Mr. Brooks never tires of his own rhetorical strategy of presenting his interventions, framed in a vulgar pastiche of Hegelian ‘Concepts’, that apes a kind of profundity.
Mr. Brooks is on this occasion a propagandist for this collaboration of Brookings and AEI:
‘Reported’ on here, in a near breathless Brooksian enthusiasm!
Written by a wide array of scholars, the report starts with the truth that the working class has been mostly ignored by the rest of society. Government has welfare programs to serve the poor and they have programs like 529 savings accounts to subsidize the rich. But there’s very little for families making, say, $50,000 a year.
The fact that ‘The Welfare State’ has been under unrelenting attack since at least the halcyon days of Reagan , as imagined by ‘Conservatives,‘ and his disciples the Clintons and their Reganite Agenda of ‘The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, is subject to Mr. Brooks’ self-serving political myopia. ‘The Undeserving Poor‘ are of no concern, but the real concern is for families that make $50 thousand a year. Perhaps these ‘families’ are part of his readership?
The ‘Bipartisan Agenda’ is represented by AEI and Brookings: the political center is still dominated by the Neo-Liberal Swindle : Mr. Brooks’ territory. There is no ‘Chastened Establishment‘! Mrs. Clinton has announced that she will run again in 2020, and Pelosi is about to be re-elected as Speaker. This ‘Report’ is an opportunity for Mr. Brooks to expatiate on familiar themes, wreathed in ever-present self-congratulation!
‘Francis Malige was the EBRD’s managing director in Kiev from 2014 to 2018. He is now based in London as managing director for financial institutions.’
This is propaganda for the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, there is no other descriptor for it! No surprise coming from The Financial Times! But an utterly shameless reminder of the purpose of the ‘newspaper’!+
The presentation of the ‘legacy of Stop & Frisk’ entertains the fiction that Bloomberg didn’t get Judge Scheindlin removed from the case. Or that he wasn’t a co-conspirator in the Show Trial of Cecily McMillan: Oligarchs have Power!!!!!!
This reader can only marvel at the Chief Justice John Roberts daring to present himself as the ‘voice of reason’ in contradistinction to Trump’s Know-Nothingism. That the leader of the Neo-Confederate/Originalist coterie, that now dominates the Supreme Court, and the author of the opinion of that Court, in the matter of Shelby County v. Holder. With the aid of Judicial Troglodyte Antonin Scalia’s ‘red head’ , a dull-witted pseudo- argument, that passed for an adequate reply to Justice Ginsberg’s eviscerating dissent, demonstrates the desperation of the whole of America’s political class.
That both Scalia and Roberts were/are the front men for a Federalist Society’s blatant racism under the rubric, self-apologetic of ‘Originalism’. That Brown v. Board I and II, presented as ‘Sociology’ rather than ‘Law’ is about the recrudescence of the Dixiecrats in the garb of bourgeouise political respectability: The Federalist Society!
Such is the desperation, indeed the political malevolence of these civic actors, that they look to Learned Hand’s ‘evolution’ of the question of Brown I and II :
That practice exemplified the pursuit of justice within the bounds of the law. Hand was a lot more comfortable working within that firm constraint than in dealing with the very broad terms of the Constitution. He was intrepid about deciding what was properly before his court and scrupulous about refusing to make decisions about matters that were not—a version of judicial restraint far more realistic and less severe than what he vainly preached about restraint in applying the Constitution. It was this pragmatic, disciplined, and fair-minded approach and Hand’s trenchant, dignified, and urbane application of it that made him so admired by lawyers across the legal spectrum.
‘Judicial restraint’ is another name for rationalization of injustice, because state legislatures were never going to recognize, that the lives and the psychic and psychological health and well being of black children was a moral and civic imperative! Warren and eight other Justices made that commitment to those children, and the fate of the Nation ‘conceived in Liberty’ for some and not for others!
The Jupiterian Revolution of M. 37% seems to stumble from crisis to crisis, all of his own making! Most of these go un-reported in one of his staunchest propaganda ‘newspapers’ The Financial Times. Mr. Bremner’s enlightening essay offers something that the Financial Times cannot, in the Times of November 21, 2018 titled:
Headline: King Macron faces his own French revolution
Sub-headline: France’s reforming president has alienated many of his citizens with a series of tax rises
The cornerstones of Neo-Liberalism are Austerity, spending cuts and tax increases that has yet to realize a return to prosperity: presented as a function of the myth of The Self-Correcting Market ,as yet to manifest itself in any economy !
A month ago, hi-vis vests began appearing on the car dashboards of my neighbours in the rural outskirts of Paris. Word had gone round, in the boulangerie and on Facebook. Anger with Emmanuel Macron had crystallised into a cause. Months of rising fuel taxes had sparked a grassroots movement that took as its emblem the gilet jaune, the yellow safety vest that is compulsory in vehicles. At the weekend, they vented their wrath at everything Mr Macron stands for. Across the country, about 300,000 people blocked roads and disrupted life for fellow citizens. One protester was killed and 400 were injured in skirmishes with motorists and police.
The gilets jaunes, who still manned a few dozen barricades yesterday, are supported by more than 70 per cent of the country. They are concentrated in “la France périphérique,” the “forgotten France” of small towns and countryside where people depend on cars. They are “the yokels against the bobos”, noted Le Figaro, referring to the young urbanites who love Mr Macron. After failing to defuse the revolt with television appearances, Mr Macron has left it to Édouard Philippe, his prime minister, to deal with the latest in a long tradition of jacqueries, the rural uprisings that began in the Middle Ages. So far, his government has refused to cut diesel taxes and has instead emphasised links between the movement and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (formerly Front).
Whether or not it simmers on, the movement illustrates the failure so far of Mr Macron to carry with him the country that he pledged last year to transform. The articulate 40-year-old still cuts a dash abroad, eclipsing the old guard of Europe, but at home he is damaged goods. The former civil servant and banker stirs extraordinary antipathy among la France d’en bas, the lower classes who feel left out of the modern economy.
Mr Macron achieved remarkable reforms in his first year in the face of protests and strikes. He eased stifling labour regulations and phased out ancestral staff privileges at the state-owned SNCF railway, but unemployment is stuck at about 9 per cent, growth is sputtering, and his heavily-taxed people feel that little has changed.
The president looks arrogant. Fewer than 30 per cent hold a favourable opinion of him and nearly 80 per cent agree that he is “president of the rich”, the tag that has stuck since he cut wealth taxes while raising social levies that hit pensioners. The leader who unashamedly cast himself as a monarch because “the French miss their kings”, has hurt himself with caustic banter that looks like contempt for the people. He has been harmed by running a secretive presidency with a staff of sharp-suited young men while keeping MPs of his start-up party, La République en Marche, on a tight leash.
Mr. Bremner in the above paragraphs takes a refreshingly critical stance toward M.37%, yet he lapses into what to call it The Party Line? on this perpetually maladroit Énarque!
His ideas for jolting France out of its old ways were initially backed by only a quarter of the voters but after beating Ms Le Pen in the run-off he was greeted as a saviour.
With the spoiled,blank and otherwise un-countable ballots, cast in the final vote, at the 36.5 % the above pronouncement probably applies exclusively to the Neo-Liberal Press, and an assortment of Neo-Cons like Bret Stephens in the New York Times,to sing his praises, as the bringer of the death of ‘Socialist France‘! These two paragraphs offer an evaluation of M. 37%’s political position
In office until 2022, Mr Macron has breathing space. With a strong parliamentary majority, he faces no challenge. His election all but killed the long-ruling Socialist Party and he crippled the conservative Republicans by poaching their talent and adopting their more enlightened ideas. He is determined to see through his reforms, next by overhauling the labyrinthine pensions and benefits systems. Tax cuts and growth will eventually put money in everyone’s pocket, he insists. But he must cut state spending which, at 56 per cent of national income, remains the highest in the developed world. That means a further squeeze on public services to which France is deeply attached.
The shrinking of such services is one of the main grievances of forgotten France and its gilets jaunes, who want “the rich” to pay more for schools and hospitals. That means mainly the business world that Mr Macron is attempting to help.
The temptation of schadenfreude is too easy, as the very fact of continuing unrest over M. 37 %’s ‘Reforms’ seems to metastasize. Will the dubious notion of a newly manufactured ‘humility’ , in sum political in-authenticity, in the face of his large electoral deficit, and his political practice of habitual maladroitness: not even considering, that from 2018 to 2020, gives ample time for the rise of many opponents, from across the political spectrum, rests on the untenable notion of a political stasis.
Ms. Slaughter has proven herself to be not just an apologist for corporate power but its henchman! From the New York Times of September 1, 2017:
Headline: New America, a Google-Funded Think Tank, Faces Backlash for Firing a Google Critic
WASHINGTON — The head of an influential think tank funded by Google is grappling with a mounting backlash — including from her own scholars and donors — over the firing of a leading critic of the tech giant.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president of the New America Foundation, pledged to re-examine her group’s policies for dealing with donors while defending the organization’s intellectual integrity. She also told the think tank’s employees that New America was “under attack from many quarters,” and warned that they should expect heightened scrutiny.
But a group of the left-leaning think tank’s current and former fellows was collecting signatures on a letter to be delivered next week to Ms. Slaughter and New America’s directors, asserting that Ms. Slaughter’s handling of the situation has jeopardized the think tank’s reputation. Other scholars affiliated with the think tank were quietly comparing notes on past instances in which they contend she placed donors’ interests over ideology.
Ms Slaughter has now become a Financial Times contributing editor, which firmly establishes her, as part of a not very exclusive club, of well compensated political scribblers, whose loyalty is to a comfortable careerism. That translates into well paid position as propagandist, for the tattered remains of the Neo-Liberal Swindle and its catastrophic, not to speak of its murderous, political adventurism. This demonstrates that the American ‘Political Center’ is now defined by the alliance between the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservatives.
The ‘way back’, of her self-rehabilitation, is for Ms. Slaughter is to establish herself as first an inoffensive ‘Feminist’: not Betty Friedan , Eva Figes nor Kate Millett but the utter fraudulence of Sheryl Sandburg’s ‘Lean In’ Corporatism. Ms. Slaughter celebrates in her latest essay the ‘hopeful sign’ of ‘positive populism’ and the concomitant ‘ the changing nature of local power’ that has been dominated by women.
In the last two paragraphs of her political intervention she establishes with the reader her commitment to this ‘new’ ‘positive populism’ as the solution to what she and her Neo-Liberal allies hope for:
These successes could just be a reflection of widespread public disgust with the many different ways that the American political system is broken: the two-party lock on politics, the entrenched advantages of incumbents, the systematic super-enfranchisement of the wealthy and disenfranchisement of the poor. But they also manifest increased trust in non-partisan alternatives and a willingness to try different solutions.
Watch this space. With xenophobia and fear spreading across the political landscape in Europe and the US, it is heartening to see a positive, pragmatic form of populism that can be turned to good.
The Midwives of Trump will never confront their political/civic culpability. Mrs. Clinton is the political leader of this coterie, who plans another run for President in 2020: such is the myopia of the New Democrats. Failing to confront the growing reality ,that the changes that are reflected in the 2018 Mid-Terms, are the clearest indicators , that old order, Clinton, Pelosi and Slaughter – their protracted long fade from power has begun- that Ms. Slaughter names ‘positive populism’ and ‘the changing nature of local power’.
Sub-headline: In splitting with Europe, Henry VIII played the long game. So must the UK
Is it a surprise that Mr. Ferguson has chosen Henry VIII, and his schism with the Catholic Church, over his rapacious sexual appetite and lust for power, as his master narrative, to describe, what should have been in the thought of other less historically sophisticated political scribblers, regarding Mrs. May’s Brexit Deal?
Neo-Cons are by definition, not just apologists for the ‘Strong Man‘ but swoon over the prospect of such a Pseudo-Hero! Munich has been shanghaied far too many times, to even approach a credible argument, but the Suez Crisis might just offer some kind of argumentative cogency? Neither will do for Ferguson, whose intellectual/political/historical sophistication renders anything besides Henry’s Reformation untenable!
The good grey Mr. Wolf , at The Financial Times, is always about staying within the parameters of bourgeois political respectability. Although he is one of its architects, he sometimes forgets his role, as titular leaders of this very important coterie. Mr. Ferguson doesn’t operate under such a stricture of historically informed thought, steeped ,of course, in an ideological commitment to the cult of power as exercised by a Pseudo-Hero, as constructed in the advantageous political moment.
In chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind, Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections, but in chapter 12 of The Righteous Mind argues that each of the major political groups—conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist.[31] Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge the political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility. He serves on the advisory boards of Represent.Us., a non-partisan anticorruption organization, the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and Better-Angels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization. Three of his four TED talks are on the topic of understanding and reducing political divisions.
Greg Lukianoff the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):
FIRE’s latest report of University Ratings is Spotlight on Speech Codes 2016: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses.[23] The foundation gathers together each university’s various harassment and hate speech policies, as well as any “Advertised Commitments to Freedom of Speech”. On the basis of these and media reports, FIRE then assigns each institution a color code: green (“no serious threats to free speech”), yellow (“some policies that could ban or excessively regulate protected speech”) or red (“at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech”).
As of 2016 the percentage of universities that FIRE deemed to “seriously infringe upon students’ rights to free speech” dipped to just below 50 percent.[23] That makes 2016 the fourth consecutive year that the percentage has dropped, according to FIRE.
In April 2007, Jon B. Gould, an author and George Mason University faculty member, criticized FIRE’s rating methods, claiming that FIRE had grossly exaggerated the prevalence of unconstitutional speech codes.[24]
We’ve seen this duo, before, but not in such a sophisticated iteration of Anti-Student Hysterics. Recall Alan Bloom and ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ that Haight and Lukianoff borrow from, to frame their iteration. ‘Tenured Radicals’ and ‘Illiberal Education’ rounded the last of this trio of reactionary political polemics ,aimed at Students and Teachers!
Its a notorious ‘Conservative ‘ ploy to cast Students as ‘radicals’ of whatever variety ,from Berkeley and its Free Speech movement in 1964/65 and charismatic leader Mario Savio, yet for all of Haight & Lukianoff rhetoric where are the charismatic leaders of this New Student Radicalism? The debates over Codes of Conduct don’t quite meet the propaganda needs of the self-declared Centrists for identifying Student Radicals . Isn’t debate about those ‘Codes’ the very center of a Democratic process?
The reliably incurious Mr. Divine uses the descriptor ‘cold civil war’ as if it hasn’t been used in ‘quite a while‘ , here is a link to the Claremont Review of Books from April 25,2017 by Angelo M. Codevilla titled ‘The Cold Civil War’:
Or a link to this portion of an address by Carl Bernstein titled ‘We are in a Cold Civil War’ published on YouTube on October 26, 2017 :
As usual Mr. Divine is intellectually lazy, or just unable to pay due credit, to those political contemporaries, that has provided him with an opening rhetorical frame for his latest polemic.
It’s been quite a while now that the phrase “cold civil war” has been bandied about. And it’s useful, so far as it goes. Polarization has now become tribalism, and tribe is now so powerful a force it is beginning to eclipse national loyalty. The two nations, to borrow Benjamin Disraeli’s description of 19th-century Britain, stand facing each other, without blinking, faces flush, equally matched, on trigger alert for offense or another set battle. What we don’t quite know is if this tenuous, balanced equilibrium is sustainable indefinitely, the system careening from one party’s bitterly contested rule to gridlock and back again, until our tribal tensions are somehow exhausted. Or whether the cold civil war could at some point get a little warmer, or even, shall we say, hot.
What we don’t know, in other words, is when the legitimacy of the entire political system could come into doubt, across the ideological spectrum, in a way that might sanction undemocratic responses. By legitimacy, I don’t mean having deep differences in policy with a president or his party; I don’t mean contempt for, or even mere opposition, to the powers that be; I mean denial of the core validity of the key institutions and players in our system. It’s one thing, after all, to disagree profoundly with an administration’s policies; and another thing entirely to believe an administration, or a congressional majority, or a Supreme Court majority, is fundamentally unjust, and its decisions therefore nonbinding.
Never fear with the bit between his teeth, Mr. Divine is at full gallop, or should I say rather at full hysterical screech. My patience with Divine’s self-serving political free associations, is, to say the least, minimal. He does not know the meaning,nor the practice of brevity. Its a cast of political characters worthy of Spelling’s television merde of the Reagan Years. Following in that perennial staple of television melodrama, political doom waits just off camera.
I usually confine myself to the first of his tripartite entries but his comment on the utterly incompetent, not to say the teetering, Mrs. May, demand even jut a sample of what this once Tory Hack can muster:
Who’s Rooting for Theresa May?
Nevertheless, she persisted.
I don’t know how else to describe Theresa May’s grueling slog toward the least worst Brexit possible. It was yet another tenderizing day for her yesterday as the Commons beat her up again and again and again on her proposed deal with the E.U., as yet more ministers resigned (including her second Brexit secretary!) and as a handful of ferocious Europhobes — led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, a parody of an upper-class twit — launched a formal bid to oust her from the leadership of the Tory Party. Good times.
The awkward prime minister is still standing upright, though maybe not for much longer. In this respect, I’m surprised more feminists haven’t come to May’s defense. May’s bourgeois Toryism, like Margaret Thatcher’s, doubtless disqualifies her from any respect from the left. But her tenacity in the midst of male obloquy is emblematic of many themes American feminists focus on.
May, after all, is taking responsibility while her male colleagues posture and preen and complain or resign; she gets almost no credit for negotiating one of the more complex international deals in British history for two demoralizing years; she works harder than anyone else in her government; and the deal she has struck is almost certainly the only one the E.U. will ever accept. A woman, in other words, got the toughest job in government in decades, did the best that could be done, has been pilloried for it, but still plowed on, and even now, won’t surrender. Her pragmatism and resilience — along with remarkably good cheer in public — are a wonder to behold. I guess May’s feminism, like Thatcher’s, requires no labeling.
This very notion of Thatcher’s and May’s ‘Feminism’ is on its face laughable! Mr. Divine is still that Thatcherite Hack to his core, in his expression of a duel apologetic for both these frauds!
The Financial Times headline writers have done their best to imitate the pathetic, bloated yet almost resonant hot air, that David Brooks makes his specialty of the house, at his perch at the New York Times: its epic bloat!
Headline: An era of estrangement distracts America and Europe.
Sub-headline: Divergent interests and global roles rather than Trump will lead them to grow apart
Mr. Ganesh’s first paragraph compares the Know-Noting Trump to M. 37%, its almost adequate propaganda:
Conservatives know liberal panic about the 45th US president as “Trump derangement syndrome”. Less diagnosed, though presenting similar symptoms, is Macron vexation disorder. Something about the president of France — his youth, his Molière-quoting polish — makes populists around the world hope for his failure with a zeal that verges on backhanded compliment.
Its almost ‘as if’ that feuilleton writing Tory Hipster, or is it New Labour Hipster?, is back in fine form? What is the difference between Tory and New Labour? The questions ramify the further one explores this pregnant first paragraph.
As one of those suffering from ‘M. 37% Heresy’ in the reality based world of anti-apologetic propaganda: the ‘Populists’ fear Macron why? Because of the gaffs, or scandals that follow his appearances, his ‘Bodyguard‘ and ‘Pétain‘ are just two examples of his maladroit, or just the expression of a dull-witted énarque?
Or the utterly laughable authoritarianism, with the moniker of ‘Jupertarian Politics’? The sine qua non of M. 37% : ‘Molière-quoting polish’ qualifies as part of his Upper-Class education and his Social Class! M. 37% is a natural ‘Leader’ in the highly stratified world that is the ‘Conservative Universe’ !
That M. 37% has become the ‘touchstone’ of political rationalism of American ‘Liberals’ and or ‘Progressives’ , that demonstrates both their cultivated ignorance of Neo-Liberalism a la francaise’s Front Man, allied to their political desperation, in facing the fact that the New Democrats will never reform themselves. The fact that Mrs. Clinton will run again in 2020 is indicative of the Party’s sclerosis!
Quoting Neo-Conservative Robert Kagan demonstrates Mr. Ganesh’s inability to come to terms with the fact that Mr. Kagan, is a fully vested member of the bellicose Nationalism that he spends so may words inveighing against.
The attitudinal gap between Europe and the US has hardly narrowed since Robert Kagan described it in Of Paradise and Power, 15 years ago.
To shanghai Harold Bloom’s metaphor, Mr. Ganesh’s essays are always a map of self-serving political misreadings.
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