War-Monger & ‘The Bell Curve’ advocate/apologistAndrew Sullivanattacks 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.
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.
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?
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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?”
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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.
Even Anthony Julius, the most trenchant Eliot critic? in his book ‘T. S. Eliot: Anti-semitism and literary form’ receives its due, as argued by Mr. Baddiel.
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Time for a more classic literary example: on New Year’s Day 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Jeremy Irons reading from the complete collection of T. S. Eliot’s poems, almost in their entirety. And this meant the inevitable inclusion of the following lines from “Gerontion” (1920):
My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
And, from “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920):
The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot.
I remember listening, and wondering how the BBC would get round this. When it came to these particular poems, they enlisted the help of Anthony Julius, a Jewish lawyer, and the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-semitism and literary form (1995), who prefaced the readings with his theory of how the highly prevalent, fashionable antisemitism of the time informed and possibly even enhanced Eliot’s work. To simplify considerably, Julius believes that Eliot was such a great poet that he could – almost uniquely, although there is of course The Merchant of Venice – make antisemitism into art.
I wrote to Julius after this because I think his position is wrong. I’m an Eliot fan, but I think the poetry does not redeem the hatred. We ended up some time later having lunch and talking about it for three hours (a very, if I might say, Jewish reaction to the whole thing). But none of this shook off the feeling I had, on that New Year’s Day 2017, that, however great the writer, however great the writing, no other minority group would be compared to rats, or envisaged as any similar negative racist stereotype, on Radio 4. It is not inconceivable that the BBC might read a whole Agatha Christie book on New Year’s Day. It is, however, inconceivable that anyone will hear Jeremy Irons’ voice saying, “And now, Ten Little N****rs”.
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The curious reader need look to a Sunday 24 February 2019 essay/news report in the Independent.
Headline: Blackface still dominates pop culture – but feigning ignorance is no longer an excuse
Sub-headline: We may not readily admit it, but for all the self-assuredness with which we celebrate British comedy, blackface has played a curiously prominent role in it for much longer than we realise, writes Kuba Shand-Baptiste
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David Baddiel also famously blacked up in Fantasy Football, playing footballer Jason Lee, who was subjected to racist abuse over his dreadlocks at the time. The list goes on, from slightly forgotten, but no less bold examples like Facejacker to disputed caricatures like The Mighty Boosh’s dreadlocked Spirit of Jazz or Howlin’ Jimmy Jefferson, based on the voodoo loa (god) Baron Samedi.
Headline: David Baddiel on The Infidel: ‘I’m not worried about a backlash’
Sub-headline: My film is a buddy movie, and it comes from a place of love, warmth and affection
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It’s not my job to promote interfaith dialogue and tolerance – I’m not a community relations officer – but I do think the movie comes from a place of love and warmth and affection, and that laughter is a good way to make people feel less tense about their status in a multicultural society. What the film is really saying is that our cultural identity can’t be easily defined.
The Corporate Press’ hostility to Corbyn is a fact, so the attack on one of his loyalists, or thought to be loyalists, is unsurprising! From February 24, 2019, written by Dominic Sandbrook is pure political hysteria mongering!
Headline: Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac
Sub-headline: If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history
This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.
It is the story of a man who does not appear to have gone to the cinema or listened to music, takes no interest in art or fashion and refused to visit Vienna’s magnificent Schönbrunn Palace because it was “royal”. It tells how he bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, deeply regretted the fall of the Berlin Wall and praised the men who attacked New York on September 11, 2001, for showing an “enormous amount of skill”. In some parallel universe, this man would currently be living in well-deserved obscurity. In reality, Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition and the bookmakers’ favourite to become our next prime minister.
David Baddiel writes ‘history made to measure’ or more pointedly propaganda! That allows him to the play the victim of prejudice/oppression. The Jew as Eternal Victim of oppression, rather that the actual political role he plays. As the practitioner of oppression, in the self-serving role as defender of a version of political rationalism. This might appear to be circular, or even contradictory, to some. Propaganda is never about argument , but about emotional manipulation: Black and Muslim stereotypes, are the foundational caricatures of both his ‘comedy’ and his politics. Neither can rise above their assigned places, in his ‘world view’.
Read this January 31, 2017 interview with Anthony Julius on the question of Anti-Semitism in Britain, and the Labour Party, headed by Jeremy Corbyn, is explored. David Baddiel’s quarrel with Julius is confined to his Eliot book?
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Julius fell out of love with the party even before Corbyn came on the scene, switching to the Liberal Democrats in 2015 “because I had no conviction young Miliband was going to make a good fist of being prime minister”.
Would Corbyn?
Julius laughs at the suggestion: “He’s not a leader of a party I would want to support.”
While Corbyn’s supporters keenly point to his record of fighting against racism, his critics say he too blithely looks past the antisemitism of those he considers allies. So, was Julius not surprised by the anti-Zionist and antisemitic stuff coming out of the Labour party last year?
“No, because I had studied the question of left antisemitism generally, and knew something about the provenance of the new leadership of the party including associated groups, political friends, and so on,” he says. “So the sense of being given permission to [express] that kind of language and sentiment was so strong.”
And where was that permission coming from?
“It seemed to me to be tacitly sanctioned by the new leadership. I don’t mean that anyone asked permission to say these things, but that there was a sense of: ‘What a relief: what we want to say is now also being said – or has been said – by the leadership, too.’”
It’s interesting that Corbyn and George Galloway have been so happy to appear on Russia Today and Iran’s Press TV in the past, I say. So, on the one hand you have Donald Trump sucking up to Putin and, on the left, you have Corbyn on Russian state TV.
“Yes, the French say the extremes touch each other. But I’m not even sure if it’s reasonable to talk about the left any more,” he says. “There isn’t a left. You get the sense that our deepest-held categories through which we see the world are ephemeral.”
And what does he think of Trump, who hires people from Breitbart, which peddles antisemitic headlines, and works closely with his orthodox Jewish son-in-law?
“I think one can only make sense of it if one abandons all conventional categories, the left and right categories,” he says.
But note that Anti-Corbyn hysteric Jonathan Freedland calls Julius out on the vexing question of ‘Zionist excesses’ :
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Julius fell out of love with the party even before Corbyn came on the scene, switching to the Liberal Democrats in 2015 “because I had no conviction young Miliband was going to make a good fist of being prime minister”.
Would Corbyn?
Julius laughs at the suggestion: “He’s not a leader of a party I would want to support.”
While Corbyn’s supporters keenly point to his record of fighting against racism, his critics say he too blithely looks past the antisemitism of those he considers allies. So, was Julius not surprised by the anti-Zionist and antisemitic stuff coming out of the Labour party last year?
“No, because I had studied the question of left antisemitism generally, and knew something about the provenance of the new leadership of the party including associated groups, political friends, and so on,” he says. “So the sense of being given permission to [express] that kind of language and sentiment was so strong.”
And where was that permission coming from?
“It seemed to me to be tacitly sanctioned by the new leadership. I don’t mean that anyone asked permission to say these things, but that there was a sense of: ‘What a relief: what we want to say is now also being said – or has been said – by the leadership, too.’”
It’s interesting that Corbyn and George Galloway have been so happy to appear on Russia Today and Iran’s Press TV in the past, I say. So, on the one hand you have Donald Trump sucking up to Putin and, on the left, you have Corbyn on Russian state TV.
“Yes, the French say the extremes touch each other. But I’m not even sure if it’s reasonable to talk about the left any more,” he says. “There isn’t a left. You get the sense that our deepest-held categories through which we see the world are ephemeral.”
And what does he think of Trump, who hires people from Breitbart, which peddles antisemitic headlines, and works closely with his orthodox Jewish son-in-law?
“I think one can only make sense of it if one abandons all conventional categories, the left and right categories,” he says.
Well, perhaps. But surely we have to acknowledge Israel’s power.
“We must acknowledge Israel’s power,” he bursts out, as though the issue were so obvious it hardly needs mentioning. “We must also acknowledge the suffocatingly short-termist perspectives of Israel towards the Palestinians. I mean, you just can’t look at the political situation in Israel without despairing, without feeling acute anxiety,” he says, rubbing his eyes sadly.
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What seems to have escaped the notice of Julius is that Corbyn has been unapologetic,in his support of the Palestinians. The invincible lawyer facade recedes, just enough, into the equivocation of ‘the new leadership‘, subject to a bit of politic reductionism?
Mr. Acherson’s essay in the December 17, 2020 edition: ‘Who Betrayed Us?’ was so helpful in understanding the time, place and the politics of Germany of the period, not a very original comment. Yet reading the 1918 & 1919 entries in the diaries of Thomas Mann, which I’ve had since 1980, provided a reveltory history of the political actors and their contexts. In his review of November 1918: The German Revolution by Robert Gerwarth.
Ascherson’s essay helped to understand this ‘nonpolitical man’ as being very political, when it came to the ‘Left’: ‘Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartakus League’ .
StephenKMackSD
P.S. I had forgotten about Colm Tóibín’s essay of November 6, 2008 entitled ‘I Could Sleep with All of Them’ a review of ‘In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story’ by Andrea Weiss, that provides insights ,or perhaps a better descriptor, a family portrait of the Mann’s .
How will Joe Biden’s attempted self-rescue, almost before the fact, from historical/political failure be accomplished? The question is at this point is moot. But Mr. Ganesh offers the compromise position in the ‘Two Biden’s Mythology’, the reader is offered this political miniature. (Note that the first sentence is not just wide of the political facts, the ‘Left’s best case against Biden’ was about ‘tactics’ not about ‘ideology’, in the 2020 Campaign? Per example : Medicare For All was ideological!)
The left’s best case against the Biden candidacy was always tactical, not ideological. It posits that a man who entered Washington in 1972 has never quite adjusted to the rise of partisanship. Such is his trust in the good faith of his opponents, that he would be easy meat for them. Such is his commitment to the oneness of America, that he would prefer a bland presidency to a provocatively active one. His half a century in public life would appear to make them right. But the platform that he ran on and still espouses points quite the other way. The next four years hinge on which is the truer Mr Biden — the bold manifesto or the emollient tone — and on whether he is even conscious of the tension.
Mr. Ganesh joins Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Turley, in their stern warnings, that Joe might just be going to fast, in his approach to governance, Post Trump. Mr. Ganesh expresses it in another, but more highfalutin, rhetorical key.
Political Reporter
P.S. Mr. Ganesh can’t resist his love of evocative authorial embroidery. The companion to his telling aphorisms…
Headline: Alexei Navalny is a real threat to Vladimir Putin
Sub-headline: The fragility of the Russian regime is becoming clear
The publisher of this report may not be to your liking. Please, no dull-witted Anti-Russian catchphrases … But how can ‘you’ resist the bait?
‘Navalny is a convicted felon, found guilty of fraud and embezzlement by a Russian court in 2014. But his jail sentence had been suspended with the condition that he report regularly to Russia’s prison authorities. A normal condition.
For nearly five months, however, he had sojourned out of the country as a de facto. That’s a brazen breach of his parole conditions. And the Russian prison service was right in issuing him a warning at the end of last month that violation of his suspended jail term risked the sentence being converted into detention behind bars.
It’s a sovereign matter of Russian laws that on returning to Russia at the weekend Navalny was arrested and is now in custody awaiting court proceedings in coming weeks on whether to revoke his suspended sentence. The hue and cry from Western politicians and human rights groups over his arrest Sunday at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport is predictable.
High level officials from the United States, Britain, Germany and France, among others, have all made strident statements demanding Navalny’s release. …
Thank you for your comment. Does the argument offered by RT have any validity : that Assange is a ‘dissident’ to use one of those ‘good old cold war’ terms?
‘Assange is languishing in a British torture-dungeon, for the “crime” of revealing to the world the truth about illegal wars and war crimes committed by the United States and Britain.
In all of the years of Assange’s barbaric detention, there has never been a fraction of the official Western public outcry that has been expressed for Navalny.
That’s because Navalny, unlike Assange, is a political asset for a Western agenda to undermine Russia.
Or is it a propaganda ploy to rationalize the arrest of Navalny? What of his legal status as ‘convicted felon’, who broke the conditions of his parole? Or is it like those Soviet sentences to Mental Institutions? Is this just the purest hyperbole? Should the reader look to the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, in which Victoria Nuland was one of the many ringleaders, of American/Eu/NATO Coup? These American controlled who was granted ‘leadership status’: who/what was legitimate leadership, in sum, determined who had political legitimacy. All this under the rubric of ‘might makes right’? Regards, StephenKMackSD
There can be no doubt who and what Robert Colvile represents, and the Think Tank that he heads, it presents themselves as unapologetic Thatcherites:
The Centre for Policy Studies is Britain’s leading centre-right think tank. Its mission is to develop a new generation of conservative thinking, built around promoting enterprise, ownership and prosperity.
The CPS does this both by producing its own policy papers – in particular on its core areas of tax and cost of living, business and enterprise, housing, and welfare. It also works with prominent policy thinkers to bring their ideas to a wider audience, including many Conservative MPs, as well as hosting events, debates and conferences.
The CPS was founded in 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, and was responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism. The CPS, Thatcher said, “was where our conservative revolution began”. And it was by implementing its policies “that we gradually restored the confidence and reputation of our country”.
The reader need be in no doubt as to Mr. Colvile’s political ideology. ‘The Left’ in his febrile political imagination, is not the Left-Wing Social Democrats represented by Jeremy Corbyn, but instead is the political nihilism of the Bolsheviks. Or are these two representation, of ‘The Left’, in Mr. Colvile’s fevered imagination somehow equal? Mrs. Thatcher, steeped in ideological fixation, like J. Edgar Hoover saw ‘Reds’ everywhere, except in the Mt. Pelerin Society.
For what might be a biography, of the Colville greed ridden mentality, the reader need only look to ‘Liberalism at Large:The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin
The above is just the preamble to Colvile’s essay that points to the Tories as the abbetors of ‘The Left’ :
Headline: While the left plays a smart game to widen the welfare state, the Tories keep leaving the field
In sum, the Tories lack the will, determination or the balls to challenge that ‘Left’! Mr. Colvile confects a potted history of this crime against the old stand-by Austerity, the fools-gold of the Neo-Liberal Swindle.
Does Colvile express actual ‘concern’ for the welfare of others who are in need?
As my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank show in a briefing note today, the flat £20 increase has plenty of flaws. For example, it did more proportionately for those claimants who needed it least — rather than providing more help for those with children or those most affected by the pandemic. The same amount would go a long way towards fixing social care, the most obviously broken part of the welfare system.
He is more interested in the politics of the situation, rather that the actuality, or possibility of human suffering. What the reader gets is more bloodless Oxbridger Policy Chatter, from someone who never experienced want! A Technocracy steeped in the second hand Political Theology of Mises/Hayek/Friedman, can best be expressed in the notion of ‘I can look with equanimity on the suffering of others’ . The rest is mere self-apologetic in the guise of an utterly unconvincing attempt at ‘concern’.
These last two paragraphs demonstrate that ‘The Left’ is going to be permanently reshaping of the State, it already is ,to the consternation of Mr. Colvile. This reader is surprised at the complete absence of Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer from this essay. The political maneuvering described takes place outside the Leadership ? Stamer is New Labour, so Neo-Liberal political bromides are not beyond his ken! As the Labour Party hemorrhages membership, a ploy to address that crisis?
The left is skilfully using the pandemic to campaign for a permanent reshaping of the state, and has become expert at assembling coalitions of the outraged to that end. The government either seems not to see these problems coming, or cannot decide between fight and flight — and so tries the first before falling back on the second. In the process, it cedes not just the argument but the moral high ground. And it contributes to the ratchet effect by which it is always easier to say yes than no to extra spending. The constituency for fiscal discipline on the Tory benches is already at its smallest for decades.
With every jab, the end of the pandemic’s acute phase comes closer. The key thing, at that point, will be to ensure a rapid and robust economic recovery.
Note Mr. Colvile’s use of catch phrases:
assembling coalitions of the outraged
cannot decide between fight and flight
it cedes not just the argument but the moral high ground.
the ratchet effect
fiscal discipline
With every jab
a rapid and robust economic recovery
The final sentence follows suit :
The more the state swells, and the more the debt grows, the harder that will be to sustain.
Mr. Colvile has not read Keynes, nor his epigones, the time for Fiscal Discipline is when an Economy is well into its recovery phase.
When I first started reading Andy Divine’s latest essay, a thought popped into my mind: What would the long forgotten Freudian coterie-how could/would they have critiqued The Proud Boys? As a telling object lesson of ” sexual sublimation’ wedded to reactionary politics. The old saw of ‘young,dumb and full of cum’ doesn’t apply to all these men, but its a useful place to start?
Andy in one his favorite roles as iconoclast critiques Biden’s Inaugural Speech:
Chris Wallace of Fox News called Joe Biden’s Inaugural address the best he had ever heard. John Heilemann almost likened it to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It wasn’t, of course. But in celebrating this country’s liberation from a uniquely delusional, malevolent sociopath in the White House, and his violent mobs, they may be forgiven for a little hyperbole. And Joe Biden’s speech, the most important he has given in his life, was definitely a good speech. It did what it had to do. It wasn’t “some weird shit” as George W. Bush is reported to have said about Trump’s. But equally, it wasn’t fresh or eye-opening; it had none of Obama’s rhetorical genius; or Reagan’s. There is not a line in it that we will be able to remember for very long.
As if Obama’s and Reagan’s ‘rhetorical genius’ breaks new ground! Those with patience and forbearance read this paragraph:
But Biden has also shown this week that his other ambitions are much more radical. On immigration, Biden is way to Obama’s left, proposing a mass amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants, a complete moratorium on deportations, and immediate revocation of the bogus emergency order that allowed Trump to bypass Congress and spend money building his wall. Fine, I guess. But without very significant addition of border controls as a deterrent, this sends a signal to tens of millions in Central to South America to get here as soon as possible. Biden could find, very quickly, that the “unity” he preaches will not survive such an effectively open-borders policy, or another huge crisis at the border. He is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.
The notion that Biden is ‘Left’ of Obama, or almost any other New Democrat is a ludicrous assertion. For Andy to lecture anyone on ‘Immigration’! And those ‘tens of millions in Central to South America‘, reads like Samuel P. Huntington’s paranoid ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ and that Mestizo Hoard about to dilute the purity of Anglo- Protestant Culture.
Biden has also signaled (and by executive order, has already launched) a very sharp departure from liberalism in his approach to civil rights.
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But Biden’s speech and executive orders come from a very different place. They explicitly replace the idea of equality in favor of what anti-liberal critical theorists call “equity.” They junk equality of opportunity in favor of equality of outcomes. Most people won’t notice that this new concept has been introduced — equity, equality, it all sounds the same — but they’ll soon find out the difference.
The subject then shifts from Immigration to ‘Critical Theory’ and its Devils: Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. Andy is by nature an Inquisitor and these ‘Marxists’ are the Apostates of choice, of long standing. Except they remain in the background, in his long description of their crimes. In this iteration James Lindsay ‘explaines’ to the reader what ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ mean to the un-named, but politically toxic bearers of ‘Critical Theory’.
In critical theory, as James Lindsay explains, “‘equality’ means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, while ‘equity’ means adjusting shares in order to make citizen A and B equal.” Here’s how Biden defines “equity”: “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.”
This reader weary of not just inept, but history-less propaganda, reaches Andy’s final paragraph, steeped in the notion and practice of ‘gradualism’ or at the least what appears to be it. ‘Identity Politics’ is the catch phrase that ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Neo-Liberals’ attach to a politics not immersed in the Colonial Mentality.
I want Biden to succeed. I want Republicans to moderate. I want to lower the temperature. I want to emphasize those policies that really do bring us closer together, even though many may still freely dissent. Biden says he wants to as well. But none of that can or will happen if the president fuels the culture war this aggressively, this crudely, and this soon. You don’t get to unite the country by dividing it along these deep and inflammatory issues of identity. And you don’t achieve equality of opportunity by enforcing its antithesis.
P.S. See Amartya Sen’s book ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny’ that presents ‘Identity’ as a shifting set of imperatives within the person.
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