StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: Argentina is in default, says Standard & Poor’s

Sub-headline: Restructuring plan amounts to the ninth time that the country has reneged on its debt

Argentina has defaulted on its debt, according to Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, after it announced plans to delay payments on its $101bn of borrowings.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/9161f0c0-caff-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

Standard & Poor’s like the other ‘rating agencies’ are bankrupt!

Headline : The Indisputable Role of Credit Ratings Agencies in the 2008 Collapse, and Why Nothing Has Changed
…
The role of the credit ratings agencies during the financial crisis remains highly criticized and mostly unaccountable. The agencies have been blamed for exaggerated ratings of risky mortgage-backed securities, giving investors false confidence that they were safe for investing. While criticizing the ratings by credit ratings agencies in an op-ed for The New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “The skewed assessments, in turn, helped the financial system take on far more risk than it could safely handle.” In 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that these ratings agencies “were key enablers of the financial meltdown.”
…
https://truthout.org/articles/the-indisputable-role-of-credit-ratings-agencies-in-the-2008-collapse-and-why-nothing-has-changed/

Germany defaulted four times in the 20th Century as reported in this newspaper:

…

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

When do the Posh Boys at The Financial Times admit that Neo-Liberalism is not just an utter failure, but a catastrophe? There is more about Macri political defeat, and ‘The Three’ lowering Argentina’s credit rating- the corrupt ‘rating’ the incompetent?

Argentina’s bonds and currency have slumped since Mr Macri — who had been a popular figure with international investors — suffered an unexpectedly heavy defeat in a primary election which all but ended his hopes of re-election in October.

…

The result of the primary election had already seen two of the big three rating agencies lower Argentina’s credit rating.

Next in line is the Financial Times’ Editorial Board’s intervention:

Headline: Argentina’s debt debacle poses a difficult choice

Sub-headline: Addiction to US dollar borrowing is haunting the country once again

Argentina is hurtling towards another disorderly debt default. It would be the ninth in the country’s history. The timing is highly unusual, coming two months before a presidential election and less than a year into an IMF bailout that had already been increased. But it is also a recognition of reality. IMF assumptions on Argentina’s ability to roll over its short-term debt proved wildly optimistic in the face of political uncertainty. A recent central-bank auction that covered only a fraction of the debt falling due highlighted how much Argentina is struggling to refinance its vast and largely US dollar-denominated debt pile.

The resounding defeat of President Mauricio Macri in a nationwide primary election on August 11 triggered protracted financial market turbulence. The currency has weakened by about 25 per cent since the vote, taking the country’s ratio of public debt to gross domestic product — 86 per cent at the end of 2018 — to something closer to 100 per cent. The finance ministry announced late on Wednesday that Argentina will seek a “voluntary reprofiling” of its debt, though describing the problem as “liquidity stresses” rather than a solvency issue. The distinction does not matter. Maturity extensions are classified as defaults by rating agencies. And institutional investors have been given no choice in the delay in repayment of $7bn in short-term debt imposed by the government. Argentina will now try to negotiate a restructuring on the rest of its debt, split between $44bn in repayments to the IMF and $50bn in international bonds. Any swift agreement will be difficult to achieve.

https://www.ft.com/content/63999014-ca67-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

The reader notes that Macri is given a bit of a scolding by @FT: his ‘Austerity Lite’ wasn’t strong enough medicine. In sum, Market Discipline must cause suffering to insure ‘salvation‘. This, the Party Line of the Free Market Mythology in route!

The country’s economic problems are deep rooted. But Mr Macri bears some responsibility for not tackling them more robustly. Years of outsized fiscal and current account deficits are only now being reined in — the latter thanks more to a collapse in imports than to any sustained improvement in exports. Had Mr Macri accelerated fiscal consolidation at the start of his term four years ago and relied more heavily on domestic financing, Argentina’s vulnerabilities would be much lower. This “original sin” problem has been the country’s downfall time and again.

The editors then consider Macri’s responsibility in this debacle, eliding from their narrative the why of the near free-fall of the peso, but most importantly, the continuing proof that Neo-Liberalism is a spent force.

With the exception of Macron’s ‘Reforms’, that are not just haunted by both the  gilets jaunes and gilets noirs, but a generalized political discontent, defined by the 36.5% of ‘spoiled ballots’ in the final vote:  that can, given the right circumstance, lead to open rebellion!

Old Socialist

Instead of announcing your ignorance about Cosmopolitanism, and your use of it as a political straw-man of your fictional New Republicanism, that looks like the same bourgeois respectable Racism of Reagan ( ’76’Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’,’80 ‘I believe in States Rights’)

Add to this inherited Dixiecrat toxicity, the usable paranoia, of the McCarthy/Mundt/McCarran/Nixon Axis, and its attack on The New Deal as ‘a generation of treason’ . Voila! there you are, the natural inheritor of this legacy, in all your brazen, cultivated ignorance, in its various dimensions : the charge that the ‘Democrats’, read New Democrats, have any interest, or the intellectual inclination, much less the  capacity to advocate for such a larger moral/political vision, is preposterous on its face! Cosmopolitanism and bankrupt Neo-Liberalism are antithetical practices and World Views !

A possible avenue of escape from your state of ignorance ?

Here is screenshot of the first page of Chapter 2, page 48:

Have one of your underlings type up a paragraph length precis of this book, and/or just block me from commenting on your twitter account!

Add to your reading list, as part of your self-education, this book:

Regards,

Queer Atheist

Headline:Seven days in August tell us ‘We’re not Rome’

Sub-headline: The US president is no Caesar, and the imperial moment lies in the past

Recall that Mr Ferguson opened his August 11, 2019 column with this, framed in the above headline and sub-headline :

‘A republic, madam — if you can keep it.” That was supposedly Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a woman who asked him the result of the constitutional convention after it adjourned in 1787.

But later in his essay he mentions his bedtime reading:

My bedtime reading last week was Seven Days in May, a bestselling novel by Charles W Bailey and Fletcher Knebel, first published in 1962, when John Kennedy was president. It’s a reminder that “We are Rome” was a much more plausible claim in the early phase of the Cold War than it is today.

Mr. Ferguson’s essay then evolves into a discussion of the 1964 film, Seven Days in May, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Ferguson can’t resist the temptation to engage in a bit of what? Hyperbolically charged Movie Criticism?

The president, Jordan Lyman, is a bookish former governor who has signed a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The would-be emperor, General James Scott (played with wolfish charisma by Burt Lancaster in the film), regards Lyman as a weakling and a dupe.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-days-in-august-tell-us-were-not-rome-cmfz29cf7

The pungent characterization of Lancaster’s performance as displaying ‘wolfish charisma‘ demonstrates that Ferguson possesses literary prowess?

In his August 25, 2019 essay Mr. Ferguson opens it with this headline and sub-headline. He frames this essay with another American Movie reference:

Headline: From Trump’s trade wars to Brazil’s fires, the world is on the brink

Sub-headline: Global games of chicken are frying our planet

‘Hey, Toreador! . . . We head for the edge, and the first man who jumps is a chicken. All right?” In Rebel without a Cause, Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) play the most famous game of chicken in Hollywood history, driving their jalopies at full speed towards a Californian cliff. At the last minute, Jim jumps. Buzz, his sleeve caught on the door handle, plunges to his death.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/from-trumps-trade-wars-to-brazils-fires-the-world-is-on-the-brink-nvq6ds90w

Mr. Ferguson is catching up on his American Movie viewing, which seems to favor Hollywood political potboilers and melodramas!

Mr. Ferguson has missed one of Lancaster’s most unmannered and memorable performances in ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’, in which he plays newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker, modeled after Walter Winchell.

American Writer

Headline: The global gag on free speech is tightening

Sub-headline: In both democracies and dictatorships, it is getting harder to speak up

After a roll call of political bad actors, in nation  state contexts, on the vexing question of ‘Free Speech’ the Posh Boy & Girl coterie @TheEconomist shift their narrative by means of this utterly weak segue:

Meanwhile, in mature democracies, support for free speech is ebbing, especially among the young, and outright hostility to it is growing. Nowhere is this more striking than in universities in the United States.

The Economist reactionary clique then rely on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s anti-student political hysteria of “The coddling of the American mind”

The Economist clique is utterly ignorant of the American political context that is essential to an understanding of ‘The Coddling‘ , as political polemic.An integral part of an American Anti-Intellectual, Anti-Student tradition.

For those of us who came of age in California during the late 50’s and 60’s, can recall Max Rafferty as State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1963- using the dismissive trope of coddling or its cognates ,to describe The Free Speech Movement of 1964, led by Mario Savio, Reagan’s governorship from ’67 to ’71 steeped in anti-student bile, the San Francisco State boycott and its conservative hero S. I.  Hayakawa.

Not to forget the substantial pioneering work done by Allen Bloom  in his  ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ of 1987 ,that described in detail, the students of succeeding generations addled by narcissism and ‘Rock Music’. ‘Students’ ignored self-appointed Platonic Guardian Bloom.  The poor old neglected Professor, had his revenge, in his polemic framed in World Historical terms, a la Hegel as interpreted by Alexandre Kojève.   Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel  its English language version compiled by Bloom. Its charitable to call Bloom’s polemic bloated hysteria mongering.

American Anti-Intellectualism was given further weight by attacks on academic professionals in Kimball’s 1990 ‘Tenured Radicals’ and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 ‘Illiberal Education’. 

The Economists writers recount to its readers, the horror stories collected by Lukianoff and  Haidt aided by other destructive actors like Black Lives Matter, “antifa” , French “yellow jacket” . ‘The Proud Boys’ are alluded to in this essay , by means of this: ‘far-right extremists’. What is reader to think of the writers at The Economist who, not very carefully, launder a gang of White Nationalists?

Headline: James Fields Guilty of First-Degree Murder in Death of Heather Heyer

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Sixteen months after swastika-toting white supremacists swarmed the streets of Charlottesville, one of the demonstrators was convicted of first-degree murder Friday by a jury that found he intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring nearly 40 others.

James Fields Jr., 21, faces up to life in prison for the death of Heather Heyer, 32, in a case that has stirred soul-searching in a city that prides itself on being a liberal bastion. Mr. Fields, who traveled from Ohio to attend the Unite the Right rally, was also convicted of nine other charges, including aggravated malicious wounding and leaving the scene of a fatal accident.

Friday’s verdict was cheered by those fighting racial and religious hatred and provided some closure in a case that cast a national spotlight on Charlottesville, the scene chosen by racists and anti-Semites to rally for their cause, near a Confederate monument that some city leaders were trying to remove.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/us/james-fields-trial-charlottesville-verdict.html

Yet none of these organization named, Black Lives Matter, “antifa” , French “yellow jacket” exist as State Actors, but indigenous civic actors, but without any demonstrable connection to State Power!

Another feminist, 60-year-old Maria MacLachlan, was beaten up by a transgender activist at Speakers’ Corner in London, where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct.

The failure of this Economist Coterie to convincingly connect the Populist Bad Actors, in their National political contexts, with the political horror stories provided by Lukianoff and Haidt , with additional embroidery, renders this essay a mere excuse for more of the same, from this ultra-conservative newspaper: Populism, and a decline in an argued ‘free speech’ allied to a  ‘political civility’, are connected to a ‘radicalism’ that threatens the benefits of ‘Centrism’ . Call that ‘Centrism’ an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism that cannot right itself.

Old Socialist

https://www.economist.com/international/2019/08/17/the-global-gag-on-free-speech-is-tightening?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/theglobalgagonfreespeechistighteningthenewcensors

I’ve read both Mr. Galbraith’s and Mr. Caryl’s reviews of ‘Russia Hand’ and tweeted these two comments to Mr Talbott:

Tweet number 1

@strobetalbott

James K. Galbraith reviews your book ‘The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy’. Although you deserve scathing polemic. Perhaps the NYRB review might provide that? Galbraith 1st then Christian Caryl.
The Ghost of I.F. Stone

In the late days of 1992, economist Axel Leijonhufvud of UCLA got in touch with me. Leijonhufvud was then an adviser to the new country of Kazakhstan. He had written a penetrating analysis of how free-market policies would destroy the industrial structure of the old Soviet Union, and with it the livelihoods of many millions living there. Leijonhufvud asked that I find a way to convey his papers to Strobe Talbott, who had just assumed a position as President Clinton’s special adviser on Russian matters. Through a personal connection, I forwarded the materials to Talbott.

The anecdote is trivial, except for two points. First, it illustrates that there were economists who did know just how disastrous the “shock therapy” program then under way in Russia would prove. The notion that no one knew has been widely used as an alibi since then, but it is false. Second, there is no evidence that this information made any impression on Talbott, nor indeed on anyone in the Clinton administration.

Talbott’s memoir, The Russia Hand, helps to clarify why this could be so. Talbott knew Russia. The opening pages evoke his youthful visit — and that of his friend Bill Clinton a year later — to the Soviet Union, the great shades of Russian intellectual life (from Mandelstam to Brodsky) encountered over the years, and how the young scholars “quietly detested” the system. (It is Clinton, not Talbott, who is the Russia hand of the book’s title.) Though Moscow was “better heated” than Oxford in 1968, the Soviet Union was drab and repressive. The regime had a criminal past; in the present, it is seen distributing “stale bread and rotten sausages.” It did not occur to Talbott that the alternative — well-stocked shops selling excellent produce that almost no one can buy — might, for many Russians, prove to be worse.

https://prospect.org/article/shock-without-therapy

Tweet number 2

Replying to

@StephenKMackSD
and @strobetalbott

Then there is this:
… as Talbott puts it, “The rules that governed IMF lending weren’t arbitrary or intrusive — they were a reflection of the immutable principles of economics, which operated in a way similar to the rules of physics.” Talbott relates this without irony.

Talbott offers this astounding proof of his cultivated ignorance:  ‘immutable principles of economics, which operated in a way similar to the rules of physics.” Economic Determinism as an article, not of faith, but of Science?

I regret to say Mr. Christian Caryl review of Mr. Strobe’s book/political self-apologetic offered minimal insights, too mild mannered a critique of Mr. Talbott. But later in his essay he gives the game away with this comment on FDR, and  his confidence that he could handle Stalin, as indicative of the dangers of ‘personalized diplomacy’

…
One of the obvious problems with personalized diplomacy, for all the hard work it may entail, is its intellectual laziness. It is the eternal fantasy of US foreign policy that leaders can simply get together and talk things over like regular guys. After reading this memoir, I came across the following remark in a new book on the end of World War II, when an ailing FDR was thoroughly hoodwinked by Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s claim, “I can handle Stalin,” was part of what Eisenhower’s political adviser Robert Murphy acknowledged to be “the all-too- prevalent American theory” that individual friendships can determine national policy. “Soviet policy-makers and diplomats never operate on that theory,” he added.
…

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/07/18/giving-the-russians-their-spinach/

In sum Mr. Caryl is a Cold Warrior and shares with Talbott the myth of Stalin as – the fate of ‘Eastern Europe’ lay in the hands of a ‘hoodwinked’ FDR: this has resonances of the Republicans, like Nixon and McCarthy, of an hysterical charge that The New Deal was a ‘Generation of Treason’,in a dilute form. Yet still partaking in a manufactured ‘betrayal myth’. The fact that the utterly destructive coterie, of demonstrably incompetent and vindictive Technocrats,  Talbott and his collection of ‘Experts’, aided and abetted the rise of the Oligarchs cannot be denied. Except to those who trade on the currency of that ‘betrayal myth’ in whatever iteration.

Old Socialist

Who can forget this moment in the life of this notorious Oligarch/Hyper-Reactionary? As reported by John Gapper @FT, Gapper’s report in a bold font, and note his use of utterly dismissive characterizations of the audience : “harried Brooklyn moms and salivating balletomanes” !

Headline: Theater Audience Boos Tea Party Billionaire David Koch

David Koch masks his role as one of the top financiers of the Tea Party movement and pro-polluter front groups by loudly tacking his name to more laudable charities, like the New York city ballet. Koch, who has professed his devotion to “The Nutcracker” ballet performance by Alexei Ratmansky, made a matching grant of $2.5 million so that it could go on this season. At a special opening of the performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music shortly before Christmas, Koch made an appearance to talk about his donation. The Financial Times’ John Gapper was in the audience and witnessed a crowd of “harried Brooklyn moms and salivating balletomanes” erupting in boos at the sight of the Tea Party billionaire:

The excitement started even before the show when David H. Koch, the co-owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately-own industrial conglomerate in the US, came out on stage to talk about his $2.5m sponsorship of the production. Most people applauded but there were also boos from near where I sat in the balcony, followed by an angry debate in the row in front of me, with one of the booers declaring “he’s an evil man” and a couple next to her telling her to “shut up” and to leave the theatre. […] Once Mr Koch had left the stage, the booing stopped and the ballet started.

https://thinkprogress.org/theater-audience-boos-tea-party-billionaire-david-koch-4f701bc64c0a/

The defense of Oligarchs is a full time job for the Financial Times ‘reporter/apologist’!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/d0d949c4-c5a5-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9

The cast of characters of Mr. Ganesh’s latest political melodrama is a crowded field! First to appear in the headline of this Capitalist Apologetic newspaper is ‘The Populist Left’ ,hardly a surprise: the specter of Marx in his various political/economic iterations, is the idee fixe of the Free Market Coterie. From Mises/Hayek/Friedman, and the great charlatan Ayn Rand, and her comic-book Objectivism. Piketty has lost his appeal as the target Economic Radical of choice? Piketty is mere Economic Liberalism, in sum, Left-Wing Social Democracy , while Marx is the eternal Nihilist Revolutionary.

The ‘actors‘ in order of their appearance:

the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama . John Maynard Keynes , the Tea Party, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders , Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Federal Reserve,  China, Trumpism, Populism, recession, Michael Bennet, Bourbon restoration, the Bilderberg classes, Polls, Revealed Truth, Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society,  Chile, Germany, Gini coefficient, Wall Street Democrats, Moderation

The above framing of his essay is suggestive of historical/political knowledge of American politics and its actors, one of Mr. Ganesh’s glaring points of weakness.  The reader eventually comes to this pronouncement on what the Democrats have to offer the electorate, in contradistinction to Trump’s erratic political nihilism: Moderation to the point of tedium is still the Democrats’ surest way to victory next year. In sum, Mr. Ganesh presents the argument of the New Democrats that only a ‘Centrist’ can win against Trump. Define that ‘Centrism’ as the alliance between the New Democrats,  the Neo-Conservatives and their Neo-Liberal fellow travelers: Biden,Harris,Warren, Booker etc. All the New Democrats can offer is a carbon copy of Hillary Clinton! This qualifies as just another form of political nihilism.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/4a3ae51c-c343-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9

Headline: Markets are braced for a global downturn

Sub-headline: The signals from bonds, currencies and commodities are increasingly alarming 

Its almost as if American Television’s dreck merchant Aaron Spelling had reincarnated as a writer or writers for the Economist. The opening paragraph, of this essay, is awash in the kind of tarted up melodrama Aaron made his trademark. But this time delivered in the almost plumy Oxbridger patois.

Looking for meaning in financial markets is like looking for patterns in a violent sea. The information that emerges is the product of buying and selling by people, with all their contradictions. Prices reflect a mix of emotion, biases and cold-eyed calculation. Yet taken together markets express something about both the mood of investors and the temper of the times. The most commonly ascribed signal is complacency. Dangers are often ignored until too late. However, the dominant mood in markets today, as it has been for much of the past decade, is not complacency but anxiety. And it is deepening by the day.
…

The concluding paragraph after all the gloom in its near perfect expression, comes this almost caution, or just its politically useful simulacrum, shaded with a canny cynicism.

…

When people look back, they will find plenty of inconsistencies in the configuration of today’s asset prices. The extreme anxiety in bond markets may come to look like a form of recklessness: how could markets square the rise in populism with a fear of deflation, for instance? It is a strange thought that a sudden easing of today’s anxiety might lead to violent price changes—a surge in bond yields; a sideways crash in which high-priced defensive stocks slump and beaten-up cyclicals rally. Eventually there might even be too much exuberance. But just now, who worries about that?

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/08/17/markets-are-braced-for-a-global-downturn

Political Observer

Andy opens his essay of August 16, 2019, with praise for Straussian Michael Anton as ‘brilliant, bespoke’ it might be a faux pas to call a man ‘chic’?  Mr. Anton began his career, at least to my knowledge, with his The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style under the pretentious non de plume of  Nicholas Antongiavanni  in 2006. Is this book the ‘root‘ of Andy’s use of the word ‘bespoke’? Andy begins his essay:

In the first year of the Trump presidency, I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while. I wanted to talk to him about reactionism, that streak in conservative thought that can become revolutionary in its hostility to modernity, but the conversation ended up sprawling far beyond that topic. Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind. And that’s why I often listen to him. He reminds me why I’m a conservative, …

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/andrew-sullivan-the-limits-of-my-conservatism.html#comments

Not to forget Anton’s essay of  March 2016 under the pen name of Publius Decius Mus:

The Flight of 93 Election

But we can probably do better than we are doing now. First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept. We should try to fix that, but given the Left’s iron grip on every school and cultural center, that’s like trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal, perhaps, but temper your hopes—and don’t invest time and resources unrealistically.

By contrast, simply building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace. These policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and (we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.

Will this work? Ask a pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say, forthrightly, “yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.

And if it doesn’t work, what then? We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate.

But for those of you who are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.

The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/

On the ‘Straussians’ and their intellectual apologists like Andy, the reader need only look to Nicholas Xenos’ book ‘Cloaked in Virtue’ for a telling expose of Leo Strauss and his mendacious, not to speak of politically self-serving, re-reading of the Philosophical Tradition!

Andy Divine has just commenced his latest encyclical! Of interest to readers is that Andy began as a Thatcherite, then ‘evolved’ into a Neo-Conservative, and finally became a Neo-Liberal. With the carefully recorded political enthusiasms along the way: of the racist Conservative Sociology of ‘The Bell Curve’ and the Iraq War, to name just two examples of his non-existent good judgement. I will stop here, as the I have reached the maximum number of unpaid views, and think that five dollars is too high a price to pay for Andy’s self-congratulatory chatter!

Political Observer