I have removed my essay of March 3, 2018 because of my own inexcusable lack of attention, to the responsibilities, that being a writer means. The title was:
‘Peter Van Buren vs Andrew Sullivan on ‘Russiagate’ and its ersatz hero Robert Mueller. Political Cynic comments (Revised)’
My apologies to Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Van Buren, and to my readers: mea culpa!!
StephenKMackSD
As an publication that takes its name from The Dismal Science, adopted by The Economist, to represent a semblance of bourgeois political respectability. While engaging in a politics representing itself as the height of British rationality and probity. The publication of ‘Liberalism at Large” The World According to the Economist‘ by Alexander Zevin demonstrated that this was a self-serving pose, of political/moral/economic virtue. Here, a selection from this essay:
Under the rubric of The Pragmatist
Headline: Joe Biden would not remake America’s economy
Sub-headline: He would improve its fortunes, though
Some leaders , when they come into office, have a powerful economic vision for transforming how their country creates wealth and distributes it. Others approach power as pragmatists whose goal is to subtly shape the political and economic forces they inherit. Joe Biden is firmly in the second camp. He is a lifelong centrist whose most enduring economic belief is his admiration for hard-working Americans and who has shifted with the centre of gravity in his party. But Mr Biden’s ability to go with the flow means that, at the moment, both the left and the right are anxious about the prospect of Bidenomics.
…
At the same time Mr Biden will head up a party that has indeed shifted more to the left and that has a more radical wing that, while not dominant, is influential and thinks America’s economic model is broken and that the answer is a vastly bigger state. Combined with this, the public is bitterly divided and many people are wary of globalisation. Under President Donald Trump, America’s standing in the world has slumped.
Because of this chaotic backdrop and Mr Biden’s own lack of a fixed economic doctrine, the range of outcomes attributed to a Biden presidency is bewildering and not always benign.
…
Mr Biden’s long career does not exactly suggest much enthusiasm for economics.
…
The Diamond State is home to the headquarters of some icons of 20th-century industry, including DuPont, some of whose workers lived in the suburb Mr Biden spent his teens in. His exposure to such folk may help explain his fondness for manufacturing and a more paternalistic capitalism.
This wan endorsement of Biden- the question arises where is Adrian Wooldridge? who might have written a more readable, succinct and stylistically sophisticated essay. Instead of this realization that the Dismal Science, married to an equally dismal Politics, that produces a rhetorical product that hews to the Market Ideology, but nothing beyond that!
Woven into this Economist essay is the predictable Anti-Left hysteria, no matter how benign that ‘Left’ may appear. That ‘Left’ being Left-Wing Social Democrats, that has become an integral part of another of the political monsters, conjured by this ‘newspaper’ , called ‘Populists’. A selection:
…
As he grapples with this topsy-turvy economy, Mr Biden will have to deal with a second force in the form of the left wing of his party. Over a third of voters in the Democratic primaries supported Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, whose plans involved a giant expansion in annual government spending. Since then Mr Biden has skillfully flattered the more radical left while ignoring their more ambitious proposals, such as nationalised health care and the “Green New Deal”, a package promoted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswomen, among others, which includes a guaranteed job for all. In July a joint Biden-Sanders task force agreed on watered-down policy recommendations. Some of these Mr Biden then further diluted into his own proposals. Even so, the left will still demand jobs in any administration. And the centre of the party remains to the left of public opinion. Opinion polls suggest the typical American is more worried about climate change and China than they used to be, and more relaxed about government borrowing (see chart 2). But 87% of them still believe in free enterprise.
…
Biden looks like a ‘Leftist’? The Income Tax of the Eisenhower era was 90%!
…
Mr Biden would raise the headline rate on corporate income from 21% to up to 28%, levy minimum taxes on foreign earnings and remove tax perks for real-estate and private-equity firms. Individuals earning more than $400,000 would see the top band of income tax rise to up to 39.6%, and those earning more than $1m might have to pay a capital-gains rate that is nearer the one they pay on their income.
…
The New York Times offers a list of contenders for ‘key’ positions in the Biden Administration. The reader can compare this list with The Economist predictions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/us/politics/biden-cabinet.html
…
A second way Mr Biden could influence the economy, and give licence to his party’s more radical impulses, is through job appointments. Yet it seems unlikely that he will appoint Ms Warren as treasury secretary, or even attorney-general. That would send an alarming signal to the business community when the economy is fragile. It would also trigger a special election to fill her Senate seat in Massachusetts. Instead the front-runners to become treasury secretary are centrists. They include Lael Brainard, a centre-left member of the Federal Reserve Board; Jeff Zients, a co-head of Mr Biden’s transition team; Sylvia Mathews Burwell, a former Obama official and Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and treasury official. If a business figure is needed then Ruth Porat, the finance chief of Alphabet, a tech giant, is also thought to be a contender.
…
A return to a random selection of the Anti-Left Hysterics, and other telling comments of The Economist, is instructive of this ‘newspaper’s’ sometimes befuddled reactionary politics.
…
At the same time Mr Biden will head up a party that has indeed shifted more to the left and that has a more radical wing that, while not dominant, is influential and thinks America’s economic model is broken and that the answer is a vastly bigger state
…
To some Republicans on Wall Street and in boardrooms he would enable a hostile takeover by the radical left. “The country is running the risk of structural changes under the guise of social justice which would take the us into a place where it won’t know how to function,” claims one.
…
Then there is this seemingly political nosequiter:
…
By instinct he is an admirer of the middle-class more than the country’s glittering plutocratic elite or its downtrodden.
…
On the possible danger of Kamala Harris. The fact that this essay’s writer misses is that Harris is just another New Democrat, in sum, a Neo-Liberal, a Biden fellow traveler. Though possessed of an ambition, that led to her merciless attack against Biden on the debate stage.
…
Based on Mr Biden’s own experience as vice-president, in which he acted as a key counsellor to Mr Obama, Ms Harris would have an important voice in his administration. She sits to the left of him on tax and spending, although she is within the mainstream. And having rejected its signature policies and outmanoeuvred its star figures, Mr Biden might try to placate the left of his party by giving it lots of jobs in the regulatory apparatus where they would emit a cacophony of left-sounding signals.
…
For a second view of Biden, see Michael Wolff’s review of ‘Joe Biden : American Dreamer’ by Evan Osnos, at the Times Literary Supplement of November 13, 2020. Recall Mr Wolff as the author of two Trump Sagas , Fire and Fury, 2018, and Siege, 2019 and his biography of Murdoch. Mr. Wolff doesn’t seem quite the type, that the TLS used to favor. The Academic reviewing, the books of other Academics, or writers, literati and pretenders on the make. Having listened to an hour long radio interview, of Mr. Wolff, on the publication of the Murdoch biography, he seemed to be suffering from an oversized ego, with the arrogance to go with that. The only thing that stuck me, beside the former impression, was his use of the catch-phrase ‘Great Television’. He seemed enamored of it as some how a telling comment, perhaps he thought of it as Delphic?
Two examples of Mr. Wolff’s canny self-promotion, on the Murdoch biography demonstrates that knows the value of a particular kind of Media Saturation:
RUPERT TO INTERNET: IT’S WAR!
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/11/michael-wolff-200911
_________________________________________________________________________
Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/murdoch-s-big-secret-is-that-he-doesn-t-have-one
____________________________________________________________________________
Some sample of Wolff’s observations, that he might think of as revelatory apercus, or at the least as something close?
Joe Biden isn’t just a dramatic alternative to Donald Trump but to Barack Obama as well. The cool, charismatic Obama promised to be a transformational figure in politics and culture, possibly the greatest ever leap forwards in American public life. It was the failure of that promise, and its over-hyped nature, that helped to pave the way for the loutish – and in his own way charismatic – Trump, whose margin of victory in 2016 was largely provided by Obama voters who converted to him.
…
Joe Biden: American dreamer by Evan Osnos, an early-out-of-the-gate primer on the new president, is in itself quite a throwback.
…
Osnos’s account of Biden’s life and political education is written in a news magazine style (Time and Newsweek, in their day, were the leading exponents of the obliging political biography). Here we see the journalist in sync with the aspirations and craft of the politician, admiring, often in awe of, his subject’s driving ambition to rise in the political structure, and his skills in accomplishing this.
…
Biden is an affecting character in the system’s last stand because he is a lover of the system, not a technocrat who strains to make the levers work but an artisan, even an artist. This most unlikely figure, without modern skills and guile, believing what, practically speaking, nobody believes – that the system is good, and that if you trust it enough it will work – has been sent to save us. That’s a fantastic story, any way it turns out.
The reader need only look at both these essays, one steeped in an Economics of a particular brand, and the other one steeped in what can’t exactly be named ‘Entertainment Value’ but is something that is too close to that ‘value’!
Old Socialist
I will begin my considerations of Mr. Continetti’s essay with this telling sentence:
It was Kristol’s role as a political entrepreneur, as an activist and organizer as well as a commentator, which provided most of the fodder for magazine profiles.
The idea , concept of ‘political entrepreneur’ is one of the touchstones of Neo-Liberalism’s Market Deification, that reduces the moral/civic actor into part of the machinery of Capital. Label it an anti-human perspective!
If writers did not focus on his career, they focused on his personality: his wit, detachment, realism, modesty, ironic sensibility, equanimity, directness, consistency, and cheerfulness. Charles Krauthammer has called him the right’s “Cool Hand Luke.” Conservatives, …
The un-mourned Mr. Krauthammer reduces Mr. Kristol to a character in a Hollywood movie! One would think that Mr. Krauthammer would have been averse to using anything Hollywood produced?
The recent launch of the Foundation for Constitutional Government’s IrvingKristol.org and the forthcoming publication by Mosaic Books of the posthumous essay collection On Jews and Judaism present us with such an opportunity. Reading these materials, along with Kristol’s five previous collections, it soon becomes clear that it is not quite true to write, as Esquire did so many decades ago, that Irving Kristol achieved notoriety mainly for his role in “advancing other people’s ideas.”
Mr. Kristol was, in fact, a popularizer for the ideas and politics of Leo Strauss. If the reader continues to explore Mr. Continetti’s essay that is readily apparent, yet this sentence seems to be a bit out of order,that would make it more effectictive: ‘These ideas reveal Kristol to be a sort of theologian—a writer whose deep interest in religious matters informed his cultural and political criticism’
Indeed, sifting through the materials, one is struck by the similarities between the political climate of the 1970s and the political climate of today. We, too, are experiencing a lack of economic growth, a preoccupation with income inequality, an apocalyptic environmentalism, an intellectually exhausted left, and an intellectually confused right. As we think through the multiplying challenges confronting America and begin to formulate responses — and perhaps even tentative solutions — to them, it is worth recalling the teachings of Irving Kristol.
In above paragraph Mr. Continetti appears to be not just a ‘reader ‘ of the ’70’s’, but of the Age of The the Pandemic, and of the slow-motion collapse of what is left of Neo-Liberalism! ‘The teaching of Irvin Kristol’ : as if he were a Prophet,’ with Continetti acting as …
The reader has reached the point at which Continetti now comments on the importance of religion in Kristol’s World View. The heading for this next section is ‘Christianity, Judaism, and Gnosticism‘. For an exposition and clarification, the reader need only look to The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Gopal Balakrishnan Chapter 16 ‘The Leviathan Myth’ for the particulars of the ‘debate’ between Schmitt and Strauss about the importance of Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ and the central question of the place of religion in political thought.
These two screen shots, just small samples of this chapter. These two may be out of order, but are, none the less, instructive. That can lead the reader to see that Kristol was a ‘student’ of Strauss. Read also ‘The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy’ by Murry Friedman pages 40 – 41 for more on the power of Strauss’ writing/thinking on Kristol”s intellectual/political development.
Mr. Continetty begins by describing a key part of Kristol’s development:
The traditional understanding of Judeo-Christian religion plays a leading role in what a post-modernist might call the Kristol meta-narrative: the intellectual history of capitalism and its degeneration that is the basis for his interpretation of politics. It was in 1979, at a conference of theologians organized by Michael Novak at the American Enterprise Institute, that Kristol described most plainly the religious lens through which he viewed modernity. His talk was later condensed into an essay, “Christianity,Judaism, and Socialism.” The full text of the discussion, including a partial transcript of the question-and-answer period, was published later that year in Novak’s Capitalism and Socialism. It, too, begins with a version of
the epigraph from Péguy, translated, more bluntly, as “Politics begins in
mysticism, and mysticism always ends in politics.”
Mr. Continetti on Kristol’s binary of Orthodox/Gnostic.
Kristol began with an anecdote. He said that a recent conversation
with a friend, a prominent rabbi, had reminded him of the distinction
between the “prophetic” tradition in Judaism and the “rabbinic” one.
The former are the rebels against the law, the critics of society’s failure to
live to the highest and strictest ethical standards; the latter are the followers of the law. The two tendencies, Kristol went on, are present in all of
the world’s major religions. “I assume the tension between the prophetic
and the rabbinic—or the orthodox and the gnostic—to be eternal.”
To a gnostic, the world is a very bad place. Horrible things happen to
innocent creatures. There is no satisfactory explanation for the problem
of evil. Society is unequal. It does not live up to our high expectations.
Laws are unjust or ignored; institutions are archaic and corrupt. Human
beings fail to realize their potential. These unsatisfactory conditions of
life provoke a revolt. “The gnostic . . .tends to say that the proper and
truly authentic human response to a world of multiplicity, division,
conflict, suffering, and death is some kind of indignant metaphysical
rebellion, a rebellion that will liberate us from the prison of this world.”
The two tendencies, Kristol went on, are present in all of
the world’s major religions. “I assume the tension between the prophetic
and the rabbinic—or the orthodox and the gnostic—to be eternal.” This is representative of Kristol as theologen. The reader will see, that the ‘orthodox’ and the ‘gonstic rebels’ ,will reappear in the political realm, as political actors and antagonists.
…
“These gnostic movements tend to be antinomian—that is, they tend to be
hostile to all existing laws, and to all existing institutions,” Kristol said.
“They tend to engender a millenarian temper—that is, to insist that this
hell in which we live, this ‘unfair’ world, can be radically corrected.”…
Should this transmogrification, from Theology made to measure, to his politics surprise? The reader can make the connection, from a self-serving version of ‘theology’ to Kristol’s politics! Kristol self-presentation is that of the representative, of the steady hand of ‘orthodoxy’, while those on the definable political/moral outside, are the ‘gnostic rebels’.
Continetti continues his narration of Kristol’s Theology/History made to measure. this is conformation of the screen-shots I posted from The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Gopal Balakrishnan Chapter 16 ‘The Leviathan Myth’ for the particulars of the ‘debate’ between Schmitt and Strauss about the importance of Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ and the central question of the place of religion in political thought.
Christianity, Kristol said, emerged out of a gnostic rebellion against
Judaism. Christians rejected the Mosaic law and embraced Jesus as the
messiah. But for Christianity to become successful, for it to last, for it
to spread beyond the Eastern Mediterranean, the Church fathers had
to manage the transition from gnostic movement to orthodox faith.
“They had to convert it into a doctrine for the daily living of people, into
something by which an institution could spiritually govern the people.”
This they were able to do, in part, Kristol noted, by appropriating the
Hebrew Bible as the “Old Testament.”
The Church fathers, he said,needed the Old Testament for certain key statements that are not found in the New Testament, or at least are not found there in an emphatic way, such as that when God created the world, he saw
that “it was good.” That is an Old Testament doctrine. It became
a Christian doctrine, and it is crucial to any orthodoxy, since
gnosticism says that no one knows who created the world—a
demiurge or whatever—but that the world is certainly bad.
Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, in Kristol’s telling, held for centuries until the beginning of modernity. Like most scholars, he identified those
beginnings in the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancients, and in the
Reformation discovery of the individual conscience. As it developed,
Kristol said, the early modern civilization of the West was “shot through
with gnostic elements.”
The concept of original sin vanished from elite and then popular
discourse. Science and technology became endowed with extraordinary
capabilities: Tasked with the mastery of nature for the relief of man’s
estate, the reputation of natural science expanded until it subsumed theology and philosophy and threatened the stature of religion itself. The
individual human life seemed to lack cosmic direction. Human beings
became confused as to their ultimate purpose.
A telling quotation from the remainder of this section of Continetti’s Kristol apologetic :
Meanwhile, there arose a class of social scientists that believed the individual and society could be manipulated with the ease and skill with
which natural scientists reshaped the physical world. The social scientists
sought to perfect humanity in the same way that engineers perfected
bridges and roads and aqueducts. “What, specifically, were (and are) the
teachings of this new philosophical-spiritual impulse?” Kristol asked in
a 1991 essay, “The Future of American Jewry.” His answer:They can be summed up in one phrase: “Man makes himself.”
That is to say, the universe is bereft of transcendental meaning, it
has no inherent teleology, and it is within the power of humanity
to comprehend natural phenomena and to control and manipulate them so as to improve the human estate.These are gnostic ideas; these are utopian ideas. “[T]he modern world, in its modes of thinking, has become so utopian that we do not even know when we are utopian or to what degree we are utopian,” Kristol told the
theologians back in 1979.
The Weakness Of Capital is the next section of Mr. Cotinetti’s apologetic, in which Kristol engages in a wan evaluation/critique of Capitalism. And its ally, the concomitant evolution of ‘bourgeois values’ . some evocative quotations:
Capitalism was vulnerable to the attack. As a social system, it made only
two promises: the gradual improvement of the material conditions of life
through economic growth, and the maximum feasible amount of individual liberty. These were not lofty goals…
The contours of all prior civilizations—their virtues, their values,
and their codes of behavior—had been shaped by political or religious or cultural elites. All of these civilizations permitted some level
of business, some degree of commerce, but not to the point where free
enterprise became an independent center of power and the driving force
behind public and private life…
Under the capitalist dispensation, religious orthodoxy tempered the
…
pursuit of individual self-interest and regulated the satisfaction of material appetites. Biblical faith had the same relation to capitalism as the
Hebrew Bible had to the New Testament: It was the moral ground that
anchored gnostic impulses to reality. The so-called “bourgeois values,”
Kristol said, maintained the balance between capitalist prosperity and
religious tradition. They told human beings how to live.
But such an inner emigration included only a portion of the
anti-capitalist rebels. Escapism could not satisfy the do-gooders, the
world-improvers, the lifter-uppers, and the power-hungry. “Rebellion
was an alternative route, as the emergence of various socialist philosophies and movements early in the 19th century demonstrated.”
The socialist rebellion against bourgeois capitalism lasted until the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was, in some sense, a two-front
war. What the theoreticians of capitalism had not anticipated, Kristol
said, was that the free market would slowly erode the very foundation
of orthodoxy on which it rested. The new capitalist testament began to
consume the old religious one.…
…Kristol said in a 1989 talk. “But, of course, values are not created; values are inherited.” He continued:
‘There is no such thing as a rationalist religion that gives you an authoritative moral code. If there were, you would have heard of it. There are no rationalist ten commandments. Morality is derived from certain fundamental dogmatic truths, and I emphasize
that word dogmatic. It is the function of a religion, in a society
such as ours, to provide the dogmatic basis for those truths.’But the old dogmas were vanishing from the world. Men and women
began to be more concerned with the here and now, with what could be
gained and lost in this life, not in the next.…
The purpose of politics becomes the maximum gratification of
desires and appetites, and the successful politician is one who
panders most skillfully to this “revolution of rising expectations,”
a revolution which affluent capitalism itself generates and before
which the politics of bourgeois democracy prostrates itself.…
The quest for the immediate gratification of the population’s desires
results in a more intrusive state, for it is assumed that collective action
and bureaucratic coercion can accomplish the goals that mere individuals cannot. The question is: Will the state succeed?
It will not, of course; unreasonable demands are by definition insatiable. But it is true that the nondemocratic state will have the power
to curb and repress these demands, where it cannot satisfy them,
whereas the bourgeois-democratic state can rely only on the selfdiscipline of the individual, which affluent capitalism itself subverts.…
Human beings chose either to create the perfect community here
on Earth—through anarchic protests, small experiments in communal
living, or totalitarian states—or to escape into self-examination, introspection, self-absorption, and a search for authenticity. Neither of these
options proved satisfactory. Communes collapsed, fascism and communism imploded, and the exploration of self was self-defeating because,
as Kristol wrote in “The Adversary Culture of the Intellectuals” (also in
1979), “[t]he deeper one explores into the self, without any transcendental
frame of reference, the clearer it becomes that nothing is there.”
So, injured and beleaguered, capitalism has soldiered on, because of
the wealth it produces but also because of the heritage—waning, yet
lingering—of Biblical religion.
The above quotation marks the end of ‘The Weakness of Capitalism’ and introduces ‘Socialism,Egalitarianism,Nihilism’. Capitalist Apologetics/Rationalizations/Cheerleading as the reader might expect from AEI propagandists :
This “The Adversary Culture of the Intellectuals” , of Kristol’s invention in 1979. The ‘prescient’ Kristol missed by a decade the Reform Movement named ‘Glasnost’ ,’Perestroika’ in the Soviet Union. Chronicled by:
…
The death of the socialist idea, and later the collapse of communism,
did not make life any easier for the defenders of orthodox religion, the
bourgeois ethos, and capitalism.
“[I]f the death of socialism is not simply to mean a general disintegration into political pseudo-socialist forms whose only common element
is a repudiation, in the name of ‘equality,’ of individual liberty as a prime
political value,” Kristol wrote in his 1976 essay “Socialism: An Obituary
for an Idea,” then proponents of liberal capitalism would have to combat egalitarianism, deal prudentially with the rise of corporations, and
somehow deal with the decline in traditional religion. A glance at today’s headlines is enough to confirm that these challenges remain.
Kristol was immune to egalitarian impulses, voiced then and now
in calls to address rising income inequality. “I do not like equality,” he
told the theologians at AEI in 1979.…
Under the banner of equality, the professional and political classes use
the state to manage a greater portion of national income, distributing the
resources—spreading the wealth—as they see fit. It is no accident, Kristol
might say, that the loudest calls for addressing income inequality come
from members of those professions—public-sector unions, academic
economists, liberal journalists, attorneys—that would benefit most in
status, power, and wealth from an America where government controls a
larger portion of GDP. As he put it in 1976:
…
One of the means by which egalitarians rally support for the furtherance
of their class prerogatives is demonization of large corporations. Corporate
capitalism, for Kristol, presented a danger not because of economic inequality or environmental pollution but because of the possibility that
“the large corporation will be thoroughly integrated into the public sector,
and lose its private character altogether.” By criticizing the “externalities”
of corporate capitalism—“air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution,
traffic pollution, health pollution, or what have you”—liberals are able
to transfer more power and decision-making from the private sector to
the public one. “The transformation of American capitalism that this
would represent—a radical departure from the quasi-bourgeois ‘mixed
economy’ to a system that could be fairly described as kind of ‘state capitalism’—does constitute a huge potential threat to the individual liberties
Americans have traditionally enjoyed.”
Returning to his theme of the religious conflict between orthodoxy
and Gnosticism that underlies political argument, Kristol suggested that
the deeper impulses animating the liberal or progressive left are not ultimately political. The roots of egalitarianism, he taught, went back to
the religious thinness of capitalist civilization:…
“Unappeasable indignation”—the phrase captures well the personality
of the activist left. It was Kristol’s insight that this indignation was a response to the failure of secular liberal society to provide to its members a
comprehensive and compelling theory of distributive justice. “I think it
is becoming clear that religion, and a moral philosophy associated with
religion, is far more important politically than the philosophy of liberal individualism admits,” Kristol wrote in his 1973 essay “Capitalism,
Socialism, and Nihilism.”
In this last quotation, from Continetti’s essay, the reader again confronts the sine qua non of Kristol’s Political Theology. Touching again the importance of the Schmitt/Strauss/Hobbes religious/political marriage of moral imperative.
…
Into the spiritual vacuum created by advanced liberal capitalism step
the forces of the left, seeking to reassert control over the market and prevent it from determining society’s shape. Society is to be shaped instead
by the left. The egalitarians seek redistribution to effect social justice.
The environmentalists seek control over business and natural resources
in their quest to stop climate change. Public-health bureaucrats tell us
what to eat, what not to smoke, which drugs we can and cannot take.
The censors have returned, policing speech and attitudes in the same
way authorities once policed entertainment and pornography.…
The above paragraph is crowded with the ‘Gnostic Rebels’, in political form. Named ominously ‘the forces of the left’ . The reader is in very familiar territory of political hysteria. This opportunity cannot be wasted by Continetti. Where does Kristol begin and where might Continetti begin, a vexing question. Yet the ends of propaganda must be served. The cast of ‘Gnostic Rebels’, dubbed ‘clerisy ‘ is almost as crowded as a Cecil B. De Mille biblical epic, to frame it in a complementary hyperbole.
…
The trial lawyers, journalists, Silicon Valley executives, Wall Street
bankers, foundation officers, social workers, bureaucrats, Hollywood
types, university administrators, public employees, and college professors ascendant in the 1970s and today constitute more than a “New
Class.” They are a new clerisy.
Growth,Virtue, and the Welfare State
…
If what Kristol called the “problematics” of liberal capitalist democracies remain the same today as in the 1970s—increasing secularization, a rise in the number of Americans with no religious affiliation, family fragmentation, a popular culture that is hostile to the bourgeois ethos, rampant consumerism and materialism, an empowered and triumphalist class of liberal aristocrats, minuscule economic growth, a weak
and inadequately defended capitalism—then the response to these problematics may also be the same. It is impossible, of course, to know precisely what Irving Kristol might think of the presidency of Barack Obama, the economics of Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty, the culture of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. But his writings offer some guidance
about how to approach today’s problems in American politics, economics, and culture. And the solutions to which they point are as likely to unsettle the libertarian right as the progressive left.
…
Name this a Crowd Scene from some ‘Pathe Newsreel’ from the 30’s : except for its contemporary Politicians, Economists and Pop Stars. Subject to the jejune conjectures of Continetti.
…
Growth acts as a balm for democratic politics. It legitimizes capitalist exchange. “It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously,” Kristol wrote in his 2003 essay “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” “that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.”
A pro-growth agenda shares elements of a social agenda that protects and promotes bourgeois values. “The reason cultural nihilism will not prevail,” Kristol said in 1992, “is that a bourgeois, property-owning democracy tends to breed its own antibodies. These antibodies immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists.”…
Manfred Max-Neef and his ‘Development Model’ ,that replaces the untenable ‘Growth Model’ ,that Continetti and his employers embrace as ineluctable, has in the face of the Environmental crisis, in the present, defines how we live today, has rendered that ‘Growth Model’ to be toxic, to all biological life on the planet Earth! Yet this quote from Kristol leaves little doubt about … ‘These antibodies immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists.”. The Gnostic Rebels make their return!
…
Kristol’s vehicle for measures to promote bourgeois flourishing was
what he called the “conservative welfare state.” Not only did he say it was
fruitless to believe that the welfare state could be overturned; he also said
that a welfare state was, in principle, compatible with conservative politics.
How? “The demand for a ‘welfare state’ is, on the part of the majority
of the people, a demand for a greater minimum of political community,
for more ‘social justice’ (i.e., distributive justice) than capitalism, in its
pristine, individualistic form, can provide,” he wrote in 1976. “It is not
at all a demand for ‘socialism’ or anything like it.”
He went on:
‘Nor is it really a demand for intrusive government by a powerful and ubiquitous bureaucracy—though that is how socialists
and neo-socialists prefer to interpret it. Practically all of the truly
popular and widespread support for a “welfare state” would be
satisfied by a mixture of voluntary and compulsory insurance
schemes—old-age insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medical insurance—that are reasonably (if not
perfectly) compatible with a liberal capitalist society.’
It is the idea of a conservative welfare state that most discomfits the right,
for the idea suggests that there really is no turning back the political
clock. The theoretical principles of the founding fathers can be recovered, laws can be passed and interpreted according to the original text
of the Constitution, but it is folly, the advocates of a conservative welfare
state say, to believe that the government of the United States of America
can or should be reduced to the size it was 50 or 100 or 200 years ago.…
The above almost takes the reader’s breath away : The Conservative Welfare State! yet reserved for the Middle Class? In the World View of Continetti’s version of Kristol, the Working Class and the Poor do not exist?
…
Above all, a conservative welfare state would be future oriented. “It
must be committed to shaping the future with at least as much energy as to preserving a traditional attachment to the past.” It would build on human motivations, rather than try to change them “through the practical exercise of our unadulterated compassion, our universal benevolence, our gentle paternalistic authority.” And it would not be
hostile to religion. “The plain truth is that if we are ever going to cope
with the deficit, and the social programs that inflate it,” Kristol wrote in
a 1993 column, “we are going to have to begin with a very different view
of human nature and human responsibility in relation to such issues as
criminality, sexuality, welfare dependency, even medical insurance.” We
are going to have to begin, in other words, with a religious view.…
Kristol advocates, in the above quoted paragraph, for a Welfare State based on ‘a religious view’ . What to name it but Theocracy!
The Limits of Politics:
…
Kristol’s metaphor for wishful political thinking, it is interesting to
note, was a religious one:
‘Too many conservatives today, like the Catholic church of the
16th Century, view the difficulties of the reformation we are living through as an opportunity to restore the status quo ante. They are wrong, as the Catholic Church was wrong. There is no more chance today of returning to a society of “free enterprise” and
enfeebled government than there was, in the 16th Century, of returning to a Rome-centered Christendom. The world and the people in it have changed. One may regret this fact—nostalgia is always permissible. But the politics of nostalgia is always
self-destructive.’
With the temptation of nostalgia on the one hand and the danger of utopianism on the other, students of Kristol’s work today must nonetheless participate vigorously in the ongoing clash between orthodoxy and Gnosticism, between the bourgeoisie and the liberal aristocracy. It is an uphill fight, but not necessarily hopeless. As new entrants join the battle, they can draw not only on the professional history and the
personality of Irving Kristol. They can draw also on his words, on his
theological and political ideas.
…
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-theological-politics-of-irving-kristol
I will end my comments here, except to say that it is readily apparent to write that Kristol was a political romantic, in thrall of his own particular expression of Utopianism, that advocates for a Theocratic Welfare State, reserved for a Middle Class in need of rescue, from the predations of an amorphous army of ‘Gnostic Rebels’. In sum, Left-Wing zealots, expressed by Kristol as ‘the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists.”
What is absent from Continetti’s long apologetical essay, on Irving Kristol, is the political/moral nihilism of Neo-Conservatism , expressed as unsalkable bellicosity that produced 37 million Refugees:
Old Socialist
The reason d’etre of ‘European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’ is to build ‘Market Economies’: the institutionalizing of the utterly failed Mises/Hayek/Friedman romance with an abstraction, in service to profit alone, owing nothing to the once prized civic obligation, that citizens owe to one another!
The defining feature of what? Not Democracy nor Republicanism, but the rapacious Free Market, that brought the ‘West’ into an ever spiraling economic/political crises! Are ‘we’ suffering from economic/political amnesia?
In the face of The Pandemic, the imperative of Democratic States is to rebuild indigenous manufacturing, to replace ‘supply chains’ that do not recognize public health and welfare as imperatives! If ‘we’ are survive, indeed if ‘we’ are to prosper, from bottom to top of our societies, the reinvigoration of the idea and practice of that Civic Ideal is the sine qua non, that must define both our politics and economics!
StephenKMackSD
What is most interesting or compelling about Sam Tanenhaus’ essay at Prospect is not that it adheres to the standard bourgeois political chatter, even his talent as writer/storyteller can’t rescue this essay from being just standard. But here the reader encounters an almost nonsequiteur, but its length leaves the reader just non-plused as to what it might be or represent. Except perhaps a maladroit attempt to recycle part of another essay?
For Biden to win alone was not enough. A Democratic victory, to be meaningful, had to be complete—a presidential landslide, with the sort of truly crushing popular vote lead that translated into the capture of several Republican citadels and a rout in the electoral college plus, and of far greater practical importance, a regained majority in the Senate. Only then might they draw up in bold outline and vivid colour the programmes they envisioned and excitedly whispered about: universal health care, a much higher minimum wage, reduced or even free college tuition, racial justice (including, possibly, some form of reparations for African Americans), science-driven climate policy. This was the “new” New Deal that Biden was said to be ready to enact, drawing on the most innovative ideas circulating on his party’s progressive wing. Biden would be the “old guy” bipartisan compromiser in a restored world of “who cares who gets the credit” concord—the inverse of the transactional deal-making huckster Trump—while the youthful advance guard, including Congressional stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would sweep the country onto a bold new path.
And there was more—the dream of making America a bigger and more genuine democracy through structural changes: admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, DC to the Union as full states with Senate seats; eliminating the notorious Senate filibuster (to end Republican obstructionism); and doing away with the electoral college and its over-representation of sparsely populated hinterland states. All this was not likely to happen under Biden, but could under his anointed successor. Vice President Kamala Harris is 56, and with her degree from Howard, the crown of America’s “historically black” universities, and her wardrobe of Spandex leggings and Converse sneakers, is the charismatic new face and voice of a party whose future lies in commanding the loyalty of Millennials and Generation Z.
The November result ended that dream. *
…
This labored hypothetical, at its end, presents the Kamala Harris of the jailing the parents of truant children, of the de facto pardon of Steve Mnuchin, AIPAC groveler, and the well deserved pillaging of the sclerotic Biden, as something other that another New Democrat on the make. Although this reader must congratulate that Harris, who fed the shit to Senile Old Joe!
Mr. Tanenhaus would have been wise to close his essay with this bit of political kitsch, rather than more of The Ring-Master Trump hyperbole, as if it were needed.
America has had beloved presidents. Grown men wept when the caskets of slain Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy rolled past, felt a hole in their lives when Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan died. There are those for whom the brightest moment in the past year was the return of Barack Obama, with his piercing wit and flashes of humor, his manner that mingles the wisdom of the college professor with the joy of the pulpit orator.
Political Observer
*
Krystal and Saagar: Biden Team Weighs BAN On Bernie, Warren As They Consider Republicans For Cabine
Just a selection from Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay, on American Political life and Foreign Policy and its World-Historical repercussions. In sum a collection catchphrases-sometimes expressed as sentences. In sum, the rhetorical architectonic is based upon fragmentary thought, held together with stylistic embellishment, one of his writerly gifts.
…
No one is better placed to restore the US to planetary leadership.
…
Whatever the empire’s faults, caprice was not among them.
…
When the cold war ended, so did America’s steadfastness. The pattern since has been one of abrupt swings not just in policy but in underlying worldview from president to president.…
When US fickleness recurs in trade, global health and other realms, you can see how countries might come to make their own arrangements or, in time, to throw in their lot with a more predictable superpower.….
Mr Biden could run a masterly foreign policy, then, and still fail to recreate the kind of US influence that he knew from childhood through to middle age.…
Aware of its relative youth as a civilisation, the west often assumes that Asia sees history as a vast Hegelian rhythm, measured out in centuries.…
The Chinese pitch to wavering countries almost writes itself: better a heavy-handed superpower than a whimsical one.…
https://www.ft.com/content/39d70d56-8beb-4725-8b9d-1e0b3183f921
Old Socialist
There are no ‘Liberals’ only Neo-Liberals! Corporate Media have a political allergy to the term! The Democrats ,capitulated to the New Democrats in 1992, with the election of Clinton and his familiar. In sum Reaganism Lite! Ganesh Cliche Mongering chatter, just part of his riff upon himself, as corporate conformist. That being an expression of Corporate good citizenship.
There is almost no politician good enough to prise voters en masse from the opposing half of the electorate — the last to win more than 400 electoral college votes was George H W Bush, in 1988.
That working class women,Blacks and Latinos were an integral part of the Trump voters, in 2020, should not surprise! As in 1968, when voters who supported Robert Kennedy during the primaries, cast their ballots for George Wallace, that merged to become 9 million strong.
Near the end of his essay Mr. Ganesh lapses into near political kitsch:
…
Of course, even the narrowest win is still potentially world-changing. It is no more possible to be half-president than half-pregnant. If elected, Mr Biden could unwind much of Mr Trump’s foreign policy, regardless of which party controls the Senate. His election would be toasted in Nato headquarters and the chancelleries of most US allies. Executive power will also matter in the fight against the pandemic. And even a raising of the presidential tone is worth something.
…
But, then he recovers his pundit’s equilibrium:
No, if there is a sense of liberal dread today, it is less about the scotched dreams of a progressive realignment than Mr Trump’s dismaying resilience. For four years, he has lived down to the Democrats’ direst expectations and remained electorally competitive. Not enough Americans regard him as a tyrant or a klutz, or care either way. Even if he loses, he has done well enough to remain the Republicans’ reference point in opposition and a plausible candidate in 2024.
Political Observer
I woke up at 4:30 AM PST, this morning, and checked twitter for the latest Election News, not knowing what to expect, other than bad news. Now at the breakfast table, I’ve read first the Editorial Board of The Financial Time on the election. I’ve quoted what I think was essential, from the thickets of the political chatter, adroitly softened, but still aided by the thoroughly discredited ‘polling addiction’, of commentators looking to legitimise their political speculations.
Headline: A critical moment for US democracy
Sub-headline: Institutions have a responsibility to ensure every vote legitimately cast is counted…
Whatever the ultimate outcome of this election, the voting starkly highlights the social, economic and political fissures in America. As in 2016, the country appears split down the middle — with the Democrats continuing to hold their edge on the coasts and in the cities and Republican support strong in small towns, rural areas and the middle of the country.
The task of responsible leaders is to bring their divided nation together around a shared respect for the democratic process. Tragically, if all too predictably, Mr Trump is already failing this test.
https://www.ft.com/content/352fac7a-d3e9-44bd-be1d-a7d8f624fe5a
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After the ‘Editorial’ I read Mr. Luce’s
Headline: A bitter US election that resolves little
Sub-headline: Whatever the result, America’s divisions will make governing very hard
…
Either way, America faces two dangers, one immediate, the other structural. The first is that the judiciary may well get involved in deciding the outcome. Constitutional scholars have been warning about this for months. This is because of the order in which ballots are counted in the three key swing states.
…
In other systems where the president is elected, Mr Biden would already have been declared the winner. America’s electoral college, which gives outsized influence to small, rural states, is like a dodgy appendix that haemorrhages a little more bile with each election.
If Mr Biden eventually prevails, he will inherit a profoundly divided country that will be hard to govern, especially if the Senate remains in Republican hands.
If Mr Trump loses, he will still have outperformed all expectations. The Republican party is Trumpian for the foreseeable future. “We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” tweeted Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who has 2024 presidential aspirations. The American people have spoken. And it is a cacophonous noise.
https://www.ft.com/content/2aca59d6-26ea-41e3-8c04-4fb925a1290c
_____________________________________________________________________
Mr. Luce cites Statistical Golden Boy Nate Silver in his essay, yet he offers nothing memorable, nor particularly insightful. That he, and his newspaper, were the propagandists, apologists for the toxic mythology of Neo-Liberalism, that destroyed the Civic Institutions, that could have been the antidote to Trump and Trumpism. Not to speak of a vital/viable electoral process: this is the ghost that haunts all the political agonizing, displayed as fraught political moments, to be played out in the concatenating present.
For the elusive quantity of a sub-rosa Trumpism, in its carefully modulated iteration, the reader must consult Niall Ferguson’s essay at Bloomberg Opinion:
Headline: Three Words That Haunt Joe Biden: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’
Sub-headline: The 1948 presidential election was bigger surprise than 2016, and has eerie parallels to 2020
Niall Ferguson can’t quite bring himself to advocate for Trump! He too attached to bourgeois political respectability: recall his Keynes Problem? So he will invoke Dewey/Truman election, in 1948, to do the actual work of Doom Saying for Senile Old Joe and his consort.
Political Observer
(Added November 5, 2020, 7: 50 AM PST
I encourage readers to look, at and consider Mr. Ferguson’s enlightening essay, even though it was a not very adroit attack on Biden, via a dubious historical comparison. Ferguson is a very accomplished historian, who in this instance writes, not just with ideological motive, but with a focus that makes this rewarding reading, given my caveats. Here is a link where this essay may, in time, be posted:
That The Economist has become the house organ for the ‘Joe Biden & Son’ political entrepreneurship should not surprise!
Headline: Why it has to be Biden
Sub-headline: Donald Trump has desecrated the values that make America a beacon to the world
…
Joe Biden is not a miracle cure for what ails America. But he is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. He is equipped to begin the long, difficult task of putting a fractured country back together again. That is why, if we had a vote, it would go to Joe.
…
Wavering Republicans worry that Mr Biden, old and weak, would be a Trojan horse for the hard left. It is true that his party’s radical wing is stirring, but he and Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential pick, have both shown in the campaign that they can keep it in check. Ordinarily, voters might be advised to constrain the left by ensuring that the Senate remained in Republican hands. Not this time. A big win for the Democrats there would add to the preponderance of moderate centrists over radicals in Congress by bringing in senators like Steve Bullock in Montana or Barbara Bollier in Kansas. You would not see a lurch to the left from either of them.
…
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/10/29/why-it-has-to-be-biden
_________________________________________________________________________
Headline: Battle-hymn of the Never Trumpers
Sub-headline: Renegade Republicans represent the breadth—and the admirable best—of Joe Biden’s coalition
…
More happily, Never Trumpers, freed of the partisan yoke, have provided most of the laughs in this grim campaign. The irreverent Lincoln Project (in which Messrs Conway and Stevens are involved) is chiefly dedicated to provoking the president to Twitter rage. With a nod to Michelle Obama, its pledge to Democrats is: “We go low so you don’t have to.” In their podcasts and articles—including in the Bulwark, a Never Trump news site—Mike Murphy and Tim Miller of Republican Voters Against Trump (rvat) have shown themselves to be two of the wittiest people in politics. This has addressed such a conspicuous cultural problem—the fact that American satire is dominated by lefties—that there is talk of the Lincoln Project being repurposed as an entertainment company.
…
Whatever their future holds, the Never Trumpers have played an admirable part. Most followed their consciences into opposition at significant risk to their livelihoods. The predictable Republican slur, that they are in it for the money, is false. If they are now enjoying success, it is because their consciences turned out to be a better predictor of America’s response to Mr Trump than their cynical former colleagues anticipated. John McCain liked to talk about the importance of backing country over party. Never Trumpers have provided an even more resounding demonstration of this than the late senator. They deserve their brief celebrity and more.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/10/29/battle-hymn-of-the-never-trumpers
__________________________________________________________________
Headline: Longstanding claims of Biden corruption all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails
…
For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former vice president in his last debate with President Trump.
In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was President Barack Obama’s policy “point man.”
When the issue re-emerged during the campaign, Team Biden continued to call it a “conspiracy theory” but this time, Joe Biden firmly put himself on record. “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses — period,” he told reporters in August 2019.
“I never talk with my son or my brother or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period.” He repeated similar blanket denials on numerous occasions.
These denials all proved to be untruthful. Period.
We now know that Joe Biden met directly with his son’s Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, in a Chinese hotel lobby on a fateful trip in 2013 (a trip that allowed Hunter to spend hours with his father, the vice president, on a transoceanic flight to Beijing aboard Air Force Two). Ten days later, Hunter landed an unprecedented $1 billion private equity deal, bankrolled by the Chinese government.
…
https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/
__________________________________________________________________
Glenn Greenwald offers a very different , indeed an enlightening perspective on what The Economist offers! Telling quotes from this in depth reporting from Greenwald, follow the title:
‘TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS
…
…
A media outlet that renounces its core function — pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people — is one that deserves to lose the public’s faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.
As my colleague Lee Fang put it on Sunday: “The partisan double standards in the media are mind boggling this year, and much of the supposedly left independent media is just as cowardly and conformist as the mainstream corporate media. Everyone is reading the room and acting out of fear.” Discussing his story from Sunday, Taibbi summed up the most important point this way: “The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it’s true.”
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored’
Old Socialist
That Richard Posner is presented here, by Michael Rips, as a ‘conservative’ is hyperbole masked as understatement! Look to the ‘Columbia Law Review’ of October 1985, Vol. 85 Num.6 for his ‘An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law’:
…
My analysis can be summarized in the following propositions:
The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to
prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated
exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of
allocating resources than forced exchange. Market bypassing in such
situations is inefficient-in the sense in which economists equate efficiency with wealth maximization7-no matter how much utility it may
confer on the offender.
Much of this market bypassing cannot be deterred by tort lawthat is, by privately enforced damage suits. The optimal damages that
would be required for deterrence would so frequently exceed the offender’s ability to pay that public enforcement and nonmonetary sanctions such as imprisonment8 are required.
Such sanctions are extremely costly for a variety of reasons, and
this, together with the socially worthless character of most of the sanctioned conduct, has a number of implications for efficient criminal law
doctrine, such as that unsuccessful attempts should be punished in order to economize on costlier punishments for completed crimes. The
threat of punishing attempts, as we shall see, makes the completed
crime more costly in an expected sense and therefore less likely to be
committed. I contend that the main differences between substantive
criminal law and substantive tort law can be derived from the differences in (1) the social costs of criminal and tort sanctions and (2) the
social benefits of the underlying conduct regulated by these two bodies
of law. I contend, in short, that most of the distinctive doctrines of the
criminal law can be explained as if the objective of that law were to
promote economic efficiency.
Richard Posner in his 1997 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures, ‘The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory’ offers this :
I. THE LIMITS OF MORAL THEORIZING
A. The Thesis of Part I Summarized
My aim is to criticize moral theory, or, more precisely, a type of moral theory (the subject of Part 1) and then use the criticisms as a lever for challenging the type of legal theory that resembles or draws on moral theory (the subject of Part DI). I have in mind, for example, the constitutional theorizing of Bruce Ackerman, Akhil Amar, Walter Berns, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, Robert George, Andrew Koppelman, and David Richards, among others, occupying all points of the ideological compass, as well as the nonconstitutional legal theorizing of Jules Coleman, Joel Feinberg, George Fletcher, Charles Fried, Leo Katz, Gregory Keating, Margaret Jane Radin, and Ernest Weinrib, and again many others of diverse political hue. I shall argue that moral theory does not provide a solid basis for moral judgments, let alone for legal ones. I shall intermittently relate this thesis to one of the big and somewhat neglected stories of our time: the rise of professionalism in a sense illuminated by Max Weber’s concepts of rationalization and disenchantment. And I shall indicate how in legal as well as private life we can get along without doing or even thinking about moral theory.
My thesis has a strong form and a weak one. The strong form, again, is that moral theory does not provide a solid basis for moral judgments. The weak form is that even if moral theory can provide a solid basis for some moral judgments, it should not be used as a basis for legal judgments. Moral theory is not something that judges are, or can be, made comfortable with or good at, it is socially divisive, and it does not mesh with the actual issues in cases. I shall focus on the strong form of the thesis in Part I of the Lectures. The distinct arguments for the weak form will emerge in Part II, which is much shorter, not only because it builds on Part I, but also because, independently of the arguments in Part I, the case for the weak form is stronger.
…
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2828&context=journal_articles
The list of responders is impressive: Ronald Dworkin , Charles Fried, Anthony Kroman, John T.Noonan ,Jr., and Martha Nussbaum. The reader only need recall their personal experience, of being part of the jury selection process, in with the Judge proclaimes to the potential jurors, that the law court is ‘above morality’, without even a hint of irony!
In sum, I would say that Richard Posner represents/represented, an equally toxic variant of American jurisprudential philosophy, as the ‘Originalist’, ‘Textualist’ coterie’s apologetics, and its contemporary historical/political rationales for ‘The New Jim Crow’. The title of the cogently, brilliantly argued moral/political intervention of Michelle Alexander, stands as a rebuke to these political romantics. Who have attempted to re-invent themselves, under the rubric of the ultra-respectactable guise of ‘Federalism’. Amy Coney Barrett is just the latest member of the New Jim Crow Supreme Court.
Old Socialist
P.S. On the question of ‘Textualism’ and Scalia, the mentor of Amy Coney Barrett, read Robert Post’s essay at The New York Review of Books:
Justice for Scalia
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reply In reply to Great big travesty
The ABA represents a guild of unaccountable, self governing cadre of those superior beings called ‘Lawyers’, who are in charge of themselves. Unaccountable to anyone but themselves. What other ‘Profession’ like doctors, dentists, insurance sales people and cosmeticians are self-governing? ‘Well qualified’ is a term of art, for the adept practitioners of jurisprudential norms, like all that bowing and scraping, to the outworn practices of courtroom decorum! Amy Coney Barrett is just more of the Post Bork generation, of normalized jurisprudential nostalgics who look to a benighted past as the model for a possible future.
StephenKMackSD
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