StephenKMackSD's Blog

This man is Public Enemy 1.

We don’t need a set of rules to govern speech on the internet! We already have Constitution & Bill of Rights!!! E.g.:

You may not dehumanize anyone based on membership in an identifiable group, as this speech can lead to offline harm.

Definitions:

Dehumanization: Language that treats others as less than human. Dehumanization can occur when others are denied of human qualities (animalistic dehumanization) or when others are denied of human nature (mechanistic dehumanization). Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to their genitalia (mechanistic).

Identifiable group: Any group of people that can be distinguished by their shared characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, serious disease, occupation, political beliefs, location, or social practices.

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/Creating-new-policies-together.html

The definitions offered by twitter are so capacious as to please any politician looking to quell ‘hate speech’. As a polemicist who engages in satire ,my writing will be the first to go!
Media Oligarchs do not own the internet, nor should ‘they’ define Corporate Political Welfare, in deference to the National Security State, as  in our interest, and somehow our responsibility as users of their media platforms. The search for bourgeois political respectability, and allegiance to the ‘values’ of  that National Security State, are the imperatives that explain the reasons for this set of usable political definitions.  We did not surrender our right to free speech because we use their platforms. Like radio and television, the FCC should have long ago made it clear that Free Speech is the sine qua non of this newest electronic media platform. But of course this Commission has been politicized and therefore utterly toothless!

StephenKMackSD

https://reason.com/blog/2018/09/25/twitter-implementing-broader-european-st?utm_medium=email

Don’t look for the usual performances from the sclerotic male Republicans on the Committee on the Judiciary? They will either be very careful with Prof. Ford, or let their obvious misogyny rule their questioning. Are these men so without perceptual abilities to know that women will be paying careful attention to the  ‘how’ and the ‘style’ of  their  method of their  inquiry. And that the Mid-term elections are just weeks away?  Is this the time for caution and political pragmatism?

Also follow Feinstein’s performance,who refused to let other New Democrats on the committee view the Ford letter. Will she act the part of inquisitor? probably not, but it is not beyond possibility, she is a member in good standing of the Senate Boys Club! Feinstein’s candidacy  faces insurgents in the coming November election: Alison Hartson, Kevin de León, Pat Harris from within the California Democratic Party.

Headline: In California senate race, a political neophyte topping Feinstein and de León in small-dollar donations

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/20/alison-hartson-kevin-de-leon-dianne-feinstein-california-senate/

Feinstein failed to get the endorsement of the California Party, she must not create the impression that she is hostile to another woman!

A look at the gender imbalance on the committee is predictably dominated by the ubiquitous sclerotic white male, of both Parties !

Political Observer

P.S. What of the roles that Senators Hirono and Harris can play in this unfolding political melodrama? Set this against the background of Trump’s penchant for tweeting his  nihilism/opportunism, as some kind of legitimate political practice of a game show host.

Posted September 24, 2018 9:23 AM PDT

Headline: Second woman accuses Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct

Sub-headline: Trump’s Supreme Court plans hit by new obstacle ahead of critical showdown this week

Brett Kavanaugh, US president Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has again been accused of sexual misconduct, in a dramatic development only four days before the Senate holds a high-stakes hearing into an earlier allegation of attempted sexual assault.

The New Yorker magazine on Sunday reported that Deborah Ramirez, a woman who attended Yale University at the same time as Mr Kavanaugh, had accused the appeals court judge of inappropriate behaviour in their first year at college. The new allegation puts a fresh obstacle in the way of the attempt by Mr Trump and the Republicans to shift the court to the right.

Ms Ramirez’s decision to go public with the allegations came after the Senate Judiciary Committee had reached a deal with Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who has accused Mr Kavanaugh of an attempted sexual assault, to appear before the committee on the same day that he will testify before the panel about the allegations. Mr Kavanaugh has denied the accusations.

https://www.ft.com/content/ae2027f4-bf48-11e8-95b1-d36dfef1b89a

Andy Divine doesn’t begin his latest essay here, but it is framed by the authorial duo of Haidt and Lukianoff and the title of their book uses an expression, that anyone who lived through the American ’60’s will recognise, as the purest kind of shaming Conservative agitprop: ‘coddling’. It also pays homage to that self-appointed Platonic Guardian Allen Bloom, whose book The Closing of the American Mind was once the urtext of another generation of Conservatives and Liberals, whose reason d’etre was to attack ‘Students’ as a cover for their failed policies and politics.

Haidt and Lukianoff note how humans are constructed genetically for this kind of tribal warfare, to divide the world instinctively into in-groups and out-groups almost from infancy. For homo sapiens, it is natural to see the world, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, as radically “divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad.” It is much harder to see, as Solzhenitsyn did, even after he had been sent to the gulag by his ideological enemies, that good and evil run through every human heart.

And it’s this reflexive, reptilian sorting of in-group and out-group that has now been supercharged by social media, by Trump’s hideous identity politics, and by campus and corporate culture. There seem to be just two inalterable categories: the oppressors or the oppressed; elite globalists or decent “normal” people. You are in one camp or the other, and, as time passes, those of us who don’t fit into this rubric will become irrelevant to the discourse, if we haven’t already got there.

After a while, the crudest trigger points of tribalism — your race, your religion (or lack of it), your gender, your sexual orientation — dominate the public space. As Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of the refreshingly heterodox new website Quillette has put it, “the Woke Left has a moral hierarchy with white men at the bottom. The Alt-Right has a moral hierarchy that puts white men at the top.” The looming midterms will not be about health care or executive power or constitutional norms (although all these things will be at stake). They will primarily be about which tribe you are in, and these tribes are increasingly sorted racially and by gender. The parties are currently doing all they can to maximize these tribal conflicts as a way to seek power. This isn’t liberal democracy.

That the political center in America is defined by the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives, exemplified by Hillary Clinton and Wm. Kristol. Mr. Divine is the perfect citizen of that political center.

Greg Lukianoff is president of  Foundation for Individual Rights in Education which is funded by :

Adolph Coors Foundation: $45,000 (2012, 2015)

Bradley Foundation: $1,490,000^[2]

Charles G. Koch Foundation:$955,561 (2008-2014)

Claude R. Lambe Foundation: $740,000 (2005-2007)

DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund: $1,372,500 (2012-2015)

Jaquelin Hume Foundation: $235,000 (2001-2011)

Randolph Foundation: $62,000 (2009-2011)

Sarah Scaife Foundation: $355,000 (2012-2014)

Searle Freedom Trust: $300,000 (2008-2013)

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education

The evidence is clear what Mr.Lukianoff’s politics are, but what does Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt offer?  He provides a new expression of Determinism based on a pastiche of  Neuroscience, that appeals to those in search of an unquestionable, ineluctable explanatory frame for human behavior. Yet each ‘new’ instantiation of Determinism is eventually put to question.

Mr. Divine is simply looking for another rationalization for one of his many obsessions, the prima facae apostasy of Students. That devolves, in the last quoted paragraph,into the speculation that the American political parties will exploit ‘tribalist conflicts’ to win the coming election. Nixon once opined about ‘The Silent Majority’.  Mr. Divine’s political memory does not reach back that far into American history.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/americans-arent-equipped-for-the-hard-questions-of-metoo.html

Mr. Ganesh has finally caught up on his reading of the old newspaper columns of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., George F. Will and Tony  Tony Blankley. Buckley the Burkian poser, the  cosseted child of a Texas Oil Millionaire , Will the Political Calvinist, and Blankley whose contempt for the Lower Orders matched that of his ally Newt Gingrich.

Headline: America can no longer carry the world on its shoulders

Sub-headline: Relative decline and domestic exhaustion create an opening for realpolitik

The headline leaves the reader wondering at the fact that America is pursuing its ‘War on Terror’ on an ever expanding  number of fronts: eight that we know about.

The sub-headline speaks of ‘relative decline’ and ‘domestic exhaustion‘. The collapse of  institutionalized Neo-Liberalism can account for both these two ‘conditions’ afflicting America, except to a partisan of this collapsed system.

Also, absent from his essay is the rise of Russia, Iran, India and China as powerful political actors. The question arises has the global hegemon closed any of its military bases? has its network of NGO’s and its Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and their domestic allies in the myriad countries where they operate been cut or curtailed? Its CIA, NSA etc. ,that escape budgetary scrutiny, are some of the unknowns Mr. Ganesh fails to address.  The passage by the Senate of a 674 billion dollar Military Budget expresses both ‘relative decline’  and ‘domestic exhaustion‘?

But Mr. Ganesh narrative is alive with his acerbic rhetoric, that seemed to be absent, that marked his arrival in America, and his reading of his trio of aforementioned tutors. Mr. Ganesh offers his own etiolated journalistic version of  ‘teleological gibberish‘.

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/6d9243e4-bb64-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5

Headline: Brett Kavanaugh and the Republicans’ patriarchal bubble

Sub-headline: Party’s fight to approve Supreme Court nominee risks further alienation of female voters

Quite surprised that Mr. Luce has read the 1970 Feminist classic ‘Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society’ by Eva Figes.  I still have my paperback copy that I bought at the Compton College bookstore in the early years  of that decade.

As with his earlier essay Mr. Luce continues to frame his comments on Kavanaugh and the Republicans in an eternal political present, with the briefest nod to Kavanaugh’s reactionary political history. Anti-Patriarchy is the rhetorical  ‘actor’ that is at the root of the Kavanaugh opposition, as argued by Luce.  Trump’s growing unpopularity with women voters is another convenient framing employed by Mr. Luce.  Yet the record of the almost wholesale Dixiecrat Migration, from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act provides part of the answer to the ‘why’ of that racism, misogyny, homophobia and a generalized xenophobia that now dominate the Republican Party. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and Reagan’s notorious Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 run for the presidency are just two examples of this. The Party of Lincoln has been supplanted, by a Republican Party, that willfully cast aside Lincoln, in favor of its newest member’s racism and misogyny, that defined the Dixiecrat’s identity politics, and in due course the seductive mirage of Free Market Economics.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/17c43268-bcab-11e8-8274-55b72926558f

The second paragraph of Mr. Luce’s melodramatic  comment on the Kavanaugh nomination and its twists and turns leaves me a bit nonplussed.

But justice is the last thing on Washington’s mind. Regardless of what happened, Mr Kavanaugh and Ms Ford now personify opposite sides of a #MeToo fight that is likely to poison Washington. Mr Trump has made it clear that Ms Ford’s allegations redouble the need to confirm Mr Kavanaugh. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man, should be worried,” a Trump lawyer told Politico. All men, by implication, should back Mr Kavanaugh’s swift confirmation. With just 50 days before US midterm elections, both parties have every incentive to escalate.

Every American Political Melodrama needs a villain. All Mr. Luce produces is the notion that this will produce ‘…Ms Ford now personify opposite sides of a #MeToo fight that is likely to poison Washington.’ That  supplants or just reinforces his earlier ‘America’s culture wars have just taken a nosedive. ‘ 

What Mr. Luce leaves out of the story is here explicated in two essays bt Ryan Grim:

Headline: Attorney Sent Letter to Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein Claiming Federal Court Employees Willing to Speak About Brett Kavanaugh

The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee were both approached in July by an attorney claiming to have information relevant to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The attorney claimed in his letter that multiple employees of the federal judiciary would be willing to speak to investigators, but received no reply to multiple attempts to make contact, he told The Intercept.

Cyrus Sanai made his first attempt to reach out to Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a letter dated July 24.

Sanai told the committee leadership that “there are persons who work for, or who have worked for, the federal judiciary who have important stories to tell about disgraced former Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, and his mentee, current United States Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. I know that there are people who wish to speak out but fear retaliation because I have been contacted by more than a half-dozen such persons since Judge Kozinski resigned in disgrace.”

Sanai is the California attorney who blew the whistle on Kozinski years before a series of articles in the Washington Post in December finally brought about the resignation of the former chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court over sexual harassment revelations. Sanai has long challenged the judiciary and was deemed a “vexatious litigant” by one trial court, an attempted designation that was overturned on appeal.

Attorney Sent Letter to Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein Claiming Federal Court Employees Willing to Speak About Brett Kavanaugh

************************************************************

Headline: Dianne Feinstein Withholding Brett Kavanaugh Document From Fellow Judiciary Committee Democrats

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have privately requested to view a Brett Kavanaugh-related document in possession of the panel’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, but the senior California senator has so far refused, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

The specific content of the document, which is a letter from a California constituent, is unclear, but Feinstein’s refusal to share the letter has created tension on the committee, particularly after Feinstein largely took a back seat to her more junior colleagues last week, as they took over Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings with protests around access to documents.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/12/brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-dianne-feinstein/

The reader can see that Mr. Luce is concerned with a problem, America’s Culture War. Yet as the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings continue to unfold he fails to consider the very real political question:  that Feinstein and Grassley were/are eager to push through the conformation of Kavanaugh. She failed to share the letter with her Democratic colleges! Why?  Its not the first time Feinstein has demonstrated her political opportunism:

Feinstein supported the Iraq war resolution in the vote of October 11, 2002; she has since claimed that she was misled by President Bush on the reasons for going to war. However, former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter has stated that Feinstein in summer 2002 acknowledged to him that she knew the Bush administration had not provided any convincing intelligence to back up its claims about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.^[9]

In February 2007, Feinstein warned Republicans not to block consideration of a measure opposing President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq, saying it would be a “terrible mistake” to prevent debate on the top issue in America.^[10]

In May 2007, Feinstein voted for an Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill, which continued to fund the Iraq occupation without a firm timetable for withdrawal. The Senator said, “I am deeply disappointed that this bill fails to hold the President accountable for his Administration’s flawed Iraq War policy. The American people have made their voices clear that there must be an exit strategy for Iraq. Yet this President continues to stubbornly adhere to more of the same.”^[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution#United_States_Senate

This Political Melodrama is in the process of finding its  villains.  Mr. Luce ‘s historical ignorance gets in the way of his pronouncements. Some of his readership were  alive to witness Abe Fortas, an associate Justice of the Supreme Court, nominated to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice, who eventually resigned tainted with scandal , The Neo-Confederate/Originalist Robert Bork and his ‘victimization’ by the ‘Liberals’ according to Right -Wing Myth. The  nomination of Clarence Thomas, not to speak of Bush The Younger’s nomination of Harriet Miers. This history of corruption, failed nominations, and just political/legal incompetence frames Mr. Luce’s commentary by its absence. Add Kavanaugh, Feinstein, Grassley and Ford to the expanding list of the villains for this melodrama that has devolved into a Telenovela.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/acb7479a-ba65-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5

In celebration of its 175th anniversary The Economist, its Oxbridger editors, write about a  defense of the Liberal tradition that no longer exists, but remains the touchstone of Free Marketeers, who supplanted that tradition with the nihilism of the Neo-Liberal Swindle. The  headline and sub-headline offers what?

Headline:A manifesto for renewing liberalism

Sub-headline: Success turned liberals into a complacent elite. They need to rekindle their desire for radicalism

In the dismal tenth year marking the of Depression of 2008, and the failure  to appear of one of the central myths of the Neo-Liberal Theology of ‘The Self-Correcting Market’ this unconvincing propaganda intervention is aimed at a readership of plutocrats, oligarchs and their hangers on. When have ‘Liberals’ ever had a ‘desire for radicalism‘? Preposterous if not simply delusional! When all else fails appeal to the delusions of your readers!

The first two paragraphs open with a frontal attack on The Left, that perpetual threat to the 1%!

LIBERALISM made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it. Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal elites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people. Elsewhere a 25-year shift towards freedom and open markets has gone into reverse, even as China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, shows that dictatorships can thrive.

For The Economist this is profoundly worrying. We were created 175 years ago to campaign for liberalism—not the leftish “progressivism” of American university campuses or the rightish “ultraliberalism” conjured up by the French commentariat, but a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform.

How does this argued commitment to this ‘universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform.’ manifest itself in Britain of the present day ?

Headline:Number of children in poverty surges by 100,000 in a year, figures show

Sub-headline: Government statistics show 4.1 million children now living in relative poverty compared with four million the previous year, accounting for more than 30 per cent of children

The number of children in poverty across the UK has surged by 100,000 in a year, new figures show, prompting calls for ministers to urgently review cuts to child welfare.

Government statistics published on Thursday show 4.1 million children are now living in relative poverty after household costs, compared with four million the previous year, accounting for more than 30 per cent of children in the country.

Compared to the overall population, children remained the most likely to be in relative poverty, at almost one in three compared with 21 per cent of working age adults and 16 per cent of pensioners.

The figures will fuel concerns that benefit cuts and tax credits under the Tory Government are seeing children hardest hit, with around one and a half million more under-18s forecasted to live in households below the relative poverty line by 2022.

Relative child poverty is measured as children living in homes where the income is 60 per cent of the median household income in the UK, adjusted for family size and after housing costs.

Separate government statistics published on Thursday show the number of households in temporary accommodation has surged 64 per cent since the Tories came to power in 2010, of which more than 2,000 had children.

…

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/child-poverty-increase-children-family-benefit-households-a8268191.html

Given the above, where might the reader place this claim of the Economist’s editors?

The share of people living below the threshold of extreme poverty has fallen from about 80% to 8% and the absolute number has halved, even as the total living above it has increased from about 100m to over 6.5bn.

The World perspective, as compared to the statistics of the country they live in, escapes the attention of the apologists, not for ‘Liberalism’, but for their championed Neo-Liberalism!

True liberals contend that societies can change gradually for the better and from the bottom up. They differ from revolutionaries because they reject the idea that individuals should be coerced into accepting someone else’s beliefs. They differ from conservatives because they assert that aristocracy and hierarchy, indeed all concentrations of power, tend to become sources of oppression.

Liberalism thus began as a restless, agitating world view. Yet over the past few decades liberals have become too comfortable with power. As a result, they have lost their hunger for reform. The ruling liberal elite tell themselves that they preside over a healthy meritocracy and that they have earned their privileges. The reality is not so clear-cut.

The Age of Democratic Revolution chronicled by R.R. Palmer was long neglected and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, along with the complete surrender of New Labour in Britain led by Tony Blair,  and the New Democrats in America by headed by Bill Clinton was the ignominious end of ‘Liberalism’. This truth is avoided at all costs, by the Oxbridger editors of The Economist.

Quoting from both Freedom House, an American Government funded NGO, and the  notorious war mongering Neo-Conservative Robert Kagan, and its dull-witted swipe at Jeremy Corbyn, can’t emancipate this political genre from its obsolescence.  Who, in this day and age, thinks that a Manifesto has anything resembling cogency, its an antique idea if not practice . The perfect form for 1843! And the Oxbridger editors of this newspaper pay a maladroit homage to this anachronism.

The last three paragraphs of this essay amounts to more self-congratulation about the hoped for re-invigoration of ‘Liberalism’.

The best liberals have always been pragmatic and adaptable. Before the first world war Theodore Roosevelt took on the robber barons who ran America’s great monopolies. Although many early liberals feared mob rule, they embraced democracy. After the Depression in the 1930s they acknowledged that government has a limited role in managing the economy. Partly in order to see off fascism and communism after the second world war, liberals designed the welfare state.

Liberals should approach today’s challenges with equal vigour. If they prevail, it will be because their ideas are unmatched for their ability to spread freedom and prosperity. Liberals should embrace criticism and welcome debate as a source of the new thinking that will rekindle their movement. They should be bold and impatient for reform. Young people, especially, have a world to claim.

When The Economist was founded 175 years ago our first editor, James Wilson, promised “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” We renew our pledge to that contest. And we ask liberals everywhere to join us.

An ersatz history made to measure is parsimoniously applied to the whole of this propaganda intervention.

Almost Marx

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/09/13/a-manifesto-for-renewing-liberalism

A. Androsin, thank you for your comment. I have not posted a comment here in quite a while, so I was reluctant to post a link to my entire comment, as it was quite long. My full comment is here:

At The Economist : a comment on ‘A manifesto for renewing liberalism’ by Almost Marx

On question one)
China is an example that renders null the idea that Capitalism must have a democratic base in order to succeed?

Question two)
‘Creation of wealth’ is and of itself a value? Or is the flourishing of all the citizens of the polity a more egalitarian notion?

Question three)
The premise of your question is that ‘Identity Politics’ the spectre that haunts respectable bourgeois pundits is first about a ‘politics’ that these authors don’t like . And that history tells us can unite i.e. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition!
It’s Timothy McVeigh. Not to worry the Republicans and the New Democrats were/are the midwives of Trump an absolute egoist and nihilist!

Question four)

Maxine Waters is as utterly corrupt as Speaker Pelosi, who is worth, as of 2014, 24 million!  Waters will not get her hands on nuclear weapons, the political nihilist/opportunist Trump is the one to worry about!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.economist.com/comment/3587034#comment-3587034

Andy wastes no time presenting himself as the voice of reason and political rationalism in the first paragraph of his essay of dated September 14,2018. This essay is awash in  self-congratulation , not to speak of outbreaks of rhetorical purple. The first paragraph is revelatory of Mr. Divine’s amour propre.

Headline: America Desperately Needs a Healthy Conservatism

‘In these fetid times, it’s easy to know what you’re against. And I’ve spent many diaries assailing the dueling Trump and “social justice” cults on the illiberal right and left these past several months. But what am I for?’

That’s a harder question but a useful one to ask yourself from time to time. You don’t defeat something with nothing. So I thought I’d take a brief detour from the tribal abyss, and go back to some first principles. I remain a conservative, pretty much where I’ve always been, with the exception of foreign policy where I’ve seen the folly of interventionism in the wake of Iraq. By conservative, I do not mean Republican. To my mind, the Republican Party has become — and not just recently — a cancer on this particular strain of Western thought. To those who believe that this is a cop-out, or a version of the “all true conservatives” gambit, I offer a new book, which sure buoyed my spirits, and helped me regain my bearings. Reading it, for me, was like feeling an unexpectedly cool, dry breeze on a stiflingly humid day.
…

Andy is not an original thinker , these thinkers/writers are the rarest of creatures,  but Andy has found his touchstone in Roger Scruton’s new book ‘Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition’. But first read Scruton’s explanation of the why of his Conservatism from his Wikipedia Page :

In 1967 he began studying for his PhD at Jesus, then became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1969–1971), where he lived with Laffitte when she was not in France.^[22] It was while visiting her during the May 1968 student protests in France that Scruton first embraced conservatism. He was in the Latin Quarter in Paris, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life “felt a surge of political anger”:^[23]

‘I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.^{[9]’ ‘}

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

Scruton and Andy Divine share a contempt for the hooligans of the Left. Of the ‘Right‘, Scruton experience and its subsequent contempt for the Marxist of Paris 1968, does not address the ‘Right’ as representative of nihilism, it plays no part at all! Except that some of those ’68’s became a part of the Nouvelle Droite:

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

And The New Philosophers:

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

An historical inconvenience for Scruton. So is this part of his Wikipedia page that puts his status of Conservative paragon into the realm of political wishful thinking!:

Tobacco company funding

Scruton was criticized in 2002 for having written articles about smoking without disclosing that he was receiving a regular fee from Japan Tobacco International (JTI) (formerly R. J. Reynolds).^[66] In 1999 he and his wife—as part of their consultancy work for Horshells Farm Enterprises^[59][67]—began producing a quarterly briefing paper, The Risk of Freedom Briefing (1999–2007), about the state’s control of risk.^[68] Distributed to journalists, the paper included discussions about drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and was sponsored by JTI.^[67][69][70] Scruton wrote several articles in defence of smoking around this time, including one for The Times,^[71] three for The Wall Street Journal,^[72] one for City Journal,^[73] and a 65-page pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs, WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation (2000). The latter criticized the World Health Organization‘s campaign against smoking, arguing that transnational bodies should not seek to influence domestic legislation because they are not answerable to the electorate.^[74]

The Guardian reported in 2002 that Scruton had been writing about these issues while failing to disclose that he was receiving £54,000 a year from JTI.^[66] The payments came to light when a September 2001 email from the Scrutons to JTI was leaked to The Guardian. Signed by Scruton’s wife, it asked the company to increase their £4,500 monthly fee to £5,500, in exchange for which Scruton would “aim to place an article every two months” in The Wall Street Journal, Times, Telegraph, Spectator, Financial Times, Economist, Independent or New Statesman.^[75][76][66] Scruton, who said the email had been stolen, replied that he had never concealed his connection with JTI.^[67] In response to The Guardian article, The Financial Times ended his contract as a columnist,^[77] The Wall Street Journal suspended his contributions,^[78] and the Institute for Economic Affairs said it would introduce an author-declaration policy.^[79] Chatto & Windus withdrew from negotiations for a book, and Birkbeck removed his visiting-professor privileges.^[69]

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

Mr. Divine’s view of the political extremes is attuned to the American present and the danger of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right‘ as the expression of nihilism. In sum, the reader is given a book review of Scruton’s conception of ‘Conservatism’, embellished with Mr. Divine’s interpretations. But Andy pulls out all the stops in one of his near penultimate paragraphs, of this part of his usual tripartite essays:

I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association. 

All that is missing from this list of what a re-imagined  Conservatism can accomplish is the fact that Conservatives care not one whit about the concerns of Mr. Divine’s Utopian Vision of Conservatism. Scruton does not represent that Conservatism, that Mr. Divine pines for in The Age of Trump, but a completely corrupt opportunism. That shopworn cliche ‘actions speak louder than words’ offers the reader a usable explanatory frame, by which to judge Scruton’s opportunism.

Mr. Divine practices, with abandon, his moralizing politics , to remind the reader of his status as an American Cassandra, or better yet a Tiresias! Who has placed his wager on the utterly corrupt Scruton,  as his political touchstone. Mr Divine is a superficial propagandist, fueled by his narcissism and by the absence of anything resembling judgement, in any of its iterations.

American Writer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/gop-destroying-conservatism.html

How utterly surprising that Van Jackson couches his attack on the ‘Left’ and its seeming lack of a Foreign Policy, via the route of an active, not just defense of Neo-Liberalism, but celebration of this failed and failing politic/economic/ethical ideology! Wendy Brown in her ‘Undoing the Demos’ is just one of the polemics against this failed ‘Free Market Revolution’ and its trio of false prophets Hayek,Mises and Friedman

In three turgid paragraphs, that could have been better spent, with the usual Party Line of ‘The Post-War Liberal Order’ which in the double-speak of the Foreign Policy technocrat is equal to American Hegemony.   Yet he quite cunningly uses speculation and wan questioning  as his rhetorical strategy.
The Wisdom of the Market is antithetical to an actual Left rather than a Right Wing Social Democrat posing as a Leftist. Is the ‘Left’ in America defined by the inept Neo-Liberal Barack Obama?

Here is Mr. Jackson’s brief biography supplied by The Wilson Center:

Bio