StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr.Collins, in your latest essay, present yourself as the ‘voice of reason’, the usual gambit of the propagandist/apologist, as opposed to the ‘political irrationalism’, indeed the Radical Political Romanticism of the Brexiteers i.e. British Gaullists!

That last word really is the mot juste, because the leading advocates and chief architects of Britain’s departure from the EU—Gove, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan—between them are drawing on a conception of the nation in which the dormant spirit of liberty is being reborn. This is not the chauvinistic nationalism of the BNP or the less appetising parts of Ukip. This is a nostalgic yearning for a Britain of recovered glory. It is British Gaullism.

The Nation State is superseded by the political/historical delusion that the EU is the culmination of The Enlightenment.

Your summation of the Brexiteers position is worthy of the tabloid:

You can tell yourself you are voting for freedom, sovereignty and independence, but you can’t even bank on taking back control of your own dead chickens.

Or your maladroit, veiled attack on the unsavory potential of Gaullism:

De Gaulle’s almost excessive patriotism was the thread that tied together his career, and this is the thread that brings together the most prominent Brexiteers too. It is always something that has a darker shadow, and there were occasional hints at where the feeling might head if it were to be deployed by a less savoury movement, such as the later Front National. But, so long as de Gaulle was in situ, he was able to express a faith in the efficacy and nobility of France, which was crucial after the humiliations of the war.

Your position is that the Brexiteers are all of a piece, not so! J.G.A. Pocock wrote one of the most succinct,valuable and sensible comments on the Brexit Vote in the London Review of Books :

J.G.A. Pocock

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

The EU and its precursor the Common Market, was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, the Technocrat Supreme, he midwived a coal and steel cartel, that morphed into the ersatz democracy of the EU. See Francois Duchene’ hagiography ‘Jean Monnet:The First Statesman of Interdependence’ for the particulars on this ‘coalition builder’. See also the 1997 collection of essay titled ‘The Question of Europe’ edited by Peter Gowan & Perry Anderson.

Consider the fact that the EU leadership will now be shared by Merkel and Jupertarian/Authoritarian Macron. While ‘tens of thousands’ gather in the streets of Paris to vent their anger at the Neo-Liberal Golden Boy, just four months after his ascent to power! The willful forgetting of the near 37% of abstentions,spoiled or otherwise uncountable ballots, marks the necessary political amnesia of the Neo-Liberals ! Read Anne-Sylvaine Chassany’s Financial Times report here on the festivities, led by that shopworn Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Another Political Romantic?

https://www.ft.com/content/c082bd48-a1d6-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2

What do you defend? Your status as ‘Expert’! How many ‘speech writers‘ can claim that status? And your near interminable, one man Bill of Attainder, lacks two important components of effective propaganda: brevity and an easily recalled slogan: British Gaullism?

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/britains-new-gaullists

Headline: Emmanuel Macron makes radical appeal for more powerful EU

Sub-headline: French leader soft-pedals on eurozone reform in speech brimming with proposals

https://www.ft.com/content/37c54ebc-a2ad-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c98a2

Macron proclaims a Neo-Liberal New Deal? Jupertarian/Authoritarian politics as argued by the E.U.’s FDR? What of those tens of thousands of dissenting French voters, that  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany reported on, in the pages of this newspaper?

https://www.ft.com/content/c082bd48-a1d6-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2

Why would the utterly shopworn Marxist Mr Mélenchon, as argued by Ms. Chassany, attract this many malcontents, just four months after Macron’s election?

Mr. Macron’s list of proposals is quite impressive, yet this list completely avoids the imperative of a complete reform of the E.U.: from a Federation of Technocrats into a real and functionally effective democracy. In sum, the Common Market, that evolved into the E.U., was and remains a cartel with the trappings of democracy: Neo-Liberalism avant la lettre!

Should the reader look to ‘The Big Read’ , reportage by a very large committee? Jim Brunsden and Mehreen Khan in Brussels, and Stefan Wagstyl in Berlin, for more of the same ‘reform chatter‘? Additional reporting by Michael Stothard in Madrid, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Paris and Claire Jones in Frankfurt (Dated September 25,2017) The pressing question, who stitched this together?

Headline: European leaders aim to seize the moment for reform

Sub-headline: But with Angela Merkel weakened despite her election victory, a new grand bargain for the eurozone will be more complicated

https://www.ft.com/content/00ad3640-9eea-11e7-9a86-4d5a475ba4c5

Given the pallid victory of Merkel, and Macron’s laundry list of less than earthshaking proposals – the regular reader of this newspaper can, and does, expect the latest permutations of E.U. apologetics. Or call it the evolution of the Party Line on the mythical ‘E.U. Reform’, that clings to the vision of Technocrat par excellence Jean Monnet: a  gussied up cartel.

Committed Observer

Neo-Con David Brooks just can’t let go of the 1960’s. He was born in 1961, so he was 7 in 1968, the heyday of Abby Hoffman. As the protege of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., he just repeats the Buckley Hysterics on Hoffman, he learned at the Master’s knee.

How is this relevant? The political fact of Trump has led the whole of the American Political Class, to search outside their own mendacious self-apologetics, for the reasons for the rise of this Know-Nothing.

Brooks in his desperation to find a ‘reason’ for the rise of Trump, instead of facing his actual responsibility, he takes Abbie Hoffman, as the historical persona that now provides the template for Trump! Hoffman was clown, provocateur, nihilist, the perfect fit for this maladroit exercise of political displacement by Brooks.

Locate Trump and Trumpism in a past that many of his readers know next to nothing about, as a cover for his own exercise of a political irrationalism, based on ‘Straussian Principals’ , as interpreted by his American Epigones/Apologists.

Call Brooks’ political moralizing by its name, a rationalization for American Exceptionalism. Not to forget that Strauss and Schmitt were allies in a pervasive bellicosity : Mr. Brooks masks his bellicosity/nihilism behind the pose of Humility.

Committed Observer

Headline: Mélenchon plays old tunes to mobilize the opposition to Macron

As the dust settles four months after Emmanuel Macron’s centrist hurricane made landfall on the French political scene, one unlikely survivor is still standing: Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Reacting to Mr Macron’s comments, a few days earlier, that “democracy is not the street”, Mr Mélenchon went on to deliver some of his most controversial attacks to date: “Mr President, you need to consult France’s history to learn that the street killed the kings. The street shot down the Nazis, the street secured a fourth week of paid leave, the street killed the Juppé plan, the street secured the withdrawal of the CPE.”

It is a paradox that at, at a time of profound political renewal in France, a 66-year-old far-left politician has emerged as Mr Macron’s main political opponent. Macronism seems to be a product of the failure of old ideologies.

Amid all the disruption, Mr Mélenchon, with his old-school Marxist rhetoric, seems to have found an opening. His speech on Saturday was a predictable anti-capitalist rant portraying Mr Macron as an “oligarch” seeking to oppress the masses. Never afraid to exaggerate, Mr Mélenchon labelled Mr Macron’s reform drive “a social coup d’état”.

By starting his term with pro-business reforms and tax breaks for the wealthy, Mr Macron has allowed Mr Mélenchon to exploit a very French suspicion of money and so to revive the old right-left divide.

Never fear Mr. Luce’s lack of candor and failure to confront the Republican Party’s ‘rapprochement’ with racism, since Goldwater, and the exodus of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party, into the Republican Party:this after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The Silent Majority allied to the Southern Strategy of Nixon, were the keys to his winning in 1968.

The perception that the Republican Party had served as the “vehicle of white supremacy in the South”, particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years.^[4]

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

Add to this political toxicity the ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’ of Reagan’s 1976 campaign. And his 1980 speech at the Neshoba County Fair where he embraced States Rights, not many miles from where Civil Rights Workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered. Then there is Bush The Elder and his Willie Horton campaign, masterminded by the unmourned Lee Atwater. Given this history of a pervasive political toxicity why is Trump , the protege of the vile Roy Cohn, a surprise? 

Not to forget the contribution of the New Democrats, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Welfare Reform with the highfalutin title of ‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act’, the Crime Bill, ‘Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act’  and NAFTA  as part of their Reganite political agenda, that simply reified the Republican’s political toxicity. Mr. Luce as Pundit operates in a self-serving and history-less political present!

Kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem is described in the blandest of terms by Mr. Luce

The practice began last December when Colin Kaepernick, the African American former San Francisco 49ers star, knelt in protest at the alleged targeting of blacks by law enforcement agencies. More than two-thirds of NFL players are black.

Trump is the undeniable proof of the political/ethical collapse of the whole of America’s political class, not just a Republican Party awash in its own destructive, mendacious history. Trump is a strutting Caudillo, created by the most unwelcome guest in American life: Network Television.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/c571fe0c-a183-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2

Ms. Rana Foroohar opens her essay with an attack on a well practiced American tradition of public protest. If you feel you have been wronged, especially when it is by an institutionalized power, you take  your case to the Court of Public Opinion! That is what Emma Sulkowicz did. If this was supposed to shock the Financial Times reader, the question arises where do these readers live? Ms. Foroohar isn’t the most practiced dramaturge on staff at this newspaper. The seeking of redress, when you feel that you have been wronged, is a valid tool to make your point to other members of the civic body, in this case the student body.

After some preliminarily self-serving potted history the reader arrives at her Bill of Attainder:

Meanwhile, the protests themselves have an anti-intellectual tenor that has begun to worry many observers. During the past few years, students and academics have demanded conservative speakers and even liberals who don’t spout the party line not be allowed to lecture on campus, in some cases citing psychological research to argue that their words could induce psychological stress that was tantamount to physical violence. Books and lectures that might offend various sensibilities now come with “trigger” warnings. Professors are being directed to ask students in the beginning of each new class which pronoun they prefer to be addressed by. In the summer of 2015, a wave of campus protests broke out at dozens of schools from the University of Missouri to Yale, with students pushing universities to implement even broader policies designed to keep them “safer” from offence (eg micro-aggression training seminars that teach how to discuss race and gender “properly”; additional college-funded research centres focused on issues of identity).

The regular reader of New York Magazine can ,every Friday, count on Andrew Sullivan to provide anti-student hysterics as part of his regular column, call it what it is screeching. The contemporary American anti-student hysteria was pioneered by Neo-Conservative scold Allen Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind.  See Essays on the Closing of the American Mind‘ by Robert L. Stone (Editor) for a set of devastating replies to Bloom’s near hysterical polemic. Attacking students radicalism used to be the exclusive domain of Conservatives. But even respectable bourgeois Liberals are finding hysteria mongering, against the menace of these radicals, student and antifas, as a tool to prop up their ebbing political relevance.  Peter Beinart, at The Atlantic, exploits another facet of  what Ms. Foroohar presents in terms of her comments on Charlottesville.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/

For an informative history of Neo-Conservatism and its roots in the conflicts between Alcove One and Two at New York’s City College see ‘The Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy’ by Murray Friedman. Read chapter two titled The Premature Jewish Neo-Conservatives, the list of student radicals is quite impressive: Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Melvin Lasky, Sidney Hook. Why is this relevant to Ms. Foroohar’s essay? The above named ‘Leftists‘ all became respectable Public Intellectuals, not to speak of becoming zealous Neo-Conservatives.

Look to Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement of 1964 at Berkley, the rise of S.D.S.,  Tom Hayden as one of its leaders/founders and drafted S.D.S.’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. He became a California State assemblymen and senator.

For more of the same of Anti-Student/Anti-Intellectualism see Tenured Radicals by  Roger Kimball or Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus by the Dinesh D’Souza for more precursors to Ms. Foroohar’s jejune polemic. 

The remainder of the essay is devoted to the Sins of not ‘Liberals’ but of the arch-enemy of Conservative chatterers,the Student Left that in its argumentative desperation mentions Charlottesville as exemplary.

The University is a laboratory in which students attempt to find their life way and political path, as my earlier examples demonstrates.  Ms. Foroohar’s cast of characters exceeds her ability to grasp their meaning, except in terms of producing a Political Melodrama that serves the ends of propaganda.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/902581a0-99ff-11e7-b83c-9588e51488a0

@Cheapside

Eureka! I have found my Boswell! And the screen name Cheapside isn’t just a self-serving ruse to avoid the honesty of signing her/his name, but has a meaning:

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

Cheapside is one of the 24 who, at least, looked at my blog! I thank you all for clicking on the link. I feel like Sally Field accepting her Oscar, almost! And kudos to Cheapside for articulating your malice with such brio: invective like this appears in these pages only when Janan Ganesh channels Baudelaire.

Regards to all,

StephenKMackSD

P.S. SD stands for San Diego, California, have fun with that!

‘Uber’ is NOT ‘a ride-hailing service‘! It is a Neo-Liberal scheme, to avoid the power of municipalities and states to regulate taxi services, in the public interest! TINA, as Mrs. Thatcher used to opine, is the position of this newspaper! In sum, The Wisdom of the Market, that Hayekian self-serving cover for greed, at the expense of others unworthy of the protections the state can provide, remains in its pride of place!  Where else but the Financial Times would the case be argued, in defense of the new political order of collapsed Neo-Liberalism, by the back door? The transportation of citizens from place to place, in a political environment ruled by the dog eat dog of Hayek’s ersatz Utopianism!

Should the critical reader look to the ‘allegations’ by the TfL? The blocking, by Greyball software, of the regulators monitoring of ‘Uber’ qualifies as tatmount to lawlessness, except to Free Market apologists!

But TfL changed its stance this week, saying Uber would not be issued with a new operating licence once its current one expired on September 30. It listed a series of criticisms, alleging a laissez-faire attitude to passenger safety and the use of Greyball software to block regulators from seeing the app in the city. Uber has confirmed it intends to challenge the ruling.

London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan states the glaring obvious:

“All companies in London must play by the rules and adhere to the high standards we expect — particularly when it comes to the safety of customers,” said London mayor Sadiq Khan, backing TfL’s decision. “Providing an innovative service must not be at the expense of customer safety and security.”

Here is the Free Market argument presented by the FT, and its mouthpiece Tony Travers, of the prestigious London School of Economics, not just a bit of garnish by ‘reporters’ Aliya Ram, Madhumita Murgia and Tanya Powley :

“There’s no question this is a titanic battle of our time,” says Tony Travers, a professor of local government at the London School of Economics. “It’s a clash between the modern and ancient worlds.”

It is NOT a clash between ‘the modern world’, meaning  an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal model, based on the almighty Market , vs the ancient world of state intervention acting for the public good. In the civic/ethical/political spheres that have been touched by the long reach of Free Market Utopianism catastrophe follows!

More of the same Party Line:

Others say that TfL’s decision shows a blinkered view of innovation and a reluctance to adapt to the future.

But what of the drivers for ‘Uber’ who are the very victims of that ‘TINA’ shouted by Thatcher and her political epigones? Where do these citizens find a reliable source of income to support themselves and their families? Not a question that Hayek and his epigones at The Financial Times can answer. Except to provide more Free Market solutions – call it more of the same, the legacy of failure. The blunt instrument that is the favorite tool, to attack the wisdom of Left-wing Social Democrats, while the abysmal failure of the Free Market produced the economic desperation that makes ‘Uber’ such an ‘enticing solution‘.

The ‘as if ‘ here is that the FT and its Free Market allies care about the flourishing of its fellow citizens, who are not wealthy, and don’t share the Conservative belief that the ‘lower orders’ cannot be redeemed!  Redeemed is the proper word, as The Free Market belief system, is in fact an ersatz Theology. With its Saints, Sinners, its Purgatory, Heaven and Hell and even its God and Lucifer: the question is where is its Milton?

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/2b12a62a-9f8c-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946

Rich Lowry’s latest essay features the two villains of American Conservatism: ‘liberal analysts’ and the scourge of  ‘a valueless international relativism’! Mr. Lowry suffers from an advanced case of a self-serving ideological myopia, because those ‘liberal analysts’ are in fact die hard Neo-Liberals, not to speak of craven apologists for the American Empire. But just not in the way that Mr. Lowry finds acceptable. Those ‘liberal analysts’ and Lowry share a wholehearted belief in American Exceptionalism.

On the question of  ‘a valueless international relativism’: the first query of this assertion of Conservative belief , just presents itself as ‘relative’ to what? The careful reader might look to this notion as the nebulous specter,that has haunted ‘Conservatism’ since the various European Enlightenments. The charge/condition, the propaganda against  ‘relativism’ dates from Burke, de Maistre, Disraeli, Oakeshott, Schmitt, Strauss, Kirk and even Wm. F. Buckley Jr.! The defense of established power, whether a landed aristocracy, or the bought and paid for republicanism of present day America, is what Mr. Lowry is defending: the Empire mired in a War on eight fronts, and a political class confronted by its self-created reality of this political Know-Nothing.

Mr. Lowry’s defensiveness of Trump takes its inspiration for the fact that daffodils grow out of soil enriched by the careful application of manure, yet he fails to address the fact that very destructive weeds also take nourishment from this enriched soil.

Committed Observer

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/20/rich-lowry-sovereignty-trump-un-215629

Is it a surprise that The Financial Times provides editorial/advertising space to a plutocrat with something to pitch: Bloomberg Global Business Forum? Mr. Bloomberg presents himself as the antidote to the Trump Political Nihilism. Here is his indictment of Trump:

Since January, the Trump administration has been signalling a retreat from the institutions that have played a central role in preserving world order and advancing economic progress over the past seven decades. The president’s failure to affirm Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty at last spring’s Nato summit, his decision to pull out of the UN’s Paris climate agreement, his proposed cuts to foreign aid, and his snail-paced filling of the highest-ranking state department positions have left world leaders questioning America’s commitment to global engagement. They have also diminished the ability of the US to exercise soft power.

Just a cursory look at the Bloomberg political record presents the reader with the fact that he is a Corporatist with a Plantation Mentality, that fits quite comfortably with the present leadership of The Republican Party of Trump:

On Stop and Frisk:

Mr. Bloomberg had Judge Shira A. Scheindlin removed from the case, billionaires have powers of ‘persuasion’ mortals don’t possess. A telling excerpt from her exit interview with The New York Times:

She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”

“They seemed out of touch with the issues that the communities cared about,” Judge Scheindlin said. “They didn’t seem to understand the impact of these policies on real people and real neighborhoods and real communities and the detrimental impact it was having, even on policing. And that’s the point. They didn’t seem to get it. It was all about fear — New York would blow up.”

On the his support for the Neo-Liberal swindle of the ‘Charter Schools‘:

I read Mr. Luce’s essay last night. I checked America’s political gossip sheet, Politico, this morning looking for some critique of the Trump UN address. Where are those fabled ‘Adults in the Room’ (Scowcroft, Baker, etc.), who presented themselves as the voices of reason in the Republican Party, when the Neo-Cons ruled American Foreign Policy, during the Bush II administration?

Then I checked The New York Times, and what I found was this synopsis of opinion from the ‘Right’ and then the ‘Left’ of the stunted political spectrum in America, as ‘reported’ by Anna Dubenko:

All of these comments were from professional ‘journalists’ who specialize in writing opinion columns. As a measure of the self-serving political myopia of both the Times and Ms. Dubenko, Neo-Con Eli Lake is identified as a ‘Centrist‘!

Another question that begs to be asked is where are the New Democrats? Are Pelosi and Schumer hoping, that if they refrain from critical comment on the Trump speech, their deal on the Debt and DACA, will remain safe from Trumpian Political Plunder? Mrs. Clinton is on a book tour, that leaves her little time, except for her self-apologetic that features her Myterdom as her central idée fixe: Bernie Bros and the creepy Trump!

Should the reader expect Sen. McCain to sound a note of dissent in the Party? The Senator who sang Bomb,Bomb, Bomb Iran might just support a simultaneous War with both Iran and North Korea. But what of the War on Terror, now being fought on eight fronts? Are the treasuries of the American Empire bottomless? Are there enough young lives to be sacrificed to Trump’s hubris?

Am I the only regular reader of Mr. Luce’s column, who detects a note of resignation in his tone? And on the question of Mr. Miller, he is just a continuation of Bannon’s infernal Plantation Mentality.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/448c3790-9d59-11e7-9a86-4d5a475ba4c5