Reading the Lincoln Project Manifesto in The New York Times is instructive, of more than this collection of carefully framed political cliches, by political technocrats, who make it their business to write evocative and high-sounding rhetoric for use in campaigns: ‘A Thousand Points of Light’ ,’Compassionate Conservatism’. Such is the power of these Kitsch Meisters . The  first three paragraphs are collective effort to sound the right notes.

Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.

That’s why we are announcing the Lincoln Project, an effort to highlight our country’s story and values, and its people’s sacrifices and obligations. This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.

This effort asks all Americans of all places, creeds and ways of life to join in the seminal task of our generation: restoring to this nation leadership and governance that respects the rule of law, recognizes the dignity of all people and defends the Constitution and American values at home and abroad.

…

It prepares the reader for this pronouncement by John Weaver in this Financial Times news report:

“We are like the French resistance. We are blowing up the supply lines,” said John Weaver, a veteran Republican political consultant and one of the co-founders of the group, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln. 

Like most History Made to Measure it is hyperbolic and self-congratulatory.  The former political advisers, place their wager on the power of propaganda, uttered in the present, about a re-constructed past, that has been laundered for easier consumption by readers in this political moment. Not a very sophisticated exercise in the politics of convenience. But it is awash in Fourth of July speechifying in all its insufferability. Lincoln might be the featured player here, if it weren’t for this coterie’s amour-propre.   

What is left of this political equation but  to frame my argument in more contemporaneous terms?  This reader can only wonder at the inaction of the members of  this Bush coterie, when The Tea Party took over the Republican Party? They were the immediate precursors on Trump and Trumpism. A vexing question: where were these Lincoln understudies to oppose that irrationalism ? that now present themselves as the representatives of  an Enlightened Republican Party!

What might the reader think of their support for a cognitively deficient candidate like Joe Biden, who has trouble constructing a comprehensible simple sentence -what can be expected of him in a debate? 

Look to the Lincoln Project as the spokes persons for the present ‘Political Center’ in America: the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives, who have been the active agents in their own political eclipse. Who now fret and strut on the political stage, as if they were the protagonists in a Shakespearean history play, rather than a television melodrama, in the black and white world of another America.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9d64b55a-0cbe-4e27-b546-6a4cf7c9345b

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July 06, 2020

P.S. Not to forget, this team of Public Relations specialists, and the vile Neo-Con David Frum, were the advocates/apologists for the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq! That continue to this day. Such is the toxic legacy of the Bush Dynasty, that now seeks to white-wash these crimes, by its courageous stand against the Trump Political Irrationalism, that they helped to birth. 

What to think of Fillon’s conviction? The notorious French Thatcherite was a shameless embezzler! 

Headline: Former French PM sentenced to jail for embezzlement

Sub-headline: François Fillon found guilty over wife’s fake job as parliamentary aide

François Fillon, the former French prime minister, has been sentenced to jail for embezzlement after paying his wife more than €1m of state funds for work she never did, in a scandal that derailed the centre-right campaign in the 2017 presidential election and enabled Emmanuel Macron’s victory. 

Mr Fillon, who had been the leading candidate for the presidency before the scandal broke, was found guilty on Monday by a French court and sentenced to five years in prison, with three years suspended, barred from political office for 10 years and fined €375,000. 

…

Later in this news report:  the impending trials of Balladur and Sorkozy contribute to the political piquancy : 

…

Another former PM, Édouard Balladur, faces trial over allegations that cash was funneled from arms sales to his 1995 presidential campaign. While former president Nicolas Sarkozy is also facing trial, probably this year, in a campaign finance case for allegedly overspending by more than €20m in his 2012 run for the presidency. Mr Sarkozy also faces a separate trial in October for influence-peddling after allegedly attempting to bribe a judge in a different investigation.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/855679e6-53eb-4d5b-9825-a1b3f4444e18

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Headline: Macron has changed prime minister but is unlikely to change course

Sub-headline: Ditching the premier has seldom worked as a route to political revival in France

In early June, Emmanuel Macron announced that the enormity of the coronavirus crisis was a chance to reinvent himself. On Friday the French president set about the task — by reinventing his prime minister. After three years leading the government, Edouard Philippe will return to the port city of Le Havre, where he was recently re-elected as mayor in a landslide. Modesty and competence had turned Mr Philippe into a more popular figure than the president, who seems unable to correct the impression he is arrogant and out of touch. 

…

https://www.ft.com/content/9dc773b6-2295-4259-b821-a78d227faddc

As usual, with The Financial Times’ reports on Macron, and his Neo-Liberal regime, that is awash in the low grade apologetics for his once highfalutin Jupertarian Politics, that has reached a series of ,what to call them? A series of confrontations, with the open rebellion by the gilets jaunes, gilets noirs and the  gilets femmes. This rebellion is unreported in this ‘newspaper’,  that mimics the Pravda of another time and place! The curious need only seek out the videos, posted nearly everyday on Twitter, for the unwelcome news about that rebellion in near ‘real-time‘. 

The Critical Reader should not engage in misplaced schadenfreude, as it offers a limited pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It is the ersatz replacement for strategic political thinking and action. 

Old Socialist 

My reply to Gerard

Thank you for your comment. ‘The gilet jaune rebellion lives on mainly in the fevered imaginations of far-right revolutionaries around the world.’
The above quote from your reply, I find puzzling, since I am on ‘The Left’, I thought that was readily apparent? But the gilets jaunes seemed to be the point of confluence ,that attracted followers from across the political spectrum, in opposition to Macron’s Neo-Liberal Project.

Your final sentence is preposterous on its face. The Financial Times led the way, in its scare mongering against ‘the great unwashed’ rebels’ from below. Its about ‘class’ and ‘caste’ , in a seemingly endless collapsing Late Capitalism. Have I established my ‘Left Credentials’? 
The gilets jaunes and Corbyn were the favorite villains, in the Neo-Liberal coterie’s hysterical Political Melodrama, endlessly repeated as if it were Holy Writ!

As to your longer comment above , it is pure bourgeois Liberalism, expressed in the Neo-Liberal patois of Enlightened Capital, and Macron as its exemplar. Macron’s attempt at Austerity, no matter how piecemeal, has pushed that Jupertarian Politics to the political periphery. All that is left is Macron’s burning political ambition to replace Merkel as the titular leader of the EU. Such is my sketch of the political territory.  

Regards,
StephenKMackSD 

https://www.ft.com/content/9dc773b6-2295-4259-b821-a78d227faddc?commentID=16561a06-bfd9-4257-b2ec-d2958374539b

 

Mr. Ganesh opens his collection of observations, prognostications, larded with the usual self-congratulation, framed by his own ‘grip on logical reasoning’,  with this paragraph:

At its midpoint, 2020 is turning out to be one of the darkest years in the peacetime history of the US. It has also affirmed the nation’s global primacy beyond any doubt. Fear not for your columnist’s grip on logical reasoning, at least any more than usual. These contrary claims are reconcilable.

After his whirl-wind of ‘History Made to Measure’ in all its multifarious iterations, tautology? He takes the measure of The New Deal , that saved American Capitalism from its rapacious greed, a least until the Clinton’s completed Reagan’s Revolution. The last paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s screed demonstrates a cultivated , not to speak of ideologically fueled, attack on The New Deal: 

This week, the UK government named some policies after Roosevelt’s New Deal, a now almost 90-year-old programme of disputed effectiveness undertaken in different circumstances in a different continent. The way the US continues to serve as a reference point is impressive. It is a vestigial mark of its time as a truly unchallenged power. But it comes at the cost of painful exposure. The world is moving on from American hegemony. It is not moving on from the American spectacle.

‘Roosevelt’s New Deal, a now almost 90-year-old programme of disputed effectiveness’ would be an astounding pronouncement, that an actual Historian might find shrill hyperbole, unless it was posited by a Hoover Institution Fellow. Social Security was/is central to FDR’s vision, and its political/civic prescience. 

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/af8e1f30-290c-4181-858e-0bf2f11a0c32

The ‘Two State Solution’ is as dead as Freud’s ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’! Psychoanalysis has morphed into, has been re-imagined into a form of ‘Jewish Storytelling’ , or a Metaphysic , according the various factions, of its coterie of practitioners.

Its just way past time to end all aid to Israel, now! Its that simple. Do American Jews owe anything to Israel? And if so, how can that debt be defined?

The treatment inflicted on the indigenous populations of Palestinians and Bedouins, is an obscene recrudescence of the European experience of Jews. If moral/political frankness be anything resembling an imperative, then facing the facts cannot be denied!

Headline: Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

The only impediment to a complete end of aid, to the Zionist State, is America’s utterly corrupt Political Class. Yet ‘The Pandemic’ and its dire economic consequences, have seen a precipitous collapse, of political legitimacy across its spectrum…

Political Observer

J St U alums tell the Zionist org its strategy hasn’t worked, it’s time to reduce aid to Israel over annexation

As a once regular reader of Timothy Garton Ash, in the NYRB, e.g. ‘The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 as Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague’ and all his essays published in that once Left/Liberal tabloid, a vexing question occurs:  how did he devolve into another of the Hoover Institution Counter Enlightenment coterie? Like Neo-Imperialist Niall Ferguson, and the would be Straussian historical re-write man, Francis Fukuyama? 

For me, this is one of those really dark days for liberty, like the crushing of Hungary 1956, Prague 1968….

For a prominent Historian to willfully forget that Hong Kong was once a Crown Colony, of the all but disappeared British Empire, while referring to the crimes of the Soviet period, sets up a once dread rhetoric, on the Right, of the myth of victimhood. The fact is that Hong Kong is part of of China, and that the protesters are nativists in the pay of Jimmy Lai.   

Hong Kong’s ‘pro-democracy’ movement allies with far-right US politicians that seek to crush Black Lives Matter

These Greyzone essays report on, and expose, the political  reactionary/racist character of the ‘pro-democracy’ movement, and its financial backer Jimmy Lai. .  

Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence

Political Observer 

Headline: Emmanuel Macron Is Losing His Urban Grip

Sub-headline: France’s cities aspire to more radical green policies, and that’s hard to square with voters from the rest of the country. 

The reader need only read Laurent’s first paragraph:

There were two obvious losers in France’s runoff round of local elections, held this weekend after a three-month delay caused by the Covid-19 epidemic. One was democracy. Only about 40% of eligible voters bothered to turn up, a record low. The other was President Emmanuel Macron, whose core urban fan base went Green.

That  ‘40% of eligible voters’ that expresses a ‘record low’ – it doesn’t occur to Laurent that there is a kind political equivalency, between to the number of abstentions, spoiled and blank ballots that ushered in Macron’s Jupertarian Politics.In the final contest against Le Pen: that number is 36.5 % , and that record low of 40% are numerically so close! In the Corporate Media, like the Stalinists of another time and place, historical erasure is the first order of business: with the caveat that not to report the full scale rebellion against Macron’s ‘reforms’ accomplices the same ends, as that erasure of another time. In order to see that ‘Rebellion’, gilets jaunes,  gilets noirs, gilets femmes, in something like ‘real time’, one need only look to twitter, more than likely foreign territory to a journalist of Laurent’s  eminence? 

Patience! Laurent has yet to play a trump card, such as it is:

The Covid-19 epidemic struck France a month later, completely overshadowing the first round of voting — which, in hindsight, really shouldn’t have gone ahead — and delaying the second round for three months. No wonder so many people avoided the voting booths and opted for post-lockdown sunbathing.

What to make of this very selective use, of the widely available evidence that presents Macron in the best possible light?

In the 2017 presidential election, the 42-year-old former banker and one-time Socialist attracted 90% of the vote in Paris. In last year’s European elections, his party came first in the capital, with 33% of the vote. This time around, Macron’s candidate came in third, behind Hidalgo and the center-right Republicans. 

That 36.5% number is obscured, by the above selectively curated election data?  But Laurent means to sweeten this bitter brew, of Macron’s long discarded Jupertarian window dressing by what means? ebbing ‘popularity’ in the face of a resistance that won’t go away, even in the face of police violence? 

Still, this election shows the potential for surprises and a further fragmentation of the French electorate. Covid-19 has put Macron’s economic reform agenda on ice, and it’s pushing him to mark a new start with a government reshuffle. This will mean deciding the fate of his successful and popular center-right prime minister, Edouard Philippe, while also seeking to steal the Greens’ thunder as standard bearers of the progressive Left.

Macron’s unslakable ambition to lead the faltering EU, as Merkel’s anointed successor, seems more distant, than when he was first elected, to the applause of so many of a Political Center, now composed of Neo-Liberals and Neo-Conservatives. Even the stodgy Times reported on Center-Right’s newest enthusiasm, Edouard Philippe!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frances-popular-pm-edouard-philippe-looms-large-in-macrons-rear-view-mirror-pnkw3j696

Old Socialist

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-29/what-emmanuel-macron-s-election-flop-says-about-france?sref=bfOwbK4O

Headline: Keir Starmer should finish the purge of Corbynism

Sub-headline: Voters are warming to Labour’s leader but need to see he has the strength and courage to take on the party’s left-wing

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/starmer-should-finish-the-purge-of-corbynism-f7vpt9fv8

Rachel Sylvester’s Time’s column, of June 15, 2020, reiterates all the shopworn accusations, that have become the Party Line of the Anti-Corbyn coterie. The opening paragraph is framed by L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and its two beloved characters The Tin Man and The Scarecrow:

In the Wizard of Oz theory of politics, Labour has traditionally been the Scarecrow. The voters think its heart is in the right place but they want it to find a brain. The Conservative Party is like the Tin Man — it is seen as competent but the public wishes it had a bit more compassion. With laser-like focus, Jeremy Corbyn managed to turn Labour into both scarecrow and tin man, lacking heart as well as head. He negated his party’s reputation for tolerance and kindness by presiding over the rise of antisemitism and a culture of bullying while at the same time failing to reverse the impression that Labour could not be trusted to the run the country.

As many years as I have read about politics, and political theory, I have yet to encounter such a theory! Should that surprise me? Sylvester’s talent for imagining political theory is confined to the nursery, or perhaps to the 1939 Hollywood Movie Classic?   

 The Party Line on Corbyn is/was his tolerance for, and even coddling, of Anti-Semites, and Anti-Semitism, within the Labour Party. Can only rightly be called a personal attack on Corbyn’s vocal  and unapologetic  public support of Palestinian Rights. The propagandists Jonathan Freedland, and Margaret Hodge, with the collaboration of the Blairite faction, constructed this self-serving mythology. With Blairite Keir Starmer as the new leader of the Party, the purge of Corbyn loyalists, and even just fellow travelers, is now in full swing. 

Ignore the glancing blows against the dull-witted Boris, he is simply a minor player, in this  dull black and white, 21 inch screen half-hour telenovella. The next walk-on: 

Chris Curtis, research director at the polling company YouGov, says there has been a transformation in Labour’s standing in the two months since the new leader took over. “What’s happened a lot quicker than many of us expected is that Keir Starmer has turned those brand metrics around. The Labour Party is starting to be seen once again as the party that cares about ordinary people and has more tolerance.

“That’s impressive but it still doesn’t mean it can go on to win an election unless you also build an association with competence and having a clear sense of purpose.”

‘Turned those brand metrics around’ the reader is now in the territory of Public Relations supplied by Chris Curtis, via that old classic by Edward Bernays, expressed in the more current technocratic jargon. Eventually Sylvester returns the the primacy of ‘Brand’ , but the reader wades through her verbose speculations/prognostication, or call it self-congratulatory chatter, to reach this penultimate paragraph: 

Brand matters in politics at least as much as it does in business. That is why both Tony Blair and David Cameron were so determined to detoxify their parties. Their aim was to change perceptions and reach out to new audiences rather than simply reinforce preconceptions. For Mr Blair that meant adding an element of the Tin Man to Labour’s Scarecrow, and for Mr Cameron that required giving the Tory party a heart as well as a head. Their electoral fortunes depended largely on how far they succeeded. Sir Keir is currently trying to broaden Labour’s appeal: his refusal to back the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol reflects the views of voters more than his party’s left wing. By contrast, Mr Johnson is trying to shore up his base by refusing to extend the Brexit transition period and fuelling the “culture war”.

Market primacy is the fools gold of the Present Age, and ‘Brand’ is one of its cornerstones. 

______________________________________________________________

Note that even Andrew Sullivan commented on Starmer’s strict and swift ‘discipline’ of Long-Bailey.  ‘Anti-Semites’ will be purged from the Labour Party, that is Starmer’s commitment. Sullivan thinks Starmer is a ‘fully fledged lefty’ not a ‘Tony Blair’: Sullivan’s career is defined by his, not just bad judgement, but that cost human lives in obscene number. He is a shameless self-promoter ,without scruple. 

The firing was swift and decisive and crisply defended: “The sharing of that article was wrong … because the article contained anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and I have therefore stood Rebecca Long-Bailey down from the shadow cabinet. I’ve made it my first priority to tackle anti-Semitism and rebuilding trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority for me.”

The left’s suspicion that Starmer would be purging its ranks from senior leadership is almost certainly overblown. Starmer is not Tony Blair; he’s a fully fledged lefty and has been ever since his high-school days. He doesn’t want to inflame party tensions. But he rightly understands that this is a key issue in regaining voters’ trust of Labour, and it will almost certainly help him build on the momentum against the Johnson government that his leadership has jump-started. As he becomes more widely known, Starmer is winning fans. His approval rating has gone from 39 to 48 percent in a month, as Boris Johnson’s ratings have plummeted and as COVID-19 continues to wrack Britain. Forty percent of Brits now see Starmer as a credible prime minister–in–waiting; and although his party continues to lag the Tories, it’s beginning to make gains. This stand against tolerating anti-Semitism will, I think, help it gain some more.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/andrew-sullivan-you-say-you-want-a-revolution.html

American Writer

Note the first paragraph of Mr. Divine’s latest essay:

One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before. The items were not merely forms of idolatry in the minds of the newly austere Protestant vision; they also served to perpetuate the rule of the pope. They could be occasions for treason, heresy, and sin.

Note that he presents himself as a member of a religious minority: a Catholic ,who came of age in a Protestant country, Great Britain. What can this mean to the reader? I don’t know that I can answer this question, perhaps just a preliminary starting point ?  Some conjecture: could a stance that put him in another category, that of being in a sexual minority, might ill serve his political ends? 

The  body of his essay is ‘A History Made to Measure’, that serves the momentary needs of propaganda. Mr. Divine’s cast of characters resembles those Hollywood Movie Epics. Once produced by Cecil B. De Mille, late in his career, filmed in vibrant Technicolor, with a cast of Movie Stars, of varying degrees of fame. This political melodrama features a series of walk-ons, of actual villainous historical actors, ideas, even institutions and places, a selection is revelatory: 

 The Taliban, Mullah Mohammed, the spirit of Paris in 1789,  Denis Diderot, French Revolution, The Romans, Iconoclasm, Mao’s Cultural Revolution,Mao’s model, late-19th-century Russia,the New York Times newsroom in 2020, Jenny Slate,  Ibram X. Kendi,  a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada, post–Reformation Europe,  Calvin’s Geneva, Orwellian moment,  its crude ideological Manichaeanism etc. 

Mr. Divine’s mimics De Mille’s late style, where mid-century actors, resemble silent actors, mugging to covey meaning, as if sound was still an absent quantity in film.  Divine’s essay moves at top rhetorical speed, fueled by an equally reductive, cartoonish iteration of political hysteria. 

American Writer

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/andrew-sullivan-you-say-you-want-a-revolution.html

Reading Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay features his ‘History Made to Measure’. Or you could look at it as an intellectual pastiche, of one of the paintings/assemblages of Red Grooms?
Do investigate the work of an American satirist, of actual talent, for an engaging mischief, that Ganesh seeks to emulate in prose?

https://www.artsy.net/artist/red-grooms/works-for-sale

Or is Mr. Ganesh emulating the work of Tom Wolf?

For a fascinating, hinting at the salacious, evaluation of the Buckley vs. Vidal political skirmishes, see this video of Christopher Hitchens:

As a high school-drop in the 1960’s, I wasted too many hours watching television. And especially the Network News coverage of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. The debates between Buckley and Vidal, refereed by the craven hawk Howard K. Smith, were high on the list. Except that I missed the most explosive, contentious one. ABC must have censored it, I only saw it decades later. The 2015 film ‘Best of Enemies’ tells the story.

The notion that somehow the ‘Culture Wars’ have been ‘won’ or ‘lost’ by any political faction, no matter how capaciously defined these entity’s may be, is the expression of journalistic opportunism, desperation? Or call this particular subject, awash in the self-serving  cynicism of its operatives, ‘sexy’: able to generate traffic on web-sites, and perhaps, boost news-stand sales, in certain markets, by word of mouth?

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/4f60f812-730e-471c-9804-82d35a543ba2

This reads like a Press Release from the Biden Campaign. Trump has it wrong its not ‘Sleepy Joe’ but ‘Cognitive Deficit Old Joe’ !
The only real question is when and how will the New Democrats unload Biden? All carefully, not to speak of melodramatically framed : Joe, for the good of the Nation, reluctantly withdraws, due to health reasons,  from his Crusade against the ‘Evil Trump’ and cedes his delegates to _______ _______. Hyperbolic? 
Its made for that small screen, that over time has evolved/metastasized electronically, to become an ungainly color wall hanging. Just as much of an unwelcome guest, as that 21 inch black and white model, that hypnotized me, and a whole generation of children. With its flickering images, appropriated from radio and Movie Serial re-runs, endlessly copied by television’s  pioneers.  
Obama is/was a more canny self-promoter, political grifter, who praised Reagan not FDR! The natural successor to the Neo-Liberal Clintons.  Joe was vocal about his racism, as all those videos on YouTube demonstrate: the irredeemable black predator, a sign of Joe’s earlier Neo-Reaganite iteration. How inconvenient, for that  host of New Democratic apparatchiks quoted in this ‘News Story’. Like the Stalinists, the New Democrats attempt at the erasure of ‘History’ succeeds only with ‘the base’ , who simply follow along with the ever changing Party Line.

Political Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/20f6c7fb-103f-4c69-889f-02fd175959df