StephenKMackSD's Blog

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 

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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        

With all the Marque Pundits on vacation, it falls the Mr. Ganesh to offer up his commentary on the Biden pick of Harris, as his vice-president. He mentions in passing Harris’ threat to jail the parents of truant children. The Los Angeles Times offers this: 

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

On the de facto pardon of OneWest Bank’s Steven Mnuchin:

Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

Harris’ pandering, not to speak groveling address at AIPAC, in which she claims that she didn’t sell Girl Scout Cookies, but raised funds for Israel. How does one ‘fact check’ such an assertion? 

Here is a link to Joe Biden’s address to the Ukrainian Rada: 

Joe Biden worked hard, at obtaining that sinecure, for Hunter Biden at Burisma Holdings!

I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

The reader has to be patient, with Mr. Ganesh’s attempt at an apologetic for Biden, in its political meander, his History Made to Measure. But here, the Janan Ganesh the readers has no trouble recognizing breaks through: 

Just not, in part thanks to that vagueness of hers, unbeatable. In a reptilian passage of Tony Blair’s chatty memoirs, the former UK prime minister explains how to go about negative campaigning. The classic error, he says, with the sureness of the thrice-elected, is the lurid, over-the-top attack. Swing voters learn to tune these out. What moves them is the lesser charge, expressed more in sorrow than in anger.

https://www.ft.com/content/26d1649a-f127-4de6-a568-f34060ca348c

The ‘Literary Ganesh’ married to the ‘Political Ganesh’ is no more insightful, but it reads ‘as if’ it were insight, rather than political chatter in a more decorous key. 

Political Cynic 

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Mr. Stavridis’ rise to the top of the Military/Capitalist coterie’s Olympus is here made clear to the reader of his latest essay at Bloomberg Opinion:

Headline: Brent Scowcroft Never Hated His Enemies

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

That such a citizen, an exalted member of the American Technocracy, praises Brent Scowcroft, via a comparison to blood soaked Hollywood Gangster kitsch, doesn’t even qualify as faint praise. Or is this indicative of the Scowcroft ‘toughness’, and or ‘resolve’?  After some preliminary and obligatory funeral oration chatter, this paragraph resolves any doubt in the readers mind:  

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.” 

In order to win, one must never be blinded by inconvenient emotion, it is offered as the sine qua non of the gangster and the political operative! Stavridis offers this admonition about the political present:

This lesson in realism remains a striking and necessary lesson for the U.S. today, from dealing with the dangerous adventurism of Vladimir Putin to the irascible behavior of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. 

In the world view of Gangsters and Technocrats it is about ‘winning at any cost’ via a strategic use of Adam Smith’s  Impartial Spectator, to dress it in undeserved intellectual finery.

Here is Stavridis’ anti-penultimate thoughts, the two that follow are simply History Made To Measure and more funeral oration cliche: 

Finally, the general advocated an international outlook. He was a keen student of history, and in that 2009 talk he pointed out to me that a century earlier, the world was on the verge of two global conflicts in three decades. His prescription was simple: to best protect the nation and serve its interests, America had to remain engaged in the world — not as the world’s policeman, but as a source of leadership when it mattered.

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

America is the World’s Policeman! Its continuing Wars of Empire, and a World surrounded by its  military bases, and its not so secret military interventions, around the world, are facts that Technocrat Stavridis will never acknowledge!

Old Socialist 

Andy Divine’s  essay of July 31, 2020 on the evolution/de-evolution of Post-Modernism, and its fellow traveler Critical Theory, leaves the reader with the realization that these conceptual and intellectual descriptions, have now been reduced to propaganda ‘catch phrases’  in the war between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. Has Mr. Divine read any of the writers that  fall under the rubrics of  Post-Modern, or Critical Theory ?    

Andy Divine has found his weapon of choice: ‘ Cynical reason How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody‘ by James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.
An excerpt:

Intersectionality: An Excerpt from “Cynical Theories”

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She lives in England.

James Lindsay is a mathematician with a background in physics. He is interested in the psychology of religion, authoritarianism, and extremism and is the author of Everybody is Wrong about God. His other books include Life in Light of Death and How to Have Impossible Conversations. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, and Time. He led the Grievance Studies Affair probe that made international headlines in 2018, including the front page of the New York Times. He lives in Tennessee.

Helen Pluckrose publishes a excerpt, of the book she co-authored, in the magazine she edits! ‘She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism.’ ‘Popular essay on Post-Modernism’ is indicative of propaganda, not scholarship.  

This is the perfect opportunity for Andy Divine to appropriate this  pseudo-scholarship, in his latest hysterical instalment against the ‘Left Juggernaut‘, that now rules the streets of ‘God’s Country’! Andy explains the value of the Lindsay &  Pluckrose polemic. 

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized. 

In Andy’s narrative ‘The Post-Modern’ and ‘Critical Theory‘ are a political/ethical singularity: propaganda makes its demands.  He features himself as its victim:

You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness

But Andy is unafraid, to inform the reader, that he missed the entire career of American Philosopher/Writer Richard Rorty, even the stolid George F. Will managed to take a swipe at Rorty. Andy was too busy preening his ego, to have noticed an American Philosopher, the equal or greater successor to James or Dewey.

As usual, Andy rambles on for paragraphs, before this section reaches its end. In ‘Andy World’ brevity gets in the way of verbose propagandizing.

Political Observer

Headline: Beirut explosion: France’s Macron warns Lebanon on need for reform

Sub-headline: International donors pledge aid in wake of explosion that devastated Beirut

There is nothing like the craven ambition of Macron! He covets the Leadership of the EU , even in the early stages of its slow-motion collapse. While his En Marche still faces persistent popular resistance.
The Neo-Liberal Project is being eviscerated by Covid, and its economic wake. That Project faces the rise of the New Intellectual/Political/Economic Triad of Keynes/Piketty/Marx!
Macron, ever in search for a ‘politically sexy’ Photo Op, this heart-wrenching catastrophe offers the perfect opportunity for his Neo-Liberalism, with an unsavory Colonial Accent. 

The above just introductory! But Macron speaks/riffs on Colonial themes, like he lectures the gilets jaunes, and then expresses his political contempt for them , via police violence.  

“The priority is unconditional aid and support for the population,” … “We will be there for you and won’t give up on you.”…  “If reforms are not carried out, Lebanon will continue to sink,” 

https://www.ft.com/content/8c7e38c5-7b56-4e95-a752-50c6652c12c9

It isn’t that Chloe Cornish in Beirut, Victor Mallet in Paris and Andrew England in London haven’t produced informative reporting. Its that this Newspaper’s Macron advocacy/apologetics is handled, indeed confected by the editors, although these reporters know the Party Line!

More of the same from Macron: 

“I will talk to all political forces to ask them for a new pact. I am here today to propose a new political pact to them,” …

The comments of ‘Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House.’ adds a bourgeois respectability to this ‘report’ except that Chatham Hose is Corporately funded: ExxonMobil Corporation, Chevron Ltd, AIG , etc:

https://www.chathamhouse.org/membership/corporate-membership/corporate-list

The IMF. the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen , nor Think Tank  Lina Khatib, whose comment…: 

‘ “without economic and political reform any aid given to Lebanon is only going to end up in the wrong hands”. ‘

Its ‘as if’ the Colonial Mentality is the parent of The New and Old Cold War. NGO’s , Think Tanks are the realization of politics by another means, via the ‘expertise’ of a class of well paid Technocrats. 

Old Socialist 

Its always rewarding, at my breakfast time, to do some exploring of the morning newspapers. What caught my attention today, with the proviso that all the Big Name’s of political comment are on vacation? was Janan Ganesh’s latest essay in The Financial Times: 

Headline:A defeat for Donald Trump is not a defeat for autocracy

Sub-headline: Voters are rejecting the president’s incompetence, not his authoritarianism

https://www.ft.com/content/889e5d1b-4e71-4fb5-bdc8-c9e0621906e1

Here is what passes for political thought: rhetorical hair-splitting, name dropping,  political yarn-spinning, self-congratulation, and an absence of the application of brevity. That might have rendered his essay to a couple of more insightful paragraphs? My patience level at the breakfast table is dependent on my coffee consumption. 

I made the mistake of going to the New York Times web site. And Bret Stephens’ essay on that  Conservative Monument Edmund Burke. 

Headline: Why Edmund Burke Still Matters

Sub-headline: He reminds us it’s hard to respect democratic political institutions while disdaining the founders of those institutions.

The political virtue of Burke, as presented by Stephens,  is that he is the antidote to the active Rebellion against the established order.  The New Democrats, Neo-Conservatives  and a Republican Party, that surrendered to the Tea Party Reactionaries, that produced Trump and Trumpism, are by means of Stephens’ political necromancy the stand-ins for a Rational Political Order?  

Burke is then presented, in his usual guise, as the Great Crusader against The French Revolution, as an expression of its inherent murderous political nihilism. Is their not just a troubling bit of inconsistency, in Stephens self-presentation, of being Burke’s representative in the political present. When he was an active member of the Neo-Conservative Coterie’s hysterical war mongering, in both Afghanistan and Iraq? What were the costs in lives, of these two baseless attacks on sovereign states by the American Military Juggernaut? 

Read Stephen’s last two paragraphs. The notion that the American political provincial  George F.  Will could write, much less conceive, a magnum opus, ‘The Conservative Sensibility’ is comic. Also featuring some critical caveats , that ‘we’ haven’t quite reached the very point of crisis, but ‘we’ are close to its edge.   

Because Burke champions a different concept of liberty than the one most Americans cherish, it may be easy to dismiss his teachings as interesting but ultimately irrelevant. George Will, in his magnum opus “The Conservative Sensibility,” speaks of Burke as a “throne-and-altar” conservative of little relevance to American experience. Whatever else might be said of events in places like Portland or Seattle, it is not the storming of the Bastille, and wokeness isn’t Jacobinism — at least not yet. The time to write “Reflections on the Revolutions in America” is still a ways off.

A ways off — but ever more visible on the horizon. To read and admire Burke does not require us to embrace his views, much less treat him as a prophet. But it’s an opportunity to learn something from a man who saw, more clearly than most, how “very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.”

Political Cynic 

The reader quickly realizes the ‘why’ of the Jerusalem Post hiring, of the 28 year old Bret Stephens, to be its editor. This newspaper is the propaganda arm of the Zionist State. And Stephens regurgitates the ever evolving rationales for this European Settler State, he knows it by wrote, but is also able to extemporize, at will, on its themes.
Mr. Stephens is given to impugning  his opponents, like the anguished Liberal Zionist Beinart. Reminding this reader of Paul,  in the commentary by Karl Barth, of  ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ or of Luther’s ‘1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology’ and his ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’ . Stephens is a zealot, that shares that commonality with the Protestant Reformation and its Biblical precursor.. 

The last two paragraphs of his essay is about the waning power of Jewish Identity, where such a concept appears as ineluctable, as conceived by Stephens, being the sine qua non of the Zionist State’s survival.

It used to be that Israelis depended on a secure and thriving American Jewry to help stand up their fragile state. Today it is American Jewry that is fragile, threatened by dwindling cultural influence, stagnant demographic trends, increasing alienation from the Democratic Party and abiding discomfort with the G.O.P., and rising anti-Semitism — sometimes masked as anti-Zionism — from across the political spectrum.

Should American Jews start looking for the exits — just as every other Diaspora community in history has done, and continues to do — they will be grateful to find a Jewish state that resisted the siren song of “one state.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/israel-palestine-one-state-solution.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Isn’t the survival of this state predicated upon lavish economic support given by America? 

Headline: Key U.S. lawmakers want to boost Israel’s $38 billion defense aid package

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-israel-defense-idUSKCN1GB2NQ

Political Observer