Mr. Frum, in this political instance, has discarded, for the moment, his pose as Wise Republican Elder, to embrace the garb of the Conspiracy Theorist, embraced by such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, her New Democratic allies, the Corporate News Media and its reporters, editors and its long-winded pundits. Not forgetting Television and the Internet, as the point of confluence of these Media Giants. The reader is confronted with a Frum not seen, or perhaps even remembered, by his current readership?
Mr. Frum was once the man behind the ‘Axis of Evil’ catch phrase that was the cornerstone of the Public Relations sales pitch of Bush The Younger’s ‘War on Terror’ (not to forget Cheney, Rumsfeld and ‘The Architect’ Karl Rove!) That ‘War’ has metastasized into a political cancer, that has rendered the once Republic null and void.
In Frum’s narrative the presidential power of The Pardon, has now been perverted as a tool of Trump’s political nihilism. Yet compare and contrast the pardons of Trump with those of George W. Bush:
Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.
Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.
Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.
In one remaining facet of the inquiry, the independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush. Mr. Walsh has characterized the President’s failure to turn over the diary until now as misconduct.
Decapitated Walsh Efforts
But in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986. Mr. Bush’s decision was announced by the White House in a printed statement after the President left for Camp David, where he will spend the Christmas holiday.
Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that “the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.”
Mr. Walsh directed his heaviest fire at Mr. Bush over the pardon of Mr. Weinberger, whose trial would have given the prosecutor a last chance to explore the role in the affair of senior Reagan officials, including Mr. Bush’s actions as Vice President.
‘Evidence of Conspiracy’
Mr. Walsh hinted that Mr. Bush’s pardon of Mr. Weinberger and the President’s own role in the affair could be related. For the first time, he
charged that Mr. Weinberger’s notes about the secret decision to sell arms to Iran, a central piece of evidence in the case against the former Pentagon chief, included “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
The prosecutor charged that Mr. Weinberger’s efforts to hide his notes may have “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” and formed part of a pattern of “deception and obstruction.” On Dec. 11, Mr. Walsh said he discovered “misconduct” in Mr. Bush’s failure to turn over what the prosecutor said were the President’s own “highly relevant contemporaneous notes, despite repeated requests for such documents.”
The notes, in the form of a campaign diary that Mr. Bush compiled after the elections in November 1986, are in the process of being turned over to Mr. Walsh, who said, “In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.”
In an interview on the “McNeil-Lehrer Newshour” tonight, Mr. Walsh said for the first time that Mr. Bush was a subject of his investigation. The term “subject,” as it has been used by Mr. Walsh’s prosecutors, is broadly defined as someone involved in events under scrutiny, but who falls short of being a target, or a person likely to be charged with a crime. In the inquiry into the entire Iran-contra affair, a number of Government officials have been identified as subjects who were never charged with wrongdoing.
Mr. Frum prides himself on his veracity and political uprightness, yet his essay of December 24, 2020 treats the Mueller Report as ‘Gospel’, even as Frum asks a series of what he considers to be the most pertinent questions.
The Mueller Report can take its place beside The Warren Commission, as a demonstration of the utter failure of the FBI, to do anything but engage in mythmaking fantasies, about its mastery over the forces of lawlessness. Frum acts the part that Edward Jay Epstein played in the defense of the Warren Report : his book ‘Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth’ was an apologetic, that was answered by Mark Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgement’, and signaled the demise of Arlen Specter’s preposterous ‘Magic Bullet Theory’ !
Mueller and Comey resemble characters in a Max Senate comedy, at the wrong shutter speed. Mr. Frum’s attempts to mitigate the mendacity of Trump, via Mueller, whose performance in front of the camera only emphasized that he was just a figurehead, a front man for an investigation, that had/has been eroded by its own incompetence.
Both Clinton and Trump share a delusion: Clinton, that she lost in 2016 because of ‘Russian Interference’ in the election. Trump, that he lost in 2020 due to massive voter fraud, and the destruction of ballots, by poll workers, and other nefarious actors. Note that both of these candidates are ego maniacs on a scale that is hard to imagine for we ordinary mortals. Mr. Frum’s essay helps to explain to his readers…
A collection of Mr. Rachman’s geo-political speculations are instructive:
In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence.
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The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China.
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But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19.
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But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19. And by helping to remove an erratic isolationist from the White House, the pandemic has also given the US a much better chance of preserving its status as the world’s most powerful nation.
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Covid-19 has also taken a terrible human and economic toll in Europe. But, in political terms, the EU followed a similar arc to the US — with near disaster giving way to an unexpected upside.
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These paragraphs act as mere preamble to Mr. Rachman’s manufacture of a weak set of arguments , accomplished by the use of a self-serving history. With its stars, the EU and China, President Xi Jinping, assisted by walk-ons by other minor players, who add dimension to his narrative, at least that is Mr. Rachman’s hope!
Note that China is the Bad Actor in Rachman’s ‘history made to measure’ that is in fact a New Cold War Melodrama. The reader of this ‘essay’ is thought, by Rachman, not to be cognizant, of the flood of Yellow Peril propaganda, that the Corporate Press never tires of printing. These two paragraphs describe the effects of Corporate Media saturation of Yellow Peril propaganda ,and an injudicious speculation of how Chinese Geopolitical Strategists might seek comfort in Western incompetence, in its various iterations: dehumanizing these technocrats is a more sophisticated version of that Yellow Peril toxin.
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This slump in Chinese soft power suggests that people in the countries polled are more impressed by the fact that the virus originated in China, than by Beijing’s subsequent success in stopping its spread. China’s aggressive response to any hint of international criticism — through its so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy — has also probably been counter-productive.
Geopolitical strategists in Beijing may comfort themselves with the thought that, whatever the collateral damage Covid-19 has inflicted on China, the damage to western standing has been worse. But if the US and the EU now roll out vaccine programmes with reasonable speed and efficiency, they will begin to repair some of the economic and reputational damage they have suffered because of their handling of Covid-19.
Rachman’s final thoughts/speculations are more of the same Geostrategic chatter, with Biden as his central actor. Is this essay, in lieu, of the usual Year’s End pundit’s summation of 2020?
A ‘news story’ so damaging to Joe Biden, that Twitter censored the New York Post’s tweets, of their actual news story. Jack Dorsey’s minions vainly tried to ‘kill’ this! Glenn Greenwald offers the sordid details of the censorship, and the fellow travelers. The utterly reactionary Sunday Times finds this worthy of its frontpage, post election, even post Christmas, a sample :
Headline: Spectre of son’s scandal to haunt Joe Biden presidency
‘At the high point of Joe Biden’s presidential election campaign in October, a blockbuster story emerged about his son, Hunter, and explosive material from Hunter’s laptop, allegedly left at a repair shop in Delaware. The leak, it was claimed, gave the lie to his father’s oft-repeated claim that he had no knowledge of the 50-year-old’s eyebrow-raising business activities. Emails showed Hunter being thanked for introducing an associate from a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to his father. They even appeared to show Hunter putting aside money from a business deal with China for “the big guy”, who was alleged to be his father. It was a story with incendiary potential, yet outside the confines of conservative media, Hunter remained an unexploded bomb. Most media outlets all but ignored it. Social media went even further, with Twitter suspending The New York Post’s account and blocking access to the story. Many Biden supporters claimed the laptop leak was Russian disinformation, though the veracity of its contents has never been denied. Yet after the election, it was revealed that Hunter is the subject of a justice department investigation into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, and the story is rolling downhill fast, with the potential to disrupt Biden’s presidency significantly. In his statement acknowledging the investigation, Hunter insisted that his affairs were handled “legally and appropriately”, and there was no indication that his father was caught up in the inquiry.’ …
The possibilities that ‘if’ the Republicans keep control of the Senate, in sum, the New Democrats can’t get Neo-Liberal Ossoff elected: there will be an Inquiry that will put the incompetent dullard Muller, and the deranged political hysterics of Schiff … Consider that Joe, who cut $1200 to $600, call it ‘long division Neo-Liberal style’, so as not to coddle we lesser beings, of the disappeared Republic. Austerity for the hoi polloi and Billions for a rapacious Capital. The Property Party has ‘two wings‘: The Republicans & New Democrats!
The opening paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay relies on two instances of potted history of 1979, with the appropriate links to a report in the Financial Times on The Hostage Crisis and a 2011 John Dickerson commentary on Carter’s ‘Malaise’ speech. And a comment on ‘The Deer Hunter’ as the low point of Hollywood ‘Mythmaking Power’: gone were the days of William Wyler’s ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’, script by Sherwood Anderson and MacKinlay Kantor , cinematography by Gregg Toland. This Movie was unafraid to focus on Post-War America’s problems.
In 1979, the US suffered the twin ignominies of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet capture of Afghanistan. Inflation took off as the helpless president evoked (without saying the word) a malaise. In garlanding The Deer Hunter, the bleakest film of Hollywood’s bleakest decade, the Oscar judges met the national mood.
The political answer to this ‘malaise’ was Ronald Reagan and his ‘Morning in America’ , ‘I believe in States Rights’ of the opening of 1980 campaign speech, and his repetition of of the racist canard of ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’. And his secret negotiations with the Iranian Revolution Leaders, undercutting Jimmy Carter’s attempts at negotiation.
What follows this opening paragraph is a Ganesh Political Melodrama, in all its breathlessness narrative power. A selection from this mock- epic retelling, of the political moments ‘we’ have recently experienced, in situ:
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To salvage the positives from such a year will strain credulity. To suggest that Americans can end it with enhanced confidence in their republic will test the boundaries of good taste. And still the case is there to be made.
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In March, an allegedly irredeemable political class brokered the largest programme of fiscal relief in US history. It has been fitfully topped up ever since and a deal to the tune of $900bn passed Congress on Monday. Those who had hoped for more and better should concede that Washington has already outperformed dismal expectations.
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It is one thing for China, or even a democracy as centralised as the UK, to take big and swift action in a crisis. For the US to do the same implies something good about its political model and the individuals who people it. To say so should not feel as subversive as it does.
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It is customary at this juncture to say that a cannier populist might one day succeed where Mr Trump failed. But the idea that an autocratic nearly-man must prefigure the real thing is too often written up as a teleological inevitability. The Republicans who succeeded Richard Nixon were Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, not a gallery of sublime rogues.
If this collection of apologetics for the now ascendant ‘Centrism’, post election 2020 – that ‘Centrism’ being the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives, in all its moral/political toxicity. Yet Mr. Ganesh celebrates ‘a grudging baton exchange’ as important to the ’cause of liberalism‘. On that ’cause’ , in all its malign iterations look to ‘Liberalism A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo.
As China avoids recession, it was prudent to cite 2020 as a grudging baton exchange from an ailing superpower to a rampant one. And perhaps even from multi-party democracy to more hierarchical modes of government. It matters to the cause of liberalism, then, not just to American pride, to hail the US system’s quiet resilience. The alternative is to do down the institutions that made a potentially terminal year merely dreadful. The trouble with pessimism is that it can be self-fulfilling.
The Financial Times offers its readership an early roasted Christmas goose, in the person of Oren Cass- let me offer a suggestion as to where that Yuletide sprig of holly might be placed!
Mr. Cass inauspicious opening paragraphs gives the game away in his vulgarity, which he attempts to soften in the next paragraph:
The push by American progressives to have Joe Biden’s incoming administration forgive $50,000 of student debt per borrower is deeply stupid, but at least clarifyingly so.
More polite language fails to capture the absurdity of singling out college attendees for an unprecedented $1tn transfer of wealth — equivalent to the total spent on cash welfare in the last 40 years. The top sources of US student debt are professional business and law degrees.
‘American Progressives’, ‘Transfer of wealth’ and ‘cash welfare’ are the catch-phrases of his particular iteration of ‘Conservatism’. Yet read what that bastion of Conservatism, the Washington Examiner, in an editorial by Brad Polumbo, has to say about Mr. Cass and ‘American Compass’ :
A new group, American Compass, launched on Tuesday to much fanfare. The group’s mission is reportedly “going back and finding things that always were part of the American tradition that have been important to conservative thinkers but that seem to have gotten lost in the more market-fundamentalist mode of, especially, the last 20 to 30 years.”
Led by former Manhattan Institute scholar Oren Cass, the group has drawn impressive names to its nascent effort to charter an intellectual course for the nationalist Right.
There’s just one problem: The “market-skeptical” conservative movement is railing against an imaginary libertarian GOP orthodoxy that does not and, frankly, never really has existed. The idea motivating this entire project is completely detached from reality and all recent political history.
Cass posits that the GOP has “outsourc[ed] economic policymaking to libertarian ‘fundamentalists’ who see the free market as an end unto itself.” In this, he and his ideological allies are waging war on a straw man.
The undeserving actors in Mr. Cass’ political melodrama are the utterly undeserving ‘students’ are those who hold ‘professional business and law degrees’. These very actors, who are, or will become the business, political and jurisprudential actors in the present and future of this country! Mr. Cass has a B.A. in Political Economy from Williams College, yet he just doesn’t campaigns against ‘Big Ed’, as he dubs it, he fulminates against it:
Perhaps this debt-forgiveness nonsense will shake the US from its complacency about higher education. Comprising the thousands of colleges and universities that together receive more than $150bn a year in public subsidies, Big Ed is among the nation’s most powerful but toxic forces. It thrives on the carefully cultivated myth of campuses as citadels of learning and on the mistaken notion that enrolment is the sine qua non of a successful life — that college, as Barack Obama was fond of saying, is the “ticket to the middle class”. Debt acquired in the ivory tower obtains talismanic status.
In fact, Big Ed’s performance is woeful, which is how a student debt crisis emerged to begin with. Its deformation of the cultural expectations and economic incentives facing young people at the formative stage of their adult lives is wreaking havoc. Higher education costs more than $30,000 per student per year in the US, roughly twice as much as in Germany or France. Still, more than 40 per cent of recent graduates land in jobs that do not require them to have degrees. And that’s among those who do finish. At two-year community colleges, barely one-quarter of enrollees complete the programme within six years. University leaders are notably reticent to measure or report whether students learn anything at all. Yet the students continue to pour in.
As Mr. Cass showers scorn on ‘Big Ed’, the reader just might ask where Mr. Cass stands on the question of free college tuition? How might that fit into his support for Mr. 47%, Mitt Romney? Mr. Cass ends his screed with an attack on ‘Progressive’ myopia that ends in a grim prediction of American intolerance.
This is the dynamic that yields “progressives” arguing with a straight face that student debt forgiveness should be a top priority, while making no effort to hold these institutions more accountable in the future. It is not a dynamic the American people are likely to tolerate much longer.
Demagogic authoritarian capitalism is a hybrid. As in the Chinese system of bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism, the ruler is above the law and democratically unaccountable — elections are a sham. But power is personal, not institutionalised. This is corrupt gangster politics. It rests on the personal loyalty of sycophants and cronies. Often the core consists of the family members, viewed as most trustworthy of all. This is the political system Mr Trump wished to install in the US.
What is needed is … honest and organised coercive force. (Wolf, 2001)
However distinct the political response to the crisis of 2008, the apparent emergence of neoliberalism during the 1980s did not entail a weak state. It entailed a ‘strong state’. Andrew Gamble’s book on the Thatcher period was thus aptly entitled The Free Economy and the Strong State, which made clear reference to the ordo-liberal conception of the relationship between the national state and the global economy.2 Susan George (1988) characterized the 1980s as a time in which everything was privatized, except the losses, which were socialized by means of debt-bondage and repressive labour market and welfare state reforms. Ernest Mandel (1987) characterized the political economy of the 1980s as ‘military Keynesianism’, a Keynesianism that refinanced a financial system on the brink in the face of the then debtor crisis and bad debt exposure. Its rescue took the form of pro-cyclical global deficit financing based on the US dollar, expansion of the military industrial complex, privatization, and financial deregulation. Military Keynesianism sought to balance the books by taking money out of the pockets of workers, and by attacking conditions. Redistribution of wealth from labour to capital was such that by the early 1990s, ‘about two-thirds of the world’s population have gained little or no substantive advantage from rapid economic growth. In the developed world the lowest quartile of income earners has witnessed a trickle-up rather than a trickle-down’ (Financial Times, 24 December 1993). This one-quarter has since expanded to include more than half the world’s population, creating an unprecedented gap in incomes, domestically and on a global scale (see Glyn, 2006).
‘Military Keynesianism’ sustained capitalism on the basis of an accumulation of potentially fictitious wealth. Debt expanded to such a degree that, according to the Financial Times (27September 1993), the IMF feared in the early 1990s ‘that the debt threat is moving north. These days it is the build-up of first-world debt, not Africa’s lingering crisis, that haunts the sleep of the IMF official’. In the face of recurrent crises since 1987,3 and various stock market fears, the USA emerged as the biggest debtor country. Magdoff et al. (2002) argued that, by 2002, outstanding private debt was two-and-a-quarter times GDP, while total outstanding debt—private plus government—approached three times the GDP. Deficit spending sustained a global economy that became completely dependent upon a mountain of debt. Throughout the last thirty years, the accumulation of potentially fictitious wealth in the form of money, M…M’, and the coercive control of labour, from debt bondage to new enclosures, and from the deregulation of conditions to the privatization of risk, have belonged together. In the context of a global economy plagued by debt and threatened by the collapse of debt, Martin Wolf argued that the guarantee of global capital required stronger states. As he put it in relation to the so-called Third World, ‘what is needed is not pious aspirations but an honest and organized coercive force’ (Wolf, 2001).
In relation to the so-called developed world, Soros (2003) argued, rightly, that terrorism provided not only the ideal legitimation but also the ideal enemy for the unfettered coercive protection of debt-ridden free market relations ‘because it is invisible and never disappears’. The premise of a politics of debt is the ongoing accumulation of ‘human machines’ on the pyramids of accumulation. Its blind eagerness for plunder requires organized coercive force to sustain the huge mortgage on future income in the present. Wolf’s demand for the strong state does not belie neoliberalism. Neoliberalism does not demand weakness from the state. Laissez-faire is no ‘answer to riots’ (Willgerodt and Peacock, 1989: 6). Indeed, laissez-faire is ‘a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based’ (Hayek, 1976: 84). That is, the neoliberal state is ‘planning for competition’ (1976: 31), and there can therefore be no market freedom without ‘market police’ (Rüstow, 1942: 289). For the neoliberals, there is thus an ‘innate connection between economics and politics’ (Friedman,1962: 8): not only does the free market require the strong, market-facilitating state, but it is also dependent on the state as the coercive force of that freedom.
Edwin Heathcote a new and welcome voice on the civic nature of Architecture- and in The Financial Times! Or, perhaps I’ve not paid attention to his other essays? It reminds me of Aline Saarinen, on the Today Show, on NBC, in the early 1960’s. An actual Architectural Critic on morning television? She was an opinionated critic of architecture, and of the arts. Television once aspired to …
Not to forget Ada Louise Huxtable’s ‘The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered’ and ‘Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger’ that reinforces the necessity of the architectural critic’s role, in making a place, not just for the notion of connesership, in all its self-congratulatory iterations, but about the spaces we occupy. and the buildings we confront in our daily lives: the good, the bad and indifferent products of builders/financiers, and their attachment to the current styles and their practitioners.
Headline: A World Safe for Democracy by G John Ikenberry — free thinking
Sub-headline: This thoughtful and profound defence of liberal internationalism looks at the political philosophy as a guide to future actions
Is Mr. Rachman’s enthusiasm for one of The American Foreign Policy Mandarinate a surprise? G John Ikenberry is the co-inventor of the catch phrase of ‘Liberal International Order‘ :
There are few political scientists who can claim to have come up with an idea that has shaped real-world politics. G John Ikenberry, a professor at Princeton University, is a member of that small group. Together with his colleague Daniel Deudney, he coined the notion of a “liberal international order” in 1999. Within a few years, the phrase had been adopted by the western foreign-policy elite as shorthand for the world they were seeking to build and defend.
Mr. Rachman describes not a ‘Liberal International Order’ but American Hegemony in a bespoke suit! All carefully tailored, to sooth the fractured political nerves, of an electorate waiting for the Inauguration of ‘Liberal Hero’ Joe Biden.
For Ikenberry, the idea of a liberal international order describes a situation in which powerful countries agree to work together, in their mutual interests, through international institutions. It is a world in which principles like open trade and international law are firmly embedded.
Prof. Ikenberry, ‘the poet laureate of liberal internationalism’ plays a featured role in Perry Anderson’ s ‘American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers’ of 2013: From page 128 etc. of the print copy of New Left Review.
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Mandelbaum’s edges are too sharp for either requirement, as his relations with the Clinton Administration showed. Their perfect embodiment is to be found in Ikenberry, ‘the poet laureate of liberal internationalism’, from whom the dead-centre of the establishment can draw on a more even unction. In 2006, the Princeton Project on National Security unveiled the Final Paper he co-authored with Anne-Marie Slaughter, after some four hundred scholars and thinkers had contributed to the endeavour under their direction.footnote21 With a bipartisan preface co-signed by Lake and Shultz, and the benefit of ‘candid conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright’, not to speak of the ‘wisdom and insight of Henry Kissinger’, Forging a World of Liberty under Law: us National Security in the 21st Century sought, Ikenberry and Slaughter explained, to offer nothing less than ‘a collective X article’ that would provide the nation with the kind of guidance in a new era that Kennan had supplied at the dawn of the Cold War—though nsc–68, too, remained an abiding inspiration.
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Ikenberry’s subsequent theoretical offering, Liberal Leviathan (2011), revolves around the idea that since the American world order of its subtitle ‘reconciles power and hierarchy with cooperation and legitimacy’, it is—emphatically—a ‘liberal hegemony, not empire’. For what it rests on is a consensual ‘bargain’, in which the us obtains the cooperation of other states for American ends, in exchange for a system of rules that restrains American autonomy. Such was the genius of the multilateral Western alliance enshrined in nato, and in bilateral form, of the Security Pact with Japan, during the Cold War. In the backward outskirts of the world, no doubt, the us on occasion dealt in more imperious fashion with states that were clients rather than partners, but these were accessories without weight in the overall structure of international consent it enjoyed.footnote22 Today, however, American hegemony was under pressure. A ‘crisis of authority’ had developed, not out of its failure, but from its very success. For with the extinction of the ussr, the us had become a unipolar power, tempted to act not by common rules it observed, but simply by relationships it established, leaving its traditional allies with less motive to defer to it just as new transnational fevers and forces—conspicuously terrorism—required a new set of responses. The Bush Administration had sought to meet the crisis with unilateral demonstrations of American will, in a regression to a conservative nationalism that was counter-productive. The solution to the crisis lay rather in a renewal of liberal internationalism, capable of renegotiating the hegemonic bargain of an earlier time to accommodate contemporary realities.
That meant, first and foremost, a return to multilateralism: the updating and refitting of a liberal democratic order, as ‘open, friendly, stable’ as of old, but with a wider range of powers included within it.footnote23 The expansion of nato, the launching of nafta and the creation of the wto were admirable examples. So too were humanitarian interventions, provided they won the assent of allies. Westphalian principles were outdated: the liberal international order now had to be more concerned with the internal condition of states than in the past. Once it had recovered its multilateral nerve, America could face the future confidently. Certainly, other powers were rising. But duly renegotiated, the system that served it so well in the past could ‘slow down and mute the consequences of a return to multipolarity’. The far-flung order of American hegemony, arguably the most successful in world history, was ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’.footnote24 If the swing state of China were to sign up to its rules properly, it would become irresistible. A wise regional strategy in East Asia needs to be developed to that end. But it can be counted on: ‘The good news is that the us is fabulously good at pursuing a milieu-based grand strategy.’footnote25
At a global level, of course, there was bound to be some tension between the exigencies of continued American leadership and the norms of democratic community. The roles of liberal hegemon and traditional great power do not always coincide, and should they conflict too sharply, the grand bargain on which the peace and prosperity of the world rest would be at risk. For hegemony itself, admittedly, is not democratic.footnote26 But who is to complain if its outcome has been so beneficent? No irony is intended in the oxymoron of the book’s title. For Hobbes, a liberal Leviathan—liberal in this pious usage—would have been matter for grim humour.
G John Ikenberry is the newest addition to the apologists for, in his characterization, ‘liberal hegemony, not empire’.
Mr. Rachman describes the bad actors in the political present :
The idea of a liberal international order has also come under sustained ideological attack from three directions — the nationalist right, the “anti-imperial” left and from illiberal nations outside the west. For “America First” nationalists, grouped around President Donald Trump, liberal internationalists are simply “globalists” who had sold out US interests. For the left, meanwhile, the current world order is associated with the defence of an exploitative neoliberalism, and with an international power structure with its roots in the age of imperialism. Parts of this critique have also been adopted by nationalists in China, Russia and elsewhere, who argue that the liberal world order is just code for American hegemony.
Note, that by inference, ‘The Left’ acts as the accomplices of both Russia and China. This is The Financial Times, this kind of defamation of ‘Left’ political actors is part of the Old Cold War baggage, subject to a tactical historical revisionism. Note the ‘Left’s’ obsession with Neo-Liberalism, as narrated by Rachman: it rings hollow as this newspaper and its writers were and are its paid advocates/apologists.
The Rachman Political Melodrama gathers rhetorical momentum:
In response to this formidable political and intellectual assault, Ikenberry has produced A World Safe for Democracy, a thoughtful and profound defence of liberal internationalism — both as a political philosophy and as a guide to future actions. By tracing the evolution of liberal internationalism over the course of two centuries, he demonstrates that this is a set of ideas with deep historical roots, rather than triumphalist fluff produced after the west’s victory in the cold war.
For Ikenberry, the ideas of international co-operation, law, open trade and democracy have followed a “crooked trajectory” throughout history, advancing at times — but also experiencing many trials and setbacks. The point is made by the cover illustration chosen for the book: a picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by the smoke of bombs, during the second world war.
The patient reader then confronts the central idea/construct of the Rachman/Ikenberry Alliance! That they are both Neo-Liberals – Free Trade, the sine qua non of this failed economic/political toxin. With ‘Liberal Internationalism’ as its newest window dressing. Except that it is just that moldering left-over of ‘Wilsonian Idealism’.
That suggests that future American governments are going to have to be more cautious about free trade. This is no small adjustment because, as Ikenberry demonstrates, support for free trade has been a core commitment of liberal internationalists stretching back into the 19th century.
The first two paragraphs on Mr. Garton-Ash’s essay are …
Writers have interpreted the failings of liberalism in different ways; the point, however, is to change it. Self-criticism is a liberal strength. The very fact that there are already so many books diagnosing the death of liberalism proves that liberalism is still alive. But now we must move from analysis to prescription.
This is urgent. The victory of Joe Biden in the US presidential election gives a fragile opening for liberal renewal, but more than 70m Americans voted for Donald Trump. In Britain, a populist Conservative government faces a Labour Party with a new, left-liberal leader, Keir Starmer. In France, Marine Le Pen remains a serious threat to Europe’s leading liberal renewer, Emmanuel Macron. In Hungary, the EU has an increasingly illiberal and undemocratic member state. The likely economic consequences of the pandemic—unemployment, insecurity, soaring public debt and perhaps inflation—will probably feed a second wave of populism. China, already a superpower, is emerging strengthened from the crisis. Its model of developmental authoritarianism is challenging liberal democratic capitalism. For the first time this century, among countries with more than one million people, there are now fewer democracies than there are non-democratic regimes.
Mr. Garton-Ash presents what ‘writers’ have offered about the failings of Liberalism, and that Liberalism’s strength is its ability to engage in self-criticism, that precedes ‘renewal’. And that the diagnosis of ‘books ,on Liberalism’s demise proves that Liberalism is still alive. This diagnosis offered by ‘writers’ and ‘books’ are unidentified except in the broadest, most amorphous terms. Liberalism is able to engage in ‘self-criticism’: in Mr. Garton Ash’s telling ‘Liberalism’ is transformed into a volitional being. The other actors in this part of his essay:
Joe Biden as the instrument of ‘renewal’.
Keir Starmer as ‘a new, left-liberal leader‘
Marine Le Pen as ‘a serious threat to Europe’s leading liberal renewer, Emmanuel Macron.‘
Hungary as ‘the EU has an increasingly illiberal and undemocratic member state‘
China ‘already a superpower, is emerging strengthened from the crisis.
This cast of political actors is followed by this statements: ‘there are now fewer democracies than there are non-democratic regimes.‘
Some clarification:
Joe Biden is a Neo-Liberal, in sum, a New Democrat of the Clinton Era.
Kier Starmer is a New Labour and a ‘reformer’ against Jeremy Corbyn’s return to Left-Wing Social Democracy
Le Pen & Macron, who confronts the ongoing Rebellion in France, unreported in the corrupt bourgeoise press.
Hungary- After a long and utterly failed trans-generational experiment with Neo-Liberalism, Populists took over the remains of a Free Market Economy.
See Philipp Ther’s Europe Since 1989: a history‘ Chapters 4 & 5 for the devastating effects of Neo-Liberalism in Eastern Europe:
China- This state became the manufacturing hub of American Multinationals, seeking an exploitable work-force: its called off-shoring to increase obscene profits for the latest electronic trinkets.
Mr. Garton-Ash then adopts a poetic metaphor :
Like Neptune’s trident, a renewed liberalism will have three prongs. The first is the defence of traditional liberal values and institutions, such as free speech and an independent judiciary, against threats from both populists and outright authoritarians.
The second prong almost embraces Piketty’s Capitalist Critique?
The second is to address the major failings of what passed for liberalism over the last 30 years—a one-dimensional economic liberalism, at worst a dogmatic market fundamentalism that had as little purchase on human reality as the dogmas of dialectical materialism or papal infallibility. These failings have driven millions of voters to the populists. We must, then, be tough on populism and tough on the causes of populism.
The third prong of the renewed Liberalism:
The third prong requires us to meet, by liberal means, the daunting global challenges of our era, including climate change, pandemics and the rise of China. So our new liberalism has to look both backward and forward, inward and outward.
Pay particular attention to ‘the rise of China‘ as part of ‘the daunting global challenges of our era‘! The Yellow Peril , in its various iterations and permutations is a standard Western trope!
Carefully camouflaged in his further explanation of his ‘three prongs’ is this example of barbarism in France.
The barbaric beheading of a French teacher outside Paris reminds us that, even in the oldest liberal societies, free speech has to contend with not only the heckler’s but now also the assassin’s veto.
The reader need only look at the inherent barbarism, that existed in France in 1961?
Mr. Garton-Ash divides his essay into eight parts. I will offer quotations from his essay and comments on each section:
No liberalism without liberty:
The featured players:
‘Liberalism is, in Judith Shklar’s illuminating formulation, a “tradition of traditions.” There is an extended family of historical practices, ideological clusters and philosophical writings that may legitimately be called liberal. All share a core commitment to individual liberty. (Only in the weird semantic universe of contemporary American politics could it appear possible to separate liberalism from liberty.) Beyond this, as John Gray has argued, liberalism includes elements of individualism, meliorism, egalitarianism and universalism. These ingredients, however, appear in widely varying definitions, proportions and combinations.
In his opening paragraph he presents Shklar’s ‘tradition of traditions’ and John Grey’s collection of the ‘elements’ of Liberalism: in Shklar’s vision it is an agglomeration of capacious constituents. And in Grey’s case more of the ‘elements’ favored by Shklar. The five paragraphs of this section, of his essay, are a potted self-serving history of the ‘evolution of Liberalism’. With the addition of current ‘bad political actors’ added to enliven his polemic.
Equality and solidarity
A crucial staircase up from the floor is education. The expansion of university education was intended by mid-20th century liberals to augment life chances and social mobility, yet now the great American universities increasingly look like another means for existing elites to perpetuate their ascendancy. Leading US colleges regularly admit more students from the top 1 per cent of households by income than they do from the bottom 60 per cent. The Economist has coined the term “hereditary meritocracy” to describe this self-perpetuating new class. Universities like the two in which I am privileged to work therefore bear a major responsibility to widen access, but they cannot achieve social mobility on their own. We also need high-quality state schooling for all, from the crucial early years up, better vocational education and, amid a digital revolution, lifelong learning.
The featured players:
Philosopher Pierre Hassner, Leszek Kołakowski, ‘dramatic growth in inequality’, Ralf Dahrendorf , Milton Friedman, Oxford University, ‘expansion of university education’, The Economist , “hereditary meritocracy” . More riffing on Piketty? Or is it more argumentative Velveeta?
Redistributing respect
The players:
‘disparity of esteem’, ‘liberal elites’, East Germany, Ronald Dworkin, ‘liberal political community’, ‘equal respect and concern’, ‘metropolitan liberals’, ‘US rustbelt’, ‘neglected communities of northern England’, ‘taxi-loads of metropolitan journalists’, ‘Yorkshire coalfields’, ‘Appalachian mountains’, Martha Nussbaum , “curious and sympathetic” imagination , “recognise humanity in strange costumes” , Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, ‘imaginative sympathy underpins is solidarity’.
Call this collection just a brief and selective resume of the sins, and the victims of The Neo-Liberal Swindle!
Checking the “liberalocracy”
The players:
“levelling up.” , super-rich, globalisation, “comfortably off”, middle-class, Extreme inequality, “hereditary meritocracy.”, concentration of power, Anglo-American liberalism, “revolving door”, “golden rule” , grotesquely distorting power of money, Rupert Murdoch, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Clintons, Tony Blair, Friedmanites and Hayekians,, Stephen Schwarzman, Financial Times, Mike Corbat, Citigroup, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, John Stuart Mill, “stakeholder capitalism”, left-wing radical, Thomas Mann, Little Dorrit, Merdle.
In this collection of political actors, the reader needs to make note of Mr. Garton-Ash’s praise for Soros : ‘Yes, some rich and powerful individuals, such as George Soros, have truly earned our respect.’ Ass-kissing sycophants for the Plutocracy is another name for The Hoover Institution.
Identity and community
The players:
‘community and identity’, cosmopolitan liberals, “the international community,”, diverse minorities, multiculturalists, “white identity politics” , Trump and his ilk, Hillary Clinton, “the basket of deplorables.”, post-1989 globalisation and liberalisation, Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Joachim Gauck, zielwahrende Entschleunigung (goal-preserving deceleration,
Note the final framing, of this section of his essay, a painting by Eugène Delacroix – La liberté guidant le peuple . With the respectable bourgeoise notion of Gauck’s ‘goal preserving declaration’ -Note that the 37 million Refugees the product of America’s Wars of Empire is avoided at all costs by Garton-Ash! So much for the mythology of ‘Liberal Renewal’ that he advocates as a somehow!
The state-nation
The players:
uncomfortable territory for contemporary liberals, the stubborn persistence of nations, “internationalism versus the nation,”, Scruton , European liberals in 1848, Covid pandemic, “liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals”, Martin Hollis, “identity politics,”, Feminism, Mill, George Eliot, “either/or”, “as-well-as-and”
These players followed his vision of a ‘Declaration of Liberal Faith’ offered as an alternative to the utterly toxic ‘identity politics’ of the multiculturalists?
Ours will therefore be an inclusive, liberal patriotism, capacious and sympathetically imaginative enough to embrace citizens with multiple identities. Membership of the nation is defined in civic, not ethnic or völkisch terms; this is not a nation-state, in a narrow sense, but an état-nation, a state-nation. Such an open, positive, warm-hearted version of the nation is capable of appealing not just to dry reason but also to the deep human need for belonging and the moral imperative of solidarity. While the coronavirus pandemic initially triggered a bout of national self-isolation, it has also showed us the best in community spirit and patriotic solidarity. Liberal patriotism is an essential ingredient of a renewed liberalism.
The challenge of the global
The players:
globalised financialised capitalism, territorially bounded, liberal democratic state-nation, What do liberals have to offer most of humankind, a moral question and a very practical one, John Gray, John Stuart Mill, East India Company, Western universalism, violent conquest, torture, genocide, slavery, highest ideals of liberty, civilisation and enlightenment, colonial oppression, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, Kosovo or Sierra Leone, abandon the universalist aspiration, a postcolonial openness, the west’s declining relative power, for a new liberalism, since 1945,predominance of western power, China, which is already a superpower, China’s unprecedented Leninist-capitalist version of developmental authoritarianism, an alternative path to modernity, the defining threat of the Anthropocene era: climate change, the Global North, to show them they are wrong, Global South, Paul Collier argues that limiting immigration can actually benefit the societies from which immigrants come, that large majority of humankind, these global challenges, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Again no mention of America’s Wars of Empire, and its 37 million refugees! Conquest and subjugation of the lesser beings of the planet is central to the rehabilitation of the Liberal Mythology. Mr. Garton-Ash political/moral blindness …
Towards a new liberalism
The players:
Arnold Ruge, entitled “Self-Criticism of Liberalism.” It was published in 1843, FDR’s New Deal, Now we need a new “new liberalism.”, I do not pretend to elaborate a normative theory.’, It strayed too far from Karl Popper’s “piecemeal engineering.”, This new liberalism will be stalwart in the defence of liberal essentials, It will be experimental, proceeding by trial and error, This new liberalism will remain universalist, This new liberalism will remain egalitarian, historically informed meliorism, hope for a human civilisation,
For the patient reader of Mr. Garton -Ash, in both his Descriptive and Prescriptive rhetorical modes, at some points intertwined, and at others nearly free-floating: he has the particular talent of collecting clichés and catch phrases. Admittedly I have written a polemic, that features a not completely arbitrary collection of these self-serving rhetorical beings. Yet Mr. Garton-Ash’s concluding paragraphs, in a way, or even a perhaps, vindicates my exercise in polemics?
Speaking only for myself, I hope I will then go down with the good ship Liberty, working the pumps in the engine room as we try to keep her afloat. But as I breathe my last mouthful of salty water—glug, glug—I shall find consolation in reflecting on one last, peculiar quality of Liberty. Some time after the ship seems to have sunk to the bottom, it comes back up again. Odder still: it acquires the buoyancy to refloat precisely through sinking. It is no accident that the most passionate voices for freedom come to us, like the prisoners’ chorus in Beethoven’s Fidelio, from among the unfree.
For liberty is like health—you value it most when you have lost it. The better way forward, however, for free societies as for individuals, is to stay healthy.
Mr. Edsall writes a nearly 3,ooo word essay, that finds ‘declining social status’ as ‘the’ explanation for the present political crisis. Exacerbated by the ‘Populists’ of both the ‘Radical Right’ and ‘Left’: the ‘as if ‘ here is that somehow the ‘Centrists’ have an answer, to the Political Apostacy of those two extremes. While pretending that that ‘Center’ isn’t what it is, an alliance between the New Democrats/Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Cons, with the Respectable Republicans, in disguise as the once Blue Dog Democrats. Some brief illustrative quotation from this ‘Centrist Agitprop’:
…
Scholars are now rectifying that omission, with the recognition that in politics, status competition has become increasingly salient, prompting a collection of emotions including envy, jealousy and resentment that have spurred ever more intractable conflicts between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Hierarchal ranking, the status classification of different groups — the well-educated and the less-well educated, white people and Black people, the straight and L.G.B.T.Q. communities — has the effect of consolidating and seeming to legitimize existing inequalities in resources and power. Diminished status has become a source of rage on both the left and right, sharpened by divisions over economic security and insecurity, geography and, ultimately, values.
…
Gidron and Hall continue:
The populist rhetoric of politicians on both the radical right and left is often aimed directly at status concerns. They frequently adopt the plain-spoken language of the common man, self-consciously repudiating the politically correct or technocratic language of the political elites. Radical politicians on the left evoke the virtues of working people, whereas those on the right emphasize themes of national greatness, which have special appeal for people who rely on claims to national membership for a social status they otherwise lack. The “take back control” and “make America great again” slogans of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were perfectly pitched for such purposes.
Mr. Edsall has assembled a coterie of Academic Experts, that might put a Cecile B. DeMille Biblical Epic to shame, in all its cinematic hyperbole. His attempt at completeness, as the-in-order-too of silencing potential critics.
But for all the various quotations from these Experts, Mr. Edsall’s polemic fails utterly to address the vexing question of Neo-Liberalism, and it’s forty year dominance, in the economic/political life of America and Europe. And its toxic effects, on populations afflicted with the failures of this Utopianism-that might just be the cause of this anxiety about a ‘declining social status’. Not to speak of low wages and jobs lost to this failed economic/political ideology.
Mr. Edsall doesn’t even consider the possibility of such. Occupy Wall Street was representative of not just disenchantment with Neo-Liberalism. but a full scale rebellion, crushed by Bloomberg and Obama. And the publication of Piketty’s book “Capital” were the political events that were the aftermath of the Market Crash of 2008. Read the reception of Piketty’s book in The Economist, the short review . And the opportunism of Obama and his ‘lets put this behind us’ and the Neo-Liberal garbage of Simpson-Bowles!
Mr. Edsall his essay with this political kitsch:
These forces in their totality suggest that Joe Biden faces the toughest challenge of his career in attempting to fulfill his pledge to the electorate: “We can restore the defining American promise, that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. And, in doing so, we can restore the soul of our nation.”
Trump has capitalized on the failures of this American promise. Now we have to hope that Biden can deliver.
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