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

Reading Mr. Stavridis’ CV, condensed by Bloomberg editors, is revelatory, to understate the case: 

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

Mr Stavridis record of  service is immaculate, in sum he is not Colin Powell, Stanley McChrystal nor David Petraeus! He projects both military and personal virtue, not to speak of his personal accomplishments, on a scale not many attain. That he is a political conformist is demonstrated by his latest essay:

Headline: Trump’s Retreat From Germany Is a Victory for Putin

Sub-headline: Pulling U.S. troops from Europe won’t save any money but it will make America less safe.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-22/trump-s-retreat-from-germany-is-a-victory-for-putin?sref=bfOwbK4O

Mr Stavridis is not just a believer in the American Mission, but one of its vital actors: ‘ former supreme allied commander of NATO’. This firmly establishes his credentials as not just an advocate, or a mere apologist for American hegemony, but one of it former military actors. He is not one of the collection of New Democrats and Neo-Conservatives who speak from the comfort of their offices/studies. Yet The New Cold War has become  a article of faith, featuring Putin, in the political guise of The New Stalin, for almost the whole of the American bourgeois Political Class , whose failed attempts at political self-rescue, generates an endless stream of political commentary, like my own!

What might Mr. Stavridis think of this news report?

Headline:France’s Macron pushes for ‘true European army’

Sub-headline: French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that Europeans cannot be protected without a “true, European army”, as he marks the centenary of the World War One Armistice.

On a visit to the former Western Front in Verdun, he said Russia had shown it could be a threat and Europe had to be able “to defend itself better alone”.

Russia’s president will be among world leaders marking the Armistice in Paris.

Mr Macron has already proposed a joint intervention force for crisis missions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed the idea of an intervention force in June, but said it would have to be part of “the structure of defence co-operation”.

The UK, while in favour of such a joint force, is opposed to a European army, because of the potential risk of creating a parallel structure to Nato.

…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46108633

Political Apprentice 

The reader of Mr. Rachman’s latest essay is first confronted by an editorial cartoon, depicting the American Eagle and an Indian Tiger, both noble and resolute, facing off with a demonic red  Chinese Dragon, with smoke coming from its nostrils. This cartoon, a readers guide as to the content of the essay. Call this the crudest kind of propaganda!

   

Mr. Rachman’s essay on the China/India ‘clashes’ is steeped in an ersatz political psychologism, attributing emotions to state entities and  its politicians, technocrats, anonymous and named, its  citizens, reduced to a carefully chosen few. Doesn’t just express lazy thinking, but demonstrates an absence of that more than valuable asset:

The mood in New Delhi, Indians feel assaulted and humiliated by China, Indians have watched nervously,has also gone down badly in New Delhi, India signalled its displeasure, in its efforts to woo India, Indians are wary,China should be worried.

Mr. Rachman provides a link to a Financial Times report:

Headline:India rethinks strategic ties following border clashes with China

Sub-headline: New Delhi likely to boost US relations and reduce reliance on commerce with neighbour

https://www.ft.com/content/47d40de6-42a9-4d45-833c-c5dc76cd4fa2

It takes three ‘reporters‘ to produce this one news story? 

Mr. Rachman role in this essay is focus on the Strategic, rather than any other consideration, if not to further the New Cold War, in its Asian iteration. In sum, Modi’s Hindu Fundamentalism, and its record of the murder of fellow Muslim Indian citizens, by Modi’s mobs of political acolytes, needs to be put in the background, of  a more pressing issues of a Strategy, steeped in a New Cold War Ethos: a moral/political obscenity.    

All four nations are intensely concerned by the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region. It is folly for China to drive India into America’s arms.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d74d9bda-6822-4f85-9d48-a285a9effe07

I came here from The Financial Times. Just looking at Gideon Rachman’s latest essay, made me a bit queasy:

Headline: India picks a side in the new cold war

Sub-headline: It is folly for China to drive its rival into America’s arms

https://www.ft.com/content/d74d9bda-6822-4f85-9d48-a285a9effe07

But seeking solace in Mr. Ferguson’s little melodrama, where he plays so many roles: Cassandra, Epidemiologist, Statistician, Historian all wreathed in the usual Ferguson self-congratulation. But the literary frame of Jack Kerouac’s ‘beatnik’ “On the Road” didn’t render his verbose polemic any more palatable. I survived the 1957 flu epidemic as a 13 year old, along with my sisters and brothers. 

Looking forward to returning to Rachman’s essay and James Stavridis (former supreme allied commander of NATO)  essay:

Trump’s Retreat From Germany Is a Victory for Putin

How should Neo-Conservatism be described? How might it be defined? by its political/philosophical myth-making, its relentless mendacity and its political schisms?
Bret Stephens, in his latest essay in the New York Times, comments upon John Bolton’s Trump Tell-All. I read the whole essay and I recommend to the reader that she skip to this last paragraph:

I write all this as someone who shares many of Bolton’s hawkish foreign-policy views. I’m also someone who urged Bolton, while he was still in office, to resign on principle. It’s a shame he didn’t do so while he still had a chance to preserve his honor, but it isn’t a surprise. Only the truly gullible can act totally cynically and imagine they can escape history’s damning verdict.

Bret Stephens is a typical Neo-Con, a dedicated Drawing Room General with no military experience. Though he is generous, with his accounts of Israelis being blown to bits, by Palestinian Terrorists in a small cafe, as his military credential.

In his column Stephens links to his political fellow traveler Anne Applebaum’s essay in The Atlantic:

Headline: History Will Judge the Complicit

Sub-headline:  Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

Her essay begins in ‘The Cold War’, with the story of Wolfgang Leonhard in 1949 East Germany, Markus Wolf, Stanley Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, Marianne Birthler, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, ‘“America First”,  the cast of characters, becomes an avalanche of names as sketches, place holders for political/moral  positions etc.  At more than six thousand words: this the epitome of Neo-Conservative strategy of exhausting the readers critical faculty, as the in-order-too of advancing their political mendaciousness. This the operative strategy of Leo Strauss and of Fukuyama. I fled to the  final two paragraphs of her essay:

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham—along with Pence, Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures—will understand what he has enabled.

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

The New Democrats, The Republicans and The Neo-Conservatives are the Midwives of Trump! The public moralizing of Stephens and Applebaum cannot forestall the judgement of history, that they so maladroitly attempt to rewrite. In that rewrite these two propagandists pass themselves off  as political paragons. Such is the state of America’s Political Class, while the Monuments and Statues of the Heroes of another Age are toppled, an echo of 1989? 

Political Observer

Andy Divine will never obtain what he most desires, a Red Hat, and the opportunity to sit in The College of Cardinals. Although his vestments could never outshine the Pope’s finery. Andy will just have to settle, like the rest of us, for what he/we could construct out of his and our attempts, to overcome what ever was in our way. Andy’s story is just more fraught with his self-created, excruciating, melodrama. 
Andy’s compensation is that he is a writer/propagandist, who arrogated to himself, the right to tell all the rest of ‘us‘, how we are to be, and act in the world. He is the Walmart of political moralists. His latest encyclical takes on Bostock v. Layton County, the opinion written by Neil Gorsuch:

Click to access 17-1618_hfci.pdf

Justice Gorsuch and Andy share a toxic commonality, an animus toward black people:  look to Andy’s enthusiasm for The Bell Curve here: 

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

A review of by Charles Lane in The New York Review of Books;

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

Justice Gorsuch is a Neo-Confederate/Originalist, whose connection to The Federalist Society is a fact, past or present. Gorsuch and Kennedy are fellow travelers, who both  masquerade, and masqueraded as ‘Centrists’, on a Court colonized by Political Romantics. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the politically necessary triumph of this coterie.

Andy can’t resist the temptation to perform his usual toxic political mischief: ‘intersectional left’ part of his continuing  campaign, against that amorphous enemy, that seeks, in Andy’s imagination, to insert itself into any and all political/moral questions, as fodder for their mendacious self-promotion. Because the religious politicking of Opus Dei, is an integral part of his inheritance of dogma, wedded to his religious self-infatuation: its like reading a misbegotten amalgam of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of reactionaries, Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher.

…

If current trends are any indication, these groups will simply merge into the broader intersectional left and become as concerned with, say, the rights of immigrants or racial minorities as they are with gay rights. In the political climate on the left at the moment, singling out gays as a separate category is increasingly impermissible. Which is why, for example, at a recent LGBTQ activist conference, there were workshops like “Elephant in the Waiting Room: Self-Love, Health, Queering Fat Acceptance” and “The Politics of Colony and Post-hurricane Politics in PR and USVI.” It’s why some LGBTQ groups keep adding various “sexualities” and “genders” to the long list and why white gay men are often seen as the oppressors, and not part of the “queer” movement, unless they agree to defer entirely to intersectional politics and acknowledge their white cis privilege.

…   

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/when-is-it-time-to-claim-victory-in-the-gay-rights-struggle.html

In the world view of Andy Divine, there are Saints and Sinners, and it is his moral, his journalistic duty, to expose these apostates, and publicly shame them. 

Political Observer 

Headline:Opponents of more IMF lending may have blood on their hands

Sub-headline: If that sounds dramatic, it is nothing compared with the death and suffering that can still be avoided

When it come to the manufacture of Economic Metaphysics Mr. Hausmann and his allies have an impressive collection of jargon, that reminds this reader of Heidegger, except that neologisms are avoided at all costs: Hausmann wants to attract readers with his inventive mind’s  slight of hand, with stage make-up by Willem de Kooning. While remaining within the bourgeois confines of ‘Economics’: The Invisible Hand, Animal Spirits, Creative Destruction, The Wisdom of the Market, Trickle Down etc.  The reader can only marvel at his collection, in its stage-makeup : 

Original sin, Self-discovery, Growth diagnostics, Dark matter, The Product Space

The IMF is an NGO:

Promote international monetary co-operation, facilitate international trade, foster sustainable economic growth, make resources available to members experiencing balance of payments difficulties

In sum a collective of Economic Technocrats, and the use of economic institutions to insure the welfare of its members : yet what Mr. Hausmann argues in his essay seems reasonable, if just a matter of self-interest. His last paragraph however doesn’t quite ring true:

Given what is at stake in terms of avoidable death and suffering, such arguments sound like those of a person unwilling to help the victim of a car accident for fear of getting blood on their shirt. But if these arguments are allowed to win the day, we will all have blood on our hands.

Mr. Hausmann’s concern about ‘blood on our hands’ refracted through these two news  reports, on his political involvement with America’s Venezuelan appointee Juan Guaido,  places his political moralizing into its proper perspective.      

 Headline:Venezuela’s Guaido pushes to name new representative to regional lender

(Reuters) – Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido named Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann as the country’s representative to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Guaido’s envoy to the United States said on Monday.

The regional lender confirmed it had received a letter from Guaido naming Hausmann and said it was considering how to proceed.

“We’ve received the letter and are determining next steps,” a bank official told Reuters.

Venezuela poses a tricky problem for the Washington-based lender, whose charter prevents its board from discussing internal political issue of member states. If the board agrees to accept Guaido’s representative, it would be the first financial institution to make such a move.

…

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-hausmann/venezuelas-guaido-pushes-to-name-new-representative-to-regional-lender-idUSKCN1QL2A6

______________________________________________________________

Headline: Hausmann, Venezuela’s representative to IDB, to step down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ricardo Hausmann is announcing plans to quit his job as governor of the Inter-American Development Bank, a position he took in March as representative of Venezuela designated by opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

Hausmann wrote Thursday on Twitter that his academic duties at Harvard University are incompatible with the job at the IDB and he suggested he be replaced by Alejandro Plaz, an engineer designated last month by Guaidó as commissioner for economic development.

The IDB is the only international financial organization to recognize Guaidó as the legitimate president of the South American country, a stand taken by the U.S. and about 50 other nations that say Nicolas Maduro’s re-election last year was rigged.

https://apnews.com/0f6f8ac927a747249b182b2854cd1e9c

Mr. Hausmann, long ago, spent his political capital! 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/351f5a02-4ba9-454b-ba42-83a6b662c665