Mr. Ganesh provides a breathtakingly reductivist History Made to Measure of Wm. F. Buckley Jr. Without even a mention of his classic ‘God and Man at Yale’ ? Do read the tart review by McGeorge Bundy, in the November 1951 issue of The Atlantic. At a mere 3, 428 words.
Buckley’s triumphalism enunciated by Mr. Ganesh in two short paragraphs!
When William Buckley launched National Review, and with it the modern US right, the aim was to stop the “radical social experimentation” of the hour. It was 1955. The age of Eisenhower and the draft, of the Hollywood Code and low immigration: if this scandalized him, his air of dejection as he neared the end of his gilded life half a century later becomes easier to fathom.
Among the experiments he had been unable to thwart were the sexual revolution, creeping atheism, normalised if not quite legalised cannabis and the doubling of the foreign-born population as a share of the US total. His conservative movement had been an electoral success and a howling cultural failure.
It is unfortunate that Buckley’s evolution on cannabis legalization, has escaped Mr Ganesh’s attention. He favors a misplaced free floating triumphalism of electoral success, buttressed by a collection of evocative walk-ons: The Permissive Society, The Supreme Court, The Federalist Society, the Gramscian march, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, “Jim Crow 2.0”, Conservative jurisprudence, progressive hubris, Tying Democrats to the “socialism” of the countries some of them fled, affirmative action, Cultural conservatives, same-sex marriage, Church membership is down.
As a propagandist Mr. Ganesh knows how to reach his readers . The deployment of catch phrases, marshalled as the in order too of securing assent from The Reader.
The way the Republicans have surrendered to the political irrationalism of the Tea Party, that devolved into Trump and Trumpism. This catastrophe, and the rise of The New Democrats, leads to the grim reality that America’s Political Class is collapsed, or can that state be more properly named the continual phenomenon of fissuring ?
David Caute offers a more sobering portrait of Berlin, as cowardly Academic Politicker, in his 2015 book:
Two high-voltage scholars engage in a bitter conflict in this irresistible tale of principle and politics in the Cold War years
Rancorous and highly public disagreements between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher escalated to the point of cruel betrayal in the mid-1960s, yet surprisingly the details of the episode have escaped historians’ scrutiny. In this gripping account of the ideological clash between two of the most influential scholars of Cold War politics, David Caute uncovers a hidden story of passionate beliefs, unresolved antagonism, and the high cost of reprisal to both victim and perpetrator.
Though Deutscher (1907–1967) and Berlin (1909–1997) had much in common—each arrived in England in flight from totalitarian violence, quickly mastered English, and found entry into the Anglo-American intellectual world of the 1950s—Berlin became one of the presiding voices of Anglo-American liberalism, while Deutscher remained faithful to his Leninist heritage, resolutely defending Soviet conduct despite his rejection of Stalin’s tyranny. Caute combines vivid biographical detail with an acute analysis of the issues that divided these two icons of Cold War politics, and brings to light for the first time the full severity of Berlin’s action against Deutscher.
Here is a short video of Ignatieff on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine of May 26, 2008:
Here is Ignatieff in a video dated May 16, 2013 :
Let this act as the historical frame of Hermione Lee’s review of ‘On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times’. The French mathematician, intellectual, and moderate revolutionary the Marquis de Condorcet at a mere 373 words. Ms. Lee then begins her comments on the ‘consolation business’, in another 230 words:
The consolation business is a crowded market. There are many books out there, presumably of help to many readers, on how to come to terms with suffering and bereavement and how to bear grief, with titles like It’s OK That You’re Not OK and I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye and I’m Grieving as Fast as I Can. Out of the pandemic have come timely aids like This Too Shall Pass and Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. There are books on how to understand your emotions, such as David Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2015). There are books of intellectual advice, like Alain de Botton’s personal take on “how to become wise through philosophy,” with encouraging thoughts on Epicurus, Montaigne, et al., in The Consolations of Philosophy (2000).
And there are some notable books by writers who have brought the powers of their imagination and language to bear on the experience of bereavement, among them C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961),Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013), and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2016). Readers respond intensely to such books because they often find their own lives reflected in them, but told in ways that they couldn’t have imagined and that provide their own form of consolation.
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Lee has missed some important Actors in this ‘game’ :
C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961),Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013), and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2016)
Then Lee points to Mr. Ignatieff, as different than the list of writers who have attempted to grapple with catastrophic loss. All but one, C.S. Lewis, reeks of the Best Seller list! Nor can this Reader think of any of these writers as being a victimizer on the scale of Mr. Ignatieff, and his ‘R2P’ zealots! ‘R2P’ was a gift to the Neo-Cons, in their war mongering, as muted as the ‘Human Rights’ issue may have been, the resonance of ‘R2P’, added some moral patina to the ‘Liberals’ falling into line with the Neo-Cons.
Lee describes Mr. Ignatieff ‘s ‘Gethsemane’ :
The book starts on a personal note with Ignatieff’s attendance at a choral festival in Utrecht in 2017, where he was giving a talk on “justice and politics” in the Psalms, which were being sung in different musical settings. He was overcome by the emotional effect they had on him, a nonbeliever, and on others like him. How do religious texts and religious music still provide consolation and “tears of recognition” in what he thinks of (though others might disagree) as a largely secular era? The book took shape out of that question, which begged to be asked all the more intensely during the pandemic.
But once the melodrama has been realized, Lee perseveres:
But on the whole he is not autobiographical, though the dismal hospital deaths of his own parents, decades ago, lie behind the book’s affecting final chapter on Cicely Saunders, founder of the palliative care movement. Nor does he tell us where and how we should find solace. His own working life—as a historian of ideas; as the biographer of Isaiah Berlin; as a broadcaster, memoirist, essayist, and novelist; as an unsuccessful Liberal politician in Canada; and as rector, in turbulent times, of Central European University in Hungary—has fed his interest in the intellectual context of ideas of consolation, whether these be Stoic, Hebrew, Catholic, or Protestant, Enlightenment or rationalist, Marxist, liberal, or secular. So the book is historical, proceeding in great jumps from the book of Job to European writers of the twentieth century (and giving sharp and succinct accounts of the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution, or the American Civil War).
The Reader has yet to even reach the end of this 3,306 word apologetic for Mr. Ignatieff ! Lee takes her rhetorical cue from the Neo-Cons: who attempt to drown the critical faculties of The Reader, in an avalanche of rhetoric!
Headline: Marine Le Pen’s niece may switch allegiance to Éric Zemmour
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the hardline National Rally, has spoken of feeling “brutal, violent” hurt after her niece signalled she was considering backing the anti-Islam pundit Éric Zemmour in the French presidential election.
Marion Maréchal, 32, a former National Rally MP, was reported by Le Parisien to believe that her aunt was guilty of “incessant ideological and policy U-turns” and that Zemmour, 63, had “made a lot of progress” in acquiring presidential “posture, tone and gravitas” since launching his campaign. If she was hesitating about throwing her weight behind him, it was partly because “I don’t want to renew family rifts”.
“The coherence, vision, strategy mean that I am leaning towards Eric Zemmour, that’s for sure. But there is a family issue,” she told Le Figaro.
Le Pen, 53, told the CNews channel that she was hurt by Maréchal’s comments. “If I told you that it didn’t affect me, nobody would believe me,” she said. “It’s brutal, violent. It’s difficult for me. You’re never really ready for that sort of thing.”
She added that she was hurt because she had a “particular” relationship with her niece, having helped to bring her up as a child when both lived in the family mansion outside Paris.
Headline: Marine Le Pen ‘betrayed’ as niece considers throwing her lot in with Eric Zemmour
Sub-headline: National Rally leader says Marion Maréchal’s ‘violent’ refusal to back her was all the more painful as she had ‘raised her’ like a daughter
Marine Le Pen has described her shock and hurt after her niece hinted she could back Right-wing rival Eric Zemmour for the French presidency in what would be a damaging blow to her campaign.
In the latest chapter in a deepening family feud, Ms Le Pen, 53, said Marion Marechal’s penchant for Mr Zemmour, a 63-year old former TV polemist, was all the more painful as she had “raised her” like her own daughter.
Ms Maréchal, 32, who has dropped her former Le Pen surname, reportedly told Le Parisien newspaper that she would not support her aunt’s electoral bid under any circumstances because she had “changed political tack too often” to be credible.
Mr Zemmour, on the other hand, had “made a lot of progress in his stance, tone and seriousness”, she said.
In a separate interview with Le Figaro, she added: “His coherence, vision and strategy make me sway towards Eric Zemmour that’s for sure.”
Note that the American ‘Newspaper of Record’, The New York Times, is too busy warmongering to pay attention to this French Political Melodrama, although Macron is featured in this photo of the front page of January 29, 2022:
Note that in The Time’s ‘report’ Maréchal ‘may switch’, is the claim. And in Telegraph ‘report’ ‘I’m thinking about it’! This is almost a News Story! Of the two ‘reports’ The Telegraph’s is more complete, in its coverage of the politics of this French Political Melodrama.
Due to my laziness, I have failed to post to my Word Press blog for sometime, and the fact that I also post to my Substack Account, has made me complacent, mea culpa! Please see my Substack account for those who are interested in my comments. I will post to both accounts in future.
A possible historical framing of the comments by Jens Stoltenberg, must embrace the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the looming catastrophe of famine, as a consequence of American Imperial fatigue, or is it disenchantment? The the modulated bellicosity is better coming from Stoltenberg, than Biden whose political capital has been spent. Stoltenberg does not speak from himself, he is an operative of the American National Security State, to state the obvious.
They are all here: Jon Finer, , Jake Sullivan, Wendy Sherman, , Bruce Stokes, Victoria Nuland, and AIPAC groveler Kamala Harris.
Another vital factor is to consider that Right Sector, Svoboda, and the Azov Battalion all notorious fascists, have been integrated into the Ukrainian Military, in resistance, to ‘Russian Revanchism’ . All to quash any possible critique, that might cast a shadow over that ‘popular resistance’. A careful public relations strategy – Neo-Cons, and their allies, have been schooled, in the past, by ‘bad publicity’ generated by this trio of fascists.
Political Observer
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Here is a telling reply, in the comments section, that places History at the center of debate on Ukraine, and the promises made to Gorbachev : Developmental Economics44 in reply to Hewer of wood
You might be interested in listening to this recent statement by Sir Edward Leigh MP on the floor of the House of Commons:
For a copy of the document Sir Edward Leigh readout on the Floor of the House, this can be accessed on line at National Security Archive at George Washington University (see link below). You will see that on the 12 December 2017 the National Security Archive posted online 30 declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents revealing a raft of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991. Some of the documents have been publicly available for several years, others were revealed as a result of Freedom of Information requests.
US Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on 9 February 1990 was only part of a raft of similar assurances. The documents also show that multiple national leaders considered and rejected Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, and that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory. The Archive reveals that subsequent Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion are founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen”.
Here is the companion piece to the above ‘news story’.
Headline: West treads narrow path to common ground in Russia talks
Sub-headline: Vladimir Putin’s red lines are expected to be rebuffed by US and European officials
US officials will sit down with Russian diplomats in Geneva on Monday in the first of a sequence of meetings that could prove crucial to European security.
Russia has laid out its red lines in two draft treaties — and with about 100,000 troops amassed close to Ukraine’s eastern border, has threatened military action if they are not met. US and European officials will counter with their own demands that Moscow abide by the fundamental principles of European security: that countries can decide their own foreign and defence policy and that borders are not changed by force.
Expectations of an agreement this week on a new security arrangement between Moscow and the west are low.
The Cast of Characters has been expanded, for this ‘news story’ :
Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, Sergei Ryabkov , Rose Gottemoeller, Andrew Weiss, Jens Stoltenberg, Patricia Lewis, Michael Kofman, Samuel Charap. The names I have italicized are all Think Tank Propagandists! This can’t even be a surprise, this is The Financial Times! The New Cold War propaganda gazette!
How telling that in America the novel and film version of the Robert Harris’ book ‘Munich’ has attracted no real attention, that I am aware of! A symptom of American insularity… it is available on NETFLIX.
I
Read Harris’ January 1, 2022 essay at the Times :
Headline: Robert Harris: my mission to redeem Britain’s most-reviled prime minister Neville Chamberlain
Sub-headline: The novelist has long been obsessed with Neville Chamberlain — then he lunched with Jeremy Irons and a gripping spy drama was born.
The Time’s usual sang-froid is missing in this sentence fragment ‘ a gripping spy drama was born’. Harris’ essay is what The Reader in America most needs to explore – a well written essay by a novelist, who can address the evolution of an idea, a collection of thoughts and suggestive fragments, as they occur. The evolution of a novel as the author talks to The Reader: a narrative self-report.
Susannah Butter follows up the Harris essay with this :
Headline: How accurate is Munich: The Edge of War? The historian’s verdict
Butter interviews various Historians on the plausibility of some of the characters in Harris’s fiction. All of the questions and answers are worthy of the readers attention. In an American context, I can only recall two instances of an historical novel, causing controversy and wide coverage in the popular press. Those being two books by Gore Vidal, ‘Burr’ of 1973 and ‘Lincoln’ of 1984.
With The New Cold Wars against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela… and the collapse of America’s whole Political Class- this Melodrama and its various protagonists occupy the the time of American Corporate Mass Media. And its collection of Soothsayers and Charlatans, endlessly chattering about the pressing question of, where ‘we’ are, and where ‘we’ are going- the pressing question of our fate in 2022 leaves little time for commentaries on popular fiction? Recall the Soviet popular fiction of ‘Children of the Arbat’ published in 1988?
The placement of an essay about the Homeless Crisis published under the rubric of ‘Opinion Life & Arts’ is about a self-serving diminution, on the pressing question of Homelessness. Add to this the headline and sub-headline:
Headline: Why homelessness is still with us
Sub-headline: It is not selfishness but an innocent trust in the outcomes of the market
But note that Janan Ganesh is the almost perfect would be boulevardier, to opine on such a pressing issue? He begins his commentary by a show of his credentials, as that ‘would be boulevardier’:
It is a conversation I have had in Washington, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and, on three occasions, in San Francisco. Someone local, surmising that I am not, apologises for the homelessness problem. I mumble that it is tragic indeed, but that I have seen as bad elsewhere. (In OECD countries, I haven’t.)
After a while, it becomes awkwardly evident that we are at cross-purposes. What aggrieves the other person is that the rough-sleepers are here. The city is a soft touch and therefore a beacon to them. With luck, someone will shoo all the tarpaulin villages out of sight. That a more universal answer exists, starting with “w” and ending with “elfare state”, is a point that I am too good a guest to ever press.
Such cold hearts. Such greed. But then some of these interlocutors are more prolific donors of time and cash to charitable causes than I have ever been. Some are progressive-to-moderate on most questions of the hour. Some are friends of mine, and wouldn’t be if I held them to be brutes or misers.
Mr. Ganesh is just one of the members of an exclusive club of the well traveled cognoscenti: he feels he needs to intervene on the pressing question of ‘the undeserving poor’ .
The problem isn’t malevolence. It is innocence. Theirs is a sincere belief in the market as a more or less meritocratic system: an audit of one’s work ethic and character. Whatever outcomes it throws up are therefore, however sad, a kind of Revealed Truth.
If you believe there is a solid link between deserts and reward, you must believe — you must — that rough-sleepers have it coming. You have left yourself no room for the role of luck in human affairs: of mental illness, of birth into a hopeless family, of dire education or mid-life tumbles down the potholes of circumstance. You are guilty of epic, almost operatic naivety. But you are not vindictive, per se. You are not selfish. You are Candide, not Scrooge.
The Candide of ‘cultivate your garden’, or of Dr. Pangloss’ ‘best of all possible Worlds’ ? Mr. Ganesh ascribes to Candide the singularity of a trope?
The reality of Thatcher/Reagan brand of the Neo-Liberal Swindle does not have any place in the rhetorical underbrush of the Mr. Ganesh’s History Made To Measure. The Political toxin of that Neo-Liberalism has been further exacerbated by The Pandemic.
On the Question of The Enlightenments:
The Enlightenment idea of the individual, which was English, Dutch and French before it was American, is filtered through that sieve of realism. The political scientist Eileen McDonagh has shown that monarchies are often the pioneers of welfarism. Lots of social reformers were blue-bloods who viewed meritocracy through a jaundiced eye. Think Bismarck or Shaftesbury. Think, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt.
How does Mr. Ganesh end his commentary? Via an inside glimpse, of the World of the Boulevardier/Cognoscenti, who views what the degradation of poverty looks like, from inside an Uber, not a Taxi! Ganesh offers wistfulness, within the comfort of his privilidge.
In the raw DC winter of 2018, my companion for the evening nodded with concern at a beggar as our Uber passed him in the sludge. Then, in a sorrow-not-anger kind of way, he wondered how a man could have made such self-defeating “choices”. It is marrow-deep, this belief, and a rare feature of the New World that I won’t miss.
After yesterday’s Gideon Rachman column, January 3, 2022 :
Headline: Putin’s attempt to control the past follows the Xi model
Sub-headline: The censorship of history in both countries is an essential part of domestic repression
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell was writing in the late 1940s — but that extract from 1984 is a perfect guide to how Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the leaders of Russia and China, treat history.
In the dying days of 2021, the Russian and Chinese governments both took dramatic action to censor discussion of their countries’ history. In both cases, the decision to “control the past” sends a bleak signal about the future.
Russia’s Supreme Court closed Memorial, an organisation founded in the last years of the Soviet Union to record and preserve the memory of the victims of Stalinism. In Hong Kong, local universities bowed to China’s central government — removing from campuses statues commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In the decades after decolonisation in 1997, Hong Kong was a bastion of free speech within the People’s Republic of China. But that era has now definitively come to a close.
The closing of Memorial feels like a turning point for the whole of Russia. For all the brutality of the Putin regime, Russia, until recently, has allowed considerably more latitude for political dissent than China. Putin’s opponents demonstrated in numbers on the streets in 2012, 2019 and in 2021. That kind of open criticism of Xi has long felt inconceivable in mainland China.
The New Cold War fought from the comfortable office/study of Mr. Rachman has been aided, by some careful garnish that History Made to Measure offers, in the way of ‘insights’ wedded to the usual New Cold War hysteria.
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Today, January 4, 2022, Janan Ganesh predicts American Doom and Gloom:
Headline: Endemic civil disorder could be America’s future
Sub-headline: A year on from the Capitol siege, the US remains vulnerable to political violence
I delayed quoting from the essay to recognize Mr. Ganesh’s maladroit framing:
Some 50 winters ago, the UK home secretary Reginald Maudling gave up on the outright defeat of Irish Republican terrorism. What might be feasible, he said, almost spoofing the British art of managing decline, was to keep the bloodshed down to “acceptable” levels. What was at the time a quite sensational gaffe went unmarked on its semicentennial last month. This was a sheepish admission that he had not been callous or defeatist, but prescient.
The turbulent, riotous, or even anarchic decades, of the 1960’s & 1970’s in America is beyond Mr. Ganesh’s reach, at least until later in his essay. If a writer is to comment on American politics, it is incumbent to confine commentary to that History? This expectation isn’t borne of cultural/political chauvinism, but of the necessity of historical context!
Some ‘highlights’ from Mr. Ganesh’s essay:
… Find this alarmist or much too optimistic, according to taste. But the first of these objections (that January 6, 2021, was not so bad, and anyway a one-off) is harder to take seriously. It is often paired with the kind of giggling taunt about liberal hysteria and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that stopped being conscionable when people died on the Capitol grounds.
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Mr. Ganesh is here on firmer ground here:
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There are several reasons to worry about the future. One is the past. It would not take an exotic sequence of events for violence to become a feature of politics in the coming decades. It would just take a regression to, if not quite the mean, then a recurring theme in US history. In the half-century after the election of Abraham Lincoln, there were three presidential assassinations and a civil war that claimed almost as many lives as all other US wars combined. Ethnic violence flared between the world wars. The 1960s brought a new round of assassinations and urban riots so bad that some northern cities only half recovered. If anything was aberrant, it was not January 6, then, it was the relative calm of recent decades. And even that lull included, in Oklahoma, the nation’s worst ever act of domestic terrorism.
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In her data-rich new book, How Civil Wars Start, the academic Barbara F Walter sees a US ripe for terrible internal violence. But no chapter is scarier than the one that tries to hold out hope. The mismatch of disease and treatment is huge, and not through lack of imagination on her part.
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Few are old enough to remember that politics can be so dangerous as to start total wars. If neither of these issues is unique to the US, they are compounded by one that is: the state has no formal monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. What exactly is to be done about factors so vast and ingrained? How a Chronic If Not Existential Level of Violence Starts is a drab thesis. It is also a grimly credible one.
What Mr. Ganesh fails to confront is the utter collapse of America’s Political Class! The enthusiasm, with which all of its operatives, Republicans and New Democrats, presented the Neo-Liberal Swindle as the dawn of a New Age, that collapsed. And immiserated both the Working Class and the Middle Class, has produced political rage. A unsparing critique of Capital, in or out of Neo-Liberal Drag, and its political watershed, will never be enunciated in this newspaper?
Just the first paragraph of this essay proves to be instructive to The Critical Reader’:
Something has gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.
It seems that the writers/editors of this newspaper have missed ‘Liberalism A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo ? The next paragraph shares the same celebratory cum apologetical mood:
Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
The last sentence of the above quotation pronounces an imperative for ‘liberals’ , note the small caps, ‘It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.’ :
Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back. Bolshevism and fascism are the twin enemies of a ‘Centrist Liberalism’ ?
But the immediate threat is from the ‘Trumpian right’ ! Yet the shift of focus, from the ‘Left’ as bad actor, to the ‘Trumpian right’, renders the argumentative force of ‘Illiberal Left’ to a position of lesser importance, this straw man of the ‘Illiberal Left’ is of primary importance, yet the argument wanders off from the issue of the primacy of ‘Liberalism’.
Nowhere is the fight fiercer than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to strike down a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.
The next paragraphs are not an argument, but a hopeless substitute for argument!
The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.
This rambling from subject to subject, the focus on current political points of contention- the writer or writers, seek to explain what makes their defense of ‘Liberalism’ superior: to the self-serving mendacities of the both the ‘Illiberal Left’ and the ‘Trumpian right’. The essay’s author or authors continue to gather at will, components of a History Made to Measure. That by political necessity expands it’s explanatory reach outward, as their argumentative frame is diluted of its cogency.
But my Readerly patience is exhausted by this paragraph:
Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”. He was right. Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals—and, in that, it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.
What has also has escaped the attention of The Economist writer/writers is that the Neo-Liberal Swindle collapsed, with a near World Wide Crash in 2008. Or the toxin of the Chicago Boys in Pinochet’s Chile! Yet there are 611 words to go…
Just as a reminder to The Reader of the self-serving mendacity of the writers at The Economist:
The first two paragraphs of Mr. Luce essay read like the political analysis provided by David Brooks, at The New York Times, with, of course, that Oxbridger undergraduate attempt at humor, stepped in disdain. Brooks describes a political landscape, and its signposts, that reads as almost familiar, but are either out of focus or eerily transmogrified!
The skill at which Donald Trump excels is creating a master narrative and ensuring every American hears it — no consultants needed. That is what he did in 2016 and will try to repeat if he runs for president again. The first time was about draining the Washington swamp. Now it is about Democrats stealing elections. Had Trump put his 2016 horse through an advisory committee, it would have come out as a camel. But he stuck to his own counsel.
The key to Trump’s unlikely success, which Democrats seem predisposed to miss, is to speak plainly to as wide a group of Americans as possible at the same time, even when the product is nihilism. It is the opposite of the microtargeting that Democratic consultants so love. This is an irony, since Democrats claim to represent “the people”. Fighting for ordinary Americans is a far harder sell when your marketing is tailored to so many different ones.
Trump didn’t offer a ‘Master Narrative’, but offered the voter the reflective rage, against a whole Political Class, whose advocacy and practice of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, over almost a generation, that destroyed both the working class and the middle class in America- Mr. Luce is incapable of even an approach to that revelation, it is beyond his ken! A former speech writer and now Boswell to Larry Summers …
If one is to scold the New Democrats for the Trump win 2016 , look to the infamous comment, by New Democrat Queen Bee Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ as an exercise in starkly ugly classism. After all Hillary was a ‘Goldwater Girl’ in 1964. That ‘deplorables’ catch phrase became the mantra for the rest of the Party. Hillary and The New Democrats were the standard bearers, of that collapsed Neo-Liberalism. As were the Republican Party establishment, that were in a panic of the outsider capturing the Party apparatus, by a self-financed campaign for President.
Here Mr. Luce offers an evaluation of Biden’s ‘build back better’ as not just a question of ‘messaging’ :
The problem is not just with the messaging. The packaging also warps the content. Biden’s “build back better” plan ought to have been a triumph of popular measures — lower drug prices, paid leave, better childcare and higher taxes on the rich. Once it got into the hands of congressional Democrats, however, it descended into a tangled mess of competing interests. When everyone is a priority, nobody is.
Skipping through Mr. Luce’s thickets of political analysis, in which he quotes the Harold Stassen of the political present Andrew Yang:
As Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential candidate, said last week: “A lot of Americans are just sick of this compartmentalised approach to politics that’s driven by consultants and . . . they see through it. They think it’s bullshit.”
Not quite satisfied with the above quote from Yang, Luce resorts to Upton Sinclair:
America’s political-industrial complex deserves the criticism it gets. But few Democratic strategists seem open to change. As Upton Sinclair, the great radical, said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
How predictable is Mr. Luce’s critique of the ‘political-industrial complex’ ? He is a member in good standing of this ‘complex’ of Political Experts- yet a possible self-criticism does not occur to him as an imperative!
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