StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here are some evocative quotations for Mr. Luce’s latest essay:  

The question is whether that kind of paranoiac, which, polls suggest, describes the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, will drift into atomised resentment or be a political wrecking force. 

The answer will shape the direction of American politics in the years ahead. Hofstadter’s observations point us in both reassuring and worrying directions. He developed his theory of “the paranoid style in American politics” having watched Joe McCarthy’s red scare, which convulsed US politics, media, academia and the entertainment industry for several years in the 1950s. 

… 

McCarthy’s fall shows that America’s bouts of paranoia do subside. From the scare over the Illuminati in the 1790s, to the Free Masons in the 19th century, to the resistance to Catholic immigration in the late 19th century, each wave crashes. But they are followed by more. Sometimes, as with McCarthyism, they evolve. The year after McCarthy’s death, Robert Welch, a wealthy candy manufacturer, founded the John Birch society, which seeded today’s US conservatism. Welch was an ardent fan of McCarthy. He believed Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy”. 

… 

Today’s conspiracy theory is supercharged by being led by the US president. To be sure, Mr Trump will have to move out of the White House on January 20. But he is giving clear hints he plans to run again in 2024. Even if he does not, it will be in his interests to keep everyone guessing. That will maximise his leverage over the Republican party and his ability to add to the more than $200m he has raised since November 3. 

… 

It is entirely possible Mr Trump’s conspiracy theory will start to pall. It is also possible that his hold over the Republican party will solidify. One recent poll showed that Mr Trump was the party’s overwhelming favourite to be the 2024 nominee. Third place, behind vice-president Mike Pence, was Donald Trump Jr. There is one simple test of whether Mr Trump’s grip will loosen. Mr. Trump looks set to boycott Mr Biden’s inauguration next month. If senior Republicans follow his lead, the party will remain his. If they ignore him and show up, his spell will have broken. 

https://www.ft.com/content/5eb76ab8-f3fe-4abb-8efa-3bf934a7cfa6

A more historically accurate sketch of the post-war Republican Party might read like this:  

The New Deal as a ‘Generation of Treason’, The Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt/McCarren Witch Hunt, Barry Goldwater: ‘a choice not an echo’. Nixon & his ‘Silent Majority’ & Southern Strategy, Rehnquist appointment, Watergate and Impeachment, Kissinger. Ronald Reagan: ‘Morning In America’ ‘I believe in States Rights’ & ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’. Bush I: ‘A Thousand Points of Light’ & ‘No New Taxes’. Bush The Younger: ‘Compassionate Conservatism’, 9-11, Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, CIA, NSA spying on American citizens. Read this as an alternative to Mr. Luce’s ‘History Made to Measure’, that ends like some maladroit pastiche of a fairy tale: 

‘Mr. Trump looks set to boycott Mr Biden’s inauguration next month. If senior Republicans follow his lead, the party will remain his. If they ignore him and show up, his spell will have broken.’ 

Hofstadter’s ‘Paranoid Style’ was the cudgel of choice, for a generation of ‘Liberals’ before they capitulated, en masse, to the Neo-Liberal Clintons: I am thinking here of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , and his cadre at the ADA.

Political Skeptic

From the early days of The Economist’s Political Romance with Mauricio Macri.

From January 2, 2016

Headline: A fast start

Sub-headline: Mauricio Macri’s early decisions are bringing benefits and making waves

‘MAURICIO MACRI, who took office as Argentina’s president in December, has wasted little time in undoing the populist policies of his predecessor. On December 14th he scrapped export taxes on agricultural products such as wheat, beef and corn and reduced them on soyabeans, the biggest export. Two days later Alfonso Prat-Gay, the new finance minister, lifted currency controls, allowing the peso to float freely. A team from the new government then met the mediator in a dispute with foreign bondholders in an attempt to end Argentina’s isolation from the international credit markets.

This flurry of decisions is the first step towards normalising an economy that had been skewed by the interventionist policies of ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband, Néstor Kirchner, who governed before her. They carry an immediate cost, which Mr Macri will seek to pin on the Kirchners. Some of the new president’s other early initiatives are proving more controversial.’
…
‘Touring northern Argentina, where 20,000 people have been displaced from their homes by floods, Mr Macri blamed the former president, saying she had failed to invest in flood defences (see article). For now, Argentines are likely to believe their new president. However, if the economic slowdown is prolonged, the honeymoon will not be.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2016/01/02/a-fast-start

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From August 11, 2016

Headline: It’s cold outside

Sub-headline: A battle over utility bills is Mauricio Macri’s first big crisis

THE most populous parts of Argentina are stifling in summer and bone-chilling in winter. The Kirchner family, which ruled for a dozen years until 2015, kept the cost of comfort low. An earlier government had fixed the price of electricity and natural gas in 2002 to help the economy out of a slump; the Kirchners barely raised it. As a result, Argentines pay a fraction of what their neighbours do for energy (see chart).

But they have paid in other ways. Energy subsidies jumped from 1.5% of government spending in 2005 to 12.3% in 2014. Partly because of such largesse, the budget deficit was a worrying 5.4% of GDP last year. Because energy is cheap, consumers use it with abandon; utilities lack cash for investment. Summer blackouts can last for hours. Mauricio Macri, who succeeded Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as president in December, said the energy crisis was the most complex of the “many bombs” she had left for him. Defusing it is proving to be perilous.

…

Mr Macri has little choice but to hope that the supreme court rules in his favour, persist with price rises and pay the political cost. “To find tariffs both attractive enough for investment and acceptable to society—without impacting inflation—is impossible in the short term,” says Carlos Marcelo Belloni of IAE Business School in Buenos Aires. Like chilly consumers, Mr Macri is waiting for balmier weather.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2016/08/11/its-cold-outside

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From September 23, 2016

Headline: How Mauricio Macri is trying to rehabilitate Argentina’s economy

Sub-headline: The president faces a vast task

FOR most of 2015 few gave Mauricio Macri much chance of becoming Argentina’s president. The pro-business mayor of Buenos Aires lagged in the polls behind Daniel Scioli, the candidate favoured by Argentina’s outgoing president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Pundits pointed out that no non-Peronist president had completed a full term in office since 1928. But in the end it was Mr Macri’s outsider status that clinched his victory. After scraping 51% of the vote in a run-off on November 22nd, his supporters at home and abroad looked forward to swapping political populism for economic prosperity. But, more than nine months after his inauguration, Argentina is still plagued by high inflation, unemployment and weak consumer demand. What has gone wrong?

The scale of the task confronting Mr Macri was formidable. Argentina had been a financial pariah for more than 14 years, cut adrift from international capital markets thanks to a long-running dispute with holders of its defaulted debt. Official government statistics were widely discredited, prompting the International Monetary Fund to issue a formal censure in 2013. A standoff with the agricultural sector meant that farmers preferred to stockpile grain and soyabeans rather than export them. Currency controls left the peso overvalued and foreign exchange reserves at a nine-year low. Years of chronic underinvestment in infrastructure had pushed the country’s energy network to the brink of collapse.

…

The new president favoured bold action. During his first weeks in office Mr Macri eased currency controls, reduced export tariffs on agricultural goods and oversaw an overhaul of the national statistics institute. In April he concluded a $9.3 billion deal with holders of Argentina’s defaulted debt, restoring the country’s access to credit markets. But the remedies, although necessary, have proved painful. The peso’s devaluation pushed up the already-high inflation Mr Macri had inherited to around 40%, the highest rate in Latin America outside Venezuela. The reduction of unaffordable energy subsidies and an accompanying rise in utility bills inflicted more pain on hard-pressed consumers. With unemployment at 9.3% and the economy in recession, union-organised protests brought tens of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of Buenos Aires on September 2nd.

Mr Macri is desperate for good news. With legislative elections due in October 2017, his political fortunes will hinge on whether or not Argentines begin to feel tangible improvements in the economy. Inflation is finally slowing: in August prices rose by just 0.2%. But the flood of foreign investment Mr Macri promised would arrive following Argentina’s return to the markets has so far failed to materialise. For now at least, experts remain optimistic. Although the IMF believes the economy will shrink by 1.5% of GDP this year, it forecasts growth of 2.8% for 2017. Argentines also appear willing to give Mr Macri the benefit of the doubt. After months in decline the president’s approval ratings have stabilised at 56% over the past two months, according to Poliarquía, a pollster. As spring arrives in Buenos Aires, Mr Macri must be hoping that his fortunes have finally turned.

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/23/how-mauricio-macri-is-trying-to-rehabilitate-argentinas-economy

From the latter days:

June 8, 2016

Headline: The IMF hands Mauricio Macri a vote of confidence

Sub-headline: But Argentines are more sceptical

THE timing took many by surprise. On June 7th, just four weeks after negotiations began, Argentina’s government declared that it had secured a three-year credit line with the IMF worth $50bn. The deal’s size is likely to reassure investors of Argentina’s solvency. Its speed is a sign of the fund’s confidence in Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s business-friendly president. But for ordinary Argentines, many of whom blame the IMF for the country’s disastrous $82bn default in 2001, the announcement carries echoes of a painful past.

An acute currency crisis meant Mr Macri had little alternative but to seek the IMF’s help. In April the yield on American ten-year Treasury bonds rose to 3% for the first time since January 2014. That prompted a widespread sell-off in emerging markets. The currencies of Turkey, Russia and Mexico were all battered; Argentina’s was particularly badly hit. Investors were spooked by the country’s large fiscal and current-account deficits, and a rapidly growing pile of foreign-currency debt. They also doubted the independence of the central bank, which in January had cut interest rates at the behest of the government, despite inflation of 21%.

…

It will be no easy task. Argentines are weary of austerity and are unlikely to thank Mr Macri for providing them with more of it, particularly at the behest of the IMF. In 2001 the IMF offered loans in exchange for commitments to cut spending. When the government reneged, the fund pulled the plug and the country defaulted. Although the politicians were chiefly to blame, the IMF’s reputation has never recovered. A poll conducted in May found that three-quarters of Argentines were opposed to any sort of arrangement with the fund. If Mr Macri is to stand a chance of re-election next year, he must convince voters that the alternative would have been far worse.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/08/the-imf-hands-mauricio-macri-a-vote-of-confidence

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From July 5, 2018

Headline: Argentina’s currency crisis is far from over

Sub-headline: BUENOS AIRESA weak currency and punishingly high interest rates mean recession appears inevitable

ON A residential street corner in Buenos Aires, Van Koning Market sells imported beers to the city’s well-heeled. Since it opened in June last year costs have soared. The peso has plummeted, meaning wholesale prices have shot up. Inflation is running at 26%; the reduction of government subsidies means the monthly electricity bill has risen from 700 pesos to 4,000 pesos ($142). Already losing customers, Sergio Discenza, the manager, is reluctant to raise prices much. “In a normal country this would be a viable business,” he says. “But here everyone is struggling.”

The year started badly for Argentina when the worst drought in 50 years hit the harvest of maize and soyabeans, both important exports. In May a stronger dollar and higher US Treasury yields prompted international investors to flee risky assets. Most emerging-market currencies suffered, Argentina’s especially. Its twin fiscal and current-account deficits have seen the peso lose more than a third of its value this year, making it the world’s worst-performing currency (see chart). A recession, the fifth in a decade, appears inevitable.

…

Mr Macri was elected because Argentines, sick of populist economic policies, supported his plans for reform. Now many are wavering. A recent poll of Buenos Aires residents found almost half saying they had been happier under his populist predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. “We would probably have sold more beer under the previous government,” says Mr Discenza, standing in his deserted shop. Until recently, political analysts felt confident that Mr Macri would win a second term. His hopes rest on convincing Argentines that their glasses are still half full.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/05/argentinas-currency-crisis-is-far-from-over

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Here is the ‘free fall’ of the peso as reported in the New York Times:

From August 12 , 2019:

Headline: Argentine Peso Collapses as Macri’s Re-election Chances Drop

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s currency collapsed on Monday and stocks and bonds crashed to a degree not seen in 18 years as voters flirted with a return to interventionist economics by snubbing President Mauricio Macri and his market-friendly approach in favor of the opposition in the country’s primary vote on Sunday.

The Argentine peso initially dropped 30.3 percent, to a record low of 65 per one United States dollar, after Alberto Fernández, the opposition candidate whose running mate is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former president, dominated the primary by a 15.5 percentage point margin that was much wider than expected. The currency recovered some of its value later in the day, reacing 55 per dollar.

Mr. Fernández has said that he would seek to “rework” Argentina’s $57 billion standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund if he won the general election in October.

Argentina’s local Merval stock index was down 31 percent and bonds also fell. Argentine stocks, bonds and the peso had not recorded a simultaneous decline since its economic crisis and debt default in 2001, according to data from the research firm Refinitiv.

…

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From December 3, 2020:

Headline: Argentina’s president without a plan

Sub-headline: Alberto Fernández is muddling through

In death, as in life, Diego Armando Maradona represented his country to the full. The funeral of Argentina’s most famous footballer on November 26th was as passionate and chaotic as his country’s affairs (see Obituary). In defiance of his own government’s health rules, President Alberto Fernández ordered that Mr Maradona’s coffin lie in state in the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Like the president, El Diego was a lifelong supporter of Peronism, Argentina’s populist-nationalist movement. When the wake was curtailed, with thousands of fans queuing, pandemonium ensued.

Mr Fernández’s craving for popularity by association is a sign of his weakness. The funerary disorder extends to the economy, too. A social democrat, the president took office a year ago, at the head of an uneasy Peronist coalition in which much power lies with his vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no relation), a leftist who ruled from 2007 to 2015. Within three months, the pandemic struck. Mr Fernández was quick to impose a lockdown, which brought a surge in his approval rating, but which delayed rather than prevented a severe outbreak of covid-19. Argentina is among the top ten countries for recorded deaths as a proportion of the population. Only now is the lockdown being eased. Mr Fernández’s popularity is below its starting point.

…

Economic recovery will be slow. The exchange controls and the wealth tax are discouraging investment. This year several multinationals (such as Walmart) have packed up. Much of the software industry has departed. Argentina, once Latin America’s most developed country, likes to live by its own rules, although that has engendered a long decline. In that, too, Maradona represented his nation. He had “so much football wealth that he thought he could squander it and it would not end”. That is Argentina, wrote Martin Caparrós, an Argentine author, in El País, a Spanish newspaper. “He fell, he got up, he fell again. He delighted in his past glories for lack of future ones: Argentina, perhaps.”

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2020/12/03/argentinas-president-without-a-plan

The death of Maradona frames the whole of this scolding essay, against Fernández as a ‘president without a plan’. In this melodrama, a Political Telenovela, Maradona is hero and Fernández is the leader ‘without a plan’! Yet, the President ‘with a plan’ Macri ‘s Neo-Liberalism Lite, precipitated a peso in ‘free fall’ and an onerous IMF intervention!

The anonymous author of this essay quotes Martin Caparrós on what Maradona represented: ‘past glories and lack of future ones’, as representative of political fate of Argentina. Which resonates with the author’s notion of ‘a long decline’ , the sine qua non of Conservatism, in its many toxic permutations and iterations.

Old Socialist

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:

___________________________________________________

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

___________________________________________

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