StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

To refresh the readers memory, here are three examples of the Anti-Corbyn propaganda from the British Press.

The first is from The Economist that uses a Soviet Socialist Realist painting of Lenin, with the face of Corbyn superimposed over the face of Lenin. A pictorial illustration of Corbyn’s ‘radicalism’ as equal to Bolshevism: pure political hysteria mongering! The second from The Good Grey Times.

The third example is by New Labour hack Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, that attacks Corbyn as an Anti-Semite:

Add to the campaign of the defamation of Corbyn, by Labour Friends of Israel

https://www.lfi.org.uk/

This provides some necessary background to Mr. Foer’s second hand animus toward Corbyn. Support for BDS, in Foer World, is synonymous with Anti-Semitism. The ‘right to exist’ is one of the favorite tropes of the Zionist State, and its apologists, except that ‘right’ is not ‘granted’ to Palestinians.

The first paragraphs of his essay are instructive, that ‘Corbynism’ is a political contagion unwelcome in  Foer’s America: 

Even though the polls always suggested the likelihood of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in yesterday’s British elections, his continued presence as the head of the Labour Party filled me with a great sense of foreboding. The local press excavated from Corbyn’s not-so-distant past videos that revealed him to be, at best, indifferent to anti-Semitism: as he vouched for the moral character of an imam who had accused Jews of drinking the blood of children; as he championed a mural artist who’d painted a cabal of hook-nosed bankers; as he accused Zionists of lacking “English irony.” When confronted with these statements—there are plenty more—he tended to express irritation rather than contrition.

A venerable political party that poses as the enemy of racism was suddenly and demonstrably rife with it. From the other side of the Atlantic, it was hard not to entertain the anxiety that something similar might plausibly happen here, and soon: In the leftward shift of the Democratic Party, a strain of Corbynism might implant itself.

As I have turned over this worry—the fear that the populist left might replicate the sins of the populist right—my concerns have usually been allayed by the fact that the American version of Jeremy Corbyn is Bernie Sanders. The two resurgent relics of the ’70s left have ascended in tandem—and their ascents have exposed subtle (but crucial) moral and ideological distinctions.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/why-bernie-sanders-no-jeremy-corbyn/603550/

Next Foer compares Corbyn and Sanders beginnings as ‘dissidents’ refracted through Foer’s Neo-Liberal lens.

The reasons to lump Corbyn and Sanders together are obvious enough. During the prime of their political careers, they were both dissidents howling at the neoliberal consensus. Decades of defiance left them as the lone, rumpled tribunes of an ideology that had supposedly been vanquished by history. But when the financial crisis of 2008 stoked raging indignation against the prevailing order, the zeitgeist unexpectedly gusted in their direction. Everything that had held them back—their righteous indignation, their indifference to artifice, their political isolation—suddenly propelled them forward.

The catastrophic collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, rendered the politics of Thatcher/Reagan, and their Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, as tutelary spirits- whose Temple is now the rubble of The Gig Economy. The notion of ‘Decades of defiance left them as the lone, rumpled tribunes of an ideology that had supposedly been vanquished by history.’ can evoke nothing but derision in the Age of Trump, and the play-acting dull-wittiness, allied to opportunism, of Boris.

Does ‘At the core of Corbyn’s foreign policy is an obsession with Israel, which has manifested as incessant sneering about Zionism.’ Support For BDS is not ‘sneering’ !

Headline:Jeremy Corbyn Endorses BDS Movement in 2015 Footage

Sub-headline: In video filmed in Belfast, U.K. Labour leader says the movement is ‘part and parcel of a legal process that has to be adopted’ Corbyn has since maintained he opposes a blanket boycott of Israel

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/jeremy-corbyn-endorses-bds-movement-in-2015-footage-1.6389090

The remainder of his collection of borrowed animus, and rehabilitated political cliches, is Mr. Foer’s calling card. And the reason for his long time employment by bourgeois political journalism’s publications.

Old Socialist

The copy of ‘Anti-Piketty’ arrived in the post of yesterday. I had ordered both ‘After Piketty’

and ‘Anti-Piketty’

in order to read both books in tandem, or essay by essay, that shared the same themes, concerns, criticisms/praise.
Just paging through ‘Anti-Piketty’ offered some insights offered by the editors  Emmanuel Martin , Nicolas Lecaussin, Jean-Philippe Delsol: 

Part 1. An Apocalyptic Vision

The empirical and theoretical work of an author is inevitably marked with a vision. It is important to discuss that vision to form a complete critique of the author’s work and thereafter to better understand those empirical and theoretical choices.
As with Karl Marx, the vision that permeates the work of Thomas Piketty is decidedly pessimistic about capitalism. Class struggle is always in the background: society is in conflict, and what A gains is lost by B. In such a society, the rich are “the
wicked” side of the story. The idea that the poor can enrich themselves through capital accumulation—the tool of domination of the rich—is nearly taboo in Piketty’s world. The fact that the poor are already enriched by the market economy obviously doesn’t fit in with the rest of the vision.
Part 1 of this volume therefore offers a critique of Thomas Piketty’s vision—a vision in which reductions in various inequalities are hidden, a vision which is tainted by an anti-rich bias, a
vision which does not serve the poor.

____________________________________

Section 1. No Declining Inequality?

Thomas Piketty pictures a world caught in an unstoppable
spiral of enrichment of a minority, at immense cost to the majority. While the 1 percent of rentiers accumulates fortune in a snowball effect, what becomes of the 99 percent? In reality, are the
99 percent becoming poorer? Are they so badly off? This section looks at the phenomenon—unprecedented in history—of the enrichment of the masses, notably in the form of extended life expectancy and access to consumption and education.It attempts to offer a realistic vision about the evolution of types
of inequality, which is a lot less pessimistic than Piketty’s

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/anti-piketty.pdf

The near hysterical defensiveness of the editors is palpable in the first two sections quoted. The text in the two quoted paragraphs, that I have put in the bold font, offers the notion of the enrichment of the masses by way of ‘The fact that the poor are already enriched by the market economy obviously doesn’t fit in with the rest of the vision.’ ,  ‘extended life expectancy‘, and ‘access to consumption and education’ : the last is a function of the Market Economy, yet ‘access’ is wholly dependent on the purchasing power of the ‘consumer’, reducing the person to the status of a function within that Market.   As one considers the issues, ‘extended life expectancy’ is dependent on the ability of the ‘consumer’ to purchase medical and dental insurance and the ability to pay for life saving drugs like Insulin.

Old Socialist

P.S.

A recent Martin Wolf review of The Great Reversal by Thomas Philippon offers an opportunity to read a Capitalist Apologist, reviewing another member of that Club, on the failure of Capitalism to live up to the singular ideal of ‘Competition‘.

Headline:Why the US economy isn’t as competitive or free as you think

Sub-headline: Martin Wolf reviews ‘The Great Reversal’ by Thomas Philippon

…
Over the past two decades, competition and competition policy have atrophied, with dire consequences, Philippon writes in this superbly argued and important book. America is no longer the home of the free-market economy, competition is not more fierce there than in Europe, its regulators are not more proactive and its new crop of superstar companies not radically different from their predecessors.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/97be3f2c-00b1-11ea-b7bc-f3fa4e77dd47

What might Emmanuel Martin , Nicolas Lecaussin, Jean-Philippe Delsol make of the deviationism of  both  Mr. Wolf and Mr. Philippon? Not to speak of the Financial Times for publishing this attack on one their Articles of Faith?

Old Socialist

In the TLS of November 29,2019, that just arrived in the post yesterday in San Diego , California: I found the list of contributors to  ‘The Books of the Year’ a bit thin, as most of the writers I most admire were ignored, or are now dead. Except for Frederick Raphael who never disappoints , his ‘The Benefits of Doubt’ published by Carcanet is an example of his critical mind/sensibility, to follow the ‘Books of the Year’ theme.

What stood out for me was Sociologist Andrew Scull’s praise for R2P zealot and recent Kissinger acolyte Samantha Power’s book ‘The Education of an Idealist’. 

ANDREW SCULL

Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist (William Collins) is an unusually engaging political memoir. Before joining the Obama campaign and subsequently becoming the youngest ever ambassador to the United Nations, Power was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for her work on genocide. She is a much better writer than the average politician, and her life – her immigration from Ireland, her complicated upbringing, her reporting from Bosnia, and her career in Washington – is a fascinating one. Power is an excellent storyteller, with a deft touch with anecdotes and a nice sense of humour. She is, besides, unusually candid for a politician, and her behind-the-scenes reportage of Obama’s well-intentioned but not always wise foreign policy decisions is compelling, as is the contrast between the seriousness of that administration’s approach to the world and the criminality of the current one.

https://beta.the-tls.co.uk/articles/books-of-the-year-2019/

 

Prof. Scull almost follows the Party Line, except for this last telling sentence that veers close to dissent, but carefully engages in political self-correction. I’ve taken the liberty of rendering this sentence in bold script above.

Ms. Power is part of a coterie of women who have emerged in the area of Foreign Policy: Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Anne Marie Slaughter, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, and even star witness in the Impeachment Hearings Fiona Hill: this coterie suffers from the same near hysterical bellicosity equal to that of their male fellow travelers – the alliance between the ‘Liberals’ and the ‘Neo-Conservatives’ has emerged as the Political Center in Foreign Policy, and even in a thoroughly Neo-Liberalized   domestic policy.

Political Observer

Niall Ferguson repeats the stale Party Line of the failing alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives ! ‘Deadlocked Democracy’ is his political extemporizing on this theme. This has become the momentary article of faith for the editors of The Financial Times,  expressed as ‘no good choices’ :

Headline: Britain’s fateful election offers no good choices

Sub-headline:The main parties have abandoned the centre. A realignment is needed

https://www.ft.com/content/d4868a48-169d-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385

Bagehot* of The Economist frames the British election as ‘Truth has been the first casualty’ , followed by an illustration of the kind of defamation The Economist editors practiced against Corbyn, early in his political ascendancy:

Headline: Truth has been the first casualty of Britain’s election

Sub-headline: An epidemic of lying is proving corrosive to liberal democracy

https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/12/07/truth-has-been-the-first-casualty-of-britains-election

Surprise! This trinity of propaganda outlets were central political actors in their campaign to codify Neo-Liberalism’s Social Darwinism, posing  not just as ‘Economic Theory’, but as the Moral Imperative of Freedom! The collapse  in 2008 ,has not dimmed the fanaticism of the acolytes of this nihilistic hybrid.

The Gig Economy: The watershed of their thwarted ambition, wedded to their  greed and mendacity, and sharing in the American blood-lust equaling Perpetual Wars of Empire, familiar British territory:  The Midwives of Boris find it impossible to face their individual and collective responsibility for assisting in his ‘political birth’. While the utterly incompetent Mrs. May plays the role uninspired caretaker.

In Britain Corbyn has been defamed by all three of these publications. Not to mention political fiction writer Jonathan Freedland’s unfounded charges in The Guardian, of Anti-Semitism!  Corbyn, a Democratic Socialist , is the enemy of a ‘Liberal Tradition’ based upon a fiction of political/moral virtue, that has been maladroitly stitched together: Liberalism’s murderous history, presented by its advocates/apologists as both virtuous and ineluctable – the historical antidote to this mythology is offered by ‘Liberalism: A Counter-History’ by Domenico Losurdo

Old Socialist

*Here is Bagehot’s (Adrian Wooldridge) CV as posted at The Economist:

Noo Saro-Wiwa reports on the interview of Hillary Clinton, and her daughter Chelsea, conducted by Mary Beard on November 10, 2019. The discussion focuses upon their book,The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience’.  Saro-Wiwa follows the Party Line on Clinton as Feminist. Yet the Clinton’s passed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The bill implemented major changes to U.S. social welfare policy, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

The law was a cornerstone of the Republican Party‘s “Contract with America,” and also fulfilled Clinton’s campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” AFDC had come under increasing criticism in the 1980s, especially from conservatives who argued that welfare recipients were “trapped in a cycle of poverty.” After the 1994 elections, the Republican-controlled Congress passed two major bills designed to reform welfare, but they were vetoed by Clinton. After negotiations between Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congress passed PRWORA and Clinton signed the bill into law on August 22, 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act

This was just a integral part of the Clinton’s Neo-Liberal Reforms that was a frontal attack on poor women of  color. The fulfillment of Reagan’s ’76 racist campaign tag line, ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’?  Noo Saro-Wiwa hasn’t done her home work on Mrs. Clinton, which renders her Feminist propagandizing on her behalf, in the ultra-respectable, not to speak of intellectually highfalutin, Times Literary Supplement,  appear just like another bourgeois magazine, Vanity Fair’s glossy chatter comes to mind. Some telling quotes from this essay:

“This book is for everybody who gets discouraged or gets knocked down and needs to figure out how to get yourself going again”, said Hillary. “We’re in a bit of a … struggle going on right now in our country.”

…

Beard mentioned the American swimmer Diana Nyad (b. 1949), who at the age of sixty-one swam from Cuba to Florida through shark-infested waters. Beard asked, “Was she gutsy or stupid?” Hillary responded: “I feel like I swim with sharks all the time”.

…

As Hillary pointed out, the development of women’s rights, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to the present day, has been very quick in broad historical terms. “This is really blink-of-an-eye history, and I don’t think we can take it for granted.”

…

Playing devil’s advocate, Beard asked whether it was right to present these women as “irremediably gutsy”, their vulnerabilities hidden away. We don’t give enough space to the people who can’t spend their whole lives being resilient. In Hillary’s view, it is important to note that everyone has ups and downs. “I’m on a campaign against perfectionism. Young women think they have to look perfect, act perfect.”

…

The conversation moved on to the media’s fixation on women’s wardrobes at the expense of their opinions or policies. Chelsea aired her frustrations on the issue: Hillary had to wear dark blue trouser suits on the presidential campaign trail just to stop the press conversation from drifting towards her appearance. Beard, who has experienced her fair share of body shaming, was more blunt about her situation: “So effing what?”, she exclaimed, to a roar of laughter from the audience.

…

“The way I reacted when that happened to me”, said Hillary,

was to ignore it. And ignoring it because … given how people’s brains work, if a woman looks like she is agitated or upset she often is viewed as not being able to handle it whatever it is, so … when I was being stalked on stage during the second debate I’m trying to answer questions about health care and immigration and the economy and my mind is going, ‘What is he doing?’

And you know, I did entertain whirling around and saying, ‘Back up, you creep – you’re not going to intimidate me’. I did think about that, but I also then sort of played out in my head … the news, you know, the political press saying, He got to her, he rattled her; look at that, she’s gonna, you know, stand up to whatever, Putin – and she can’t take Donald Trump stalking her? Hmm, that doesn’t seem too presidential. It’s a really hard choice … When people try to denigrate you and undermine you, pay no attention whatsoever.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/swimming-with-sharks-clinton/

An actual Feminist would have never supported ‘ Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act’ but a Neo-Liberal political opportunist would and did! The Clinton pose as Feminist is pure fiction, confected after the fact of her support for a Reaganite political agenda, under the rubric of reform. To also ignore her Neo-Conservative Foreign Policy, her alliance with Clapper and Brennan in the Russia-Gate hoax is to subject history, to the most violent kind of  re-write!

Old Socialist

@NYT front page du 5 décembre 2019 Anti-Macron, grèves anti-néo-libéralisation en France: en respectable bourgouise parle! #Un euphémisme comique?
‘Les troubles posent un nouveau défi à M. Macron, dont le style de gestion descendante a suscité des critiques.’

Vieux commentaires socialistes