StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: The rise of a new generation of anti-Americans

Sub-headline: Condemnations of the US are becoming routine — and may not end when Trump departs

One can only imagine the Financial Times, of other eras,  and one of its hirelings opining about ‘New Generation of Anti-British’.  Except that Mr. Luce  chooses to write about Anti-Americanism, one can only ask the most obvious question, why? Spending too much time with the other reportorial movers and shakers called ‘pundits’  of Washington D.C. ?

This time feels different. Earlier bouts of anti-Americanism were typically fuelled by wars, such as in Vietnam and Iraq, or fear of war, such as the arrival of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe in Reagan’s first term.

On the ‘Wars’ question: Mr. Luce’s self-serving myopia reaches the point of absurdity.  The fact that America’s ‘War on Terror/Clash of Civilizations’ now embraces, at last count, is being waged on at least  eight fronts. There is no end in sight, the treasuries of the Hegemon are endless?  An audit of the Pentagon reveals:

Headline: Pentagon Audit Shows Logistical Arm Of Military Can’t Explain Where $800 Million Went

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly talks with Politico’s Bryan Bender about a story he broke earlier this week on troubling results from an internal audit at the Pentagon. The audit finds that the Defense Logistics Agency has no paper trail for more than $800 million in construction projects.

https://www.npr.org/2018/02/08/584335323/pentagon-audit-shows-logistical-arm-of-military-cant-explain-where-800-million-w

Trump is the expression of the utter bankruptcy of both Republicans and the New Democrats. The latest moral obscenity of Trump  is the forced separation of immigrant children from their parents. America’s contempt for the Mestizos of Mexico and points south are confirmed by the facts of history: The Bracero Program, America still  owes $500 million in back wages to these workers. From 1942 -1964. In California Prop. 187 supported by Pete Wilson, but fellow traveler Feinstein was anti-immigrant in the 1994  election. And  look to Obama’s dismal record of the number of deportations. Trump’s sadism has been well documented, but he had a long line precursors. in both political parties. No wall will be built on the border with Canada, as yet.

The why of  Anti-Americanism  is the conundrum that leads this British pundits’ apologetic for the American Empire: that faces a re-invigorated Russian power, called ‘revanchism’ by American apologists, the rise of China, and its holding of American debt, and the rise of regional powers like Iran and its close ally Iraq.(How wrong could the Neo-Cons and their front group PNAC have been?)

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/ae6d2aca-7530-11e8-b6ad-3823e4384287

@GNR @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment. Mr. Luce set the rhetorical parameters for his essay, such is the Luce argumentative meander! Or should I call it by its actual name, history, of a sort, made to measure? I tried to follow his free imaginative historical variations as best I could, but polemic demands a bit of burlesque.  On the themes that Mr. Luce wrangles into an essay worthy of the Financial Times.

This Perry Anderson quote is instructive of my deranged, schizophrenic, demented approach:

Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

What I wrote was longer than 3 paragraphs. Perhaps you failed to follow the link to the remainder of my comment? Yet you also mention  five paragraphs…
Your characterization of my comment as having 15 theses, and my writing expressed as deranged, schizophrenic, demented, as states of my being and intellect seems to present a very decided contradiction. How can a person afflicted by: derangement,  schizophrenia, dementia present theses? My writing can only reflect that being and intellect. Your argument undercuts itself. But those descriptors were meant as mere personal abuse, not representative of argument, but masquerading as such.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://on.ft.com/2yG6i2s

Your series of tweets was informative as to your ‘Liberalism’. Damir Marusic & Rich Lowry set the argumentative parameters of the moral/political shame of the Trump separation of children from their parents? Call this the sadism of the Neo-Confederate/Originalist coterie, and its Dixiecrat Sessions! Out of the pages of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ strides Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III! Yet your gutless caviling proves the ‘why’ of your status as a ‘Liberal’  @Brookings hireling.

Read ‘The Machiavellian Moment’ by J.G. A Pocock, the integuments between the republican tradition and its roots in a moral/ethical philosophy, the awareness necessary to support that tradition. This is not the ‘Age of Fracture’ as Daniel T. Rogers titled his informative and challenging book. He squandered an opportunity in his Epilogue: he could have used this opportunity to speculate on how a civic actor might conduct herself, in this Age, but he lost his nerve , if he had any!

Carl Schmitt was correct about one thing, except his timing was wrong, the political present in the Age of the Friend/Enemy distinction, that makes  historical/political sense in Trump World. The ‘Liberals’ were/are actually Neo-Liberals who are the Midwives of Trump. Take a bow Mr. Hamid!

Political Observer

Read Ms. Dempsey’s impressive credentials here at the Carnegie Europe web site:

http://carnegieeurope.eu/experts/693

That she is part of the Atlanticist coterie is easily obtained, even for the mildly curious. A link to the Atlantic Council’s web site:

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist

Who else would the Financial Times assign to write about the political melodrama of the  Merkel/Macron ‘Summit’  but a NATO, EU loyalist , if not an  employee of a sort, than Ms. Dempsey? Or does plain speaking demand the name of propagandist ?

Headline: Macron and Merkel will struggle to show Europe a united front

Sub-headline: The leaders will arrive at the EU summit with opposing visions for the future

Ms. Dempsey wastes no time in coming to the point, she is nothing if not conscious of what her Atlanticist political loyalties demands:

But the meetings are not just about the EU responding to its own crises. They are also about the bloc’s two most important leaders confronting the erosion of the post-1945 transatlantic pact that has held the west together.

In the triumph of Trump and Trumpism signals that his particular ‘brand’ of American Know-Nothingism represents a threat to the Atlanticist institutional structures, and the very idea of the status of Europe as an American protectorate. Especially considering that the myth of Russian revanchism is now a central component of a ‘New Cold War’ that has become reason d’etre of the re-invigoration of  the NATO/EU alliance.  I’m a bit ahead of myself.

Ms. Dempsey warns that the ‘Summit’ between Merkel/Macron:

The summit could go terribly wrong.

The remainder of her essay is an exploration of the differing  ‘visions’ of the EU between  Merkel and Macron. Merkel the stolid conservative, not willing to give up the German dominance of the EU, and the use of the ECB as its capo: recall Greece?  And Macron, whose Jupertarian self-conception will be writ large upon Europe i.e. the realization of the EU as a Federalist State?  An actual Neo-Liberal Reformer?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/31cc9802-6e50-11e8-8863-a9bb262c5f53

Chris Hedges quotes Mr. Debs, and one is taken with Debs honesty,forthrightness even his status  as a paradigmatic Socialist politician.  Not to speak of his bravery compared to today’s political opportunists.  Yet to quote that ‘Great American Philosopher’ Reinhold Niebuhr on “sublime madness” indicates to me that Mr. Hedges has not read Mr. Fox’s insightful biography. That chronicles the life of this American Poser, or as he was called in his time,  the thinking man’s Billy Graham. Niebuhr offered in 1932 that he was a Marxient thinker and that the working class should not give up the use of violence to achieve its ends. These two statements led to word reaching  Niebuhr  that J. Edgar Hoover was about to act against him, that was the reason for his letter denouncing his earlier statements, and the Communist Menace.

Niebuhr became a prophet, whose mission was to sell his particular ‘brand’ of Christian Realism, that was a riff on ‘render unto Caesar’ expressed as an obedience to the imperatives of the American National Security State. He is the perfect ‘Philosopher’ for Obama, and others whose ignorance of his career as a political/moral conformist, offer a convenient rationalization for the conformism of the political present.

Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr and the ADA were the ‘Liberal Wing’ of  McCarthyism. Read  Schlesinger’s Diaries, as edited by his sons, the early entries are startlingly  inflected by the use of the term ‘commies’, to almost comic effect, until the the time and the political scene shifts. Sen. Sanders does not represent the Socialist politics and integrity of Debs, but does fit comfortably into the ‘political tradition’ ,that both Niebuhr and Schlesinger represent in The New Democratic Party’s political practice of today.

Political Observer

Et Tu, Bernie?

In order to apply an inadequate whitewashing of Macri’s failed bid to re-enter the Neo-Liberal World Order Mr. Dujovne offers this:

Mr Dujovne nevertheless pointed to innovative clauses in the deal proposed by Argentina that will allow the government to increase spending on social programmes and relax the deficit targets if necessary, which the fund “welcomed warmly”. “It will probably apply this in other countries,” he added.

Such socially sensitive terms contrast with past IMF programmes, not least the fund’s last standby arrangement with Argentina that ended with the 2001-02 financial crisis that had grievous social consequences and tarnished the multilateral lender’s reputation in the country and beyond.

The Financial Times hireling dutifully reports on, presents, this  as what, via Mr. Dujovne ‘s pronouncement ? An admission that the Austerity Lite has not worked, but that somehow this newest IMF sanctioned and  ‘tweak-able’ interventions will work ? Martin Guzman and Joe Stiglitz analyze the Argentine economy, and Macri’s economic interventions and finds them wanting, or worse!

A change in macroeconomic policies will not be sufficient to set Argentina on a path of inclusive and sustained economic development. But, as last month’s currency scare showed, abandoning the approach adopted by President Mauricio Macri’s administration at the end of 2015 is a necessary step.

The currency scare that Argentina suffered last month caught many by surprise. In fact, a set of risky bets that Argentina’s government undertook starting in December 2015 increased the country’s vulnerability. What was not clear was when Argentina’s economy would be put to the test. When the test came, Argentina failed.

Argentina had to address a number of macroeconomic imbalances when President Mauricio Macri took office at the end of 2015. Early measures included the removal of exchange-rate and capital controls and the reduction of taxes on commodity exports. Argentina also recovered access to international credit markets following a settlement with so-called vulture funds over a debt dispute that had lasted more than a decade.

The government undertook a new macroeconomic approach based on two pillars: gradual reduction of the primary fiscal deficit, and an ambitious inflation-targeting regime that was supposed to bring annual price growth down to a single-digit rate in just three years.

Markets cheered. The prevailing view, eagerly promoted by Argentina’s government, was that the country had done what was necessary to achieve sustainably faster economic growth. Presumably, foreign direct investment would flow in. But it did not.

The Roots of Argentina’s Surprise Crisis

 

In order to apply an inadequate whitewashing of Macri’s failed bid to re-enter the Neo-Liberal World Order Mr. Dujovne offers this:

Mr Dujovne nevertheless pointed to innovative clauses in the deal proposed by Argentina that will allow the government to increase spending on social programmes and relax the deficit targets if necessary, which the fund “welcomed warmly”. “It will probably apply this in other countries,” he added.

Such socially sensitive terms contrast with past IMF programmes, not least the fund’s last standby arrangement with Argentina that ended with the 2001-02 financial crisis that had grievous social consequences and tarnished the multilateral lender’s reputation in the country and beyond.

What would the Plutocrats/Neo-Liberals do without the Financial Times?  Mr Dujovne comments on the economic effect of the IMF agreement:

“It is very probable that in the first quarters we will make use of the option [to access the quarterly disbursements stipulated in the agreement], but then as sovereign risk falls and the market has a greater appetite to absorb Argentine debt at low rates, we can [return to the market]. But for now the fund’s rates are very favourable,” said Mr Dujovne.

Then on the political future of Mr. Macri:

“Winning the elections will not depend on whether growth is at 4 per cent rather than 2 per cent, but on whether people continue to want the change this government represents, or to go back to populism,” he said, arguing that the Peronist opposition was “very far from offering itself as an alternative” for voters.

No surprise that the failure of Macri’s interventionism is unmentioned, but that Anti- Populism is the reference point of choice. The ‘as if ‘ here is that the political/economic landscape will remain the same. Call this by its name political delusion.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/23975fd2-701d-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914

Read Mr. Divine’s sermon of June 8,2018 titled Another Glimpse of State Terror in Trump’s America here:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/traumatizing-children-is-the-new-weapon-in-trump-arsenal.html

The violence and moral obscenity of separating families, gives ample moral space for Mr. Divine to shift into high dungeon, about the evil of Trump and his Dixiecrat Attorney General  Sessions.

But here is information provided by Fact Check, that addresses the vexing question of how many people Obama actually ‘deported’ from the US :

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deported-more-people/

Perhaps the reader might consider the policies of both Obama and Trump as a matter of  the degree of sadism? But the question unaddressed by Mr. Divine’s verbose moralizing hysterics, is the very center of an American Immigration policy, that refuses to recognize the contradictory nature of a Nation of Immigrants who will not recognize itself as excising a specific kind of xenophobia! As yet there is no proposed wall at the Canadian border, but there is one being constructed at the Mexican border. The Mestizo invasion, a paranoid apparition that Samuel P. Huntington,  proposed in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity has now become a vivid reality.

The stark object lessons of America’s treatment of the Bracero program  from 1942 to 1964 :

It is estimated that, with interest accumulated, $500 million is owed to ex-braceros, who continue to fight to receive the money owed to them.^[13]

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

And Prop 187 of California of 1994:

…

Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, was a prominent supporter of Proposition 187, which ultimately became a key issue during his 1994 re-election campaign against Democratic opponent Kathleen Brown. After facing record low approval ratings during his first term, Wilson trailed Brown in opinion polls by more than 20% early during the gubernatorial campaign. Commentators considered his aggressive support of the Proposition 187 as crucial to his re-election.^[7]

…

During the United States Senate election in California, 1994 campaign, the incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein and Republican challenger Michael Huffington both adopted tough policies against illegal immigration. The candidates each revealed that they had previously hired illegal immigrants for housekeeping and childcare. Unlike Feinstein, Huffington had hired a housekeeper who was an illegal immigrant after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Feinstein was narrowly re-elected.^[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_187

These two instances, allied to a rampant xenophobia in both Parties, as the quoted parts of this Wikipedia entry demonstrate, were simply the precursors to the Trump/Sessions policy of separating children from their parents. Unaccompanied minors were also  grated the right to hearings:

Headline: Court Says Undocumented Minors Have the Right to a Bond Hearing

Sub-headline: A three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that immigrant children held in detention are entitled to present their case before an immigration judge.

Unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant children have the right to a court hearing to determine whether they can be released, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with the government’s argument that laws passed after the 1997 Flores v Reno Supreme Court case replaced the bond hearing requirement by giving a federal agency authority over unaccompanied minors. That agency is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“In the absence of such hearings, these children are held in bureaucratic limbo, left to rely upon the agency’s alleged benevolence and opaque decision making,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the court, later adding: “Not a single word in either statute indicates that Congress intended to supersede, terminate, or take away any right enjoyed by unaccompanied minors at the time of the acts’ passage. Thus, we hold that the statutes have not terminated the Flores Settlement’s bond-hearing requirement for unaccompanied minors.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/do-unaccompanied-minors-have-the-right-to-a-bond-hearing/532794/

Even as ‘unaccompanied minors’ these ‘undocumented’ children still have rights. Yet this whole mendacious history of the abuse of the Braceros, the 1994 Prop 187, and the treatment of the contemporary ‘undocumented’ is indicative of Mr Divine’s historical ignorance, it would get in the way of his self-congratulatory moralizing.

The political opportunity, that the Trump/Session sadism represents, is too ripe an opportunity for Mr. Divine to pass by. As a means to reify in the mind of the reader Divine’s moral superiority. He revels in this opportunity to display his unmatched moral uprightness. The record on Mr. Divine’s ‘political evolution’ from Thatcherite to Neo-Conservative to Neo-Liberal is the story not of an evolution, but a kind of political opportunism, linked to his inherent self-concept as a moral/political arbiter of the good.

Political Cynic

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/traumatizing-children-is-the-new-weapon-in-trump-arsenal.html

Mr. Fenby wrote an informative review of ‘A Certain Idea of France. The Life of Charles de Gaulle’, by Julian Jackson until the last three paragraphs when M. 37% and his ‘Jupertarian’, i.e. Rule by Decree politics, entered from stage Right. In FT parlance he is a ‘Reformer’ of the bankrupt Socialist State of France.

Hewing to the FT Party Line is the payment rendered for writing for this newspaper. De Gaulle and Macron have one thing in common their egotism. Yet de Gaulle was an actual leader and hero of WWII, no matter one’s politics, he was a major political actor of the 20th Century. Macron, a product of the Grandes Écoles and a banker, another name for an Oligarch.

The search for ‘grandeur’ in the case of Macron appears as a pathetic attempt to enter the World Stage as a major political actor. He has made no friends as the Germans run the EU, Merkel and her latest capo, after Schnabel, will never ‘Reform’ this Union: four time defaulter in the 20th Century won’t let go of power willingly.

A coterie of ‘Liberal Hacks’ act as if the idea of Europe were a matter of ‘faith’ rather than mendacious statecraft without an actual state, but the simulacrum of such an entity.    While his Neo-Liberalism first met with a nearly 37% of uncountable ballots, and now the Rolling Strikes from Unions. These Union members think and act, as if, they have some kind of claim to a life not subject to the immiseration visited upon the other  workers in Western Democracies. That are still sunk in the watershed of the misbegotten Free Market social/political/economic engineering!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/efb5b922-6a6b-11e8-aee1-39f3459514fd

Prof. Kramer defense of Bernard Lewis, is couched in the denial that he was the ‘last Orientalist‘, should not surprise the reader, as Bernard Lewis was Prof. Kramer’s thesis director.

Kramer began his undergraduate degree under Itamar Rabinovich in Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University and completed his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton as well, under Fouad Ajami, L. Carl Brown, the late Charles Issawi, and Bernard Lewis, who directed his thesis. He also received a History M.A. from Columbia University.[1]
…
Kramer earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, where he prepared his thesis under the supervision of Bernard Lewis. He then spent twenty-five years at Tel Aviv University, where he directed the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Kramer has taught as a visiting professor at Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Georgetown University, and The Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). He has also served as a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

…

Kramer was an early advocate of attacking Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, arguing in December 2001 that regardless of a possible involvement, he posed a threat to the entire Middle East.^[3] However, he was critical of the shifting rationale for the war in October 2002, questioning the United States’ “tools of social engineering” needed to promote an eventual democracy process in the Arab world.^[4]

He was a senior policy adviser on the Middle East to the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Campaign in 2007.[5]

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

The fact that Prof Kramer was ‘senior policy adviser‘ to Rudy Giuliani is indicative of his politics. But his visiting fellowship at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy can leave no doubt that Prof Kramer is a Neo-Conservative. And that Lewis was one of an  Orientalist Vanguard that provided the Neo-Conservatives with the rationalizations that legitimized their bellicose  imperial ambitions. The Washington Institute was the political offspring of AIPAC only confirms Prof. Kramer’s Neo-Conservatism.

Steve J. Rosen and others at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) created the Washington Institute in 1985 to draw from the experience and scholarship of academics and former high-level government officials.^[5] The Institute would “focus on cutting-edge research on regional issues that were not being addressed comprehensively by existing organizations.”^[1]

Martin Indyk, an Australian-trained academic and former deputy director of research for AIPAC, helped found WINEP in 1985. Indyk sought to produce nonpartisan scholarship and disinterested assessments on the Middle East; he saw the institute as “friendly to Israel but doing credible research on the Middle East in a realistic and balanced way.”^[6] The research was thus designed to be more independent and academic-quality.^[7] At the time it was founded, the Institute focused research on Arab–Israeli relations, political and security issues, and overall U.S. Middle East policy.^[1] In the 1990s, prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, and changes in regional strategy, the Institute expanded its research agenda to “focus on Turkey and the rise of Islamic politics.”^[1] Under Indyk’s leadership, the institute gained notability as a center for the study and discussion of Middle East policy, and attracted Arab intellectuals to its events.^[8] Indyk would go on to serve in several U.S. diplomatic posts including U.S. ambassador to Israel, special envoy for Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, special assistant to President Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council and assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Indyk is currently vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.^[9]

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

Another question that might be asked: why would Kramer frame his defense of Lewis in a rhetorical frame of ‘last Orientalist’ as Orientalism was the title of  Edward Said book? Here is a review in the May 9, 2008 Times Literary Supplement of Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism by Ibn Warraq and Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Publications on the Near East) by Daniel Martin Varisco. A screen shot of the review in question and a link, behind a pay wall:

http://find.galegroup.com/tlsh/newspaperRetrieve.do?qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28tx%2CNone%2C40%29Defending+the+West%3A+A+Critique+of+Edward%24&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&sort=DateAscend&docLevel=FASCIMILE&inPS=true&prodId=TLSH&userGroupName=tlsacc&tabID=T003&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchId=R1&docId=EX1200549731&currentPosition=1&docId=&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=&relevancePageBatch=EX1200549731&contentSet=LTO&callistoContentSet=TLS&docPage=page&fromPage=&recNum=&newOrientation=0&newScale=1.00&pageIndex=3&enlarge=enlarge

Didn’t the interventions  of Warraq, Varisco and Irwin’s equivocating about Said’s book,   check the potency of the idea of Orientalism as an invention of Said’s act of historical/literary incompetence tinctured in mendacity? Or should this duo of Said’s critics published in 2oo7 , and reviewed in the TLS  of 2008, of a book published in 1978, be judged as what? Yet even in the year  2018, Prof. Kramer’s imperative is to deny that his mentor,  and ersatz hero, Bernard Lewis in not the Last Orientalist.  Prof. Irwin, in this paragraph of his review, provides some valuable insights about Prof. Kramer’s personal loyalties and his politics:

American Writer

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2018-06-07/conflicted-legacy-bernard-lewis?cid=int-fls&pgtype=hpg

The California Primary was about the  same old New Democratic hacks, the utterly vile Feinstein, the erstaz Anti-Trump poser, return. With the addition of Newsom, who has a built-in edge in the LBGTI Community, for his performance of marriages, in the state before it was actually  legal. Some of us Queers are grateful, and some found it grandstanding! But it was the adroit exercise of the lifeblood of politics ‘Public Relations’ as the Madison Ave. and Hollywood  hacks call their propagandizing.

If you read and used the California Statewide Direct Primary, the official guide that all voters use, you’ll see that neither Newsom nor Villaraigosa bothered to place the usual candidate statement in this guide. Even Feinstein managed to post her exercise in self-congratulation, along with a carefully re-touched black and white photo.  The big question is why?  Villaraigosa is a compliant New Democrat, as is Newsom.  Villaraigosa immediately endorsed Newsom after his defeat. The ads I saw from Newsom were focused on his opposition to the NRA, featuring his status as the brave opponent of this powerful advocacy group. The usual political kitsch, communicated by video of Newsom striding through crowds of supporters, shaking hands with the lesser beings that he seeks to lead, and the obligatory shots of his encounters with the children of those lesser beings, and quick photos and videos of him performing those marriages. In sum, the Villaraigosa candidacy supplied the the fiction of contest.

See James Hohmann’s  Washington Post  essay on the California Primary, and other states, of 2018 that reads like a Press Release from the victorious Sen Feinstein’s office. Mr. Hohmann scolds ‘The Left’ for being what they are an actual opposition!  I’ll post a link and picture of part of this lengthy essay at my blog:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/06/06/daily-202-the-democratic-establishment-strikes-back-in-california-new-jersey-and-other-primaries/5b17260d30fb04092c75ae60/?utm_term=.d99133dd9328

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/2b2ea24e-695d-11e8-b6eb-4acfcfb08c11

Dyson and Goldberg do not represent ‘The Left’, they represent the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservate alliance that defines the Political Center of today. Dyson reviled Cornell West in print, at great length, for his attack on Obama’s Neo-Liberalism , as West had promised he would do. Dyson being a supporter of  Obama’s domestic Neo-Liberal Agenda, his essay is Dyson at his most verbose, allied to his appetite to dominate rhetorically , a trait he shares with Mr. Peterson, although Peterson seems more resigned in this YouTube video.

https://newrepublic.com/article/121550/cornel-wests-rise-fall-our-most-exciting-black-scholar-ghost

Goldberg is now a regular contributor to the New York Times opinion page. She shares that space with Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks and AEI’s Arthur Brooks: in sum Ms. Goldberg is a Milk-toast Liberal,  a supporter of the political status quo: the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative alliance and its Champion Hillary Clinton and her New Democratic fellow travelers.

Dyson is right about Peterson being a Mean White Man. We only need look to his precursors Eric Hoffer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of ‘benign neglect’ infamy. Or The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein or The Clash of Civilizations by Huntington, or Fukuyama’s intellectual riff on Strauss’ philosophical mendacity ‘The End of History’. The intellectual propagandist is all important in framing debate. Not to  forgot Mr. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Propaganda Chief, whose interventions in this area of propaganda included ‘Nudge’,  call it Authoritarianism With a Human Face !    

The Left isn’t the problem, its the utterly corrupt ‘Center’ that is the nihilism eating away at a Republic,  that was long since been swallowed whole by the imperatives of The American National Security State. Place this whole panel, not withstanding Dyson’s more than apt description of Peterson as a Mean White Man, in its bourgeois political context : the search for political respectability, and employment opportunities in the future!

This whole exercise, in the dull witted art of  placing blame, is the favorite game of a plethora of desperate indeed hysterical engineers of the dismal political present. ‘The Left’ is its favorite target, as retrograde defense of the failed Neo-Liberal Project, and the failure of one of its central dogmas the Self-Correcting Market, to manifest itself in the political present! Its just a question of degree that separates Goldberg, Dyson and their  antagonist Mr. Peterson. Who is not just a ‘Mean White Man’ or defender of ‘White Male Privilege’  but of a Patriarchal system, in this regard, not to forget that both Dyson and West are also ordained  Christian ministers. By any measure Christianity is part of the larger religious tradition, in which male power, over its lesser beings is a central dogma. The Abrahamic Tradition is the codification of that Patriarchy. Mr. Peterson expresses this male power as under threat, from the Left and its imperative to a Political Correctness,  that seeks to  dismantle that hierarchy.*

But the very Project of Modernity, and a Capitalism that is no longer sustainable, except to a rapacious 1%.  And the emiseration, even the destruction of a Middle Class, present a confluence of forces that neither Dyson, Goldberg nor Peterson have the political/intellectual/moral capacity to confront. This ‘debate’ is the stuff the great shit-hole of Television, as the last bastion of bourgeois political respectability, within very proscribed political parameters. But more importantly it is a form of political entertainment: the ersatz Gladiators do Battle, to a breathless audience waiting for the first blood to be spilled. Dyson’s ‘Mean White Man’ is part of this dismal battle of political antagonists as entertainment, an abundance of posturing and recitation of ideological cliches. Those aficionados waiting  for that blood letting were utterly disappointed!

Almost Marx

Added 2:35 PM PDT

* Nothing can be more evident than that Dyson, Goldberg and Peterson are incapable of  constructing  a critique of ‘The Left‘ , ‘political correctness’, without also constructing a critique of the Patriarchy, and the very language that we use to discuss these ideas. I’m referring to Derrida’s Phallogocentrism, as central  to how we think and reason, in a language determined by the patriarchal matrix of Western thought.

The phallogocentric argument is premised on the claim that modern Western culture has been, and continues to be, both culturally and intellectually subjugated by “logocentrism” and “phallocentrism”. Logocentrism is the term Derrida uses to refer to the philosophy of determinateness, while phallocentrism is the term he uses to describe the way logocentrism itself has been genderized by a “masculinist (phallic)” and “patriarchal” agenda. Hence, Derrida intentionally merges the two terms phallocentrism and logocentrism as “phallogocentrism”.   

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

None of these propagandists  have any interest in the thought and writings of Derrida, who is now passe, but one of his central insights into our language, and its evolution and  practice, that represents linguistic determinism, as an historical phenomenon over time.  Language evolved as determined by the Patriarchal imperatives.

SKMSD