An investigation is opened after the death of a man during his custody in Lille-Sud this Sunday. He was arrested in the night from Saturday to Sunday when he was about to commit a break-in theft, rue Delespaul, in Lille. Placed in police custody, he was found unconscious in his cell in the morning. The circumstances of his death remain to be clarified. The autopsy which has just been carried out concludes with a “death of natural or toxic origin” indicates the parquet floor of Lille, but additional examinations have been requested.
The circumstances of the death remain to be clarified
The young man who died in police custody is undocumented; we therefore do not know for the moment how old he is, or even if he is major or minor. It is also unknown whether he lives in Lille or its region.

A source close to the file says that the young man saw a doctor, as the procedure requires, just after his arrest around two in the morning. The doctor would not have considered his state of health incompatible with a placement in police custody, indicates the Lille prosecutor’s office. Police officials are being heard.

The Lille prosecutor’s office, in charge of the case, rules out “any traumatic or suspicious cause” to explain the death of the young man, in view of the various elements collected so far (hearings of police officers, video surveillance of cells, and results of the autopsy , which concludes with a death “of natural or toxic origin”). However, additional expertise is still in progress.

…

Almost half of Mr. Rachman’s essay was devoted to Polling Numbers, but he, then, admonishes his readers, about the fateful lessons offered by 2016. And quoting Debbie Dingle. He offers his readership this bit of – what to call it? It doesn’t even qualify as political myopia:

The Democrats initially reacted to defeat in 2016 with determination to engage with the woes of the white working-class.

https://www.ft.com/content/78e01581-65e4-4229-ab65-30958a091a94

Hillary Clinton even before the election was screeching about Russian Interference in the American Election:

September 6, 2016  

Headline:Hillary Clinton Accuses Russia of Interfering With U.S. Election

MOLINE, Ill. — Hillary Clinton accused Russian intelligence of interfering with the American election, implying that President Vladimir V. Putin viewed a victory by Donald J. Trump as a destabilizing event that would weaken the United States and buttress Russian interests.

“It’s almost unthinkable,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday, referring to what she called recent “credible reports about Russian interference in our elections” and citing a hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails in July.

“We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack,” Mrs. Clinton said in a news conference. “I want everyone — Democrat, Republican, Independent — to understand the real threat that this represents.”

The comments, Mrs. Clinton’s most extensive yet on one of the more unusual subplots of the presidential campaign, came after a Washington Post report that United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing a wide, covert Russian effort to disrupt the presidential election.

…

This ‘Russian Interference’ produced two American Melodrama’s The Mueller Report and the Adam Schiff Three Ring Circus. Both dismal failures, even as they were the focus of American Media’s fawning attention. Even the Senate Report, of over a thousand pages, recently released…   

Nor did the reader need to be reminded of the latest books, on the American reporter’s  shifting taste in political analysis, in its various iterations, as the some-how touchstones of a political present: 

The book Hillbilly Elegy has been replaced on bedside reading tables by White Fragility. 

Perhaps, in the World of Political Pundits, and the scribblers who present themselves as the descriptors, of the latest confection of the Political Phenominologists, seems to lose  potency, in the accelerated time of the evanescent political moment?

On ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ the  J. D. Vance’s memoir read this L.A. Review of Books essay by Florence Dore, J. D. Connor, Dan Sinykin:

Rebel Yale: Reading and Feeling “Hillbilly Elegy”

…

 The runaway success of Hillbilly Elegy means that it is now firmly established as the single most popular attempt to understand the “cultural crisis” underlying Trump’s victory. Rather than urging Americans to read it, as so many of its first reviewers did, we now need to examine why we’ve bothered and what we’ve taken from it.

…

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rebel-yale-reading-feeling-hillbilly-elegy/

What is the possible commonality between a memoir of self-emancipation and a book about racism? A description of the shifting character of the political focus of one political pundit? The L.A. Review of Books team provides a clue: 

…

 Hillbilly Elegy’s presence on student bookshelves is but one sign that Thomson has it wrong. Hillbilly Elegy isn’t so much “resonating beyond traditional elites,” as justifying elitism under Trump.

We can begin to understand the book’s subtle plug for elitism when we consider the appeal on college campuses for a book about “hillbillies” and “rednecks.

…

Or has Larry Summers enthusiasm for ‘Hillbilly’, been a deciding factor for Mr. Rachman? 

‘“Reading about @hillbillyelegy is not the same as reading it. Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it.”

On ‘White Fragility’ reviewed by John McWhorter

The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility

The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.

…

Reading white fragility is rather like attending a diversity seminar. DiAngelo patiently lays out a rationale for white readers to engage in a self-examination that, she notes, will be awkward and painful. Her chapters are shortish, as if each were a 45-minute session. DiAngelo seeks to instruct.

She operates from the now-familiar concern with white privilege, aware of the unintentional racism ever lurking inside of her that was inculcated from birth by the white supremacy on which America was founded. To atone for this original sin, she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist.

As such, a major bugbear for DiAngelo is the white American, often of modest education, who makes statements like I don’t see color or asks questions like How dare you call me “racist”? Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it.

DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.

When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws.

…

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

That these two best sellers  just garner a mention, in passing,  from Mr. Rachman,is evidence of their momentary status as touchstones, in the American political melodrama, that have now faded, but provide an almost highfalutin background, for unimaginative political prognostication.  

Philosophical Apprentice 

______________________________________________________________

In reply to Elliott

Headline:Biden frames 2020 as a fight between light and darkness

Sub-headline: The Democratic nominee wants this presidential contest to be about character

Crime Bill Joe & the California Attorney General ,who sent the parents of truant children to jail, Kamala Harris: not quite the characterization as presented in the political gush by Mr. Luce. But this has to be the most jejune expression of Mr. Luce’s particular brand of political kitsch:

‘But when the choice is reduced to personality opposites — an ageing Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader — the strangest bedfellows fall into line’. 

It aspires to the standards of one of those Cecil B. De Mille Biblical Epics. But the dull-witted George Lucas, and his Star Wars movie serial Transcendentalism  & Luce’s kitsch, a marriage made in Public Relations Nirvana! 

StephenKMackSD     

https://www.ft.com/content/16d5d779-aef0-4b8c-baca-fab73cf0d243

______________________________________________________________

 Replying to WesteringHo

The whole of America’s Political Class midwived Trump! The very notion that Trump is a political anomaly is the purest bunk! He is the political creature of the utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle, and the two Parties, that made that Swindle possible, yet still can’t admit their collective culpability! 
There is no ‘Rule of Law’,  but there are the imperatives of The American National Security State, and its legislative and jurisprudential servants. 
The very notion of some kind of ‘Restoration’, as we sink further into the status of a failed State…
Biden gave a speech riffing on ‘Light’ vs ‘Dark’ , it was impressive for its recitation of political cliche, framed in that old American standard  Political Theology: Cotton Mather tinctured in Jonathan Edwards?
The New York Times was awash in Biden euphoria, even the the self-proclaimed America Political Prophet, David Brooks, sang from the same hymnal.
Regards, and thank you for your comment
StephenKMackSD         

How did I miss this essay by Mr. Ganesh? The only reason that I became aware of it was a tweet from Daniel Larison.

Headline: The lost virtue of doubt

Sub-headline: Sceptics such as the late Brent Scowcroft are the world’s unsung heroes

This sentence of Ganesh’s belated Funeral Oration for Scowcroft, stands out for its sheer irrelevance, to anything resembling argument: suffused with self-serving jargon, that relies upon an ungainly attempt at political hyperbole/paradox, gone wrong. 

Obituaries of the aide to four presidents, who died this month, describe a career of radical prudence.

The first question the reader must ask is how to define ‘radical prudence’ ? It being mere rhetorical interior decoration: Ganesh as Mario Praz? 

In Ganesh’s telling Scowcroft attains near mythic status as an Enlightened Man of The Right:

He helped to winkle the last US troops out of Saigon. He discouraged western triumphalism as the Berlin Wall fell. He advised friends against the invasion of Iraq. And all of this as a man of the right. It was a life spent averting and undoing the mistakes of true believers, to vastly more resentment than thanks.  

After a brief snippet from Graham Greene the reader encounters this meditation on the danger ‘fervent belief’ as opposed to ‘one belief system’ :  

The greatest public calamities do not stem from any one belief system, but from fervent belief itself. The Iraq war remains a haunting case in point but the crash of 2008 also fits the pattern. More or less plausible ideas — about the self-correcting nature of markets, about the competence of elites — were held too blindly, until the reckoning came. In the end, we fashioned technical solutions to both misadventures, but the source of the problem was always conceptual. For the want of doubt, the world burnt.

Has Mr. Ganesh overcome New Labour’ s Thatcherism Lite and its Iraq War enthusiasm? Or in an American context, Republican and New Democratic ‘Free Market’ enthusiasm and the shared War Mongering?      

A segue to The Real World:

Headline: Brent Scowcroft Never Hated His Enemies

Sub-headline:His realist approach to global affairs came straight from “The Godfather.”

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and chairs the board of counselors at McLarty Associates.

James Stavridis offers a more sober evaluation of his adviser Scowcroft:

Scowcroft, who had served as national security adviser for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, spent a couple of hours with me and laid out a detailed geopolitical picture. Reflecting on his time served in half a dozen presidential administrations, the general provided a balanced, sensible and practical approach to take with both the Russian Federation and our European allies. As we concluded our lengthy talk, he patted me on the shoulder and said: “You’ll do well over there, Jim. Don’t let the Russians get under your skin.” 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-10/brent-scowcroft-never-hated-his-enemies?srnd=opinion&sref=bfOwbK4O

Another ‘insight’ into the Scowcroft World View and Methodology from Stavridis: 

A second quality was his unemotional, analytic approach to the world, sometimes called realpolitik. Scowcroft earned his spurs around former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and took Kissinger’s place the first time he became national security adviser. When he told me not to let the Russians get under my skin, he meant to stay calm and be the adult in the room. As Don Corleone puts it in Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather”: “Never hate your enemies — it affects your judgment.”   

If only Mr. Ganesh were a reader! He wouldn’t commit this extemporizing on the themes of the political present, of the falling apart of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, exacerbated by Covid-19, and the utter failure of America’s Political Class to act ‘as if’ they cared. The manifestations of that collapse as it unfolds in that present. Mr. Ganesh fills out his essay with pseudo-philosophic chatter, about one man’s ‘tentativeness’ and ‘ambivalence’ as somehow offering a key to political behavior.   

The want is still there, in new and strange forms. This summer, celebrities, writers and academics have tried to re-establish respect for the freedom of expression. As a tactical fix in censorious times, it is indispensable. But it is a tactical fix. The deeper problem is the absolute certitude that drives the silencing behaviour in the first place. No one who is tentative or ambivalent in their beliefs is going to cancel anyone, much less hurt them. Intolerance is not a misguided expression of these people’s dogma. It is a natural outcome of it. The point is to coach them into new habits of mind, not just new manners.

https://www.ft.com/content/de843f6e-0be1-4667-8a9f-f397cf840e72

Mr. Ganesh rambling essay continues with walk-ons by Henry Kissinger, John le Carré, Robert Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Theodore Roosevelt. And ending with this coda: 

The insinuation is always that there is something timid and anti-chivalric about not committing to an epic cause. The more this stigma holds, the more prone our societies become to errors of enthusiasm. It is a kind of systemic risk. The way out is to heroise the doubters.

Old Socialist  

Headline: Russia says it is ready to provide Belarus with military support

Sub-headline: Up to 200,000 people protest in Minsk as Kremlin give its backing and Nato says it is ‘closely monitoring’ situation

https://www.ft.com/content/0f860c07-fc3b-4efb-8807-ff13950ce588

How obvious can this repeat of Ukraine be? All that is missing is Neo-Con ghoul Victoria Nuland, passing out chocolate chip cookies to the ‘Freedom Fighters’ !
In geopolitical terms, just look to the fact that Belarus shares a common border with Russia. The ‘NATO multinational presence’ is just the ersatz cover, for more New Cold War attacks against Putin’s Russian, at its periphery. 

The discontent of this state’s populous, should not be minimized, but note just who might be the potential political players: NATO, FDD, The Atlantic Council, American backed NGO’s and other wealthy New Cold Warriors, are the same actors that subverted the duly elected government of Ukraine.    
The question that remains is what will Putin do, to the check this further encroachment of the American Empire’s obvious, continuing encirclement of Russia? The Anti-Russian Hysterics are a political/moral toxin: proceed with caution is an antithetical strategy to these zealots.   

Old Socialist 

Headline:On Being a Biden Conservative

Sub-headline: It’s about upholding your principles at the expense of your politics.

Mr. Stephens can always be depended upon for proclaiming his political/moral uprightness, that equals the voice of political reason. Like his fellow traveler David Brooks. That ‘Biden Conservatism’ is equal to that of  George H.W. Bush’s conservatism. Recall that ‘Thousand Points Of Light’ merde? Or even the Lee Atwater Willie Horton racist hysteria of 1988? Or Bush The Elder checking his watch during the ‘Debate’ with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot? Mr. Stephens depends on the cultivated , not to speak of a self-willed political ignorance, of his readers, in the political present:

 … 

  
Whatever else he does, Biden won’t expend his political capital belittling, demeaning and humiliating other Americans. He won’t treat opponents as enemies, or subordinates as toadies, or take supporters for fools. Joe Biden is the Democratic equivalent of George H.W. Bush — another ambitious vice president who believed in loyalty and decency more than in any particular set of ideas. History remembers the senior Bush’s presidency well.

…

More of  Stephens’ hyperbolically expressed political/moral self-congratulation: 

… 

To be a Biden conservative isn’t easy. It’s about upholding your principles at the expense of your politics, and embracing mediocrity to ward off malevolence. Above all, it’s about curbing your enthusiasm. If that isn’t conservative, what is?

Old Socialist

Headline: The decoupling of the US and China has only just begun

Sub-headline: Business logic has been displaced by strategic rivalry

The headline writers, for this newspaper, don’t bother with the usual highfalutin Neo-Liberal ‘Free Market’ rhetoric, but frame Rachman’s essay in ‘business logic’.    

This newspaper and at least one of its hirelings is in a panic about Globalism! After the Depression of 2008 and the Pseudo-Recovery, Neo-Liberalism was profitable to Capital in all its various iterations, but not to ordinary citizens. America’s Political Class failed to bring back prosperity except for the 1%…
The Covid-19 Pandemic demonstrated that the mythical ‘supply chains’ were just that. The Modern Nation State is not an outworn institution, but the bedrock of a polity that acts in the name of the public good. The ability to manufacture and supply the needs of its population, the need for strategically necessary goods is now self-evident. 
American Capital, as the in order too, of first destroying Unions, and saving money on decent wages and benefits for workers, moved overseas. These Corporation keep those  profits overseas, its tax evasion.   
The American Project for the next forty yeas will be to rebuilt our manufacturing, that enables a vibrant Working and Middle class , Medicare for all , free Public Education from kindergarten through College,  a Welfare State that provides for those who cannot provide for themselves . The Neo-Liberal Age is past! If your searching for  political precursors: Helen Keller and Eugene V. Debs.

On the question of ‘imprisoned millions of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang’ :

Headline: China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing

Sub-headline: Claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims are based largely on two studies. A closer look at these papers reveals US government backing, absurdly shoddy methodologies, and a rapture-ready evangelical researcher named Adrian Zenz.

The US House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act on December 3, legislation which calls for the Donald Trump administration to impose sanctions against China over allegations that Beijing has detained millions of Muslim-majority Uyghurs in the western region of Xinjiang.

To drum up support for the sanctions bill, Western governments and media outlets have portrayed the People’s Republic as a human rights violator on par with Nazi Germany. Republican Rep. Chris Smith, for instance, denounced the Chinese government for what he called the “mass internment of millions on a scale not seen since the Holocaust,” in “modern-day concentration camps.” 

The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region is repeated with increasing frequency, but little scrutiny is ever applied. Yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.

While this extraordinary claim is treated as unassailable in the West, it is, in fact, based on two highly dubious “studies.” 

The first, by the US government-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, formed its estimate by interviewing a grand total of eight people.

The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports “scriptural spanking” of children, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China.

As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of obscurity and transformed almost overnight into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang. He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now!, and delivering expert quotes in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent “China Cables” report. His Twitter bio notes that he is “moving across the Atlantic” from his native Germany.

Before Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal questioned Zenz about his religious “mission,” at a recent event about Xinjiang inside the US Capitol, he had received almost entirely uncritical promotion from Western media.

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which first popularized the “millions detained” figure, has also been able to operate without a hint of media scrutiny.

…

China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/9000d2b0-460f-4380-b5de-cd7fdb9416c8

Should it surprise the reader that Mr. Luce begins his essay with a small quote from Timothy Geithner? ‘“plan beats no plan”
What might the reader make of this demonstration of Mr. Geithner experience with ‘plan’?

WASHINGTON — Treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner on Wednesday said he made “careless mistakes” when he did not pay all of his taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund and apologized to senators for adding to their burden when the economy is in the midst of a severe recession.

“These were careless mistakes,” Geithner told members of the Senate Finance Committee during his nearly four-hour confirmation hearing. “They were avoidable mistakes, but they were unintentional. I should have been more careful. I take full responsibility.”

…

In total, Geithner paid $34,023 in back taxes and $8,679 in interest.

…

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=6704526&page=1

What  must Mr. Luce think of his readers political memory? 

Reading further Luce paraphrases the Biden Campaign:

It seems like a good moment to enter the 21st century with the “largest mobilisation of public investments” since the second world war, as the Biden campaign puts it. 

That campaign is careful to avoid any mention of The New Deal, as Neo-Liberals are its ardent opponents, in the political present. Its was once dubbed, by Republicans, as ‘New Deal Nostalgia’ in a effort to ‘cancel’ the Reform Wing of the New Democratic party. But look at the number of wins, for reformist Democrats, in recent elections. Or are all those ‘wins’ a collection of anomalies? Biden is an ardent opponent of ‘Medicare for All’

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/biden-says-he-wouldd-veto-medicare-for-all-as-coronavirus-focuses-attention-on-health.html

In order of appearance comes :

the ungrateful Left and its would be champion Elizabeth Warren, who stayed in contests, in which she could not even place, as an impediment to Sanders wins 

The ‘Left’ should be grateful according to the Luce’s Speculative History Warren and Sanders will draft legislation

Luce then explores 1932 and then offers better analogies 

America’s left should picture a Biden presidency:

A Biden administration would be their best opportunity of rewriting America’s social contract in more than half a century. The left’s instincts to go for the perfect over the good could still get in the way.

https://www.ft.com/content/27b43b9c-1996-4f42-80e0-9e6c8a2a6178

Mr. Luce’s essay continues to wander, in the territory of political speculations, on our possible present, and possible future. This essays loses what force, it may have had, as an unofficial Press Release from the Biden/Harris campaign. 

Old Socialist 

______________________________________________________________

Do read Mr. Luce’s column from July 24 , 2016 :

Headline: The fight of Hillary Clinton’s life

Sub-headline: If she opts for politics as usual against the headline-grabbing Trump, prepare for a tense election

‘First things first. Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton. To many Americans, mere talk of it is preposterous. They should get used to it. At some point, Mr Trump is likely to take a lead in the polls. It might last for two days or persist for weeks. Liberal Americans should steel themselves. As author Nancy Isenberg put it: “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance the dancing bear will win.”

Mrs Clinton, moreover, is capable of squandering her inbuilt advantage. Whatever happens at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this week, the next three months will be the battle of her life.

What should most concern the anti-Trump forces? Mrs Clinton’s biggest hurdle is the depth of hatred for her across large parts of America. Personally, I have always found Hillaryphobia hard to fathom. As first lady in the 1990s, she was hated for being a creature of the left — her supposed radical feminism and her push to enact leftwing healthcare reform. Nowadays she is reviled for the opposite reasons.

The Hillary Clinton of 2016 personifies Wall Street values and an entitled global elite. The common thread between these two phases, briefly suspended when she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state, is the view that every move she makes is for political gain. Nothing is authentic. Even Mrs Clinton’s gender is a kind of calculated ruse.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/44088ede-5027-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc

Comparing this 2016 column, to today’s column, it almost makes Mr. Luce of 2016 look positively prescient! 

StephenKMackSD  

Joe Biden’s choice of Harris as Vice-President has produced a surfeit of political chatter, that views this ‘team’ as The Answer to Trump. Harris as the Colonel House to Biden’s Wilson? This Party Line, in all its iterations, is tiresome to read!
At the least, Lauren Fedor offers a new cast of characters:

Jon Henes, a partner at law firm Kirkland & Ellis, who was national finance chair for Ms Harris’ failed presidential bid…

“It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to win an election,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina.

Andra Gillespie, a political-science professor at Emory University… 

https://www.ft.com/content/ac82fea9-34f8-4b8f-95c3-9e4558096329

The fact is that Harris never captured more than  3% of the vote, this somehow evades this reporter’s retelling, of the American Saga of a child of immigrant parents.

OneWest Bank gets a mention:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/05/kamala-harris-fails-to-explain-why-she-didnt-prosecute-steven-mnuchins-bank/ 

But the  actuality of jailing the parents of truant children:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-kamala-harris-truancy-20190417-story.html

And her kow-towing to AIPAC: 

A Corporate Media ‘newspaper’ swooning over this Neo-Liberal…

Old Socialist  

Recall the hysterical, war mongering David Brooks of ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ ?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-collapse-of-the-dream-palaces

Mr. Brooks has ‘evolved’ over time, aided by his political opportunism, into an American Political Prophet. In his latest column its headline announces: ‘This Is Where I Stand’ with a sub-headline, ‘The power of conservative radicalism in an age of upheaval.’ The first four paragraphs are awash in the rhetoric of his new status. 

Radicals are not my cup of tea, but I’m grateful for them. The radicals who brought us Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign gave the problem of income inequality a prominence it wouldn’t have had without them.

The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization put racial injustice at the top of the national conversation. The radical populists who ultimately produced Donald Trump showed us how much alienation there is in Middle America.

Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.

But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.

It easy to tire of Mr. Brooks’ ‘history made to measure‘, as narrated by him, of a putative  ‘conservative radicalism’. This all ends with an appeal to the ‘authority’ of Cold Warrior Isaiah Berlin, an acolyte of the politically/morally toxic Bundy brothers:

Not to forget Berlin’s cowardly black-balling of Isaac Deutscher: 

Mr. Brooks final paragraphs present himself as supporting ‘conservative radicals’, as a way of defeating the ‘illiberalism of radicals on left and right.’ No intellectual/political contradiction here! Or the notion of Berlin, as representative of a standard that must be upheld, from a weak appeal to some notion of authority.      

If your views haven’t shifted over the past four tumultuous years, you’re probably not doing much fresh thinking. I find I have moved “left” on race, left on economics and a bit “right” on community, family and social issues.

Mostly I find myself supporting the conservative radicals, leaders who are confident that we can push for big change while defeating the illiberalism of radicals on left and right.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said he occupied the “extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement.” If that’s good enough for Isaiah Berlin, it’s good enough for me.

David Brooks riffs on the self-serving mythology of the ‘Radical Center’ that keeps appearing, in its various iterations, as some kind all purpose Political Antidote. America’s Political Class gave birth to Trump, Brooks one of the leading figures in Free Market Necromancy, that destroyed our economy. Not to speak of America’s Wars of Empire that Brooks advocated in his puerile ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’. Mendacity is the point at which Mr. Brooks stands!

Old Socialist