StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is a collection of would be telling, or better yet, wan attempts to offer ‘insights‘ on the Democratic candidates, still in the running. Well before the first Primary in February 2020. The Villain in this retelling is the favorite Financial Times’  Straw-Man ‘The Left’, in sum, the actual Left-Wing Social Democrat Sanders. Ersatz ‘Progressive’ Warren, and the rest of New Democrats, who have grown as stale as guests, who have overstayed their welcome. ‘Centrism’ in the American political present is defined as the alliance between the New Democrats/Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives.

Gone, for the moment, is Mr. Ganesh’s acidulous style, replaced by attempts at political commentary, framed as aphorisms, or its second cousin:

Mr Obama had astronomical star power.

The left’s takeover of the Democratic party is proving to be much slower and patchier than anticipated.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left’s coming force in Congress, is not all that typical of the party’s base, and nor is The Daily Show.

…then the revolution can wait for another time.

The biggest flops have been perceived careerists who seemed to affect left-wingery after years of subtler politics.

Mr Buttigieg means his Emmanuel Macron-ish technocracy.

The left still has all the social conditions to win.

It is hard to believe that a candidate so attuned to modern class schisms has already had her moment.

If the left still has a chance, though, it is not the overwhelming one of such recent hype.

The idea that Americans are being forced to choose between left and right extremes, like the luckless British, not only draws a spurious equivalence between Mr Trump and Ms Warren, it ignores all the pickings in between.
No longer. They hate him so much as to make them prudent.

https://www.ft.com/content/477f37a2-167b-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385

Make note that Ganesh’s links to Martin Wolf’s review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon, acts the part of the Anti-Piketty, continuing the Anti-Leftism theme. Harvard University Press has published both Piketty books: ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ and ‘Capital and Ideology’ and Philippon’s ode to competition, under threat from the Robber Baron’s of the 21st century.

Old Socialist

____________________________________________________

@doc martin

Thank you for your comment. Your argumentative rigor, in your posts below, amply demonstrate  your facility and eloquence of its own! My favorite: ‘ Why I saw the dem party left me (ACLU type who recalls going to a McGovern rally)’. James Pinkerton never let go of his animus to Sen. McGovern, even in the early 2000’s he was still offering up his political bile, as if it mattered.

You even inspired  @ALM to this bit of maladroitly re-engineered school yard taunt, for @FT’s reactionary readership: ‘Has the Socialist Worker removed the option to comment on its website? A dialog showing a permalink to the comment.’
Best regards,
StephenKMackSD

Headline: Michael Bloomberg: the magnate shaking up the 2020 election

Sub-headline: Money on top of his success as New York’s mayor make a formidable candidate despite a late start

https://www.ft.com/content/90cadb44-11eb-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e548a

Should the reader look at the candidacy of Mr. Bloomberg as a frontal attack on the ersatz Leftist, nee New Democrat, Warren, and an actual Left-Wing Social Democrat Sanders? Is the speculation that Obama and Bloomberg may have made alliance, as the in-order-too of checking a ‘Left’ takeover of a party still mired in Neo-Liberal self-delusion, post 2008? The Fate of American hangs in the balance equals made for Television political melodrama!

How fitting that John Micklethwait co-author of ‘The Right Nation’, ‘The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent The State’, ‘God Is Back:How The Global Revival Of Faith Is Changing The World, is Bloomberg’s editor, not to speak of former editor-in-chief of The Economist. A Hoover Institution association is here, though it seems to have lapsed:

https://www.hoover.org/profiles/john-micklethwait

The lily-white hands of an Oxbridger insures what? Should that give the reader a clue of the politics of this ‘privately held financial, software, data, and media company.’ If ‘Mike’ is such a ‘Centrist’ , then that reader can conclude, that the political center, in America, is as skewed to the Right as it has ever been. Joshua Chaffin does a workman-like job of writing this ‘news story’ that should have appeared as an editorial endorsement, or have I missed that?

Here is the good grey Times endorsement of ‘Mike’ framed as a ‘pep up’ in the presidential race:

Headline:The Times view on Michael Bloomberg entering the Democrat race: Billionaire’s Row

Sub-headline: The media magnate and philanthropist has only a slim chance of winning the nomination, but should pep up the race for the US presidency

Again Bloomberg is presented as an antidote to Leftists Warren and the  Political Apostate Sanders and billionaire Tom Steyer. In true Oxbridger hysterical Anti-Left rhetoric is a pronounced riff on Obama’s Anti-Leftism.

Mr Bloomberg will present himself as a champion of the centre ground vacated by many of the Democrat frontrunners, including Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, who has tweeted that billionaires “should not exist”. Another Democrat rival, Elizabeth Warren, mobilises her supporters by hitting out against the unfairness of income inequality. She wants an “ultra-millionaire” tax. One of the Democrat contenders, Tom Steyer, is himself a billionaire and is campaigning on the need for America to beef up taxes on the rich. In this overheated and one-sided discourse, wealth not poverty is the problem. For them, countering the rich 73-year-old white male president with a very rich 77-year-old white male rival is an absurdity.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-michael-bloomberg-entering-the-democrat-race-billionaires-row-6v05sdv6w

Recall that Obama didn’t rhapsodize about  Franklin Roosevelt but about Ronald Reagan as transformational :

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html?source=post_page—————————

Both The Financial Times and The Times are not true believers in Bloomberg’s candidacy, but will take what is on offer! ‘Stop and Frisk’ was the offspring of The Manhattan Institute’s ‘Broken Windows Policing’. Read Judge Shira A. Scheindlin’s exit interview in the New York Times, for her withering comments on Bloomberg and Ray Kelly:

Headline: Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case

…

She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”

“They seemed out of touch with the issues that the communities cared about,” Judge Scheindlin said. “They didn’t seem to understand the impact of these policies on real people and real neighborhoods and real communities and the detrimental impact it was having, even on policing. And that’s the point. They didn’t seem to get it. It was all about fear — New York would blow up.”

…

 

Old Socialist

P.S. The final paragraph of The Times endorsement of Bloomberg’s candidacy is instructive.

Mr Bloomberg is a full-square Democrat on gun control and climate change, a multilateralist and business-friendly. He may be worth $54 billion, but he is not a son of privilege. And in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics, where tribal allegiances are worn thin, he may yet stand a sliver of a chance. American politics can only benefit from listening to what he has to say.

This screen shot of a Times report from November 29, 2019  The Times has finally caught up with one of its columnist:

The above from November 13, 2019 that links to this Economist interview of November 7, 2019. On Russia :

…

My idea is not in the least naive. I didn’t by the way talk about a “reset”, I said it might take ten years. If we want to build peace in Europe, to rebuild European strategic autonomy, we need to reconsider our position with Russia. That the United States is really tough with Russia, it’s their administrative, political and historic superego. But there’s a sea between the two of them. It’s our neighbourhood, we have the right to autonomy, not just to follow American sanctions, to rethink the strategic relationship with Russia, without being the slightest bit naive and remaining just as tough on the Minsk process and on what’s going on in Ukraine. It’s clear that we need to rethink the strategic relationship. We have plenty of reasons to get angry with each other. There are frozen conflicts, energy issues, technology issues, cyber, defence, etc. What I’ve proposed is an exercise that consists of stating how we see the world, the risks we share, the common interests we could have, and how we rebuild what I’ve called an architecture of trust and security.

…

What guarantee does he need? Is it in essence an EU and a NATO guarantee of no further advances on a given territory? That’s what it means. It means: what are their main fears? What are ours? How do we approach them together? Which issues can we work on together? Which issues can we decide no longer to attack each other on, if I can put it that way? On which issues can we decide to reconcile? Already, sharing, we have more discussions. And I think it’s very productive.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own-words-english

It is hard to be patient with Macron, who is the self-appointed leader of Europe with a vision, while he still violently tries to suppress the continuing rebellion, that has disappeared from the Corporate Media, which approaches it 56th weekend of demonstration, as I write this. In this portion of the Economist interview he sounds just like a respectable ‘Bourgeois Liberal’. For the Neo-Liberal ‘The Market’ is the sine qua non. ‘The Community’ is  a political prop. Macron is selling himself. Hoping that his audience will forget, that in final vote in the French election, 36.5% of the voters rendered their ballots ‘spoiled’ or otherwise ‘uncountable’ !

…

Europe was built on this notion that we would pool the things we had been fighting over: coal and steel. It then structured itself as a community, which is not merely a market, it’s a political project. But a series of phenomena have left us on the edge of a precipice. In the first place, Europe has lost track of its history. Europe has forgotten that it is a community, by increasingly thinking of itself as a market, with expansion as its end purpose. This is a fundamental mistake, because it has reduced the political scope of its project, essentially since the 1990s. A market is not a community. A community is stronger: it has notions of solidarity, of convergence, which we’ve lost, and of political thought.

…

Old Socialist

Mr. Ganesh is a quick study, with all it attendant historical lacunae starkly evident.His collection of historical personages is tailored to impress a reader with his knowledge of American history, as his own.  Some book recommendations: the Gaddis biography of Kennan and a collection of critical evaluations in the Journal of Cold War Studies.  https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/JCWS_a_00401?mobileUi=0&.

Add to this list The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington by Gregg Herken, Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue by Edwin Yoder and the indispensable Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel. Not to forget another  essential , American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson. 

Mr Ganesh brings his stylistic aplomb, not to speak of his casual misanthropy, to confect his bricolage of references, in his latest essay on how the Republican right must learn to love ‘The Deep State’ -should the Republicans learn to love that entity, like The New Democrat Hillary Clinton and her  ‘Deep State’ allies Clapper, Brennan,with FBI stalwarts Comey and Mueller?

In praise of the unsung bureaucrat, besides Mr.  Michael Lewis latest and soon to be BestSeller: one of those unsung bureaucrats is Ray McGovern who has an essay worth the readers time, and close attention, on one of those bureaucrats Fiona Hall:

Headline:Ray McG0vern: The Pitfalls of a Pit Bull Russophobe

Sub-headline: Like so many other glib “Russia experts” with access to Establishment media, Fiona Hill, who testified Thursday in the impeachment probe, seems three decades out of date.

RAY McGOVERN: The Pitfalls of a Pit Bull Russophobe

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e517bb14-10f5-11ea-a225-db2f231cfeae

It shouldn’t surprise that Andy Divine shares a propinquity with Fiona Hill. Ms. Hill’s thesis adviser was the notorious Neo-Conservative Richard Pipes. So her Russophobia, bordering on paranoia, is comfortable political territory for Andy. The first paragraph of his essay is…

I’ve been in Britain, so it was tough to give this week’s impeachment hearings the attention they deserve. But one obvious theme has emerged: the imperturbability, professionalism, and courage of the women who have testified. When I sat down last night and watched some of the footage of Fiona Hill online, I was gobsmacked.

‘Gobsmacked‘ is familiar descriptive territory for Andy, in sum, hyperbole is the first and last line of argument. His essay proceeds via a riff on what her voice evokes in emotional terms , and his familiarity with the various accents of the districts Britain. And his fascination with her personal history. The admiration of one scholarship student for another?

What of Ms. Hill’s testimony? available here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466380-1/impeachment-inquiry-hearing-fiona-hill-david-holmes

At about the 1:10:12 point in the c-span video Ms. Hill describes the Party Line of both the New Democrats, and the Neo-Conservatives, about ‘Russian Interference’ in the 2016 American Election*. And the attempt by the Russians to deflect that, by the use of the charge that Ukraine interfered in the American election.

…

From these modest origins, as she acknowledged in her opening statement, Hill became what we saw yesterday. One of the wretched things about the last few years has been following and staying sane in the blizzard of bluster, misinformation, gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and the actual empirical, complex reality we have been confronted with. To keep one’s focus while enduring this torrent of deliberate confusion and competing narratives has been extremely hard.

But not for Hill.

…

It is never hard for the ideologue to adhere to the approved narrative. Andy knows the territory, it is his home ground! The last two paragraphs of his essay, are awash in a maudlin exploration of the dimensions of political kitsch, allied to the patriotism of a 4th of July picnic speech, by an old pol, who relies on the cultivated ignorance of his audience.

Hearing Hill’s still voice of calm in this storm moved me deeply, and not just because she comes from the country of my birth too, but because her immigrant, accented voice revealed an understanding of America in a way this president simply doesn’t understand. She knows what’s at stake. And she has done her part. It gives me hope, I guess. Hope that we can, in fact, expose and defeat this malignancy at the heart of our democracy.

If we see Trump as the poison he truly is, we have now also seen something else. We have seen the antidote.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-fiona-hill-is-the-antidote-to-trump.html

Political Observer

P.S. With 27 hours and 30 minutes of video, available for viewing on C-Span, of these hearings of last week -its a full time job, to even stay moderately well informed on this issue!

* This opening portion of Ms. Hill’s testimony, in which see acts ‘as if’ she were a member of the Committee, rather that as a witness, is telling!

THE RUSSIANS INTERESTS TO DELEGITIMIZE OUR ENTIRE PRESIDENCY. ONE YRBISSUE I DO WANT TO RAISE AND I THINK THIS WOULD RESONATE WITH OUR COLLEAGUES ON THE COMMITTEE FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THAT THE GOAL OF THE RUSSIANS WAS TO PUT WHOEVER BECAME THE PRESIDENT BY TRYING TO TIP THEIR HANDS ON ONE SIDE OF THE SCALE UNDER A CLOUD. SO IF SENATOR CLINTON HAD BEEN ELECTED AS PRESIDENT, AS INDEED MANY EXPECTED IN THE RUN-UP TO THE ELECTION IN 2016, SHE TOO WOULD HAVE HAD MAJOR QUESTIONS ABOUT HER LEGITIMACY. AND I THINK WHAT WE’RE SEEING HERE AS A RESULT OF ALL OF THESE NARRATIVES AS THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT WAS HOPING FOR. MISINFORMATION, DOUBT, THEY HAVE EVERYBODY QUESTIONING THE LEGITIMACY OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, BE IT PRESIDENT TRUMP OR POTENTIALLY A PRESIDENT CLINTON, BUT THEY WOULD PIT ONE SIDE OF OUR ELECTORATE AGAINST THE OTHER, THEY WOULD PIT ONE PARTY AGAINST THE OTHER. AND THAT’S WHY I WANTED TO MAKE SUCH A STRONG POINT AT THE VERY BEGINNING. BECAUSE THERE WAS CERTAINLY INDIVIDUALS AND MANY OTHER COUNTRIES WHO HAD HARSH WORDS FOR BOTH OF THE — WHO HAD HARSH WORDS FOR MANY OTHER CANDIDATES DURING THE PRIMARIES, A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO WERE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT ON THE REPUBLICAN SIDE. THERE WERE MANY PEOPLE TRYING THEMSELVES TO GAME THE OUTCOME AS YOU KNOW IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE BOOKIES TAKE BETS, YOU CAN GO TO LADBROKES OR WILLIAM HILL AND LAY BETS ON WHO YOU THINK WILL BE THE CANDIDATE. THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT WERE TRYING TO LAY THEIR OWN BETS. THEY WANT TO GIVE A SPREAD, MAKE SURE THAT WHOEVER THEY HAD BET ON WHOEVER THEY TRIED TO TIP THE SCALES WOULD ALSO EXPERIENCE SOME DISCOMFORT THAT THEY WOULD BE BEHOLDEN TO THEM IN SOME WAY, THAT THEY WOULD CREATE JUST THE KIND OF CHAOS WE HAVE SEEN IN OUR POLITICS. SO I JUST WANT TO, AGAIN, EMPHASIZE WE NEED TO BE VERY CAREFUL AS WE DISCUSS ALL OF THESE ISSUES NOT TO GIVE THEM MORE FODDER THAT THEY CAN USE AGAINST US IN 2020.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466380-1/impeachment-inquiry-hearing-fiona-hill-david-holmes

Rep. Schiff then comments on Ms. Hill’s testimony. I’ve rendered in bold type Schiff’s comments, that render the utterly failed Mueller Investigation subject to, not just to an act of breathtaking revisionism, but a re-write.

THANK YOU, DR. HILL. I WILL NOW PROCEED TO THE FIRST ROUND OF QUESTIONS. AS DETAILED IN THE MEMO PROVIDED TO THE COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 45 MINUTES OF QUESTIONS CONDUCTED BY THE CHAIRMAN OR MAJORITY COUNCILFULED BY 45 MINUTES FOR THE RANKING MEMBER OR MINORITY COUNCIL. FOLLOWING THAT, UNLESS I SPECIFY ADDITIONAL EQUAL TIME FOR QUESTIONING WE’LL PROCEED UNDER THE FIVE MINUTE RULE. I RECOGNIZE MYSELF FOR MAJORITY COUNCIL FOR THE FIRST ROUND OF QUESTIONS. FIRST OF ALL, THANK YOU, BOTH, FOR BEING HERE. THANK YOU FOR TESTIFYING. DR. HILL, YOUR STORY REMINDS ME A GREAT DEAL OF WHAT WE HEARD FROM ALEXANDER VINDMAN. FEW IMMIGRANT STORIES WE HEARD JUST IN THE COURSE OF THESE HEARINGINGS ARE AMONG INGS ARE AMONG THE MOST POWERFUL I HEARD. YOU AND DR. — AND COLONEL VINDMAN AND OTHERS ARE THE BEST OF THIS COUNTRY. AND YOU CAME HERE BY CHOICE AND WE ARE SO BLESSED THAT YOU DID. SO WELCOME. MY COLLEAGUES TOOK SOME UMBRAGE WITH YOUR OPENING STATEMENT, BUT I THINK THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN BE FORGIVEN IF THEY HAVE THE SAME IMPRESSION, LISTENING TO SOME OF THE STATEMENTS OF MY COLLEAGUES DURING THIS HEARING THAT RUSSIA DIDN’T INTERVENE IN OUR ELECTION, IT WAS ALL THE UKRAINIANS. THERE HAS BEEN AN EFFORT TO TAKE A TWEET HERE AND OP-ED THERE AND NEWSPAPER STORY HERE AND SOMEHOW EQUATE IT WITH THE SYSTEMIC INTERVENTION THAT OUR INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES FOUND THAT RUSSIA PERPETRATED IN 2016 THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN AND A HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATION. INDEED, THE REPORT MY COLLEAGUES GAVE YOU THAT THEY PRODUCED DURING THE INVESTIGATION CALLS INTO QUESTION THE ACCURACY OF INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE’S FINDING THAT RUSSIA INTERVENED TO HELP ONE SIDE, TO HELP DONALD TRUMP AT THE EXPENSE OF HILLARY CLINTON. NO ONE IN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY QUESTIONS THAT FINDING. NOR DOES THE FBI, NOR DOES THE SENATE, BIPARTISAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT, THE MINORITY COMMITTEE REPORT OF THIS COMMITTEE, THE HOUSE REPUBLICAN REPORT IS AN OUTLIER. BUT LET ME ASK YOU, DR. HILL, ABOUT YOUR CONCERN WITH THAT RUSSIAN NARRATIVE THAT WASN’T THE RUSSIANS THAT ENGAGED IN INTERFERING IN THE ELECTION IN 2016, AND, OF COURSE, THIS WAS GIVEN A BOOST WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP HELSINKI AND THE PRESIDENT QUESTIONED HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES, BUT WHY ARE THE RUSSIANS PUSHING THAT NARRATIVE?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466380-1/impeachment-inquiry-hearing-fiona-hill-david-holmes

_____________________________________________________

Added November 26, 2019

Read  this essay by  Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/fiona-hill-pitfalls-being-pit-bull-russophobe

If you’re in need of a mild chuckle today @JananGanesh @FT provides something that might meet your needs? This, for his audience of scriveners pretending to the status of Internet Boulevardiers. The pretentious is his métier.

Allow me to itemise all the burdens that I bear. I have to obey the criminal law of the US and the UK. I am contracted to perform certain duties for the FT. After that, well, some people insist on a reply text these days, but really, in all candour, that is it. The world asks almost nothing of me. What with my talent for saying No (I am what you might call a people-displeaser) I don’t even feel informal pressure to serve this or that cause, live this or that life.
I and the millions like me are CS Lewis’s “men without chests”. As much as our hard-to-target lower pecs need tightening, this is in fact a slight at our listlessness. We are all desire and reason with no higher calling. Francis Fukuyama cribs the phrase in The End of History, which has displaced Das Kapital and perhaps even The Origin of Species as the most invoked book that nobody reads. Among the consequent misunderstandings is that Fukuyama relished the triumph of liberalism as the end-state of humankind.
…

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/f068080c-0c4a-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84

Mr. Ganesh opens his essay via ‘The Servant’ a movie, cineasts forgive my use of such an unsophisticated American term, just call me a provincial!

The class animus in The Servant was meant to be peculiarly British. 

Wasn’t this more about a celebration of Decadence, rather than the proffered ‘class animus’? Although there is something to be said about – the reader could almost cast this in Hegelian terms, via Kojève’s reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit: Master and Slave fight to the death in his Philosophical Novel. Have I reached to far? Or is that even possible in Ganesh World? Or are Pop Culture references the ultimate limit?

What writer would think that ‘class neuroses’ has any kind of intellectual/political weight? Freud and his epigones, the Neo-Freudians, have faded into a richly deserved obscurity. Except for the practitioners of  a ‘Science’ that has transmogrified into a Metaphysics, or an instance of Jewish Story Telling, and other forms of  an etiolated apologetics. Place this under the rubric of self-rehabilitation.

Let me speculate that Mr. Ganesh has not read the classic books by Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and Neurosis and Human Growth. A clinic named in her honor is still accepting patients.

Home

Neo-Freudians were the experts on  ‘psychological pathologies’ , while I was coming of age in the 50’s and 60’s America, these two books were part of my self assigned reading, as a pseudo-analysand.

Although the desperation of the practitioners of the ‘Psychoanalytic Method’ has led to a ‘Science’ transmogrified into the afore-mentioned  Metaphysic , or the preposterous notion of the art of Jewish Story Telling, and other such rehabilitative tropes. The reader should direct their attention to the work of Frederick Cruz: ‘Memory Wars’, Freud: The Making of an Illusion and his essays at The New York Review of Books.

The Revenge of the Repressed, from the November 17, 1994:

Or his  incendiary biography of Freud, here reviewed by Matthew Hutson in The Washington Post: 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/young-freud-cruel-incurious-deceptive-and-in-search-of-fame/2017/09/01/df3e74a4-76fa-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html

Read Frank Kermode’s essay of 1976 titled ‘Fighting Freud’ a review of Cruz’s ‘Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method’ that might just offer a rejoinder, to both mine , and Cruz’s dissent to the Cult of Freud and his epigones.  The Skeptic’s practice of setting two arguments against each other, equipollence, might lead to a valuable reckoning?

Fighting Freud

‘ Neuroses’  as a frame for his latest essay places Mr. Ganesh’s firmly in the territory of anachronism, used maladroitly to discuss  class/racial/ethnic prejudice. Using Marxism, in any of its iterations, to discuss the above triad of vexing moral/political, what to name it conundrums?, is antithetical, or in the interest of candor anathema, to both Mr. Ganesh’s Neo-Liberalism and the editors and readers of this newspaper.

Mr. Ganesh’s last paragraph identifies a kind of tribalism, that looks down upon others as less than themselves.

It reminded me of the awesome pride that people I grew up with felt at not living in a council house, even if they were just one notch better-off. Looking back, my mistake was to think of their obsession with hairline differentials in status as uniquely British. As my life plays out on its fourth continent, I search for traits that hold more or less across the world. Nothing stands out as much as the need to look down on someone.

I recall ,when I was seven or eight, telling my mother I was going to play with a friend from school, who lived in a motel, on the boulevard very near my house. In that time, my sisters and brothers and I walked all over our neighborhood.  I was surprised at her response, which was very negative about him and his mother, for living in a motel. I recall later in my life my mother used the term ‘white trash’: she felt that was the ultimate insult.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/63e4bd6a-0607-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca

It is getting very close to election day in Great Britain. Because so much is a stake, in this election, where can Mr. Freedland be? He’s the Blairite attack poodle who authored this from The Guardian of March 18, 2016 :

Headline: Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem

Sub-headline: Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn

In my internet search for the above essay, I see that I have missed Mr. Freedland’s latest intervention. Facing the fact that polling ‘data’ is notoriously unreliable ,Freedland’s polemic is in need of ballast to keep it  afloat. Labour Friends of Israel is Freedland’s natural ally, or more likely acting as co-conspirators, in his attacks on Corbyn.

From October 25, 2019:

Headline: The question for Labour: why are you sticking with Jeremy Corbyn?

Sub-headline: The party leader is polling so badly that we risk a hard Brexit and five more years of Boris Johnson. It’s time to change course

…

The Labour leader has the lowest poll numbers of any leader of the opposition since records began. His net satisfaction rating is minus 60, outstripping the previous negative record held since 1982 by Michael Foot. He is less popular than Boris Johnson among both men and women, in every socioeconomic category, whether richer or poorer, in London and Scotland as well as the Midlands and Wales and, remarkably, in every age group. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the over-65s prefer Johnson to Corbyn by 62% to 8%, but it’s arresting that even among the youngest voters, aged 18 to 24, those once seen as the Labour leader’s base, Corbyn is less popular than the prime minister, albeit by three points.

…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/labour-jeremy-corbyn-party-leader-brexit-boris-johnson

Yet Mr. Freedland seems to have modified his hysteria, to the extent that he focuses upon matters of politics rather than his usual hobby-horse of Anti-Semitism. What has happened? Perhaps ‘saving the best for last‘?  Yet the reader might just title this ‘Corbyn, Johnson, Brexit & The Poor’. Neo-Liberal’s like Freedland do not care about the poor, although the closing paragraph of his essay demonstrates an unalloyed self-serving hypocrisy, in sum, completely familiar territory!

The diehards will say that to criticise Corbyn in this way is to side with the Tories against the poor and vulnerable. But the opposite is true. To stick with a path that makes five more years of Boris Johnson, and a hard Brexit, more likely is not to side with the poor and the vulnerable – it is to betray them.

Readers responses to the above essay have been carefully carefully chosen/sanitized  by the Guardian editors .

Headline: Putting fear of Corbyn’s Labour in perspective

Sub-headline: Readers respond to a piece by Jonathan Freedland in which he asked how Jews can vote for the Labour leader

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/11/putting-fear-of-corbyns-labour-in-perspective

What can a reader think of a publication which posts, for the most part criticism framed in faint praise,  in its various iterations, to Freedland’s essay?

Old Socialist

______________________________________________________________

P.S.Here is a link to Mr. Freedland’s more considered, or call it highfalutin, essay on Brexit,  refracted through a  ‘Brexit novel’  Middle England by Jonathan Coe , in The New York Review of Books of September 26,2019.

Fools Rush Out

The essay seems like an almost straight forward book review, of a book that satirizes Brexit, until this paragraph:

That this can even look like a promising political strategy for the Tories is a function of the parlous state of the British opposition. The forces of Remain are hopelessly fragmented, divided among Liberal Democrats, Greens, and the nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales. Labour, the main opposition party, is itself divided: members and activists are overwhelmingly and passionately pro-European, but the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his tight ruling circle are drawn from a hard-left strand that has long been suspicious of the European project. Corbyn voted No to joining Europe in 1975, regarding the venture as both a capitalist club and part of the architecture that propped up the West in the cold war. (On the major international questions of the last five decades, Corbyn’s sympathies have rarely lain on the Western side.) Accordingly, Corbyn has wriggled and writhed on Brexit, saying “Labour respects the result of the referendum” and promising to oppose only “a damaging Tory Brexit” rather than Brexit itself.

This sentence wastes no time in presenting Corbyn as what? (On the major international questions of the last five decades, Corbyn’s sympathies have rarely lain on the Western side.) Mr. Freedland abandons, for the moment, his Anti-Semitism hobby-horse, for what has become a popular trope for American Neo-Liberals: to engage in political defamation of their opponents, using these terms of art, ‘Russian asset’ or ‘useful idiot‘. The New Cold encourages dull-witted phrase making.

Old Socialist

Macron s’annonce, déjà comme le leader de l’Europe! Où si Merkel?

https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own-words-french

L’économiste ultra réactionnaire agit “comme si” l’ascension de Macron à la direction de l’Union européenne est un “fait politique”! Macron récite tous les clichés, y compris celui de la “merde de l’histoire” du charlatan politique Fukuyama. À droite du pastiche hégélien d’Alexandre Kojève. Ce n’est que le début des récitations des prémices de l’opportunisme néolibéral!

Vieux socialiste

(Mes excuses pour mon terrible français!)

@tdal1moe

Thank you for your comment. One of the reasons I came to read The Financial Times is that Chomsky recommended its reporting as more reliable. Iv’e been a reader since around 2007 and I’m inclined not to agree with Chomsky.
As the ‘reporting’ ,especially on Argentina and Macron, has steeped a kind of paranoia about the return of de Kirchner ,and a wan apologetics about the collapse of Macri’s Neo-Liberalism Lite, in the near free-fall of the peso. And Macron as the return of political sanity to France, via the now discarded Jupertarian Politics i.e. Rule by Decree. Not to forget that 36.5 % of the French electorate rendered their ballots uncountable. The spontaneous political manifestation of both the gilets jaunes and then the gilets noir, is a sign of deep anger about Macronism, and it attempts to Neo-Liberalize France. The naked character of Macron’s attempt ,to become the titular leader of the foundering European Utopia, is both darkly comic as it is mendacious. This internal rebellion no longer ‘reported’ in The Financial Times, Except for one lone interview with the least radical of the resistors:

https://www.ft.com/content/82624d98-f72f-11e9-a79c-bc9acae3b654

I was ‘guilt tripped’ into voting for the utterly misbegotten Hillary, you and a great many American voted for Trump. He is all you say about him and more, yet the New Democrats have based their Impeachment on hearsay, as Jim Jordan’s questioning of Taylor amply illustrates: ‘I heard that…’ . The center of the case against Trump is hearsay combined with the fact that the New Democrats haven’t got the votes to convict in a Senate controlled by the Republicans.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/7b8f8a12-0661-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca?commentID=db29fb34-5131-4495-bb5f-f6844d40c348