StephenKMackSD's Blog

While Neo-Liberalism is still in its seemingly endless state of collapse, exacerbated by Covid-19, this newspaper continues to quote the Think Tank dullards, who sold this Utopia as the ‘Radiant Future’, to borrow from Zinoviev!
The combat between Johnson & Macron, over the vexing question of fishing rights, takes up valuable newspaper space, as the in order too of what? Here are some answers!

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Headline: Why is France’s new national security bill controversial?

Thousands of protesters gathered at demonstrations across France on Saturday to protest a controversial new bill that would ban police images and increase surveillance.

The legislation, which is pending in France’s parliament, intends to protect police officers from online calls for violence, according to the government.

What does Article 24 stipulate?

The new article would amend current legislation to make it an offence to show the face or identity of any officer on duty “with the aim of damaging their physical or psychological integrity”.

The offence would carry a prison sentence of up to one year and a maximum fine of €45,000.

The amendment to France’s global security legislation was proposed in October by President Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! party and its ally, Agir.

…

https://www.euronews.com/2020/11/28/why-is-france-s-new-national-security-bill-controversial

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Headline: Thousands protest in France against new security bill

Sub-headline: Anger against bill, which would make it illegal to share footage of on-duty police, fanned by video of Black man being beaten by cops.

Thousands of protestors hit the streets of France Saturday to demonstrate against a controversial draft security law that would criminalize sharing images of police officers if done for “malicious purposes.”

In Paris, 46,000 people gathered against the bill, according to the interior ministry. Police fired tear gas and stun grenades as some protesters lit fires and hurled rocks and fireworks at the security forces during an otherwise peaceful march.

Protesters also demonstrated in other French cities, such as Lille, Rennes and Strasbourg.

Many were also demonstrating against police violence, after the brutal treatment of Black music producer Michel Zecler at the hands of the police last weekend.

The focus of much of the anger on Saturday, fanned by the violent beating of Zecler caught on video, is the law’s 24th article, which says that those who distribute either video footage or photographic images of on-duty police officers with the intention of causing them harm could face prison sentences and fines.

A wide range of critics across French society say the controversial new security bill will curb press freedom, but President Emmanuel Macron and his Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin have pushed ahead with it nonetheless, hoping it would cast them as tough defenders of the French police, and law and order.

After the bill was passed by the lower chamber of the French parliament earlier this week (senators are yet to scrutinize the bill), Prime Minister Jean Castex said an independent committee would revisit the contentious article. However, Castex was forced into an embarrassing U-turn on the scope of the committee Friday, after a backlash from MPs and senators.

On Friday, Macron condemned the treatment of Zecler. “The images we all saw of the beating of Michel Zecler are unacceptable. They shame us,” the French president said in a statement posted on Facebook and Twitter. 

Saturday’s protests were attended by a mix of journalists, civil liberties activists, and Yellow Jacket protesters, Reuters reported.

…

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-protests-security-bill-police-violence/

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Headline: Protest Against Macron’s Security Law Turns Violent In Paris

Violence erupted in Paris on Saturday during a march against a controversial new security legislation that would ban the publication of images of police officers with intent to cause them harm.

Turmoil erupted at about 4 p.m. local time on Saturday during the march, which was near the Bastille square where as many as 46,000 people gathered. Some protesters dressed in black — a regular fixture in France in recent years — overturned a van on a street leading to the square, while others used steel pedestrian barriers as shields against the police, AFP reported.

A brasserie and a newspaper kiosk on the square were set alight, the city’s police tweeted. Meanwhile at least 37 police officers were wounded, according to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who condemned the violence in a tweet.

Activists and journalists are concerned the “global security law” will allow police violence to continue unchecked at a time of growing calls for more oversight. Anger has been heightened by videos that showed police using unwarranted force against a black man and migrants on two separate occasions this past week.

President Emmanuel Macron, whose party pushed for the legislation to help protect the police as the government presses on with its promise to improve security and crack down on crime, said the police brutality videos “shame us,” and condemned violence both by and against officers, in comments posted on Facebook and Twitter on Friday evening.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-28/macron-under-pressure-as-thousands-expected-to-protest-new-law?sref=bfOwbK4O

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All these news stories are from late November! In sum, the Rebellion against Macron gathers strength for his ‘Jupertarian Security Law’. Should the reader look to ‘Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory’ by Jim House and Neil MacMaster as a brutal object lesson, of the power of a Leader and his Police?

Checked the front pages of this newspaper since Nov. 28, 2020 and no report on the demonstrations in France, quelle surprise!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/e0f0d580-77e5-4a9b-8839-20fb80277231

BRITAIN AND EUROPE IN A TROUBLED WORLD 

176pp. Yale University Press. £16.99 (US $25). 

Vernon Bogdanor 

RELUCTANT EUROPEAN 

Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit 
352pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $35). 

Stephen Wall 

In this long paragraph Mr. Evens quotes Bogdanor’s argument about the opposition of ‘provincial England’ to the EU, but in his explanation of Bogdanor’s ‘oversimplification’ Evans resorts to a carefully homogenized version of the uneducated lower orders verses the educated elites. But the fact that the uneducated lower order cast ballots, unlike those of the elite minimal turnout, according Evans’ statistical data.

…

‘Added to the question of immigration as an impulse behind the growing support for Brexit was the economic crisis in 2008, which, Bogdanor argues, had its most significant impact on “the disadvantaged and insecure, the victims of social and economic change, who were alienated from the banking and financial establishment”. This provoked a “grass-roots insurgency in provincial England which led to Brexit”. The vote for Brexit was a vote against the elites by people who felt ignored by them. But this diagnosis, though not wholly wrong, is a considerable oversimplification. To begin with, the strongest correlation with support for Brexit was education. Seventy per cent of voters whose education stopped at GCSE level voted Leave; of voters with a university degree, only 32 per cent supported Leave. This dovetailed neatly with voting patterns by age. Seventy-one per cent of voters under twenty-five supported Remain; of voters over the age of sixty-five, only 36 per cent supported Remain. This reflected not least the fact that up to the early 1970s under 10 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds were or had been in higher education, while by 2011/12 the rate had risen to nearly 50 per cent (for eighteen- to thirty-year-olds). In other words, the older you were in 2016, the less likely you were to have a degree and the more likely you were to vote Leave. How you interpret this is a matter of preference: the ignorant against the informed, or the masses against an arrogant and uncaring elite, or the nostalgic against the forward-looking? The final statistic to throw into the mix is voter turnout. Sixty-four per cent of registered voters aged eighteen to twenty-four exercised their right to cast a ballot paper, but among those aged sixty-five and over, the turnout was 90 per cent. This relative reluctance of the young to go to the polls was a material influence in swinging the outcome in favour of Brexit.’

…

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/european-union-brexit-book-review/

For the case against The E.U., in a shortened, but evocatively polemical form, read Bernard Connolly’s introduction to the 2012 edition of his The Rotten Heart of Europe. This is a link to the Kindle edition of Connolly’s book, that makes available to the reader, the whole of that invaluable introduction.

Old Socialist

The reader can look to Mr. Ganesh’s essay of November 27, 2020 for his latest rhetorical strategy:

Headline: What the dream hoarders get wrong about parenting

Sub-headline: The rich screen their children from the hardships that form genius

https://www.ft.com/content/b3b92ba4-f6e7-4fd1-bc61-6a73272e8b49

It’s Matthew Parris’, Fracture , assisted by Richard Reeves’ “dream-hoarders” that provides the rhetorical frame for this essay. In Ganesh’s essay, it’s acts as a kind of maladroit apologetic riff on The Hillbilly Elegy, and the author who evolved, out of his experience of deprivation, into a ‘Conservative Without Conscious, to borrow from John Dean.

In a 19th Century American context, Mr. Ganesh could have looked at ‘The Jameses: A Family Narrative’ By R. W. B. Lewis, for the story of privilidge, and the fact that two of America’s greatest writers/thinkers, alcoholics, and a neurasthenic all come from privilidge.

If the outcome were a super-caste of dazzling people, honed generation to generation, the inequity of it all might be pardoned. Society would profit from their governmental skill and artistic flair, as per the Bloomsbury dream. But with exceptions, the outcome is more often an innocuous sort of rich kid. Learned but unoriginal, diligent but not consumed with ambition, successful without ever troubling the historians: having known none growing up, I have not been able to move for them in 15 years. The British ones have the manners to feign guilt but they are much of a muchness everywhere.

Mr. Ganesh rambles on in his idiosyncratic way, that ends in two paragraphs of the pseudo-prescriptive, that is if I’m reading it correctly?

But if a seething work ethic can make the most out of one’s talent, it does not account for the talent itself. A subtler theory is that distress makes an outsider of its victim. And it is there, in the wound-licking margins, where the world is perceived from a slight angle, that originality stirs. Parris is good on gay greats, though he might have made more of the young Keynes.

Such is the self-reinforcing nature of privilege, the next batch of dream-hoarders will be all but untouchable. Averting the ossification of this sect would entail state action of unpopular and perhaps even unethical invasiveness. Their appeals to nature (“I’d go to the wall for my boy!”) will always win out. The one case for an over-class is that its brilliance helps us all as a benign externality. Growing up, I assumed that was the deal. But I got to know them.

In his essay of December 1, 2020 Mr. Ganesh appropriates a rhetorical framing provided by Peter Turchin and his ‘elite overproduction’ . Note that the faming is couched in economic terms. Would ‘overcrowded specializations’ been a more appropriate concept? Or is his framing about propping up the faltering Neo-Liberalism?

Headline: The real class war is within the rich

Sub-headline: An academic blames ‘elite overproduction’ for political turmoil in the west

https://www.ft.com/content/0bf03db8-c61b-4222-8c76-4fb23988ec13

The reader experiences deja vous! Its as if Mr. Ganesh is in thrall to The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Who preach against a tenth percentile of upper-class college students, who are politically/morally toxic. Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 into early 2012. Should the reader look to this moment, as the ‘trigger’ , that led to these two creatures of the political establishment, in sum ‘political centrists‘, Neo-Liberals/New Democrats to write the latest expression of anti-student hysteria.

It is appropriate that Mr. Ganesh should refer to the Éminence grise of Anti-Student Hysteria Allan Bloom, adding rhetorical distance in his attribution to the ‘populist right’. And ‘woke culture’ as the province of the malign ‘underemployed humanities graduates’ Look to Saul Bellow’s ‘Ravelstein’ for a portrait of ‘the prof’ spending hours on the phone advising, counseling his acolytes.

Nor does the theory exhaust its usefulness with the populist right. What is woke culture if not the howl of a generation of underemployed humanities graduates? Since Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the right has deplored the substance of what the young are taught. “Critical theory” and the politicisation of the west’s literary canon cause particular anguish.

Mr. Ganesh’s question brings into focus another enemy of the virtuous centrist political moment ‘postmodern theories’ Yet he misses that other enemy, the toxic Neo-Marxism of The Critical Theory of Adorno/Horkheimer!

 If postmodern theories vanished from campus, would this surplus of frustrated graduates really just go about their lives as room-temperature liberals?

The next paragraph explains the exalted status status of Super-Technocrat Prof. Turchin, and his “Cliodynamics,”, and a revelatory comment of the real actors of the French Revolution: not the most impoverished, but those ‘those several tiers above’.

Prof Turchin is a member of no fewer than three departments at the University of Connecticut. “Cliodynamics,” his polymathic effort to give the study of history some of science’s quantitative rigour, is prone to over-reach. But one need not ride with him all the way to see that his core insight, the narcissism of small differences, recurs over time and space. It was not the most impoverished people in France who overturned the ancien régime. It was those several tiers above, held back by class rigidities from the pursuit of their happiness.

Mr. Ganesh equivocates on Prof. Turchin’s “Cliodynamics,”: ‘But one need not ride with him all the way to see that his core insight,…’ It has fulfilled it rhetorical purpose as a highfaluting frame. Or should it be more carefully considered as mere political décor?

And Hillbilly Elegy does garner a mention:

If their movement unites the not-quite-elite and the Hillbilly Elegy classes, no governing programme can serve them both. 

Mr. Ganesh polemic ends, with his specialty, an extemporizing on a politically clotted Sunday Supplement Kitsch:

The past four years have underscored the quandary. Had Mr. Trump governed as an economic populist, taxing the rich to build infrastructure, he might have won a second term. But he would also have forfeited the Fox News anchors, the lavish donors, the high-income voters: people who liked him because he scandalized those slightly above them in the US prestige league. They are not the same as those who voted for him as deliverance from real hardship. Formal government exposes the incoherence of the populists. Their recourse, says Prof Turchin, lest we relax, might be the politics of the street.

Could that ‘politics of the street’ be a rebirth and reimagination of Occupy Wall Street?

Old Socialist

Headline: Machine guns and a hit squad: the killing of Iran’s nuclear mastermind

Assassination set to escalate tensions as US president-elect Joe Biden keen to restart nuclear talks

https://www.ft.com/content/a2fade69-f-9fd3-1641ae1fddb13b03-4d0

Note that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is named as the sinister, in fact evil ‘nuclear mastermind’

My comments:

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How soon will the comments section get too pointed, so that the editors close down the comments section, of the reworked Mossad propaganda from yesterday? When the going gets tough…

Headline: Iran’s nuclear mastermind ‘assassinated’

Sub-headline: Officials in Tehran suggest Israel involvement in killing that escalates tensions with US

 https://www.ft.com/content/e1bf7e03-b760-4494-b7b2-4e26514a83cd

What if an American Scientist was murdered inside America? What would be the punishment for the responsible party, who hired thugs to do their dirty work?
StephenKMackSD

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In reply to Koln

Do better!!! I’m in America not in Tehran, and I have voiced my opinion, just like you have! Iran threw off the yoke of Imperial Oppressors.  A coup conducted by BP and Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA removed the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and put the Shah, and his secret police in power: this was the incubator of the mullah’s that you now inveigh against.
The Iranians come by Anti-Americanism and Anti-Britainism  via the route of the machinations of the American National Security State and British Petroleum to deny the sovereignty of a state because Mossadegh said he would Nationalize Iranian Oil.
‘The West’ is the object of Iranian rage for very good reasons as I have mentioned.
The final question in my post still stands unanswered. Because the answer is clear!

Thank you for your comment.
Regards,
StephenKMackSD 

https://www.ft.com/content/a2fade69-f-9fd3-1641ae1fddb13b03-4d0   

    

Headline: The Tories must mobilise soon in the culture wars, or they may find themselves outflanked

Mr. Colvile’s opening paragraphs is a tale of victimhood, once in the reactionay imagination the province of ‘The Left’.

Last week the journalist Suzanne Moore wrote a lengthy, powerful essay about leaving The Guardian. She described how 338 of her colleagues complained about the paper’s “pattern of transphobic content” — a reference to a column in which she supported the idea that sex is innate and biological. She wrote of receiving “death and rape threats for me and my children”, after being judged by “an invisible committee on social media”.

The Moore saga is the latest episode in Britain’s culture war, which had already turned JK Rowling into an online pariah for expressing similar sentiments. Yet for something so central to our politics, the culture war is surprisingly ill-defined.

The evolution of Colvile’s argument reads as shopworn, as it has been endlessly repeated, the reader need only look to the eminence grise of Alan Bloom, and his ‘The Closing of The American Mind’ and its successors in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This in an American context, yet Bloom acolytes are the expression of his less than ardent cosmopolitanism, allied to his self-assigned status of Platonic Guardian. Which leads to a kind of political intoxication. Look to the rise of the moralizing charlatan Jorden Peterson and Andrew Sullivan as the legatees of Bloom’s Anti-Student polemic.

Much of the discussion of the culture war, especially on the left, starts with Brexit. Yet for Tories this conflict had a much longer gestation. What started as “political correctness” has mutated into an ideology that has captured not just the left but much of the ruling elite.

At the heart of this world of “safe spaces”, “cancel culture”, “no-platforming”, “cultural appropriation” and “critical race theory” is a world-view built on grievance, which argues not just that western societies were founded on slavery, imperialism and discrimination, but that they remain defined by them.

This American reader can’t shake his feeling of deja vu , of having read this before, authored by Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher or any number of New York Times scribblers, who act the role of generic apologists for the political present. I think what Colvile misses, in the above paragraphs, is what so many have found to be a politically potent target , which is Critical Theory itself, and it’s sorcerer , in the Conservative Imagination, Theodor W. Adorno. A book recommendation for Mr. Colvile:

Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius 

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057135

Mr. Colvile presents the Tory position on the ‘Cultural Apostates‘:

Hostility to “woke” ideology — so called because its adherents believe only they have awoken to the dark truths of our society — has duly become one of the binding agents of the Tory coalition. Not least because it is viewed as an existential threat, with the left waging a long-term and alarmingly successful campaign to render Toryism illegitimate. There is particular vitriol aimed at perceived traitors such as Priti Patel and Sajid Javid, for combining brown skin with blue rosettes.

Mr. Colvile turns to the descriptive and then to the prescriptive. His political admixtures are rife with political malapropisms, bordering on caricature, or something like mendacity?

…

Many Tories feel that if the government leads the charge in the war on woke, it will take the majority with it — and force Labour to ally itself with the defunders of the police and topplers of statues.

…

There is also the problem of finding convincing messengers, given that the people most likely to fulminate online about critical race theory also tend to refer to masks as “muzzles” and tweet about “Adolf Johnson” plotting to end British liberty.

…

Mr. Colvile’s political propinquity with Johnson is demonstrated in the last two paragraphs of his essay:

This plan reflects the prime minister’s character. For Johnson there is no contradiction between backing gay marriage and backing Brexit. He is instinctively liberal, in the old-fashioned British sense: he believes everyone should be free to live as they wish, but that this should include not getting death and rape threats for saying things others disagree with.

Johnson’s government is fighting on many fronts, but this is arguably one of the most important for his party. For if the prime minister cannot articulate and defend a liberal vision of Britain, it will become that much harder to defend a Conservative one.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-tories-must-mobilise-soon-in-the-culture-wars-or-they-may-find-themselves-outflanked-q7mkth7gn

Queer Atheist

Alexander Douglas reviews two books, that led me to some thoughts and considerations.

  
Adam Smith  
Systematic philosopher and public thinker 
Sympathy not selfishness  
By Eric Schliesser 
 
The Infidel and The Professor  
David Hume, Adam Smith, and the friendship that shaped modern thought 
By Dennis Rasmussen 

Just reading this first paragraph I could only think of Amartya Sen’s introduction to the 250th Anniversary edition of ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’. Google Books has made available a 48 page preview, that makes Sen’s revelatory introductory essay accessible. Mr. Douglas reduction of Smith to the level of ‘mascot’ is dismissive, not to speak of degrading !  

Adam Smith has achieved his greatest fame neither as an economist nor as a moral philosopher but rather as a mascot. His name and image symbolize a single thought: that individuals considering only their own advantage can bring about a result that benefits others. Selfish actions can have, in fact, the consequences that unselfish actions have in intention. Smith has also widely been taken to have justified free-market liberalism with that thought. 

Douglas opines, sometimes thoughtfully, and at other times, within the same paragraph, he lapses into flaccid ideology, or something resembling that rhetorical creature:  

Schliesser argues that Smith’s thought amounts to a coherent system of “anthropic philosophy”: a comprehensive understanding of human life and all its social possibilities. In doing this, Schliesser seeks to renew the intellectual foundations of modern liberalism. Both projects require a proper appraisal of Smith, going well beyond the famous bromide about selfish actions having happy consequences. 

… 

As Mark Blaug once noted, “the prejudice that every action motivated by private gain must be antisocial by virtue of this fact alone was widely current in the 18th century”. Those who held this prejudice presumably believed that too few of the games we play in society are positive-sum for us to expect many social benefits to arise from individual self-interest. Smith’s claim was that, on the contrary, our social life is full of positive-sum games, or at least can be with the help of some institutional reform. Proving this involves a detailed moral psychology and an analysis of our social institutions. These are mostly found in his 1759 treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his much more famous work of 1776 on political economy, Wealth of Nations. Schliesser also finds a great deal of insight in Smith’s lesser-known early and unpublished works. 

… 

On the question of ‘Modern Liberalism’ it seems to have been answered, at least in part, by Liberalism : A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo. It reads like a well deserved indictment! 

Douglas then moves from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘The Impartial Spectator’, and a telling quote from H. L. Menken couched in moral cynicism, that riffs on the notion that God sees and knows every human action, as in Johnathan Edwards hysterical Protestantism.  

Sympathy is also interestingly reflexive in Smith’s theory. As we observe someone and project ourselves into her situation, she also projects herself into her spectators, imagining what it would be like to observe herself from the outside and then feeling what she would feel in this case. From this root the tree of morality grows. Our natural projection into the imagined vision of an “impartial spectator” develops into moral conscience, which Smith calls “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct”. But for all Smith’s lofty rhetoric, he isn’t far off H. L. Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice that warns us somebody may be watching”. 

See D.D. Raphael’s ‘The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy’ for a more concise and reasoned explanation of what that ‘Impartial Spectator’ might actually be!  

Mr. Douglas rambles on at some length about The Wealth of Nations, and its impact on thought and action, since its publication. It could be argued that Smith once looked upon the rise of Capitalism as emancipatory, the poor no longer tied to a Landed Gentry, or long apprenticeships, but could strike out on their own to earn a living. ‘Wealth’ has been the ur text of the Neo-Liberals and their Trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman, and other apologists for the excesses of institutionalized Capitalist Greed. 

Smith embraced ,within his writing, the two seemingly antithetical worlds of Capital and Morality. The Legacy of Smith awaits its successor. Perhaps Piketty will write such a volume?

Old Socialist  

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/adam-smith-less-famous-achievements/

‘You’ quote two members, in good standing, of The American National Security State. Brennan is a notorious liar, not speak of a maladroit practitioner of subterfuge: he is an incompetent liar and propagandist!

The significance of the latest killing is contested. “It no doubt undermines morale and might temporarily disrupt whatever projects Fakhrizadeh might have been working on,” says Eric Brewer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, and a former director for counter-proliferation on America’s National Security Council.

John Brennan, head of the CIA in 2013-17, says that Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was a “criminal…act of state-sponsored terrorism” which would risk “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict”.

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/11/27/the-father-of-irans-nuclear-programme-is-assassinated?utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_source=twitter

StephenKMackSD

Katrina Manson opens her essay with Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She is part of  ‘A global team of respected professionals’ at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, D.C.

https://www.albrightstonebridge.com/

Mr. Biden can respect a fellow self-promoter! Joe Biden & Son is a Corporation with a Vision for the Future!

After Thomas-Greenfield makes her appearance garnished with home-style kitsch, comes the appearance of ‘a senior Republican congressional aide’. Nothing adds to the piquancy of a political commentary like an anonymous source.

Next in order of appearance is part of a tweet from ‘Marco Rubio, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee’

Then Joe Biden’s appearance on NBC pronouncing that a Biden Administration is not an ‘Obama Third Term’.

The utterly amorphous ‘Some in the US foreign policy establishment’ makes its formulaic appearance. This rhetorical strategy makes possible the opinions of a ‘reporter’ – it adds a necessary strategic distance from the writer.

The next ‘walk -on’ is ‘Washington foreign policy veteran Tony Blinken’ For the particulars on Blinken. see America’s Political Gossip Sheet Politico:

https://www.politico.eu/article/nine-things-to-think-about-antony-blinken/

Blinken is a partisan of The American Empire, and its ‘Middle East’ ally of the Zionist State. ‘talked of a need for “equal measures of humility and confidence” on the world stage while also praising America’s history as the “last best hope on earth”.

More walk-ons:

Jake Sullivan: Mr Biden’s pick for national security adviser, pledged to be “vigilant in the face of enduring threats, from nuclear weapons to terrorism”.

Karim Sadjadpour, a foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador now at the Council on Foreign Relations,

Charles Kupchan, an informal Biden adviser during the campaign

Andrew Bacevich the last and most valuable comment, to be quoted in this essay, not a member, but a dissident to this collection of Foreign Policy Technocrats: who express a full, but chastened faith in the Manifest Destiny writ large of the American Empire.

“The notion that we are called upon to be the world’s moral leader is presumptuous,” said Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a non-partisan think-tank that advocates for greater restraint in US foreign policy.

https://www.ft.com/content/7b687a78-109c-416e-9795-793bb017f964

Note that the Foreign Policy Technocrats are afflicted with a sclerotic conformity. How could a possible critic, of American Exceptionalism, rise from within that academic lock-step? All those who might supervise a dissertation, that takes a critical stance to the myth of American Exceptionalism – where might they be?

The most prominent critics of that ‘Exceptionalism’ are Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald,  Chris Hedges, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté etc. None of these writers/thinkers are members of that Foreign Policy Establishment, which is what makes them so utterly valuable, as critics of this toxic mythology!

Old Socialist

  

Should the reader look to Robert Colvile’s essay in The Sunday Times of November 22, 2020, for his answer to the conundrums enunciated by Mr. Sunak, and reported upon here at The Financial Times ? The headline gives the game away:

Headline: In case no one has told you yet, debt’s piling up and there’s only one way out — growth


The headlines could have been from parallel dimensions. One day the prime minister was announcing the biggest boost to the defence budget in decades. The next, the Treasury was reported to be preparing a public-sector pay freeze amid record borrowing figures and a national debt topping £2 trillion.

This hairpin turn from boom to bust doesn’t just suggest schizophrenic media management. It reflects the fact that despite the ejection of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, the government is still deeply divided over the fundamental issue of how much we can afford to spend.

During the pandemic, the government has spent and borrowed at extraordinary levels. Billions upon billions have been ploughed into furlough, test and trace, the desperate trolley dash for PPE and all the rest of it. It will surpass the 2018-19 budget for NHS England three times over.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-case-no-one-has-told-you-yet-debts-piling-up-and-theres-only-one-way-out-growth-prllcwpmx

Its ‘as if’ the ghosts of Hayek and Thatcher have conspired to inhabit Mr. Colvile, in tandem, producing the tinny echo of Neo-Liberalism’s collapsed Utopianism. 

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/8250fec7-0581-477e-a525-bc2ab2dd5a11

Bagehot ( Adrian Wooldridge) in his November 21, 2020 essay at The Economist:

Headline : In search of a modern Machiavell

Sub-headline: The ideal political adviser is hard to find

After some preliminary commentary on Johnson’s advisers, their costs and their ‘bromides’ Bagehot offers this advice to Downing Street ,not to Boris Johnson.

But a better way would be to read a few books. Start with Machiavelli’s “The Prince”—the first book on politics to describe men as they are, warts and all, rather than as moralists would like them to be, and a wonderful source of eternal insights. Then imitate Machiavelli’s method and “step inside the courts” of previous leaders by reading lots of history.

According to Bagehot, the vital part of the success of a politician is her/his chief advisor, names ‘James Baker, chief of staff to both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush’,  ‘Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff’.

But Bagehot’s political ignorance or mendacity gets in his way with this: ‘Patrick Moynihan brought out the best in Richard Nixon.’ Moynihan provided the political twin of the Southern Strategy, un-mentioned by Bagehot.

The complete text of Moynihan’s “benign neglect” memo was printed in the New York Times in January 1970. Particular sections of this explosive document bear reproducing:

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You are familiar with the problem of crime. Let me draw your attention to another phenomenon, exactly parallel and originating in exactly the same social circumstances: Fire. Unless I mistake the trends, we are heading for a genuinely serious fire problem in American cities. In New York, for example, between 1956 and 1969 the over-all fire-alarm rate more than tripled from 69,000 alarms to 240,000. These alarms are concentrated in slum neighborhoods, primarily black. In 1968, one slum area had an alarm rate per square mile 13 times that of the city as a whole. In another, the number of alarms has, on an average, increased 44 per cent per year for seven years.

Many of these fires are the result of population density. But a great many are more or less deliberately set. (Thus, on Monday, welfare protectors set two fires in the New York State Capitol.) Fires are in fact a “leading indicator” of social pathology for a neighborhood. They come first. Crime, and the rest, follows. The psychiatric interpretation of fire-setting is complex, but it relates to the types of personalities which slums produce. (A point of possible interest: Fires in the black slums peak in July and August. The urban riots of 1964-1968 could be thought of as epidemic conditions of an endemic situation.) . . .

The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of “benign neglect.”The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. The Administration can help bring this about by paying close attention to such progress — as we are doing-while seeking to avoid situations in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom, heroics, histrionics, or whatever, Greater attention to Indians, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans would be useful.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3145-benign-neglect-and-planned-shrinkage  

How could Bagehot have so missed the mark? Undaunted Bagehot continues his testament to ‘adult supervision’ in first term of Clinton by David Gergen. The 1996 best seller Primary Colors by Anonymous could not have been stopped, by even a master of ‘supervision’ like Gergen? Here is a link to an insightful review by Alexander Cockburn. He was on the campaign with the Clintons.

What follows is a two paragraph testament to the value that the ‘modern Machiavelli’ can offer. It is the two most interesting paragraphs of the whole of his essay, although, at times, couched in the vocabulary of such current political catch phrases as ‘when to play nice‘.

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The modern Machiavelli has to be willing to prick ideological bubbles. There is nothing more dangerous for an organisation than self-congratulatory groupthink. Advisers need to be well versed in past mistakes so that they can probe their bosses’ ideas and plans for weaknesses before rivals or reality expose those flaws. At the same time, whenever hubris turns to despair, as it so often does in politics, they need to be able to put the babble of daily headlines into perspective. Machiavelli’s injunction that both princes and advisers should study history and “note the actions of great men” is even more germane today, when too many politicians study economics or, even worse, management science.

The ideal adviser needs to know when to pick fights and when to play nice. Machiavelli was right that change is dangerous because “he who innovates will have as his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new”. But too many Tories have come to believe that, because you can’t make progress without making enemies, the mere existence of enemies is a sign that you’re making progress. Demonising the establishment as a reactionary blob is less effective than co-opting its members by appealing to a mixture of their ambition and their better natures. Not all of the government’s ideas for universities, the civil service and the bbc are daft, and a little digging reveals that many insiders agree with some of them.

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https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-modern-machiavelli

Bagehot offers this to ‘Advisors’ :

 Advisers need to help their bosses build coalitions across the political nation, supping not just with journalists, mps and civil servants but also with city mayors, who rightly feel slighted by the London-focused political system.

On the Rubber levers of power:

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Finally, successful advisers also need to roam beyond Downing Street. One of the commonest complaints of prime ministers is that they grasp the levers of power only to discover that they are made of rubber:

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Note that this attempts to offer an explanation of the self-interested manipulation of ‘the rubber levers of power’: the Grand Game as described by an Oxbridger, who is in search of a rhetorical formula, to impress his readers, that he has grasped the essentials, of the care and maintenance of that power. What is left out of Bagehot’s list of imperatives, is the power that a Leader can exert, via the expressed will of his followers to influence, pressure, demand political action, from the lower orders of that political system. Bagehot is the natural inheritor of an Economist tradition, whose self-presentation is that of the inherent virtue of a class of men, educated and convinced of their natural affinity for the management of that power.

Boris Johnson plays a minor role in Bagehot’s self-congratulatory polemic, as an object of scorn.

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But none of his fine words about the green industrial revolution will mean a fig unless he can find a modern Machiavelli strong enough to drive policy forward and self-effacing enough to devote himself to the greater glorification of King Boris.

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Political Observer