StephenKMackSD's Blog

The American Empire can never seem to falter, that a given of Imperial Power. So it can come as no surprise, that Mr. Garton-Ash’s polemic is suffused with the political panic of a Technocrat-crisis becomes the singular rhetorical note of his essay.
This reader left contemplating the fact that the American political system, headed by a bone fide demagogue is facing a very important election. The failure to recognize, that he was produced by an utterly failed political class, committed to the toxic mirage of Neo-Liberalism, remains outside Mr. Garton-Ash’s political grasp. But the position of ‘crisis’ offers the not very soothing balm of:

Democracies everywhere must prepare for the contingency of a contested result in the most important US election in living memory.

Mr. Garton-Ash offers some solutions to the onlookers to the inexorable ‘crisis’:

A calm, considered approach by the world’s other democracies will be most relevant in the “blue shift” scenario. These countries will have thousands of diplomats and journalists on the ground. The US and international media will be reporting this event intensively, and Facebook and Twitter are going to great lengths to stem misinformation. Although the facts will be disputed, that does not mean there will be no facts. A vital task of liberal democracies is to stick to and stand up for those facts.

In doing this, they can rely on an election monitoring mission from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which includes the US in its 57 members. It has conducted some 370 election observation missions over 30 years and has, with US help, developed benchmark best practices for rigour and impartiality. The OSCE mission has just presented an interim report and will hold a press conference in Washington, the day after election day.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/b4f3932a-3e0e-49ae-9a19-415cdb80de19

This reader approaches Mr. Garton-Ash’s ‘solution’ to this vexing question, with skepticism as mere political analgesic, rather than an actual and viable ‘solution’.

The Supreme Court’s 2000 Coup of Bush v. Gore, was/is both a betrayal of Federalism (State’s Rights) of the Rehnquist/Scalia coterie. And the fact that the Majority declared their decision, in this case, ‘beyond/outside precedent’! In sum it rules itself outside political/legal question. As anyone who has served on an American Jury, or been part of that process knows, judges declare the Court to be ‘above morality’! Even Oliver Wendall Holmes declared that Law was a kind of ‘Public Morality’.

Political Observer

I’ve been catching up on reading Andy Divine’s essays, and noticed his total silence on the Amy Coney Barrett Senate Confirmation Hearings. I’ve gone back to October 9, 2020, and not even a mention.
Don’t miss his latest production, with the learning and intellectual heft of Cecil B. De Mille epic, aided by his Oxford education with telling references to:  the Temple of Eleusis,Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero,etc. ( Hurry the Pay Wall is fast approaching!)

Headline: The Psychedelic Election

Subheadline: A new issue arrives on the horizon. Why it matters.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-psychedelic-election

I usually make the daily ‘rounds’ of Politico, The New York Times, The Financial Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic , The American Conservative and sometimes The Economist, and Twitter searching for likely subjects to read and comment upon. I am a journalistic parasite. I didn’t find one of Andy’s essays published outside his blog.

Old Socialist

This reader just has to wonder at the ‘why’ of Mr. Ganesh latest essay in celebration of Eisenhower. Perhaps an advanced case of ‘Trump Political Exhaustion’? Its ‘as if’ Reagan, and his tag-line of ‘government is the problem’, had never reached to the very center, of the greed ridden class, that made their money supplying the Defense Industries of the American Post War period, that were not actually ‘entrepreneurs’, in the political romantic parlance of the Mises/Hayek/Friedman coterie. But rather just part of the ‘supply chain’ of vendors, who were just the smaller cogs, that held the machinery of mammoth corporations together.

One also thinks about the Republicans, like Howard Jarvis, of the Tax  Payers Association, named after him, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Lewis H. Brown founder of AEI, and their epigones, on the vexing question that Mr. Ganesh’s celebration of Eisenhower evokes. Or the Neo-Cons, that had their political moment in the Bush II administration: recall the White Phosphorous used on Fallujah, a monument to their moral/political nihilism?  

Consider some quotes from Mr. Ganesh essay :

The mistrust of government that has defined the Republicans since the 1980s is a liability in a nation that has grown more collectivist in its views. 

One might more pointely opine that the American electorate has come to realize that they share a common political fate.

Its market dogma is a much larger cause of that drift than one demagogic president.

The reader needs no reminder that both the Republicans and New Democrats are Neo-Liberal. Bernie Sanders was/is the only Dissenter!

Free-market economics were necessary and popular as his postwar consensus soured in the over-governed 1970s. Whether they answer the public anxieties of the early 21st century is doubtful.

Free Market necromancy never, ever goes out of style!

Republicans seem to mistake the public’s cynicism about “government” in the abstract with indifference to actual services and fiscal transfers.

The fact is that the Neo-Liberal State must be a strong state, as the in-order-too of its proper functioning.

The cause of Republican reform will go nowhere until it makes peace with the state

The ‘Never Trumpers’ are the sales people that brought the catastrophic ‘War on Terror’ with the help of ‘The Architect’ or just call him a gutter-snipe, Karl Rove and his henchmen here identified as ‘noble’. This not just a ‘misreading’ but shameless apologetic propaganda.

The “Never Trumpers”, the Bush-era alumni who endorse Mr Biden, the Republican donors who fund the other side: there is a nobility to these apostates, but a shallowness of thought, too.

Ganesh links to an Eisenhower letter, and his truncated quotation from it ‘about the who could not reconcile themselves to the New Deal” “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid… Yet read more carefully, what appears in addition, is an apologetic for the Iranian Coup, that sent the duly elected Mossadegh into internal exile,  and that prefigured the rise of the Islamic Republic.     

A year ago last January we were in imminent danger of losing Iran, and sixty percent of the known oil reserves of the world.  You may have forgotten this. Lots of people have. But there has been no greater threat that has in recent years overhung the free world. That threat has been largely, if not totally, removed. I could name at least a half dozen other spots of the same character.

That Eisenhower was a Cold Warrior, not a surprise. In an attempt, to find reasons for the present inability of the contemporary Republican Party, fully colonized by Trumpism, to recognize Eisenhower as a viable touchstone of Republican Values: the inquirer might just look to his appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and the unanimous decisions in Brown I & II. The sending of Troops to Little Rock and his Farewell Address? 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/affe91ca-c1a9-41b2-8592-9ba9580eb130

What can the regular reader think of the latest, but one of the infrequent essays of Anne-Marie Slaughter, to appear in this newspaper? First, a fragment of the opening sentence uttered at full rhetorical screech: The world is watching the US presidential election with horror: the production of hysterical political melodrama is not her strong suite!

By the second paragraph, the reader enters Ms. Slaughter’s more rational speculations about a possible, probable Foreign Policy of a Biden Administration. Or should it more rightly be named ‘Joe Biden & Sons Inc’?

The US would re-embrace multilateralism and reach out to allies and partners with renewed vigour. But it would still be more inwardly focused. It would return to the global fold on the necessity of combating climate change, pandemics and other global threats. But it would still embrace great power competition and focus on China as its main rival. It would substitute a values-based foreign policy for a power-based approach. But it would not return troops to Syria or Afghanistan and would remain sceptical about foreign intervention.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is CEO of the New America Think Tank, which places her in the category of New Democrat. As a Biden partisan the reader must acknowledge her as a Party loyalist, when considering her essay. Which postulates the puerile notion of the Three D’s : Domestic, Deterrence and Democracy. 

The reader then becomes mired in Slaughter’s thicket of policy speculation, featuring the ‘Brand Names’, who might just fill those potential Foreign Policy jobs, of a potential Biden Administration. Contingency defines these speculations! The final paragraph of Slaughter’s essay leaves no doubt about Biden:

Commentator James Traub points out that phrases like “the free world” come naturally to Mr Biden, however old-fashioned they may seem to the progressive left. In this formulation, he writes, Mr Biden “would refound ‘the west’ for a new age of problems without borders”. Perhaps. Mr Biden and his advisers are still more comfortable dealing with problems that require beating or bonding with other nation states than those that transcend borders such as climate change. Still, unlike Mr Trump, they recognise the need to manage both types.

https://www.ft.com/content/6f85ae61-2e16-4272-8974-a38123ed994f

Joe Biden is the prisoner of ‘The Old Cold War’, that has become ‘The New Cold War‘, in sum, via the framing of Huntington’s xenophobia, expressed in World Historical terms, in The Clash of Civilizations and more parochially in his ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’.

In Slaughter’s apologetic for Biden, we read about a mythic notion of a ‘return to normalcy’ after the nightmare of Trump. That is about a return to a Neo-Liberalism that continues in its state of slow motion collapse, in the face of The Pandemic and a Capitalism in constant need of Keynesian upbuilding.

Look at your choices, fellow readers, on the subject of Joe Biden’s possible advisors.

July 31, 2020


Headline: Inside the Massive Foreign-Policy Team Advising Biden’s Campaign


Sub-headline: If Joe Biden wins, here are some of the top foreign-policy experts who could be tapped for senior and midlevel jobs in the administration.


https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/31/inside-biden-campaign-foreign-policy-team/

( Cost $15. 99 for access)

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December 19, 2019

Headline: Why Biden’s Retro Inner Circle Is Succeeding So Far

Sub-headline: In 2019, there’s a tiny group of Democrats who believe the party hasn’t lurched leftward. Oh, and their boss happens to be winning the primary.


https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/19/biden-2020-campaign-president-advisers-087410


_______________________________________________________________


October 5, 2020

Headline: Just How Good Is Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team?

DSub-headline: It is difficult to escape the impression that a Biden administration might constitute a restoration of neoconservatism in liberal hawk garb


https://nationalinterest.org/feature/just-how-good-joe-biden%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-team-170216

_______________________________________________________________

Old Socialist

I missed Andy Divine’s October 16, 2020 ‘political diagnosis’ about what ails ‘us’: ‘Post-Modernism’ in all its iterations. If only Andy had read Detlev Claussen’s ‘One Last Genius’? Incuriosity is the intellectual armor of the ideologue.

Yet the transgenerational political/economic/civic addiction to Neo-Libearalsm that he championed – his misdirection equals a self-apologetic for his always toxic politics. In which he quotes the disappeared political hysteric Bari Weiss.

A question I’ve wrestled with this past year or so is a pretty basic one: if critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap, as I have long contended, how has it conquered so many institutions so swiftly?

It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

It’s everywhere. Across the country, schools and colleges are dumping SATs so they can engineer racial equity, and abolish the idea of merit. The Smithsonian backed the idea that working hard, showing up on time and perfecting a task are functions of “whiteness”. In California, there’s a ballot initiative to legalize government discrimination on the basis of race; and a new mandate that company boards add members from under-represented communities. Corporations who haven’t publicly committed themselves to the full woke project are being hounded by their employees into doing so, meaning hiring and firing on the basis of race, or forcing employees into re-education sessions, guided by DiAngelo and Kendi. The NBA, for Pete’s sake, is now a festival of wokeness, even as viewership collapses. CRT propaganda like the NYT’s 1619 Project can be exposed as untrue and unethical, but the paper can both debunk it in its own pages and still hail it as a triumph. And the pièce de resistance: 21 percent of liberal students in the Ivy League favor some level of violence to stop campus speech they disapprove of.

…

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/why-is-wokeness-winning

(Patience, only 1,242 words to go)

Andy’s search for political heretics defines his self-appointed role as pundit and political/moral visionary. Andy is the natural ally/inheritor of the legacies of Allen Bloom, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza. Not forgetting the newest inheritors of Anti-Student mendacious politicking, Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukianoff.

Andy’s continuing quest for someone/something to blame for Trump and Trumpism, and the rise of a re-invigorated ‘Left’ is utterly transparent. This is about his inability to face his own political complicity in the rise of Trump, and its immediate precursor The Tea Party. Post-Modernism and its Marxist component are the perfect target, in a country steeped in the post-war tradition of Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt/McCarren!

Political Observer

Amy Coney Barrett is neither ‘mystery’ nor ‘enigma’ ! The reader need only look to ‘Politico’, the American Political Gossip Sheet for a telling report on who Amy Coney Barrett is.

 
Headline: ‘She’s been groomed for this moment’: Amy Barrett’s Supreme Court preparation began early

Sub-headline: From her first year as a Notre Dame law student, conservatives marked her as a future leader in the mold of the Federalist Society.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been seated on the Supreme Court for only a year, in 1994, when a group of professors at the University of Notre Dame first recognized the potential of a first-year law student and began paving the way for her career as a conservative jurist: collaborating on scholarship, helping her land a Supreme Court clerkship and later recruiting her to the law school’s faculty.
The group was part of a growing legal movement opposed to the secularization of American society generally and to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. The 1973 abortion-rights decision not only struck many conservatives as an affront their religious values, but to the principle of judicial restraint. To wage what would be a decades-long fight to reverse the activist decisions of the court from 1950s to the 1970s, they needed young legal minds like Barrett’s.

The plan worked better than they could have hoped. Now a judge on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett is the leading contender for President Donald Trump’s nomination to replace Ginsburg on the court. Her ascension would be a coup for Catholic culture warriors 25 years in the making and a high point in the right’s decades-long project of reshaping the judiciary.

“She was kind of the Manchurian candidate,” said one former colleague at Notre Dame Law School. “She’s been groomed for this moment all the way along.”

…

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/20/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-419219

The Neo-Confederates, ‘Originalists’/’Textualists’ made a tactical mistake with Robert Bork, who looked like he stepped out of pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not to speak of his part in Watergate:’

Barrett’s self-presentation is about the creation of an ‘Image‘, that resonates with the viewer: a quiet, reasoned self-confidence, assumed by the viewer, and constantly repeated by her political allies, in the hearing room. Jurisprudential excellence is her metier, this is about a well practiced, adroit Public Relations campaign. Barrett is an accomplished political/civic actor, she has stage presence.

Amy Coney Barrett seems an adroit practitioner, of a highly truncated rhetoric of ‘Originalism’/’Textualism’ . She is poised , confident, charming and thought to be a judge of the first rank. Who will not let her religious beliefs intrude into her judicial decision making. Thomas B. Griffith assure his readers of this.

Headline: Amy Coney Barrett’s Religion Won’t Dictate Her Rulings

Sub-headline: A person of faith can be an impartial judge.

…

Let me start with my own experience as a person of faith who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 15 years. During those years, I gave dozens of talks at law schools, colleges and universities. The biographical introduction that typically preceded my remarks unavoidably announced my religious commitments. Before becoming a judge, I had been the general counsel of a prominent religious university, published on religious themes, and even taught courses in scriptural studies and theology.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-12/amy-coney-barrett-s-religion-won-t-dictate-her-rulings?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=view&sref=bfOwbK4O

American Skeptic

That the hallowed ‘Free Market’ created Monsters is a surprise to Mr. Ferguson? He uses ‘We’ as his distopian descriptor , while ‘The Yawning Heights’ is more apt. As usual he rambles and furnishes a maladroit, or wan apologetic? for the business partnership of ‘Joe Baden & Son’ that ends here:

‘I am even open to the theory that the whole story is bunk, the emails fake, and the laptop and its hard-drive an infowars gift from Russia, with love.’

Mr. Ferguson in New Cold Warrior drag, framed by hysterical Anti-Russian political cliche. Its way past time to deem the Internet a Public Utility and place these ‘providers‘ under strict State Control, in the name of Free Speech via The Bill of Rights and The Constitution. Oh, the screeching and gnashing of teeth! of the Free Marketeers, who are, at this point in political time, resemble, in every way, the callabos of these Internet Oligarchs.

With ‘Reform Republican’, Josh Hawley, leading the way for prompt Senate Hearings. This, a plan of self-rescue, in light of the inability of the ‘Political Class’ to pass another economic aid bill, in the face of a ever approaching political/economic collapse? With Election day mere weeks away, what better way to demonstrate a simulacrum of political resolve?

Old Socialist

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-18/facebook-twitter-google-can-t-be-good-censors-of-politics?sref=bfOwbK4O

Chris Hedges:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LO_wqI_YCE&t=3s

Noam Chomsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdFTe3OjdGg

StephenKMackSD

StephenKMackSD

Micklethwait & Wooldridge (M&W) begin their essay with Ambrogio Lorenzetti fresco of 1339, ‘The Allegory of Good and Bad Government’. What can two Oxford grads offer but the most highfalutin historical reference, yet obscure enough to evoke a kind of awe, in the thought of the reader? In sum, it is an allegory on ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Government. In their telling, political scientist Samuel Lubell enters their melodrama, and he postulates that there are two Parties , the party of ‘the sun of the sun’ which creates the light and heat, and a “party of the moon,” which ‘shines in the reflected radiance of the heat thus generated’.

In this paragraph M&W apply their borrowed frame to British/American political history:

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the right has been the “party of the sun” in the United States and Britain. Now it is in danger of becoming the party of the moon unless it radically overhauls both its personnel and its ideas. Certainly, it has ended up on the bad-government side of Lorenzetti’s fresco.

M&W present to the reader with this characterization of ‘Left’ governance since 1979:

Since 1979, the left has managed to install only four people in the White House or Downing Street — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on one side of the Atlantic, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on the other (and the latter never won an election). The right has established a clear advantage in two things — practical competence and intellectual dynamism.

This parade of ‘Leftists’: ‘Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on one side of the Atlantic, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown‘. What significance might the reader attach to M&W’s proclamation of Conservatism’s ‘practical competence and intellectual dynamism’ ? E.g. The Depression of 2008? What do all these ‘Left’ politicians have in common? Both The New Democrats, Clinton and Obama, and New Labour Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are Neo-Liberal just like Reagan and Thatcher.

In an American political context the reader need only look at Obama’s praise, not of FDR, but of Reagan.

“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.

“He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into — he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

…

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html

A further long quote from M&W is revelatory:

…

The first is a traditional advantage of conservatism. Both Republicans and the Tories have based their electoral appeal on the idea that they will do a better job of looking after your money and protecting your country than the other guys. Vote for the left if you want to build castles in the air. But if you’re more interested in preserving the value of your house and keeping criminals off the streets, then vote for the right.

…

Not content with just the above M&W continue their unstinting praise for ‘Conservatism’ in all its attachments to demonstrably failed policies- in an American context look at the Neo-Liberal Clinton’s and Welfare Reform, Crime Bill, and the catastrophic repeal of Glass-Stegall! M&W praise ‘Conservatism’ yet its attachment to intellectuals like Milton Freedman and James Q. Wilson are part of an alliance of Conservatives, with the equally toxic Neo-Liberalism: that demands a strong state to protect the hallowed Free Market. This utterly antithetical to Reagan’s battle cry of ‘government is the problem’! Or Mrs. Thatcher passing out ‘Road to Serfdom’ as if it were a party favor. Not to forget the most politically exploitable ‘Leftists’, and their attachment to a corrosive Anti-Capitalism!

…

However, the right has also been more dynamic, generating the intellectual light that the moon can do no more than reflect. Since 1979, modern conservatism has produced nearly all the important ideas that have changed the political universe, from privatization to welfare reform to “broken windows” crime policy. These ideas may sound obvious today, but they were widely regarded as “crazy” when they were first floated in the work of maverick intellectuals, such as Milton Friedman in economics and James Q. Wilson in social policy. Indeed, those ideas became so mainstream that they changed the left, too. Clinton and Blair, the two most successful left-leaning politicians of the past 40 years, were often accused of being conservatives. Clinton balanced the budget and reformed welfare. Blair gave his party a new name, New Labour, and abandoned the dream, laid out in Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution, of nationalizing the means of production.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-11/john-micklethwait-and-adrian-wooldridge-on-the-crisis-of-conservatism?sref=bfOwbK4O

The real problem with ‘Conservatism’ is that in America, its titular head is a TV Game Show Host, Donald Trump , whose political precursor was the Tea Party, that devoured itself in a permanent revolution, and found Trump’s ‘Brand’ very easy to embrace with a kind of fervor. With the rank and file and office holders eventually acceding to his power. And in Britain Boris Johnson, a political Know Nothing, yet he managed to accomplish Brexit, yet still maintains his status as political buffoon.

Old Socialist