abundance! I ran out of that ‘commodity’ on page 213 of John van Buren’s ‘The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King’. I will return to this book, I can do no other! Heidegger remains of interest, I found ‘Transcendental Heidegger’ edited by Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpus both challenging and rewarding reading.

Reading this collection of essays, titled  Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, was simply confirmation of the most irrefutable kind of Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism. This was not a surprise , but the evidence of its pervasive toxicity …   

StephenKMackSD 

War-Monger & ‘The Bell Curve’ advocate/apologist Andrew Sullivan attacks The New York Times  & Dan-el Padilla Peralta for attacking the ‘The Classics’!

Headline: He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?

Sub-headline: Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.

Read the first comment from ‘Pat’ in Virginia, that places Andy’s hysteria into a kind of perspective, that councils restraint.

Why will I stop reading Juvenal, Lucian, Plato, Aristotle etc.? Andy just needed to work himself into a fit of political hysteria, because it is his habit of being.

Political Cynic

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-the-classics-d60

P.S. Does Andy still think its still 1994 , and that he still enjoys the editorship at The New Republic? Link below to the original excerpt:

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt   

In 2017 The Scientific American published this on ‘The Bell Curve’:

He’s back. Recent college protests have propelled Charles Murray into the news cycle again, and his resurging book sales show the publicity’s not all bad. Attempts to fully discredit his most famous book, 1994’s “The Bell Curve,” have failed for more than two decades now. This is because they repeatedly miss the strongest point of attack: an indisputable—albeit encoded—endorsement of prejudice.

…

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/

‘The Scientific American’ missed this devastating 1994 review of The Bell Curve, by Charles Lane, in the New York Review of Books:

Added February 6, 2021

Where does the reader of Mr. Sullivan’s essay find Dan-el Padilla Peralta in Rachel Poser’s essay? In the classroom, doing what a teacher does, teaching students! These two paragraphs demonstrates the prima-facie value of Dan-el Padilla Peralta and what he stands for: a committed critique within his area of speciality. What does education mean? The ability to apply critical thinking to any set of problems, beliefs, ideologies?  

…

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments. But many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture. “There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.” Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”

…

Ian Morris makes plain what Sullivan dare not face: ‘“Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,”.

Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter betrayal of the New Deal Tradition, in America, might just work in Britain: thus was born, the post WWII Labour Party and its Welfare State morphed into ‘Thatcherism Light’? Political opportunism, wedded to what would evolve into the myth of ‘The Third Way’ (Edward L. Bernays wrote the manuel.)that led to the economic/political catastrophe of 2008!

The archive of the US broadcaster C-Span is among the internet’s little wonders. In January 1993, an “Anthony Blair” toured Washington with another British MP named Gordon Brown. Their brief: to divine how president-elect Bill Clinton had won office and what their four-times defeated Labour party might learn. Their interview with a C-Span anchor of the just-the-facts school (“How many MPs in the House of Commons?”) is immortalised.

That ‘C-Span anchor‘ is Brian Lamb. He conducts a polite, and informative interview, aimed at an American audience. Not much more to be said. Except, of course, from Mr. Ganesh’s lofty perch.

Then the reader confronts more Ganesh mis-readings, misapprehensions, or just ideologically inflected chatter e.g. :

President Joe Biden’s centre-left peers are out of power and often out of sorts in the UK, France, Australia and the Netherlands.

A vexing question arises: how can a Neo-Liberal be ‘Center-Left’? The ‘Center’ in Western political life is now defined by the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives. Such is the toxicity of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism, that an actual rational political Center cannot exist. Except as a pose, a self -created mirage, a simulacrum.

 If the Democrats stand out from a centre-left malaise, it is for reasons that are not much imitable outside the US.

I’ve run out of patience with Mr. Ganesh! How telling that Right-Wing Populism is the watershed of a failed Neo-Liberal Swindle? After the Crash of 2008, the fate of the Working and Middle Classes left to a rapacious Capitalism, and a politics controlled by sycophants to that Capital, and their Media allies.

On that ‘Center-Left Malaise’ in Europe see Phillip Ther’s ‘Europe since 1989: A History’ Chapters 4 & 5 that describes the toxic effects, that a fully embraced Neo-Liberalism, that left the Mitteleuropean states ripe for the Populists. That might just be first step toward an understanding of the ‘center-left malise’? Mr. Ganesh’s ‘center -left’ could be a stand-in for ‘Liberal’ or even ‘Left-Wing Social Democrats’?

With his political parameters in place, Mr. Ganesh is at full political gallop, the ‘Left’ in all its political iterations, is the enemy of choice. But the garnish is all important, the catalogue of reasons, a political symptomology is offered.

What can the reader make of the continuing rebellion, in France, against the Neo-Liberal Macron, which the Corporate Media ignores, although twitter is its life blood. And Corbyn’s ‘Project for Peace and Justice’ are the signs that the ‘Rebellion Against the Elites’ has simply reached a new stage of political development, maturation?

Mr. Ganesh final paragraph, the highfalutin notion of ‘the social contract’ dresses up his intervention with a quandry, or is it a conundrum?

What is distinctively American is the gap between the two parties on the social contract. And the subsequent indispensability of the Democratic voice. That the Biden and Republican plans for pandemic relief are $1.3tn apart could not be more eloquent of the stakes. To look at their electoral record, then the lot of the US poor, it is hard to tell if the Democrats are the most successful progressives in the rich world or the most consistently disappointing.

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/7f9e8797-a6a0-4ff8-a25d-ea2bad3e2d3c