StephenKMackSD's Blog

What an opening paragraph, brimming with Reagan/Thatcher nostalgia, such is the moral/political desperation of Mr. Luce for a ‘beginning’ to  his political moralizing.

It takes effort to recapture how Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. Images of that triumphal moment are as fresh as yesterday. The atmospherics smell of another era. Yet it is worth the effort.

Consider the headline and sub-headline:

Headline: The humbling of the Anglo-American world

Sub-headline: Abandonment of common sense during the pandemic has damaged the US and UK national brands

Note that Mr. Luce riffs on the themes of ‘Anglo-Protestant Virtue’ of Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. But quite surprisingly, its not just the editors that use the concept of ‘brand’ , but Luce himself. After his stern admonishments to those who have failed, like the good school master of old, I found his stern scolding a bit comic. He returns to the the least compelling argument of his moralizing stance : ‘brand’. 

Corporate brands take years to build but can be broken in short order. The national brands of America and Britain are the product of centuries. Self-belief gives them a greater appetite for risk than found in non-anglophone democracies such as Germany, Spain, France, Japan or Italy. But it is producing worse outcomes. Each of the latter have living memory of defeat, occupation, revolution and failure.   

How deeply entrenched in Mr. Luce’s conceptual imagination, in fact colonized by Neo-Liberalism, and its idee fixe of ‘The Market’ as an historical singularity. That is not just a part, of an historical development of the human project, but that it is defined by the Economic Trinity of Mises,Hayek and Friedman,that the Market is the central animating force in human history! ‘Brand’ just being a part of a larger Capitalist World made up of ‘Products’. That became the center of commerce’s propaganda arm of Public Relations and Marketing, or vice versa.

The very notion that:  ‘Self-belief gives them a greater appetite for risk than found in non-anglophone democracies such as Germany, Spain, France, Japan or Italy.’ The series of Enlightenments, yes plural, that manifested itself across Europe is subsumed under the Luce Market/Brand portmanteau. The history of European Thought offers:  Germany:Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling Hegel. France:Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot. Italy: Pietro Verri,  Cesare Beccaria, Francesco Maria Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. How do these thinkers factor into Luce’s political polemic? History Made to Measure, is propaganda. 

Let the reader come to terms with the Leader, in the pecking order of the European Settler States, as declared by Mr. Luce , with Australia, New Zealand and Canada, finishing last. Note that most celebrated American Enlightenment personages were slave-holding white men, who believed in, and practiced, their natural superiority. That notion of ‘superiority’ has become sedimented in the American Political Imagination, as Exceptionalism. 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d2d76a6f-27f4-4788-a901-1c7dcea4c26f

What a powerful opening paragraph , or is it just hyperbole in high gear? On first reading, approaching the breathtaking.  Bravo!  

‘ The shape, direction, and force of the next Republican vector is the next great question of political physics. Trump’s looming defeat will leave behind a low-pressure zone not seen since 1932. What will come after?’

‘Political physics’ sure to appeal to the Financial Times readers. And your examination of the ‘California Model’, sans mention of the Howard Jarvis coterie’s Prop. 13 hysterics, is a very succinct observation: on the politics of the Oakies and Arkies of its second, third generations on, whose willful forgetting of their Dust Bowl origins, and their allegiance to the self-created myth of their entrepreneurship. When, in fact, they were the indispensable sub-contractors of the Cold War Arms Manufactures. Hence the cults of both Goldwater and Reagan, while not forgetting Schwarzenegger, as another Hollywood political refugee, like George Murphy, in this state.

As a ‘Native Californian’, whose parents moved west from Minnesota and Idaho I must say you have articulated an argument, sans my critique, that is hard to gainsay!

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD 

https://www.ft.com/content/736846b8-6061-4ef1-872c-5d821fdab9bf?commentID=960b4359-35c4-4de3-acfe-37b7a9458aac

That two books on Liberalism, not ‘liberalism’ as Mr. Ganesh would have it, have escaped his attention is no surprise, it might interfere with his political yarn spinning.

Liberalism at Large:The World According to the Economist by Alexander Zevin

Liberalism:A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo

That Liberalism is toxic is not self-evident to Mr. Ganesh: he swims in its vast ocean of self-congratulation. A link to Anthony Scaramucci’s  August 22, 2019 essay as illustrative of a ‘threat to liberalism’ is vulgar political comedy.       

This paragraph offers Trump’s Populist successors: 

It is the next iteration of populism that should trouble them. Those who are expected to jostle for the Republican candidacy in 2024 are of Mr Trump’s persuasion, but not of his background. With rare exceptions — the Fox News host Tucker Carlson is one — none is a celebrity or political neophyte. They are US senators (Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley), former state governors (Nikki Haley, who once ran South Carolina), intelligence chiefs-turned-cabinet members (Mike Pompeo) and, in vice-president Mike Pence, a decade-long Congressman. Most are more culturally conservative than the president and all are better-equipped to turn their instincts into law. Even those who do not emerge as the party’s leader will help to shape the opposition to a Biden White House.

The notion that Biden will be the eventual nominee is proof that the cynical New Democrats have cast their spell on another gullible scribbler? Moving past the political chatter, the reader meets Senators Cotton and Hawley, who then take Center Stage.

The trouble starts when those with institutional knowledge embrace the same programme. And that trouble is coming. Senators Cotton and Hawley, the two youngest in that gerontocrat’s chamber, constitute the vanguard. If I say that Mr Hawley, who wishes to abolish the World Trade Organization, is the softie, you have a sense of their zeal. Mr Cotton does not want young Chinese studying hard sciences at US universities (Shakespeare is fine). Last month, he caused a rumpus at the New York Times with an incendiary column about the race protests, making a rightwing folk hero of this slightly rigid man. 

Cotton and Hawley are then subject to a trivializing characterization of ‘high-jinks’. Cotton’s essay in The New York Times: the editors of this newspaper sought out the Senator to write his essay. The Editors wouldn’t even defend their own collective  judgement, in a regretful retrospect.  

The ‘Lincoln Project’ is made up of the public relations team of  the Bush Family. Look to the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as a clear demonstration of their collective toxic mendacity. The ‘as if’ here is that ‘we’ live in the United States of Amnesia! 

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/736846b8-6061-4ef1-872c-5d821fdab9bf

The reader is a bit puzzled by Ferguson’s reliance on his proximity to ‘The Great Man’, he is now at The Hoover Institution, where 1929 went to live, and conservative thought flourishes, and is the author of a hagiography of Kissinger.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen…

After Kissinger comes his History Made to Measure of the New Cold War with China: 

What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-05/is-the-u-s-in-a-new-cold-war-china-has-already-declared-it?sref=bfOwbK4O

Ferguson articulates The Party Line, with an assist from ‘The Great Man’ , as if he were surprised.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable. 

More of that History, with a plug for his and co-author Moritz Schularick, political Disney Cartoon of Chimerica :

…

West Chimericans are wealthy and hedonistic; East Chimericans are much poorer (even adjusting on the basis of purchasing power parity, their per capita income is around 16% of that in West Chimerica). But the two halves of Chimerica are complementary. West Chimericans are experts in business administration, marketing and finance. East Chimericans specialize in engineering and manufacturing. Profligate West Chimericans cannot get enough of the gadgets mass produced in the East; they save not a penny of their income and are happy to borrow against their fancy houses. Parsimonious East Chimericans live more humbly and cautiously. They would rather save a third of their own income and lend it to the West Chimericans to fund their gadget habit — and keep East Chimericans in jobs.

Under this arrangement, East Chimericans generate massive trade surpluses which they immediately lend back to West Chimerica. By channeling all these surpluses through government hands into government paper, East Chimerica depresses the key long-term interest rate in West Chimerica. And thanks to artificially low interest rates, financial and real assets in West Chimerica and its satellites are booming.

To be sure, Chimerica is an economic but not a monetary unit: East Chimericans have the renminbi, West Chimericans the dollar. Nevertheless, the scale of the financial transactions between the two halves is comparable with the flows that traditionally have occurred within nation states rather than between them.

…

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117063838651997830

This part so beyond what an actual academic thinker might produce, It had to have been written by Ferguson, its pop culture vernacular is the proof.

Ferguson rambles on. But Ferguson’s essay wakes, from its technocratic reverie, and comes alive.

Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.” It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.

“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

‘The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.’

A quick re-entry by Kissinger, Ferguson adopts the role of Mrs. Malaprop:

Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism. 

The ‘Yellow Peril’ makes its fated return:

Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but “The Dark Forest” gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us. 

Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.

‘How Xi’s China thinks’ is the purist form of anthropomorphism!  

Political Observer

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

______________________________________________________________

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

______________________________________________________________

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