Andy Divine’s latest moralizing intervention starts off with the Roy Moore scandal and ends with Bill Clinton. It is, as always, a convoluted political/religious imaginative variation on the themes he hold most dear: the Christian Revelation, and its sine qua non of the inherent ‘wickedness’ , indeed ‘evil’ of the human person. One need only look to the architects of Christianity, Paul, Augustine and Jerome, to witness the self-hatred of these three monstre sacrés as its source. Their  self-hatred was institutionalized as primary dogmas of the Church! As cudgel for Christian Moralists to condemn  human self-seeking, self-justification in the name of saving souls for Christ! this is illustrative of the theme of his latest essay (Italics are mine):

I have to say I was deeply moved by the New York Times op-ed yesterday by an evangelical law professor from Alabama. The piece, by the wonderfully named William S. Brewbaker III, moved me because it was the first genuinely Christian thing I’ve heard an evangelical say about the Roy Moore scandal. It did more than renounce the tribalism that has led so many alleged Christians to back Moore; it presented Christianity, properly understood, as the core alternative to tribalism, as one way out of tribalism’s dead end. Brewbaker’s critical and deeply evangelical point:  

…

This is not just an evangelical truth. It is deeply embedded in all of Christianity. No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on “the right side of history,” or on the right side of a battle between “good and evil,” is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the “good.” These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time. In the Catholic church, the conviction that the institution could do no wrong, that its reputation must endure because it represented the right side in the struggle against evil … led to the mass rape of children and teens.

The Abrahamic Tradition is defined by ‘tribalism’ of Judaism, Islam and the ‘tribalism’ of the Saved of Christianity. The last paragraph, of this part of his weekly column, demonstrates his obsession with the falleness of the human person, as codified in Christian Dogma.

There is a moment here. No party is immune from evil; no tribe has a monopoly of good. If these bipartisan sex-abuse revelations can begin to undermine the tribalism that so poisons our public life, to reveal that beneath the tribes, we are all flawed and human, they may not only be a long-overdue turning point for women. They may be a watershed for all of us.

Can the reader even imagine the total absence of cognitive dissonance, in the moral/political evaluations of a Christian,  whose unslakable war mongering, whose allegiance to the ethical/political/economic vacuity of the collapsed Neo-Liberal Dogmas, to the perpetual demonizing of the Left, and a moral/intellectual fealty to that monument to Conservative Sociology of the notorious ‘Bell Curve’?

Queer Atheist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/the-danger-of-knowing-youre-on-the-right-side-of-history.html

If Israel is going to retain mainstream political support, it cannot allow itself to become the pet cause of right-wing bigots and conspiracy theorists. That requires putting serious distance between Bannon and every pro-Israel organization, to say nothing of the Israeli government itself, by refusing to provide a platform for him and his ilk. Personal and national reputations alike always depend on the company one keeps. Not every would-be supporter deserves consideration as a friend.

Anti-Semitism is both the socialism of fools and the conservatism of creeps. If the past century holds a lesson for Jews, it’s to beware every form of illiberalism, including the illiberalism of those who purport to be on our side. Repair of the world may not be the central teaching of Judaism. But it’s always wise to stay far from those who wish to tear it asunder.

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.

PerryAnderson

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

The reader of Mr. Stephen’s latest essay is framed by a grim diagnosis of America’s political present.  Its rhetorical centerpiece is the use of the royal ‘we’.

We are also living through another era of democratic self-doubt. Low growth became the new normal for the better part of a decade. We fight wars we don’t know how to win and rue the consequences of action (Iraq) and inaction (Syria) alike. We inhabit a culture we despise and see no way of improving. Congress is paralyzed. The parties are broken. The president is a dolt.

Are ‘we’ living through an era of ‘democratic self-doubt’? or rather through an age of the complete corruption, of the two political parties that control that democratic process and its practice? The Republicans and New Democrats are defined by political opportunism, not to speak of kowtowing to the imperatives of the National Security State as sacrosanct!

Is the ‘low growth’ just the consequence of the codified, but utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal dogmas, that have dominated the politics/economics of the ‘West’ since the age of Thatcher/Reagan?

We fight wars we don’t know how to win and rue the consequences of action (Iraq) and inaction (Syria) alike. Should the reader look to the Neo-Conservative cabal, Mr. Stephens being one of its most vocal bellicose partisans , for the root cause of the wars we don’t know how to win? ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ of Samuel P. Huntington is the Neo-Conservative’s touchstone , that transmogrified itself into the ‘War on Terror‘ of Bush the Younger.

Do ‘we’ live in a culture we despise? Mr. Stephens,  like his brethren who share the notion that we live in a condition of perpetual decadence, of our politics and an utterly absent morality. Mr. Stephens attacks the Liberal Despisers of his fundamentalism, both pseudo-religious and political, that is Neo-Conservatism. Leo Strauss mendacious attempt to re-write the history of ‘Western Philosophy’ provided the template for the Neo-Conservatives to proclaim their political/ethical exceptionalism as transformative. They are the prophets without honor, in their own time, whose vision will be redeemed in the future. This is a pseudo-religious vision! 

Is Congress paralyzed?  If the reader looks at the historical record of Republican obstructionism, or better yet, call it by its real name nihilism, from Clinton vs. Gingrich to McConnell/Ryan vs. Obama, the political picture is very clear! The Republican Party went from being in the thrall of the Know-Nothings, the Tea Party, to Trump and Trumpism of the present, at lightening political speed. While the New Democrats repudiated the New Deal, and became Neo-Liberal with Bill Clinton, and have yet to see that the way forward is a New Deal re-imagined, re-written for the 21st Century!

Is the President a ‘dolt‘?  Mr. Stephens and his fellow travelers, across the political spectrum, must abase themselves by donning figurative sack cloth and ashes, as their penance for their political bankruptcy. As that will never happen, the reality of the continuous denial of responsibility for Trump and Trumpism is,  and will remain, the Party Line of Mr. Stephens and his coterie of opinion makers.

I have focused my attention on this paragraph of  Mr. Stephens latest essay, as it is foundational to the whole of his self-congratulatory exercise, in his role as  political prophet. The Age of the Strong Man  provides the backdrop for this episode of The Midwives of Trump: hysteria mongering is an American Tradition, dating from the Salem Witch Trials, and William Stoughton’s admittance of Spectral Evidence as proof of guilt!

Publius

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.

Perry Anderson

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

Andy Divine is America’s favorite ‘Drama Queen’ and nothing proves his status than his recent comments on the 2017 Virginia Election. I’ve selected just the opening paragraphs of his column of Friday November 10, 2017 from the pages of New York Magazine. Be prepared for Andy at his most hyperbolic, when it come to manufactured melodrama he can’t resist its temptations.

I was wrong! Thank God Almighty, I was wrong!

You probably felt the same thing I did last Tuesday night: a euphoric whiplash as deepening dread turned suddenly into a wave of intense relief in the off-year results from Virginia. I’m still riding it. I hope you are too. Almost every surprise since last November has been a soul-crushing one. I feared yet another one. But Tuesday night’s string of decisive victories by Democrats dispelled the gloom and was the first time since Trump’s election that hope appeared a little more realistic than despair. So let’s take a moment to soak it in.

But I do owe you an account of why and how I misjudged this one, and failed to see the glimmer of dawn on the horizon. I didn’t predict anything. But I feared Northam might fall short — and what that would portend. I’ll stick by much of my analysis. I don’t think anyone suddenly believes that Ralph Northam, now governor-elect of Virginia, ran a great campaign. He didn’t. Nor is anyone reevaluating him as a charismatic, inspirational figure. He is who he is — a regular, normal candidate, with a mushy message. The good news is that he won convincingly anyway.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/andrew-sullivan-hope-arrives-in-virginia.html

There is so much more of Andy on this crucial election, a winning combination of self-criticism, about what he missed, and hosannas for the victory, while not being impressed by candidate Northam: ‘a regular, normal candidate, with a mushy message.’

Andy then comments on the Pope’s admonitions to the faithful on ‘cell phones’ ,  and his own comments on those who wished to capture sunsets on their phones. The human desire to capture important, indeed, beautiful moments in their lives escapes the attention of both the Pope and Andy: each moralizing scolds!

Not to forget Andy, making concrete in the minds of his readership, his status as a New Cold Warrior, commenting on: Professor Joseph Mifsud, the Kremlin-affiliated academic who met with Papadopoulos in London, cannot now be found.

Gore Vidal once opined that Time Magazine was the chronicler of the fictional lives of real people, in the age of Luce. Andy proves beyond doubt that he too specializes in this genre of ersatz journalism!

Myra Breckenridge

Mr Zuckerberg demonstrates beyond question that he is a political/intellectual bumpkin! He built his search for dates into a ‘Brand’ that is Facebook. He had help. But to say that the ‘opioid crisis‘ and technology are the causes of America’s divisions is the pronouncement of a either a fool or a knave! He is utterly clueless as to the fact that  America needs a New-New Deal in answer to the collapsed Neo-Liberal swindle, and that the Civil War never ended, but is still in stalemate. And the abandoned Reconstruction is the great unfinished business, of the once noble/ignoble (take your pick) American Experiment. And that the American Empire must be dismantled in the name of both Justice and Peace.

The rise of Mr Zuckerberg, as some kind of possible answer, to the stark object lesson of Trump and Trumpism,  is demonstrative of not just the failure, but the corruption of the whole of America’s Political Class, New Democrats and Republicans!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/8936e254-c645-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

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.

Perry Anderson

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

Headline: Uber loses appeal in UK employment case

Sub-headline: Company must treat its drivers as ‘workers’, tribunal rules

Even Mr. Elvidge gives the game away by declaring Uber to be a taxi service, rather than the Neo-Liberal euphemism used by The Financial Times of ‘ride haling service’ . The power of the state and municipalities to act in the public interest didn’t collapse in 2008! But the Neo-Liberal Fiction that The Market is the totality of the human aspiration, in its political/economic/ethical dimension has proven to be an expression of a pernicious nihilism. See ‘Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution’, by Wendy Brown:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

  Tom Elvidge, Uber UK’s acting general manager, said: “Almost all taxi and private hire drivers have been self-employed for decades, long before our app existed. The main reason why drivers use Uber is because they value the freedom to choose if, when and where they drive and so we intend to appeal.”

Uber is an employer, who hires people and pays them for their labor. The notion that they are not employers, but merely brokers, is more of the same ‘freedom to choose’ Party Line spouted by Milton Friedman, of the Chicago Boys infamy. Mr. Elvidge, and his cronies at the Financial Times, will never stop their propaganda offensive, against the role of government to protect its citizens from the predations of Capital!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/84de88bc-c5ee-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

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.

Perry Anderson

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

I read Mr. Ganesh’s column earlier in the week, but felt like I could not offer a cogent or relevant comment, that didn’t repeat what I had said many times before . Yet in my internet explorations , I  encountered  John Sturrock’s review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Whatever, the English translation of Les Particules élémentaires , in the London Review of Books of  January 1, 1999: That seems to describe in detail the political/ethical/rhetorical stance of Janan Ganesh, or at the least it strongly echoes that stance, in his essay under the headline:

Britain is overexposed to its ruling class

Sub-headline :If government is weak, or strong but wrong, little stands between us and its doings

… hard-line neo-Darwinian, but what he has is more a case of localised spleen than of cosmic angst., …he writes ‘animal fiction’, or sardonic fables of feral behaviour that constitute his ‘ethical meditations’,‘I associate little with human beings,’ ‘…as a red-in-tooth-and-claw reminder that the animal world is no place to look for ethical improvements on the human one.

This is the ‘domaine de la lutte’, the brownfield site of struggle as it might have been marked out by some hard-line neo-Darwinian, in which, once expelled from childhood, a stage of life that Houellebecq looks sentimentally on (as he does on grandparents, virtuous folk whose sons and daughters have somehow gone terribly wrong), we’re asked to spend the rest of our lives locked into a society in which men are in the business of wholesale domination and women that of seduction. It’s tempting to take Houellebecq’s own struggler at something like his own valuation, as a metaphysical Outsider, but what he has is more a case of localised spleen than of cosmic angst. He is far from being party to the old, exalted humanism that saw our species as being trapped in godless immanence, but potentially admirable for the lucidity with which it embraces its predicament. ‘I associate little with human beings,’ Houellebecq’s lone ranger declares, and in a formal act of dissociation from them he writes ‘animal fiction’, or sardonic fables of feral behaviour that constitute his ‘ethical meditations’ – in the new novel, the Aesopian mode makes way for the Attenboroughesque, and natural history on TV serves as a red-in-tooth-and-claw reminder that the animal world is no place to look for ethical improvements on the human one.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n02/john-sturrock/agitated-neurons

Philosophical Apprentice

https://www.ft.com/content/a88fab42-c2d3-11e7-b2bb-322b2cb39656

https://www.ft.com/content/70aca220-c30a-11e7-b2bb-322b2cb39656

https://www.ft.com/content/3327c766-c325-11e7-b2bb-322b2cb39656

https://www.ft.com/content/21db0302-c25c-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

https://www.ft.com/content/e64f21e4-c222-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

https://www.ft.com/content/c6066ce0-c2fd-11e7-b2bb-322b2cb39656

https://www.ft.com/content/563ea65e-c314-11e7-b2bb-322b2cb39656

https://markets.ft.com/data/announce/detail?dockey=1330-643383en-4QU46A2VSMU9SD4NVDBT44T2M5

https://www.ft.com/content/4680a384-c2fb-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

What the Paradise Papers Tell Us About Global Business and Political Elites

 

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/paradise-papers-tell-us-global-business-political-elites.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

The Panama Papers revelations succeeded by the Paradise Papers: Capitalism lurches  from crisis to crisis, aided by its lawless impunity, and tax avoidance schemes confected by the mendacity and greed of lawyers and politicians.

Old Socialist

Mr. Sturrock’s ‘The Word from Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers’ 

Links to two of Mr. Sturrock’s insightful and challenging review/essays for the London Review of Books : (Behind a pay wall, but completely worthy of the cost, and your readerly attention!)

Ego’s End

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v01/n03/john-sturrock/egos-end

Le pauvre Sokal

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pauvre-sokal\

American Writer

P.S. Let me add another link, to another review/essay in the London Review:

I resume and I sum up

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/john-sturrock/i-resume-and-i-sum-up

Thank you for your comment.

‘How do you know which activities I pursue? I would be really interested.’

At the least, Keynes was a fascinating and complex man, thinker and being! Full of contradictions, but none the less worthy of the readers attention and critical evaluation. I must be blunt, you are a rather grey technocrat, whose rhetoric and status demands hyperbole/polemic. You are one of the many experts/technocrats, at The Financial Times, who write apologetics for the failure of the Free Market Mythology, that has yet to manifest its powers of self-rescue: where is the Self-Correcting Market, nine years after the 2008 Crash and the Depression that is its continuing legacy? And then you and your political fellow travelers agonize over the ‘Rebellion Against the Elites’ that evolved into the Populist Menace, and the Brexiteers. Even the legitimacy of  European nation state is under attack :

https://www.ft.com/europopulists

https://www.ft.com/topics/places/Catalonia

https://www.ft.com/content/38f625f6-b7dc-11e7-8c12-5661783e5589

The successors of The Mont Pelerin Society convenes at the FT!  Keynes is certainly  the rescuer of Capitalism, although his insights accomplished that until the benighted reign of Thatcher/Reagan. In the time of Adam Smith capitalism was emancipatory from the predations of English feudalism, and probably for others, in our time who form co-operatives to sell the goods and services to their fellow citizens, if their aspiration/practice is not stopped by government or some Multi-National!  Monsanto sues small farmers for ‘patent infringement’ .

On the question of China,  read the whole of my comment on the amount that it spent in 2013 on ‘Internal Security‘!

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-defence/china-hikes-defense-budget-to-spend-more-on-internal-security-idUSBRE92403620130305

What of the rebellions and suicides of worker at  Foxxconn:

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

How many reforms of Capitalism will it take? As Manfred Max Neef pointed out long ago the model of growth must be supplanted by the model of development if we are to survive.

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

Global Capital has its collection of front men: Lloyd Blankfein of ‘We are doing God’s Work’. Or vulture Capitalist Paul Singer, who made obscene profit out of rescuing Argentina from the predations of the de Kirchners. Mr. Singer is an avid contributor to Neo-Conservative causes:

https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-marco-rubios-far-right-neocon-donors/

You wish to be invited back by the Chinese, and your rhetoric reflects your courtship of Xi Jinping and his confederates, that becomes ‘The results were spectacular.’ You soften your critique as the in-order-to of your courtship: not quite in Walter Duranty territory, but uncomfortably close!

Let me close by offering this valuable observation by Perry Anderson on polemic. I write polemic.

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.

Perry Anderson

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

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2zxLCJL