StephenKMackSD's Blog

The latest bizarre twist, in this election year, is that Republican John Kasich will speak at the Democratic Convention. He being part of the ‘Never Trumper’ contingent. This coterie somehow finds Joe Biden, even in his state of advanced cogitative deficit, a wiser choice than Trump.
Now Mr. Ganesh, or the headline writers of this newspaper, present the reader with:

Headline: The deceptive radicalism of Joe Biden

Sub-headline: His pragmatic image would provide Democrats with cover for unexpectedly bold policies

The opening paragraph is an almost a comic riff, or just the product of rhetorical blundering ?

The Soviet Union used to alternate between bald leaders and ones with formidable hair. The US, which is seldom ruled by the smooth of pate, swings around a different axis. It seems to crave a breather after each high-drama president. 

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The reader eventually reaches 

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More, perhaps, than in any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson. Mr Biden is running some way to the left of his old boss, Mr Obama, or of Bill Clinton before him. On healthcare, but also on housing, education and climate change abatement, he is a late-life convert to expansive federal government. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the public debts it has incurred, he proposed to raise taxes on higher earners.

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 Joe Biden is a Neo-Liberal, like Obama and Clinton, so the notion of ‘deceptive radicalism’ is the kind of fiction published by this newspaper with regularity. The potted history of Roosevelt,Truman and Johnson is that near comic turn, almost realized.  

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Franklin Roosevelt was a blue blood whose New Deal remains America’s noblest act of class-treachery. Harry Truman was a machine politician from the pragmatic Midwest. As for Johnson, progressives feared they were getting an unreconstructed vulgarian, not the Civil Rights Act and Medicare.

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The notion that Joe Biden, in any way resembles Clement Attlee, is not just to misread this exhausted old pol’s non-existent ‘deceptive radicalism’, but to remind the reader of the still born comic potential of Ganesh’s opening paragraph.    

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This trick is not unique to US politics. Britain’s postwar prime minister Clement Attlee was such a parody of English diffidence that, when asked if he was an agnostic, he supposedly said: “I don’t know.” After six years in office, he had nationalised healthcare and major industries. No firebrand could have done it.

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The reader can, with profit, skip to the final paragraph of Ganesh’s Campaign Press Release, in the guise of a political commentary, to read this final morsel of political wisdom.

The more he is seen as a do-nothing grandpa, the more license Mr Biden has to advance ideas that would have done for another candidate. Americans, if he wins, should not count on a quiet life. 

https://www.ft.com/content/f207fc7e-2afc-407c-beda-6e7e38100739

Old Socialist 

Headline:The Tyranny Of Tenderness

Sub-headline: A warning from Walker Percy: well-intentioned but ill-considered solutions will do more harm than good.

The Bearers of White Privilege confront Black Lives Matter with a version of an ‘Ersatz Sociology’ , via Walker Percy and  Flannery O’Connor:

‘well-intentioned but ill-considered solutions will do more harm than good’

What is on offer is a version of political/moral fatalism, that rationalizes the political present, as not amenable to another solution. Based in a practice, in that present, as immutable. Even an attempt at self-emancipation from tutelage, is in this context irrelevant. This possible attempt will become:  ‘It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”  The Soviets and the Nazi’s!   

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The novelist Walker Percy snatched a quote from his fellow Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor to provide the theme for his novel The Thanatos Syndrome. In Mystery and Manners O’Connor wrote, “In the absence of… faith, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

…

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-tenderness/

 ‘Fr. Dwight Longenecker is a Catholic priest working in Greenville, South Carolina’.

Fr. Longenecker is a dedicated self promoter, indeed, a business man as his web site makes clear :  

Fr. Dwight Longenecker

What is willfully ignored by both Fr. Longenecker, and The American Conservative is that the Catholic Church is mired in a trans-generational, scandal is too trivial descriptor, of child abuse rooted in the practice of priestly celibacy. Gary Wills offers two essay, that bring into focus the policies and the institutional actors, of the Catholic Church, over time.  

Here is a link to Gary Wills’ May 23 , 2002 essay at The New York  Review of Books titled ‘Scandal’:

Scandal

The second part of Wills’ essay titled ‘Priests and Boys’ of June 13, 2002:

Priests and Boys

In the world  of the American Conservative and Fr. Longenecker the attempt at meliorism is not just ill-fated, but leads to a political/moral collapse, ending in the death camp and the gulag. While the child abuse, within the Church, is not just subject to an erasure, but to a self-serving cultivated ignorance.

Philosophical Apprentice       

Translation of the whole thread, from the beginning:

There are some “interesting” things in the RGN of June with a special file on policing.

https://gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr/crgn/Publications/Revue-de-la-gendarmerie-nationale/Revue-N-267

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Already the general objectives of doc. Globally GM have two problems: the increase of social conflict (the question of the means of repression, police and judicial) and the problem of image of FDO because of videos on social networks (the com)

There are several articles on the history of gendarmerie / policing. Funny they identify the first “framed” event (the 2nd for Ferrer in 1909), as a turning point. Find out why …
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At the beginning of the XXth century neither the left nor the right nor the army wanted a body of soldiers to ensure public order. Too much resemblance to a Praetorian guard, a unit cut to repress workers, the fear of an anticlerical armed force …

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At the time it was not shocking that the CRS returned the projectiles, there was only that to tell the truth.

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Also, it took a long time to accept the tear gas, because in the opinion of all it looked a lot like the combat gas of the 1st. Especially since there were hairy in the demonstrations so it made it average.
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Also, it took a long time to accept the tear gas, because in the opinion of all it looked a lot like the combat gas of the 1st. Especially since there were hairy in the demonstrations so it made it average.
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Concerning GM com, there are also totally Orwelian parties on the semantics of maintaining order, where we would call batons “protection sticks” (sic)

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On the com, the usual complaint as with cop unions: “truncated” videos because of the cursed smartphones. To counter this, the professionalization from NDDL of the image taken by GMs (one camera per unit), both operationally and com.

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On the AFI (“sublethal” weapons) there are a few stray bullets for the looters, not well trained in policing unlike the super pros of GM (Saint-Astier, the ethics of the gendarme, Toussa).

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An article from SDAO (the intellectuals) on the “new radicalities” which show that they do not always capture much on the tactical / ideas relationship. “Let us not forget that the radical ultra-left activist is first of all a product of his time before being a dangerous revolutionary”

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An article on armored vehicles (the VRBG and VAB of the reconverted army). We learn that there were 13 in NDDL and 20 in Paris for Act IV of the GJ, and that overall it was already limited at the operational level.

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There’s a math project (OPMoPS) to manage the crowd (and the MO) by algorithm, detect the vengeful crowds, be able to better place the GM lines etc. By relying on all image sources that go direct to the PC from now on.

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The AI ​​does not stop there, since associated with drones + with the tethered balloon (a novelty, which we will not see from the ground) it will facilitate arrests thanks to facial recognition and predictive behavior management. It will be fun turfu.

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Besides, the ZAD (and in particular the evacuation of NDDL) was a turning point in the use of drones (drone / helicopter cooperation, anti-enemy drone device, guidance of tear gas throws via cougars).

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I end there (because it is too long), by the ingenious of GM on the distribution of PMC (outstanding products, which remain for weeks on skin / clothing), and tear gas by drones. They feel that opinion is not ready but they are in the starting blocks.

Y’a quelques trucs “intéressants” dans la RGN de juin avec un dossier spécial sur le maintien de l’ordre.

https://gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr/crgn/Publications/Revue-de-la-gendarmerie-nationale/Revue-N-267

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Déjà les objectifs généraux du doc. Globalement les GM ont deux problèmes: l’augmentation de la conflictualité sociale (la question des moyens de répression, policière et judiciaire) et le problème d’image des FDO à cause des vidéos sur les réseaux sociaux (la com)

Y’a plusieurs articles sur l’histoire gendarmerie / maintien de l’ordre. C’est marrant ils identifient la première manifestation “encadrée” (la 2ème pour Ferrer en 1909), comme un tournant. Allez savoir pourquoi…
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Début XXè ni la gauche ni la droite ni l’armée voulaient d’un corps de militaires pour assurer l’ordre public. Trop de ressemblance avec une garde prétorienne, une unité taillée pour réprimer les ouvriers, la crainte d’une force armée anticléricale…

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A l’époque ça choquait pas que les CRS renvoient les projectiles, y’avait que ça à vrai dire.

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Aussi, ça a mis du temps pour accepter les lacrymos, parce que de l’avis de tous ça ressemblait pas mal aux gaz de combat de la 1ère. Surtout que y’avait des poilus dans les manifs donc ça le faisait moyen.
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Aussi, ça a mis du temps pour accepter les lacrymos, parce que de l’avis de tous ça ressemblait pas mal aux gaz de combat de la 1ère. Surtout que y’avait des poilus dans les manifs donc ça le faisait moyen.
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Sur le souci de com des GM, y’a aussi des parties totalement orweliennes sur la sémantique du maintien de l’ordre, où on appellerait des matraques des “batons de protection” (sic)

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Sur la com, la plainte habituelle comme chez syndicats de flics: des vidéos “tronquées” à cause des maudits smartphones. Pour contrer ça, la professionnalisation depuis NDDL de l’image prise par les GM (une caméra par unité), à la fois sur un plan opérationnel et com.

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Sur les AFI (les armes “sublétales”) y’a quelques balles perdues pour les baqueux, pas bien formés au maintien de l’ordre contrairement aux super pros de la GM (Saint-Astier, l’éthique du gendarme, toussa).

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Un article du SDAO (les intellos) sur les “nouvelles radicalités” qui montrent qu’ils captent tjr pas grand chose sur le rapport tactique/idées. “N’oublions pas que l’activiste radical d’ultra gauche est d’abord un produit de son époque avant d’être un dangereux révolutionnaire”

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Un article sur les blindés (les VRBG et VAB de l’armée reconvertis). On apprend qu’il y en avait 13 à NDDL et 20 à Paris pour l’acte IV des GJ, et que globalement c’était déjà limite au niveau opérationnel.

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Y’a un projet de matheux (OPMoPS) pour gérer la foule (et le MO) par algorithme, détecter les foules véners, pouvoir placer mieux les lignes de GM etc. En s’appuyant sur toutes les sources d’images qui vont direct au PC dorénavant.

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L’IA s’arrête pas là, puisque associée aux drones + au ballon captif (une nouveauté, qu’on verra pas du sol) elle facilitera les arrestations grâce à reconnaissance faciale et gestion prédictive des comportements. Ca va être fun le turfu.

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D’ailleurs les ZAD (et notamment l’évacuation de NDDL) a été un tournant dans l’utilisation des drones (coopération drone / hélico, dispositif anti drones ennemi, guidage des lancers de lacrymos via les cougars).

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Je finis là (parce que c’est bien trop long), par les ingénieux de la GM sur la distribution de PMC (produits marquants, qui restent pendant des semaines sur peau/vêtements), et lacrymos par drones. Ils sentent que l’opinion est pas prête mais il sont dans les starting blocks.

The third paragraph of Andy’s farewell letter, after the politic gestures, is an exercise of blame placing, at its most intellectually bloated: ‘A critical mass’!  

 
‘What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-you-next-friday.html

The work of Horkheimer and Adorno has been the hysterical focus of Conservatives, the most recent by Reactionary Guru Jordan Peterson. And his use of the catch phrase of ‘Marxist Post-Modernism’, as the enemy of the respectable bourgeoisie, and their attempts at intellectual/political climbing. 

An antidote to this attack, on Adorno, and his political ally Horkheimer, is to read Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius by Detlev Claussen, that presents a picture that is at odds with Sullivan’s polemic. 

I’ll end my commentary at this paragraph, where Mr. Sullivan presents himself as ‘a voice of  political reason’, instead of another of a collective of thinkers, writers, self-publicists who are part of a collective of Neo-Conservatives and Neo-Liberals, that can more than accurately be called The Midwives of Trump. Note that the enemy identified by Sullivan are ‘students’! Recall Allen Bloom, and his natural inheritors, in the political present, of Lukianoff & Haidt?     

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

Old Socialist  

The reader needn’t go any further into Mr. Barber’s review of Patrice Gueniffey’s book  Napoleon & de Gaulle to realize the political propinquity between author and reviewer:

Rather, Gueniffey is lining up with those who fret that history is no longer the cement that holds together the French nation. Today’s school textbooks, he says, “are full of holes, entire aspects of history have disappeared, as have, even more certainly, those who made or incarnated history”. He bemoans the turn in the French education system towards the history of non-European civilisations, not to mention the penchant of French intellectuals for Marxism, sociology, psychoanalysis, structuralism and other fads that denigrate the historical role of individuals.

The last sentence presents the ‘Post-Moderns’, to use a catch-phrase,  as somehow still the ‘victors’ in French intellectual life, while the history of the rise of the ‘Liberals’, in French intellectual life, is the subject explored in these books  :

‘Political Philosophy 1: Rights- The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’ and its two successor volumes, published in France in 1984  

Ferry and Renaut’s ‘French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay in Antihumanism’ , published in France in 1985.

Intellectual History of Liberalism by Pierre Manent , published in France in 1987

The State And The Rule of Law by Blandine Kriegal ,published in France in 1989

New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Mark Lilla , Editor published in America in 1994

The phantom of ‘Post-Modernism’ whether in full dress, or in its constituent parts, still haunts the political/intellectual imaginations of  Neo-Liberal writers, historians out to cultivate the fiction of their  political/intellectual wisdom. In sum, the Post-Moderns were  a collection of intellectual charlatans. As his star faded in France Derrida…

The New York Times: The TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS by Colin Campbell from February 9, 1986 

de Gaulle is then described , via a quote from ‘the leftwing theorist’ Régis Debray:

In physical appearance and character, de Gaulle formed a stark contrast to Napoleon. Exceptionally tall, aloof and filled with a sense of destiny, he was memorably described by Régis Debray, the leftwing theorist, as an “exasperating beanpole”. In his heyday, de Gaulle aroused more hatred than Napoleon did, especially on the right, elements of which never forgave him for repudiating the Vichy regime of 1940-44 and for giving up control of Algeria.

https://www.ft.com/content/ffb576be-4363-4d1f-81d1-6e283f7f7381

My remembrance of de Gaulle is watching this comic figure, to my a-historical American gaze, marching behind the parade of dignitaries, at John F. Kennedy’s State Funeral in November 1963. 

Political Observer 

After Mr. Ganesh’s July 10th’s comic meditation on Alaric the Goth and English ‘chippyness’ , that he posited ‘as potent a source of motivation as exists in life.’ , supplied by Douglas Boin’s book.

https://www.ft.com/content/43e1d489-def7-422c-a8fb-00f4d9e11db9

Mr. Ganesh drew certain lessons, on a collection of political/civic actors as diverse as Oprah, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Pierre Poujade, Richard Nixon, Mark Zuckerberg, himself,David Cameron: The driving force of these lives was/is ‘the inferiority complex’.

The reader is today confronted with Mr. Ganesh’s opening paragraph about ‘partisanship‘ and its uses:

Ferocious partisanship has its uses. If nothing else, a divided nation can console itself that no government idea goes unexamined and unopposed. Scrutiny can be all the more exacting for being born of tribal malice rather than Socratic truth-seeking. The US is riven — it has managed to politicise the workaday face-mask — but it avoids the equal and opposite danger of unreflective consensus.  

Mr. Ganesh is an adept practitioner of striking a self-serving political pose, as his July 10 essay demonstrates. An example from his latest essay of this practice:

 The US is riven — it has managed to politicise the workaday face-mask — but it avoids the equal and opposite danger of unreflective consensus. Except, that is, on the most momentous policy of the century. To be in Washington is to sense a nation sliding into open-ended conflict against China with eerily little debate.

The New Cold War is being fought, in political terms, by means of the failed Mueller Report, and the equally failed Impeachment of Trump, as maladroitly scripted by Adam Schiff, aided by his Neo-Con ‘witnesses’. The propaganda about ‘Russian Interference’ in it variously argued guises was/is the work of political fiction writers. But still, the myth of  The New Cold War’s politics dates from the 2014 Ukrainian Coup: Russian Revanchism?Ivan Katchanovski’s essay ‘The far right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan massacre in Ukraine’ answers some vital questions about Ukraine.

file:///C:/Users/steph/Downloads/ArticleFarRighttheEuroMaidanandtheMaidanMassacreinUkraine.pdf 

And the myth of China’s ‘provocative actions in the South China Sea’, and its actions in Hong Kong, in response to the Nativist Rebellion. The answer to many questions about this ‘Democracy Movement’ are answered here, in revelatory detail.  

https://thegrayzone.com/category/hong-kong/

Why would Mr. Ganesh waste his, and the readers time, lecturing the various members of America’s Political Class? Is moralizing the sine qua non of the political Journalist? The questions abound, but look to this evocative, even sumptuous paragraph, for a possible answer to the proffered ‘un-American thing,consensus’?     

The result is that un-American thing, consensus, and it concerns not just the future but increasingly the past. Everyone now “knows” that pre-Trump Washington was a place of Whiggish credulity, forever betting on material enrichment to make of China a vast Japan or South Korea: a democracy, a friend. In this account, its admittance to the World Trade Organization was the inadvertent crowning of a rival by American enablers.

Brevity is not an integral part of the Ganesh rhetorical strategy. What rescues his essay is it’s growing cast of characters, complete with their necessary historical baggage, subject to an uncomplimentary reductivism.     

 George HW Bush, Barack Obama, ‘lost China’, Robert Taft , NATO, ‘George Kennan,  Mikes Pence,  Pompeo, Trump, McCarthyism, Harry Truman, General Douglas MacArthur   

The final paragraph present the reader with a troubling question, does Mr. Ganesh actually care about the ‘China question’, as he poses it? Or was it an opportunity to show the American reader, that he has mastered their history enough to construct a simulacrum?     

Washington now is nowhere near that level of frenzy. Even by the standards of an election year, though, the reluctance to say anything construable as “soft” is impossible to miss. America’s ultimate advantage is the raucousness of its public discourse. On the China question, it is troublingly civilised.

https://www.ft.com/content/9b7e64c9-c7c4-47b7-b038-f728bfd23e28

American Writer

Pankaj Mishra is the one reason I subscribed to this publication! Without doubt a writer always worth reading, and contemplating, in the immediate retrospect. And as recollection.

‘Cancel Culture’ is the latest political fiction, confected by an utterly corrupt class of apologist for the Present Age of Neo-Liberal collapse, exacerbated by The Pandemic. This is a strictly rhetorical battle against a ‘Mob’, as conceived by a cadre marinating in their own bad faith.   
Yesterday, I scanned Janan Ganesh’s latest essay at The Financial Times, that opens with a ‘review’ of sorts of Douglas Boin’s ‘Alaric the Goth’: reduced in the imagination of a writer facing a deadline- who re-writes this as an ancient example of the English “chippiness”. Promise?

https://www.ft.com/content/43e1d489-def7-422c-a8fb-00f4d9e11db9

 I am currently reading ‘My Struggle: Book 1’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard: his interpretation of Capote’s ‘Non-Fiction Novel’? I just ordered Mr. Mishra’s  ‘The Romantics : A Novel’ as a possible antidote to Knausgaard’s exercise in the demotic. As I read ‘My Struggle’ I just keep thinking of Proust’s ‘Overture’ to Swann’s Way. I’m experiencing a kind of nostalgia for its poetic evocation of his past, as an example of what writing can immediately present to the reader. 

Political Observer 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-14/cancel-culture-isn-t-a-mortal-threat-to-free-speech?srnd=opinion&sref=bfOwbK4O

For some reason I felt compelled the stop reading this book, last month : Chapter 6 Mysticism , Ontotheology, Anti modernism, on page 118. Even the reading of  the history of Heidegger’s thought can be a challenge to the readers patience, with his re-description of the History of Philosophy, or more accurately a re-write of that History.  Theodor Adorno offers a key critical evaluation of German existentialism in his  The Jargon of Authenticity

I’ve been reading about Heidegger since the publication of a review by Thomas Sheehan of  Richard Wolin’s ‘The Heidegger Controversy’ published  by MIT Press. In the pages of The New York Review of Books, provocatively titled ‘A Normal Nazi’

In the interim I read Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ :  earlier I had read Michael Wood’s ‘On Empson’ out of curiosity. Christopher Norris’ ‘William Empson And The Philosophy of Literary Criticism’  ,  ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac. I succumbed to the temptation of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle: Book One’. I just wanted to ‘taste it’! I wanted to throw it up against a wall, as he droned on about death.  Now on page 99, and his Rock Band Failure.

Yesterday, I was feeling guilty about not finishing the Young Heidegger, and that it hadn’t met my expectations, about that myth of ‘The Hidden King’, and his hold on generations of students- why not skip to page 133 and Chapter 7 ‘Demythologizing Metaphysics‘ to see if it offered more of what I actually wanted? I’d forgotten that Heidegger can exhaust my patience, so much so, that I simply have to put him and his commentators/historians down, and return at a later time.

StephenKMackSD

Andy Divine praises Justice Roberts, larded with toxic self-congratulation :

The Wisdom of the Roberts Court
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Yes, this means that almost all employers can be legally punished if they discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people, but employers whose business is wrapped up in their religious values — in Catholic hospitals and schools, for example — can be exempted from these punishments if they are merely seeking to retain the religious integrity of their enterprises. I really can’t see the problem with that. As someone who is both gay and religious, I can see the merits of both. As a citizen, I hope I can see the legitimate concerns of both as well.

The fact that Trump’s own appointees ruled against him in the cases about presidential power is also worth absorbing and admiring. The left’s caricature of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh has been muddied by their actual records so far. Kavanaugh has not exactly behaved as if he is a bitter partisan on these questions. Gorsuch stuck to his legal literalism even when it conflicted with his ideological preferences. And at the same time, the large majority of cases in which the chief justice, John Roberts, has been on the winning side is impressive. He is guiding a conservative Court — not a Republican one.
…

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-covid-19-will-be-the-real-swing-voter.html

Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are playing the ‘Long Game’ ,willing to make sacrifices on the more ‘trivial’ LGBTQ issues, for the moment, as the in-order-too of an Originalist Court: that could last, if all remain in good health, at least a generation, or more. Alito and Thomas are not just along for the ride, given the possibility of a trans-generational ‘reformation’ of the Court.

The Voting Rights Act and its ‘pre-clearance clause’ was eviscerated with the aid of the fictional ‘Centrist’ Kennedy, under the rubric of ‘things have changed’ in Shelby County v Holder. 

The reader might just ask: is there any difference between a Conservative Court and a Republican Court? Was the Warren Court a Republican Court? Brown v Board answers that question! 

Political Observer

On the why of the rise of the ‘nativist government’ in Mitteleuropa read ‘Europe Since 1989’ by Phillipp Ther. Chapter 4. Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon and Chapter 5. Second-Wave Neoliberalism. These countries rejected any form, of what they considered to be ‘Socialism’, and as a result that Neoliberalism’s toxicity was all pervasive.  And was the political precursor of those nativist governments. Applebaum uses this occasion to advertise her book!  

I’d had a similar experience myself, in Poland a few years earlier — I’ve described what happened when a nativist government took over the country in my new book, Twilight of Democracy —

The reader has to cultivate patience when reading Applebaum, she is of the Leo Strauss School of self-serving rhetorical bloat, as a means to create an exploitable reader fatigue. That contributes to a wan acceptance, on the part of that reader’s surrender, to what was/is presented as somehow meeting argumentative standards.

After the preliminary cast of characters that  establishes a verisimilitude, she has demonstrated her mastery of the politics of her own ménage. Applebaum is a Neo-Conservative and a friend/ally of the Bush Coterie, that has now appears in the political guise of  The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump.

A more rough hewn, as compared to a once Conservatism of a ‘genteel world’. As a person in her mid fifties, how can she ‘know’ of that world, except by study? She is not just a Political Historian, but an Historian of Sensibilities?    

These organisations moved the argument away from the rooms in Washington and into a different sphere. In doing so, they recognised a changed reality: once upon a time, conservative politics was a genteel world where well-written articles for literary magazines or editorial pages could exert great influence. At least at the high end, voters as well as politicians listened to William F Buckley in the National Review or George Will in the Washington Post. The election of 2016 proved that was no longer true. Nowadays, real politics mostly happens somewhere else: in the swamps of social media, in the great battle for attention, in advertising wars and duelling YouTube video clips.

The Lincoln Project waded into those swamps, battles, wars and duels with gusto, drawing fire. Their breakthrough moment was an advertisement on the theme of “Mourning in America” — a direct reference to the famous Ronald Reagan advertisement and slogan, “Morning in America”. The video had sad music, Americans in hospitals and an ominous voiceover: “Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker and poorer.”

In this essay Applebaum self-presentation is that of outside commentator, when, again, she is a Fellow Traveler. 

In its defence, the Lincoln Project’s founders are all former Republican strategists, their real target is Republican voters rather than the president, and they believe that much of the language Republicans are used to hearing from their party is already overwrought. The point is to give them familiar symbols, people and stories with which they can identify, and which will persuade them to turn against the president. Outrage is a tactic needed to break through what feels like a wall of indifference, even in the news media: “It’s not just the consumers of information that are numb,” Weaver told me, “It’s also the conveyors.”  

More of Mr. Weaver: 

None of these groups are affiliated directly with the Biden campaign, and they don’t want to be. “We’re just blowing up supply lines,” says Weaver. “We’re not responsible for winning the war.”  

What reader can forget Mr. Weaver’s other self -congratulatory comment on the French Resistance and supply lines  :

“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. 

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

This followed by more of Applebaum’s jejune political observations, the reader is then  presented with this shameless political advocacy, or just call it propaganda! 

Follow @projectlincoln and @RVAT2020 if you want to watch them try.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/69d9d287-6d9c-41f4-901d-8f1a18f4b8e1