StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: 2019: the year of street protest

Sub-headline: Mass demonstrations around the globe show no sign of fizzling out

Call this an Opinion Writer’s jejune pastiche of History, that comes to this lackluster conclusion:

Above all, as the last 12 months have demonstrated, social unrest is now repeatedly breaking out in unexpected places, for unanticipated reasons.

Its ‘as if’ , Mr. Rachman’s hallowed ‘Post War Liberal Order’ and its various iterations, positive and negative,  can’t protect ‘us’ from the dangers of an inherent human anarchy?  This, an extemporizing on the themes of Herbert Spencer? Or, have I gone to far in providing an explanatory frame, for the intellectual sloth, that is the stock and trade of this Opinion Writer?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9f7e94c4-2563-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134

The New Cold Warriors @NYT can’t help themselves! With the ‘Impeachment’ on hold, under the direction of Schiff/Nadler , the best political duo since the Ev and Charley Show, and ‘I haven’t got the votes in the Senate’ Pelosi-I’m sorry I’ve wandered a bit!

Putin now enjoys the status once enjoyed by Stalin, as an all powerful, indeed ubiquitous force for evil: its all part of an exhumation of the 21 inch black & white World of 1952 , with a new cast of characters, who can’t leave the temptation of McCarthyism alone. Its an America Tradition. Its in the spirit of Cotton Mater and his use of ‘Spectral Evidence’ in the Salem Witch Trials. Please note how this photo and headline dominates the Front Page!

Old Socialist

Before you gather the family around the T.V. to watch ‘Its a Wonderful Life’ with your mugs of Cocoa and that Tree all lit up, Ozzie and Harriet style: (Don’t pretend you don’t know who they are!) be sure to read Niall Ferguson’s contribution to Holiday Cheer at The Times.
Well! Its a burlesque of that Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ re-imagined, or just dragooned, into an American political context. Niall’s literary ambitions are sometimes subject to its maladroit exercise, to the chagrin of his readers.

Merry Christmas,

Myra Breckenridge

Headline:Israeli Jews are ‘equivalent of Seminoles deciding to take over Florida’ and Palestinians are the cowboys — Jeffrey Goldberg reemerges

While I was reading portions of Goldberg’s comments I was reminded of the column’s of David Brooks , in which the political territory looks very familiar, yet refracted through the Brooks lens it is rendered alien, in greater or lesser degree. Perhaps the rhetorical strategy is to create an exploitable  historical/political vertigo?
As a non-Jew I do not understand this obsession-call it a form of ancestor worship. As a self-identified Queer/Atheist my sense of alienation is advanced, to say the least.
I am currently reading ‘Liberalism: A Counter -History’ by Domenico Losurdo: my fascination with the hero’s of the Enlightenment, by way of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th Century Philosophers’ ,dates from my early twenties.
My ‘faith’ in this collection of thinkers is being slowly eroded, by the ugly facts of ‘Liberalism’s’ complicity in slavery, indentured servitude, genocide against native peoples, work-houses etc.
For anyone to present Jewish Suffering and the hard work of being an ‘actual Jew’, in the corrupting Age of the Internet,  as the sine qua non of self-apologetics for the oppression/murder of not just Palestinians, but Africans, Jewish and Non-Jewish, and the Bedouins put on ‘Reservations’ requires more argumentative acrobatics.

Mr. Goldberg reminds me of ‘New Historian’ Benny Morris on Mondoweiss :

Headline:Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing

Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing

And Hannah Arendt :

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

Queer Atheist

Israeli Jews are ‘equivalent of Seminoles deciding to take over Florida’ and Palestinians are the cowboys — Jeffrey Goldberg reemerges

Headline: Robert Harris: ‘Johnson must fancy himself as Caesar’

Sub-headline: The novelist on Cicero’s lessons for Brexit Britain, Labour’s future — and how to write a bestseller a year

Reading Frederick Studemann’s interview with Robert Harris is a literary amalgam of quotes from Mr. Harris, wedded to workmanlike scene setting, and a running commentary by Mr. Studemann. It is both a pleasure to read, an evokes a world of Posh Boy privilege, in Harris’s case it was that of ability and good fortune. Mr. Harris describes himself  as “left liberal”. New Labour is/was Neo-Liberal, so the very notion of his self-ascription is what? mere political fancy, or worse?

On Boris’ victory:

“Every triumph has to be paid for,” he says, with a nod to his research on classical Rome. Johnson will now have to deliver. “Politics is just relentless . . . nothing ever ends. You get Brexit and then there’ll be an NHS winter crisis.”

On Labour’s political future:

“in quite a strong place in 2024 because the Tories won’t have their two great advantages — ‘get Brexit done’ and Jeremy Corbyn”…

Mr.  Studemann offers this-it can’t be called an interpolation, but is simply a part of Financial Times’ political ideology:

…
The difficulty will be getting the right new leader and reorientating the party, not easy with the hard left that now controls Labour and seems not actually that interested in winning elections.

…

Harris on his ‘evolution’ from the Working Class to a member of the ‘metropolitan media elite’

“It’s pretty distant,” he says. He left home at 18 to go to Cambridge and later joined the BBC and has ever since been “a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan media elite”.

Harris on Brexit/Remain political impasse:

… “In a way, what Remain people like me really wanted was a confirmatory vote. We just wanted for people to say, ‘Yes, we’ve looked at this, and this is what we want’,”
“might finally bring that postwar reckoning that we’ve never had about our status in the world”. …
“but we’ve traded a lot on past glories, some of which have fed into Brexit”.

On the political power of Roman demagogues:

…
“demagogues who are themselves very wealthy, powerful aristocrats, directing the anger of the population against the elite, against the Senate and Cicero, for their own political advantage”.*

Harris offer this evaluation of Johnson, via Mr. S,

…
“He’s, let’s say, flexible in his approach. I don’t think he is guided.”

…

This is self-explanatory:

…
“One of the things that I did learn from writing the Cicero books is the obvious one: that in every great victory lie the seeds of subsequent defeat.”
…

Harris opines on Decline, as viewed from his place of residence:

 …
“Around here there were lots of big Roman villas. They were palaces really, but nobody knew how to work them once the Romans left.”
…“fascinates and haunts” him is that “one day the buildings of the City of London will topple and they won’t take long to decay, the roads will be grass and then trees and forests and then there will just be strange concrete blocks left around”.

Smartphones as indicative of the rise of  a’Technology’ divorced from human reality:

…
“It’s losing that tactile sense of being able in the end to make a shelter, cook a meal, not get something from delivery.”
…

Harris on his relation to Technology, cars:

…
“Good God, no. I can’t even mend a bicycle puncture,” he retorts. “I’m the original dreamy boy in his bedroom from the age of eight writing stories.”
…

Harris describes his life outside London’s metropolitan media elite:

“It’s been a great thing for me, not living in London, not going to launch parties, not being in all of that circuit. Just working quietly. Nobody reads reviews out here, nobody cares. That’s great.” His wife calls him a “sociable hermit”.

Harris on being a Writer of the 19th Century tradition

…
“It’s a profession, a job,” he says. “There’s a terrible preciousness about writing. I think that if you write, you’ve just got to get on and write.”
…

On the V2 rockets of WWII:

… 

“I just find it extraordinary to think that one European country is occupying another, firing ballistic missiles at the capital city of another — within living memory.”
…

Harris on the Brexit  novel he would like to read by a Northern Leaver:

…

“writing against the prevailing liberal cultural authors”.

…

Harris on the Roman Republic:

…
“Look at the republic in Rome: Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Pompey — huge figures and what was the result?”
…“That was a system obsessed with politics and with geniuses in the senate and the result was a catastrophe.” Rome endured, but “the republic itself had gone. It became a kind of gangster empire.”

…

Harris on his children leaving home:

“It’s quite a shock when they move out,” he counsels, adding that it is something not written about enough. “It’s quite depressing because it’s a chapter close. You know that, let’s face it, the biggest chapter of your life has just come to an end . . . if it’s a novel, you’re now getting fewer pages.”

https://www.ft.com/content/7eae7f68-20ed-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

I have read Mr. Harris’ ‘Fatherland’, and found it good, but it does not compare with Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem.  ‘Pompeii’ was an enjoyable entertainment: both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler were the masters of that particular literary genre, played out within the world of crime, and espionage.  ‘The Ghost’ simply lost my interest. I read and enjoyed all three Arturo Perez-Reverte’s  novels ‘The Club Dumas’, ‘The Flanders Panel’ and ‘The Fencing Master’ each was published in the 1990’s, and were contemporaneous with Mr. Harris’ publications.

American Writer

*For a corrective to the ‘Cult of Cicero’ see Chapter 6 ‘Ethnic Personae’ of Ann Vasaly’s ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ Its first sentence is instructive.

To paraphrase a cynical maxim of our own day , no Roman orator ever came to grief overestimating his audiences prejudices toward ethnic minorities.

Prof. Vasaly also provides a footnote that provides further information on the ethnic prejudices of Romans: ‘Romans and Aliens’ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon chapters 3, The Roman Outlook, 1. The Greeks and chapter 4‘The Roman Outlook’ 2. Other Peoples

Headline: The Democrats are badly in need of a messiah

Sub-headline: Few of the candidates show signs of winning the hearts of a party that likes to fall in love

Where to begin on this thick slice of political Velveeta? This paragraph caught my attention:

Mr Sanders shares with Ms Warren a penchant for radical promises. Each may indirectly have been damaged by the scale of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party’s defeat in last week’s British election. The Democratic party’s moneyed wing now has a champion in Michael Bloomberg, who is the ninth richest person in the world, according to Forbes. But his upside is capped by a lack of charisma. Should the field still be fragmented on “super-Tuesday” in early March, when half the US states hold a primary, Mr Bloomberg’s record election spending may be enough to bring about a brokered convention — the party’s first in decades.

The very idea that Sanders and Warren may be ‘indirectly damaged by the scale of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party’s defeat in last week’s British election.’ is the purest projection of Luce’s political preoccupations!

And then ‘Stop and Frisk’ Mike, you could call him Charter School Mike, or Anti-Teachers Union Mike,  pick your sobriquet! ‘Lack of charisma’ was one of the characteristics that fueled Ross Perot’s 1992 Third Party campaign. Mr. Luce was twenty four at the time of Perot’s political ascendancy. Never the less, when has the Financial Times and its hirelings found a Plutocrat an unacceptable ‘messiah’? what can this religious framing device contribute to an understanding of a political contest? Mere pretentious widow dressing?

As a regular reader of this newspaper I can’t help recalling this newspaper’s celebration of Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Listening Tour’ before his fall from grace. To engage in the most vulgar kind of scientism, it is part of this newspaper’s political/economic DNA. 

Old Socialist  

https://www.ft.com/content/fd7ad5f8-2174-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

Mr. Rachman signals, with his reference to his conversation with Fyodor Lukyanov in Moscow, as the reification of his status as well traveled ‘expert’ . The subject of Lukyanov’s contemptuous laughter is Boris’ notion of a “liberal Brexit”. Mr. Rachman’s observation is predictable:

Viewed from Russia, the idea that Brexit is anything other than a savage blow to the liberal cause evidently seemed absurd.

How might the reader define for herself the idea of ‘liberal cause’? Monnet’s Common Market that ‘evolved’ into the E.U. ? The Marshall Plan of 1948,The founding of NATO in 1949? Kennan’s Long Telegram of February of 1946, that became Mr. X’s essay published in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” ? that advocated Kennan’s idea of Containment, later abandoned by him? The Atlantic Council ‘Think Tank’ founded in 1961? Might that reader consider that another place holder for actual thought?   ‘Post-War Liberal Order’ is an integral part of that ‘liberal cause’? A collection of the Mr. Rachman’s uses of the word ‘liberal’

 “liberal”, liberal internationalism, liberals, liberals ,  traditional liberals, “era of liberal democracy is over”, liberalism,liberalism, liberal freedoms, liberalism, liberal internationalism,  institutionalisation of liberalism, liberal cause, a liberal,  “liberal”, liberal nationalism

A collection of the Mr. Rachman’s uses of the word ‘liberal’ , in its nominal and adjectival senses, is used by Mr. Rachman seventeen times in his essay. And Mr. Rachman’s statement below is the weakest kind of rhetorical armature to hold his essay together. Have I strayed too far?

The question of whether Mr Johnson and the Brexiters can, in any way, claim to be “liberal” is of more than academic interest.

Of interest is the book mentioned by Mr. Rachman  by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes book, The Light That Failed,- another essay that evolved in a book suffering from rhetorical/intellectual bloat? The original essay here, or at least one of its iterations :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/24/western-liberalism-failed-post-communist-eastern-europe

This section of the essay engages in the most blatant kind of obfuscation, about one of the root causes of the rise of the dreaded populism in Eastern Europe. A collection of ‘reasons’ , (I have put them in bold font) but the naming of the actual culprit of Neo-Liberalism is  never proffered as one the ’causes’ of the rise of this ‘Illiberal Democracy‘ .

The striving of ex-communist countries to emulate the west after 1989 has been given an assortment of names – Americanisation, Europeanisation, democratisation, liberalisation, enlargement, integration, harmonization, globalisation and so forth – but it has always signified modernisation by imitation and integration by assimilation. After the communist collapse, according to today’s central European populists, liberal democracy became a new, inescapable orthodoxy. Their constant lament is that imitating the values, attitudes, institutions and practices of the west became imperative and obligatory.

There is another historical source, rather that the melodramatic kitsch of ‘The Light That Failed’ and it is  ‘Europe Since 1989, a history’  by Phillip Ther

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167374/europe-since-1989

This book explores the role that Neo-Liberalism as one of the causes, in the economic/political policies, adopted in Eastern European countries after 1989.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/2867d79e-1fe4-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

Here in all its breathless detail is a report on Mr. Ferguson’s election night. The reader can read for herself all the …

The defeat of the political monster Corbyn, and the victory of Posh Boy Boris in chronicled, in scrupulous personalized detail by our historian/narrator . The first three paragraphs tell the riveting part of the story. But don’t miss Ferguson’s attack on ‘a certain type of indignant Indian Intellectual’ , Pankaj Mishra and Priyamvada Gopal, by way of a cudgel provided by Yoram Hazony’s 2018 book ‘The Virtue of Nationalism’. Mr. Ferguson’s rhetoric seems to re-invigorate a very specific expression of the Colonial Mentality, that still must hold sway over at least one Conservative writer?

Now there is a certain type of indignant Indian intellectual — step forward Pankaj Mishra and Priyamvada Gopal — who insists ad nauseam that Brexit is an expression of nostalgia for the British Empire, if not a repressed desire to re-establish it. Nothing could be more wrong, as Hazony explains, and as anyone knows who has spent even an hour in a pub with Brexit supporters like my good friends in the Prince of Wales near Bridgend (another Labour citadel that fell last week).

Perhaps Mr. Ferguson would pay attention to the white New Zealand born  historian J.G.A. Pocock’s comment on the E.U.?

J.G.A. Pocock

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

Old Socialist

Andy’s Daddy Worship began with the Church, and later expressed itself  as worship of The Iron Lady, with her off-brand Chanel and her lacquered hair, that resembled a medieval helmet. Her ‘there is no such thing as Society’ was her cudgel to defeat the ‘civic’ and exalt the singular status of The Market. This describes her violent nihilism, political and cultural. Her weapon of choice, passing out copies of Hayek’s tract The Road to Serfdom.
In his latest essay, at least the first portion devoted to the exaltation of Boris, who play-acts the part of political buffoon- as a scholarship boy he ought to recognize his natural enemy,one of his bullies, a Posh Boy? That would have been an impediment to Andy’s rise: he is a climber!

This paragraph of his rambling essay gives away Andy’s game of political conformity, allied to his dubious notion of sexual conformity, that he proclaims as if it were revealed truth, a habit of mind of a publicist/advocate, or just call him a propagandist for- Kant’s imperative of self-emancipation from tutelage has escaped his attention. His animus toward those who don’t meet his standards, of how they ‘ought to be’, becomes part of his admixture of politics, Sexual Politics and ends on this, expressing a class bias that he has almost avoided, ‘absurdly plummy accent.‘.

The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that. Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/andrew-sullivan-boris-johnsons-winning-formula.html

The last paragraph of his essay compares Boris’ politics to Disraeli’s  “One Nation Conservatism.” that will check both the dangers of ‘The Right’ and ‘The Left’. Except that Boris is of ‘The Right’, not some kind of political hybrid, as the answer. Andy’s politics, cultural and sexual, are about his fealty to his deeply entrenched Patriarchal Attitudes, to use the title of Eva Figes book, first published when Andy was seven years old!

Johnson will have to work superhard on this if he is to re-create not the Thatcher coalition but the Disraeli nation. That’s what he means when he talks about “One Nation Conservatism.” That was Disraeli’s reformist conservatism of the 19th century, a somewhat protectionist, supremely patriotic alliance between the conservative elites and the ordinary man and woman. It will take a huge amount of charm and policy persistence to cement that coalition if it is to last more than one election. But if Boris pulls that off, he will have found a new formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup.

Myra Breckenridge