StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Sullivan’s penchant for political  moralizing is a never ending phenomenon, some examples of his analysis of the governor’s race in Virginia between Ed Gillespie and Ralph Northam are demonstrative of his rampant self-congratulation, not to speak of  his self-conception as ‘expert’ .

On Democrat Northham:

Northam seems to me almost a classic Democratic politician of our time. I have no idea what his core message is (and neither, it seems, does he); on paper, he’s close to perfect; his personality is anodyne; his skills as a campaigner are risible; and he has negative charisma. More to the point, he is running against an amphibian swamp creature, Ed Gillespie, and yet the Washington lobbyist is outflanking him on populism. Northam’s ads are super lame, and have lately been largely on the defensive, especially on crime, culture, and immigration. He hasn’t galvanized minority voters, has alienated many white voters, and has failed to consolidate a broader anti-Trump coalition. In Virginia, Trump’s approval rating is 38/59, but Northam is winning only 81 percent of the disapprovers, while Gillespie is winning 95 percent of the approvers. Northam’s early double-digit lead has now collapsed to within the margin of error.

On Republican Gillespie

If all this sounds like a rerun of 2016, well, that’s what it is. But insofar as it also represents Trump’s consolidation of the GOP, it’s all too 2017. Ed Gillespie is the last person you’d predict to become a Trump-style populist, and bring out the enraged base. He’s deeply Establishment, formerly moderate, and easily identified as part of the Washington-as-usual crowd. And yet he’s morphed — successfully — into a Bannonite, without losing mainstream Republican support. Somehow, the GOP still manages to rally together; and somehow, even now, the Democrats cannot. Gillespie also has a killer instinct. Putting what’s left of his conscience and decency in cold storage, he has been pushing out ads that make the Willie Horton spot look like Mr. Rogers. One ad targets Northam for believing that the Confederate statues should come down or be placed in museums; another blasts him for his waffling on sanctuary cities (in a state where none exist!) and links him to weakness against the MS-13 gang; another all but calls him sympathetic to pedophiles. The ads are brutal, foul, racist, demagogic, and effective. They embrace Trumpism with fervor and shamelessness and, in Gillespie’s case, staggering cynicism.

The ‘as if’ of both these ‘evaluations’ of the candidates is that reader is ignorant of Sullivan’s own ‘political evolution’ from worshipful acolyte of Thatcher , to Neo-Conservative, to Centrist Neo-Liberal of the Clinton warmongering variety.  As an advocate/apologist for that monument of Conservative Sociology ‘The Bell Curve’ Mr. Sullivan’s attack on ‘Gillespie’s case, staggering cynicism‘ is an example of the Sullivan investment in his cultivated ignorance of the history of racism in America. It is an act of will, not of some kind or type of historical analysis. Staggering is the fact that Sullivan somehow thinks that his readers are ignorant of his historically verifiable past. The record of the utterly corrupt, and clueless Democratic Party machine, in the thrall of Clinton and her minions, is well known.

The political monster of the ‘Left’ makes its obligatory appearance, fear mongering is the cornerstone of Sullivan’s political world view, he shares that specter with both the Republicans and Democrats. But his conclusion is what? Sullivan as Cassandra or Tiresias?

This is not a good omen. If Gillespie wins, or the result is close, it means the Trump-transformed GOP is electorally viable in every swing district in 2018. That it could win in the state where actual white supremacists marched this past summer and when the president is 20 points underwater is a sobering reminder of the actual state of play in our politics. I can only hope it’s a wake-up call to the Dems. In 2017, they are either useless or actively counterproductive in the struggle to resist right-authoritarianism. They have learned nothing from 2016. Their intelligentsia seems determined to ensure that no midwestern whites ever vote for the party again. Their public faces are still Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi. They still believe that something other than electoral politics — the courts, the press, the special counsel — will propel them back to power. They can’t seem to grasp the nettle of left-populism. And they remain obsessed with a Russia scandal that most swing voters don’t give a damn about.

They think they are “woke.” They are, in fact, in a political coma.

Their intelligentsia seems determined to ensure that no midwestern whites ever vote for the party again. Mr. Sullivan presumes that the reader buys the Party Line that he is somehow not part of the Democratic Intelligentsia, or at the least its witting ally! Sullivan must demonstrate his independence: that he is some how apart from that body of apologists/advocates that are/were the Midwives of Trump.

Sullivan declares that the current leadership of the Democratic Party: ‘They can’t seem to grasp the nettle of left-populism.’ Such is the cultivated political myopia of Sullivan, neither he nor the current leadership of the Democratic Party, confront the fact that the future of the Democratic Party lies in the New Deal Democrats Warren and Sanders. But if not them, then the Greens and the Libertarians will be that force for change. There is an alternative!  Sullivan hews to the myth that these two parties are eternal!

Committed Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/how-the-democrats-are-failing-the-resistance.html

Yet how has the system that failed in Moscow succeeded in Beijing? The big difference between the two outcomes lay with Deng Xiaoping’s brilliant choices. China’s paramount leader after Mao Zedong kept the Leninist political system — above all, the dominant role of the Communist party — while freeing the economy. His determination to maintain party control was made clear by his decisions during what the Chinese call the “June 4 Incident” and westerners the “Tiananmen Square massacre” of 1989. Yet his resolve to continue with economic reform never faltered. The results were spectacular.

Mr. Wolf again demonstrates that Economics is the dismal science! He is no Keynes, who spent his days arising late in the day, and speculating in the stock market, and profiting handsomely in those investments. While he engaged in many cultural and varied sexual pursuits.

Mr. Wolf is all earnest technocratic commitment to Western Capitalism, even when it has proved itself unworthy of anything but contempt. But the Chinese ‘autocracy’ , better to call it by its real name totalitarian,  has proven that Capitalism does not need democracy to flourish, but can thrive in a state that has has an inexhaustible supply of slave labor: to manufacture Western electronic equipment, and the status symbols of the the Age, mobile phones. The suicides and rebellions of these workers have been quelled, or just covered up. Leninism was about establishing a network of state terror to keep the population in line! The spending of the Chinese government on ‘internal security’ is more than its military budget:

BEIJING (Reuters) – China unveiled another double-digit rise in military expenditure on Tuesday, but for a third year in a row the defense budget will be exceeded by spending on domestic security, highlighting Beijing’s concern about internal threats.

Spending on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will rise 10.7 percent to 740.6 billion yuan ($119 billion), while the domestic security budget will go up at a slightly slower pace, by 8.7 percent, to 769.1 billion yuan, according to the budget released at the opening of parliament’s annual meeting.

The numbers underscore the ruling Communist Party’s vigilance not only about territorial disputes with Japan and Southeast Asia and the U.S. “pivot” back to the region, but also about popular unrest over corruption, pollution and abuse of power, despite robust economic growth and rising incomes.

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

Spectacular compared to the Western Capitalism? And its politics lurching toward Corporatism, codified as ‘Trade Agreements’ TTP, TTIP, whose provisions make war on the very democratic traditions, of the modern Western nation state, that Mr. Wolf proclaims to be in need of institutional revitalization.

The west needs rejuvenation, too. It cannot rejuvenate by copying the drift towards autocracy of far too much of today’s world. It must not abandon its core values, but make them live, once again. It must create more inclusive and dynamic economies, revitalise its politics and re-establish anew the fragile balance between the national and the global, the democratic and the technocratic that is essential to the health of sophisticated democracies. Autocracy is the age-old human norm. It must not have the last word

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/3721c694-bd82-11e7-9836-b25f8adaa111

Before I begin to comment on Mr. Brooks’ current essay the reader might just begin at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its entry on Francis Bacon, and its entry 3.1 and sub-entries of 1 through 4. To refresh the reader on Bacon’s concept of Idols:

3.1.1 Idols of the Tribe

3.1.2 Idols of the Cave

3.1.3 Idols of the Market Place

3.1.4 Idols of the Theatre

Mr. Brooks lacks historical and philosophical breadth, he defines the notion of the  American parochial,  so to begin with Bacon assists the reader, in the  recognition of that lack of historical/philosophical breadth. Brooks parses Idolatry, as in the end self-defeating, an expression of nihilism, or just the hope of salvation through material goods, as ill fated. Brooks’ analysis of Idolatry is religious in nature, its the usual Protestant Party Line of tent preacher Billy Graham, or even of the loathsome Calvinism of Christian Realist Reinhold Niebuhr.

The pallid introductory paragraphs on Richard Linklater’s movie Boyhood are almost irrelevant, except that it is wreathed in a kind of nostalgia that appeals to the American Conservative sensibility, although not so roseate in the film.

Mr. Brooks’ ‘evolution’ from Neo-Conservatism to ‘Public Moralist’ is so awash in self-congratulation, and an ersatz humility, its hard to bear his chatter. But Mr. Brooks is more given to mild public scoldings, not quite in the mold of a Sunday Sermon from my youth at St Paul’s Lutheran, but more muted than the ‘Youth Night’ sermons at the Baptist church.

If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality. But we also need to put politics in its place. The excessive dependence on politics has to be displaced by the expulsive power of more important dependencies, whether family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed.

Better myths!? Quite plainly Mr. Brooks as Neo-Conservative political writer/propagandist never stood for anything like ‘social equality’, he claimed the territory of the Platonic Guardian, via Strauss and his American coterie,  rather than the social prophet and moralist of his present ‘evolution‘.

To be a moderate is to be at war with idolatry. It’s to believe that we become free as we multiply and balance our attachments. It’s to believe that our politics probably can’t be fixed by political means. It needs repair of the deeper communal bonds that politics rest on, and which political conflict cannot heal.

As one of the Trump Midwives, Mr. Brooks now claims the territory of the ‘moderate’, that might describes that amalgam of Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism that is the present political center of American politics. Note, that Mr. Brooks reaches a startling conclusion, that  leads to this conundrum or just call it nihilism!

It’s to believe that our politics probably can’t be fixed by political means.

Those ‘deep communal bonds’ that are in need of repair, as Mr. Brooks argues it, and holds in such high esteem, in the political present of Trump and Trumpism, are the very ones that he made war against his whole career.  Should the reader identify Mr. Brooks’ ‘turn’ as the product of satori?

Philosophical Apprentice

Mr. Ganesh again proves that he is talented at producing the political and moralizing feuilleton. A journalistic staple of a European journalism of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, though not focused on the larger questions he touches upon.

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

Except that Mr. Ganesh tries to connect the disparate manifestations of discontent that mirrors his self-serving cynicism: direct democracy being his idée fixe, that gets lost in his profusion of civic actors and the forces of  his ‘history made to measure.’

The norm we have grown up with, of the greater share of the population being free to choose its rulers, has been around for the historical equivalent of the time it takes to cough.

Now the Greeks and the Romans were selective in their practice of democracy, while it lasted, but Mr. Ganesh elides this from his precis, these were manifestations of democracy, no matter its imperfections. They are and were are precursors.

Demonstrative of Mr. Ganesh’s self-serving trivialization of the present Age of Fracture:

When we try — and many far-from-hysterical commentators have been moved to since the rise of Donald Trump as US president, the moderate conservative David Frum among them — the dread is always an authoritarian dictatorship.

David Frum is not a ‘moderate conservative’, but a Neo-Conservative, a political nihilist, whose fretting about Trump is rooted in his yearning, or better yet a political romantic, whose ‘nostalgia’ is for an actual Philosopher King of  Platonic origin, celebrated by Leo Strauss

Skipping back, we confront a finding  of the Pew Survey that causes :

The trouble is that 43 per cent approved of a system in which “experts, not elected officials, make decisions”  …

One of the most honored of American political thinkers, and newspaper writers, Walter Lippmann was the foremost advocate for the rule of technocrats, as a necessary check  against too much democracy. Recall the role of Cass Sunstein in the Obama administration, as full time propagandist?

Then there is this bit of dubious advice from Mr. Ganesh:

It is there in the dystopic commentary and the fretful re-reading of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (a novel whose greatness, like that of 1984, lies in everything but its predictive power).

Having read Mr. Roth’s ‘Plot’ I can say that it is awash in the usual Roth sexual obsessions of voyeurism, masturbation, and his perpetual obsession about his Jewishness, as not just an accident of birth, but as some kind of moral calling. Now he does construct a very likable hero for his book, himself, and he is the only consolation of this literary exercise. So winning a character, that he is reminiscent of Scout in Harper Lee‘s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in capturing the affection of the reader.  But Roth’s obsessive narcissism is the central conceit of  ‘Plot’ with an  ‘American Fascism’ , and its fictional leader Charles Lindbergh: featuring  re-education camps in the American Midwest for Jewish children, is the most dismal exercise of American Jewish paranoia, given free reign,  that I have ever encountered. In sum, ‘Plot‘ is about Roth’s usual obsessions, with the rise of American Fascism and its leader Charles Lindbergh, as mere back drop. Roth’s advisor for this novel was Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , the quintessential American political and moral conformist, with a narcissism equal to Mr. Roth’s.

But let me end my comment by quoting this bit of Mr. Ganesh’s comic fatuousness:

What Karl Marx said of capitalism’s inherent instabilities is truer of democracy.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/73349dae-bd5b-11e7-9836-b25f8adaa111

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

Michael Tomasky has left, for just a moment,the journalistic shit-hole that is The Daily Beast, for the bourgeois respectability of The New York Times. Mr. Tomasky spent most of 2016 attacking Bernie-Bros, and other undesirable elements, in the Democratic Party, while singing the praises of Hillary Clinton, as the natural successor to Obama’s Reaganism Lite. Mr. Tomasky wrote Hillary propaganda throughout the campaign.

Mr. Tomasky uses his essay to instruct the Democrats, under the portentous title of  ‘What the Democrats Must Do’  in order to win in 2020. But he has the temerity to lecture the party that it must emancipate itself from its Neo-Liberalism. The reader is somewhat surprised by Mr. Tomasky’s frankness. Where was this realization in the 2016 contest? Was the failure of the Neo-Liberal Faith not utterly apparent in 2008, or in the years since? Both political parties are fully committed to its ‘Free Market Nostrums’.

Mr. Bush appears in this long quotation of his recent speech:

“The great democracies face new and serious threats, yet seem to be losing confidence in their own calling and competence. Economic, political and national security challenges proliferate, and they are made worse by the tendency to turn inward. The health of the democratic spirit itself is at issue. And the renewal of that spirit is the urgent task at hand.”

Tomasky’s reply is instructive of one political midwife’s opinion to that of another:

I was hardly a fan of how Mr. Bush sought to renew that spirit as president. But I was impressed with these words. They show an understanding of the grave stakes that challenge the United States and other Western democracies.

Mr. Tomasky and Mr. Bush were and are Trump’s political midwives, and need to, but never will, admit their culpability. Never will there be the expression of such honesty in American political life. Trump is a cataclysmic political accident, without cause in the world views of these two mendacious civic actors. The cause and effect that rules the universe, is rendered null set, in the world according to the newest American political alliance of Bush & Tomasky.

Old Socialist

Miriam González Durántez isn’t just an ‘international Lawyer’, she is described as both a lawyer and a lobbyist on her Wikipedia page:

‘She is the wife of Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.’

González Durántez was also on the Board of Directors of Acciona, S.A. between June 2010 and July 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Dur%C3%A1ntez

So the opening paragraph of her essay is no surprise , it is the gambit favored by opinion writers, who declare themselves to be, and to represent, the rational centrist position on  any vexing question. Mrs Clegg advocates that ‘political leaders’  provide ’emotional space’ for ‘moderates’ , later in her essay. She refers to herself as that ‘moderate voice’. She is, in fact, the voice of Capital. Hardly surprising given the Financial Times’ politics.

The Spanish government has decided to take back powers from the Catalan region. Legally, it had little choice. However, repairing the covenant that underpins the Spanish nation will take much more than that. As both sides race towards the extremes, the influence of a moderate voice in Spanish politics is missing and urgently needed.

But the patient reader is rewarded, in the third paragraph,  where Mrs. Clegg gains her footing and turns public scold, by way of storytelling.

While the referendum was the catalyst, the most striking moment of the current crisis took place a week later, when anti-independence Catalans, as well as many Spaniards across the country, took to the streets in huge numbers. Catalans who are hostile to Mr Puigdemont had generally kept silent up to then; but that day they finally found the courage to speak up. Years of tolerating and managing demands for Catalan independence gave way to something more uncompromising throughout Spain. Public patience — as well as the patience of all mainstream parties — snapped.

The Financial Times’ editors probably consider the Catalonian secession as a ‘premature’ expression of The Rebellion Against The Elites. So the calculated back and forth of the various political positions presented almost end here:

It is obvious that the solution to this crisis demands more than a tough approach towards the organisers of the illegal referendum-…

Before the reader goes any further, read Dr. Albena Azmanova’s essay at the Social Europe web site. That examines the question in political terms

There is, however, a more fundamental argument. Mr Rajoy’s government and the European leadership seem to be reducing the rule-of-law principle that lays the foundation of liberal democracies to the rule-by-law principle that has empowered many dictatorships. The notion of rule-of-law has its roots in the Natural Law doctrine, according to which the source of basic rights and freedoms is human nature, not a document (be it a Constitution), nor a human agent (be it a Parliament or a democratically elected leader). A constitutional codification might help protect those rights (not always, as we’ve just seen), but their existence is not predicated on a written document, on a judicial ruling or a political decision. By force of their being universal and unconditional, these rights have superiority over any legal provision. That is why such rights are respected in the United Kingdom even in the absence of a written constitution. Another element in the rule-of-law doctrine (in contrast to rule-by-law) is that political rule is based on the consent of the governed. The recent referendum in Catalonia was meant to assess this consent, just like the 2014 referendum in Scotland confirmed the enduring consent of the Scottish to be subjects of the British crown.

Moreover, the Spanish Constitution makes a mockery of the Rule of Law by equating it to the will of the people, as it pledges to “consolidate a State of Law which ensures the rule of law as the expression of the popular will.” The ‘popular will’ is the source of sovereignty in a democracy. The ‘rule of law’ guards individuals from the abuse of power by any power, including that of the ‘popular will’. Sourcing the rule of law from the will of the people, as does the Spanish Constitution, provides a legal basis for a dictatorship: as we Europeans know only too well, all our great dictators claimed to speak with the voice of the people.

No, Europe is not about to fall into the abyss of Despotism, but it has taken a careless step down that slippery slope. Preventing the downgrading of the rule-of-law into a despotic rule-by-law is the business of every European citizen.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/abuse-rule-law-european-union

Dr. Albena Azmanova will never appear in this newspaper, her ‘Preventing the downgrading of the rule-of-law into a despotic rule-by-law is the business of every European citizen.’ is much too radical an assertion. Mrs. Clegg is the perfect apologist for a Nation State, mirroring the fissuering of the EU: in sum, the 2008 economic/political collapse has hastened what Daniel T. Rodgers has called ‘The Age of Fracture’ ,that seeks to describe an American histoical/political/economic situation. But as an idea, writ large,  has implications for the European Project, and its foundation in a Nation State that seems to be,  at the least, unstable. Veneto and Lombardy  in Italy  are asking the central government for ‘greater autonomy’.

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

Mrs. Clegg is the voice of moderation, a moderation defined by Corporate alligence, in her pseudo-feminist critique of  ‘testosterone-driven measures’ , that  (the echoes of the language that has become common in Brexit Britain are striking). The Nation State and the EU Cartel share a commonality of purpose.

But there are moderates in every party who are privately uncomfortable with the drift of this debate. Prominent political figures from different parties need the courage to turn their private doubts into public advocacy and to co-ordinate and galvanise a fresh approach. Every day that passes, the Spanish government is further away from a solution to the Catalan crisis. The answer does not lie in testosterone-driven measures, even if they are justified by the law. The answer lies in realising that in moderation lies true strength.              

Will the ‘moderates’ like Mrs. Clegg save the Nation State and the EU Cartel?

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/b460607a-b7f6-11e7-bff8-f9946607a6ba

The headline at the Financial Times should hysterically proclaim : The Second Spanish Civil War Approaches! But given the latest developments as reported in the pages of this newspaper that headline should now read The Second Spanish Civil War is Fact!

With the EU Project in a downward spiral, the Nation State itself now becomes the focus of the post 2008 Depression’s ‘Rebellion Against The Elites’: not just Catalonia, that has decided that secession is the way forward,  but Veneto and Lombardy  in Italy have reached a similar conclusion, of sorts : ‘greater autonomy’. Is that simply the first step?

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

For some very necessary clarity, on this vexing question that presages something catastrophic, read Dr. Albena Azmanova’s essay at the Social Europe web site. That examines the question in rational political terms, rather than in terms of eye catching  ‘headlines’:

There is, however, a more fundamental argument. Mr Rajoy’s government and the European leadership seem to be reducing the rule-of-law principle that lays the foundation of liberal democracies to the rule-by-law principle that has empowered many dictatorships. The notion of rule-of-law has its roots in the Natural Law doctrine, according to which the source of basic rights and freedoms is human nature, not a document (be it a Constitution), nor a human agent (be it a Parliament or a democratically elected leader). A constitutional codification might help protect those rights (not always, as we’ve just seen), but their existence is not predicated on a written document, on a judicial ruling or a political decision. By force of their being universal and unconditional, these rights have superiority over any legal provision. That is why such rights are respected in the United Kingdom even in the absence of a written constitution. Another element in the rule-of-law doctrine (in contrast to rule-by-law) is that political rule is based on the consent of the governed. The recent referendum in Catalonia was meant to assess this consent, just like the 2014 referendum in Scotland confirmed the enduring consent of the Scottish to be subjects of the British crown.

Moreover, the Spanish Constitution makes a mockery of the Rule of Law by equating it to the will of the people, as it pledges to “consolidate a State of Law which ensures the rule of law as the expression of the popular will.” The ‘popular will’ is the source of sovereignty in a democracy. The ‘rule of law’ guards individuals from the abuse of power by any power, including that of the ‘popular will’. Sourcing the rule of law from the will of the people, as does the Spanish Constitution, provides a legal basis for a dictatorship: as we Europeans know only too well, all our great dictators claimed to speak with the voice of the people.

No, Europe is not about to fall into the abyss of Despotism, but it has taken a careless step down that slippery slope. Preventing the downgrading of the rule-of-law into a despotic rule-by-law is the business of every European citizen.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/abuse-rule-law-european-union

Dr. Albena Azmanova makes the very necessary distinction  between the rule-of-law and rule-by-law:

‘Preventing the downgrading of the rule-of-law into a despotic rule-by-law is the business of every European citizen.’

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/01355070-bae7-11e7-8c12-5661783e5589#comments

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 

There is nothing like the self-congratulatory tone of Protestant Theologians who have seen their cultural/moral/political influence wither. Even when it takes the guise of a book review, wreathed in praise of wide knowledge of literature, the arts , and thinkers from other traditions.   Brad East reviews David Bentley Hart’s ‘A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays’ , and who should Mr. East pick as the model of that theological tradition but Reinhold Niebuhr. The re-invigoration of the Cult of Niebuhr has grown with the publication in 2011 of Why Niebuhr Now?

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo11315821.html

An excerpt from the advertising copy  for this book at the University of Chicago Press is instructive.  Obama, McCain and Andrew Sullivan are the misbegotten trio of War Mongers who praise Niebuhr!

Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.” John McCain wrote that he is “a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war.” Andrew Sullivan has said, “We need Niebuhr now more than ever.” For a theologian who died in 1971, Reinhold Niebuhr is maintaining a remarkably high profile in the twenty-first century.

The reader need only look to Richard Fox’s biography for confirmation that Niebuhr was, at best, a political conformist. Who said in 1932 that he was a Marxient thinker, and that the Working Class should not not give up the use of violence, to achieve their ends.  Like Elia Kazan,  Mr. Niebuhr didn’t think his youthful flirtation with political radicalism should interfere with their very important work, in the utterly changed political era of The Cold War. Kazan’s calling was to make movies,  and  Niebuhr’s was an expression of  the demonstratively parochial ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Kazan appeared as a ‘friendly witness‘ and Niebuhr wrote a letter excoriating Communists and their fellow travelers. As Fox argues it, J. Edgar Hoover was in hot pursuit of  Niebuhr. The idea that Niebuhr is the paradigmatic figure of American Protestant Christian Theology is demonstrative of  its bankruptcy. The last theologian I can recall as having any real audience in America was Harvey Cox, and do not forget clergyman William Sloane Coffin Jr. as a necessary antidote to Niebuhr’s imperial apologetics!

The reader can now turn her attention to a sample of Mr. East’s unstinting praise of Mr.Hart, in sum, one theologian in praise of another:

God, naturally. But which God? And how understood? Hart’s answer is at once classical, ecumenical, and particular.

Best to begin, following Thomas Aquinas, by saying what God is not. God is not the biggest being in the universe, or outside of the universe. God is not a discrete entity, like you or me, or a cloud or an atom or a quark, or (if one can put it this way) the universe itself as a whole. Nor is God the clockmaker, winding up time and matter and letting them run their course on their own.

God is the eternal and immaterial fullness of being and life that is the condition of there being anything at all. Infinitely rich and inexhaustibly beautiful, God is being itself, and as such, goodness and truth. Singular and simple, God lacks nothing yet, out of boundless and inexplicable love, creates what is other than himself, that which is not God. Distinct from God, what is not God — which is to say, everything: creation — is nevertheless bound to God, dependent at every moment and in every respect. Yet this dependence is not debilitating but enabling. It is the source of power and identity and, for living creatures, agency and, for rational creatures, freedom. To be is to depend on God for everything, and to acknowledge and celebrate this dependence is to be alive, fully alive, transparent to the source and end and empowering life that fills and moves all living things.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/public-theology-in-retreat/

But this  Protestant Christian Party Line is now expanded to include:

Hart describes this view as “entirely and ecstatically derivative: pure ‘classical theism,’ as found in the Cappadocians, Augustine, Denys, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Mulla Sadra, Ibn Arabi, Shankara, Ramanuja, Philo, Moses Maimonides … well, basically, just about every significant theistic philosopher in human history.” Granting a touch of exaggeration, the gesture is clear: this vision is intended to be, not generic, but fulsomely non-parochial, informed by centuries, cultures, and religions beyond the early 21st-century English-speaking academy.

This followed by Hart’s presentation of the Alice books as the descriptive conundrum of our journey on this earthly plane.  But here is the pièce de résistance:

theology is — if scrupulously pursued — a complex and pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds.

Next in the succession of topics are the concomitant rise of Capitalism/Secularism/ Individualism , but that is not all:

nihilism and secularism, capitalism and individualism, consumerism and voluntarism, scientism and materialism are all of a piece, “a seamless garment” that simultaneously signifies and effects the triumph of the will in all human affairs without exception. As Hart writes:

Add to that the New Atheists, Nietzsche, scientism, etc.,etc.

I must end my comment here, as my patience has worn thin,  with this apologetic of one public theologian for another.

More to the point, Hart remains a distinguished public theologian in a country that continues to produce theologians but no longer recognizes them — in either sense of the word. The national culture no longer rewards or seeks out the public theologian’s wisdom or commentary, but more significant, it quite literally does not recognize the office of theologian, does not find intelligible what its occupants have to say. In turn, writing a little over a decade ago, Hart says that, should “the price of [theology’s] recognition by the post-Christian university […] be its reciprocal recognition of the secular order,” then “ignominious exile might be preferable to repatriation on sufferance.” Indeed, “The academic margins might be a more hospitable and healthy climate just at the moment; the desert, after all, has often proved the most fertile garden of the spirit.” Substitute “cultural” for “academic,” and one has Jacobs’s portrait of the contemporary Christian public intellectual in nuce.

This ‘book review’ is a tedious, not to speak of verbose, apologetic for Public Theologians. That uses the utterly bankrupt Reinhold Niebuhr, as its model for theological/political probity. Niebuhr’s Christian Realism was simply a highfalutin apologetic for the imperatives of the American National Security State. Both Niebuhr and Schlesinger believed themselves to be archetypes of the ‘Vital Center‘, that saw all other civic actors as unworthy of the right to free political expression. They were the ‘Liberal Apologists’ for the political purges of McCarthy and Nixon , who proclaimed The New Deal as a ‘Generation of Treason‘.

Queer Atheist

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/public-theology-in-retreat/

Update 12:33 PM PDT October 25, 2017- My comment was removed from the L.A. Review of Books.

( October 26, 2017 6:06 AM PDT ) Some further thoughts on Niebuhr as Public Theologian:

Mr. East’s ‘review’ of Mr. Hart’s ‘A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays’ avoids confronting the very central role of the ‘wickedness of man’ and the self-hatred that became dogma in the Christian Mythology, via the thought of  Paul, Jerome and Augustine. The reader can view the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the thought of Luther, Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli as sharing the same persistent self-loathing of the three Church Fathers named above.* The preceding argument is too inconvenient in terms of a defense of an ideology/theology, now dominated by the imperatives of an ersatz, not to speak of, a self-serving notion of ecumenism. The role played by Niebuhr, in American life of his period, was of public scold, that placed the ‘sinfulness of man’ as his central concern. And  with the Christian God as the only means of that ‘sinner’ redeeming himself. How many times had I heard this Party Line repeated in Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, when I was a child,  and as an adult in Catechism classes? In sum, Niebuhr was the bourgeois respectable version of the vulgar tent preacher Billy Graham.

*Note that Heidegger uses the theme of the ‘falleness’ of Dasein, in his philosophical pastiche of Christianity, in which ‘Being’ replaces ‘God’ as its central, almost redemptive actor. The care of ‘Being’ , even replaces the tradition of ethical conduct, as it had evolved from the Greeks to the time of Heidegger’s philosophizing.

See Being and Time page 219 #38. Falling & Throwness. Macquarrie & Robinson translation 

The reader has to just wonder about the ‘why’ of this piece of Warren Report retrograde  apologetics appearing at Alternet. As Jim Garrison said over a generation ago: ‘Let Justice be done though the heavens fall’!

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

‘Conspiracy Theorists’, a propaganda invention of the CIA, as the in order to of discrediting the critics of the Warren Report, still hold sway in respectable bourgeois political circles.  In fact, the Warren Report is the touchstone of the many apologists for  America’s ‘Security Agencies’ whose machinations gave birth to the Kennedy assassination. One of the most egregious demonstrations of the Warren Report’s  lies is the ‘Magic Bullet Theory’ presented as ‘truth’ by Arlen Specter, that defied the laws of physics, but served the purposes of self-exculpatory propaganda.

The Dreyfus Case was subject to the same kind of the self-serving  lies used by the French State, and its many apologists: never an admittance that that State has made a mistake, and then covered up its mendacity, by convicting an innocent man! In sum, that it was wrong! Read Michael Wood’s essay at the London Review of Books on the letters between Dreyfus and Marie Arconati Visconti :

Lettres à la marquise: correspondance inédite avec Marie Arconati Visconti by Alfred Dreyfus, edited by Philippe Oriol
Grasset, 592 pp, £19.00, March, ISBN 978 2 246 85965 9

Mr. Wood’s concluding paragraph of his examination of the Dreyfus Affair is revelatory of the position of a State that favors self-exculpatory lies over truth!

…

The Dreyfus Affair teaches us, among many other things, that evidence is easily faked, and that when the fakes don’t work or you don’t want to use them, you can plead national security: you can claim to have documents you can’t show. There is a real difference between a document that isn’t produced and one that doesn’t exist, and that is what I mean by saying the truth is not damaged in this perspective. But we have to ask who can see or certify this difference, who controls its display, and what sort of model of probability or prejudice we are going to use in the absence of facts. ‘As for those who have made themselves my executioners,’ Dreyfus wrote in his diary while still on Devil’s Island, ‘ah, I leave their consciences to them as judges when the light is shed, when the truth is revealed, for sooner or later, everything in life is revealed.’ Not quite everything, perhaps.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n17/michael-wood/the-french-are-not-men

StephenKMackSD

https://www.alternet.org/comments/news-amp-politics/buyer-beware-trump-promises-release-secret-jfk-files#disqus_thread

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

The regular reader of Mr. Stephens knows that he, like his Neo-Conservative tribalist allies, likes nothing more than attacking Students,  and the particular Students he finds so without merit are from the ‘Left’. And their coddlers in America’s Universities, are the weak willed administrators, who bow to the blackmail of these petty tyrants, or so the story is confected by Mr. Stephens.

This maladroit propaganda barrage is used as cover for Mr. Stephens unrelenting campaign to wage war against both Iran and Russia.  As if the War on Terror, now being fought on eight  fronts, isn’t enough to satisfy Mr. Stephens’ unslakable appetite for war. Having no actual experience of war makes Mr. Stephens’ enthusiasm for war – he is no Ernst Jünger exalting the clarifications of battle.

Where have  I read this political merde before? Probably in a newspaper, in my case the unmourned Los Angeles Herald Examiner, during and after Berkeley while the ‘Free Speech Movement’ had its day. Or when Columbia exploded. One of America’s most valuable Journalists was there, Juan González.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gonz%C3%A1lez_(journalist))

Nothing new under the sun? Except the mendacity of Neo-Conservatism and one of its junior members, Mr Stephens, who exercises his historical ignorance in the garb of enlightened centrism.

Neo-Conservatives have made a tradition of this particular brand demonizing of generations of Students finding their way in a University settings. Look to Allen Bloom and his ‘Closing of the American Mind’ as one of the templates used by the succeeding generation of Neo-Conservatives, to continue the fight against the perceived/invented, the reader must choose her side, Student Political Irrationalism. Except that Bloom’s diagnosis was that those ‘Students’ were addled by both ‘Rock and Roll’ and their own advanced narcissism. To engage is reductive psychology, Bloom’s hysterical diatribe had its root in his being ignored, as the dinosaur he was,  by the very Students he attacked with such venom. Like Bloom Stephens is a Prophet of Nihilism!   

Enter the hero of Mr. Stephens moralizing melodrama Robert Zimmer, the President of the University of Chicago. The usual technique of the respectable bourgeois commenter: proclaim themselves to be the voice of rational centrism, as opposed to the un-reason of the Students of the Left. Mr. Stephens cultivated historical ignorance doesn’t effect some of his readership, who recall vividly Theodore Hesburgh as fulfilling not an identical role/purpose as Zimmer,  but so disturbingly, even uncannily similar, to the ‘rationalists’ of present day America. Yet, he wasn’t quite the kind of political actor that Stephens might unreservedly admire. Mr. Zimmer fulfills the role of both scold and enforcer of respectable bourgeois political norms, that Mr. Stephens finds admirable.  A link to a web page in honor of Father Hesburgh is instructive:

‘A week after Father Hesburgh sent his letter to the student body, President Richard Nixon requested that he advise Vice President Spiro Agnew about federal legislation to control student violence on campuses because the vice president would be meeting with all the state governors to discuss and vote on the issue. He wrote a letter to the vice president opposing any sort of federal legislation or action regarding the issue, suggesting that students were often being portrayed unfairly and inaccurately and suggesting that the colleges and universities themselves were better suited to deal with their own communities. When the governors first gathered, more than 40 of them were prepared to vote for federal action, but after reading Father Hesburgh’s letter, more than 40 of them voted against federal legislation.

In October 1969, Father Hesburgh more publicly expressed his own disagreement with U.S. policy in Vietnam, and signed an open letter with other college and university presidents calling on the government to accelerate its withdrawal of troops.’

http://hesburgh.nd.edu/fr-teds-life/the-notre-dame-president/the-60s-and-student-activism/

History and its civic actors, and the political nuances expressed by  those actors, are inconvenient to a perpetual political present. This ‘present’ is by definition history-less, in sum, free floating, ambiguous, cultivated by a writer, whose opinionating is defined by a complete lack of curiosity, and a political program that, in fact, renders that lack of curiosity usable to the ends of propaganda.

Committed Observer