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Headline: The Sun King: Macron burnishes his presidential image

Sub-headline: French lap up ostentatious display of grandeur from youthful head of state

From the utterly shameless, what to call it, kowtowing,worshipful, obsequious stance of The Financial Times towards Macron, the reader just might think that they are reading an excerpt of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs. Or is that just hyperbole to match the bowing and scraping that has become the stance of this ‘newspaper’, and one of its ‘reporters’ in this instance Michael Stothard? He, at one point, offer a telling insight: ‘is so contrived as to invite mockery.’ but only for a moment.

Then there is this from Mr. Stothard: ‘But, it seems, the French public is lapping up the ostentatious display of grandeur from their 39-year-old head of state.’ The reader sees not the admiring throngs of worshipful voters, but tight close-up  photos of Macron riding in a military jeep, with world leaders, and in a nuclear submarine, reeking normalien confident leadership. Mr. Stothard lapses into what can only be called parody with this: He gave Donald Trump a bone-crushing handshake in their first meeting, saying France was not there to make “small concessions”. We are not ushered, but strong armed, into the territory of the Prime Time Soap Opera featuring on-the-skids Hollywood Stars! Mr. Stothard himself enters into the dread territory of  ‘is so contrived as to invite mockery.’ !

One really important fact is left out, is in fact erased from this hagiography, that vexing and potentially lethal but very inconvenient fact of that 57% Abstention rate that ‘swept’ Macron into office.

Macron takes as his model of leadership Charles de Gaulle:

Mr Macron’s official portrait, which is heavy in symbolism, contains an open copy of de Gaulle’s wartime memoirs. “Like de Gaulle, I am choosing the best of the [political] right, the best of the left and even the best of the centre,” Mr Macron said at a political rally in Paris in April.

The political parallels with Leftist turned Neo-Liberal Mitterrand as ‘titan of late-20th century France’ and Neo-Liberal Obama and Trudeau make for a more easily acceptable  political symmetry, as answer of the Populists of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ who threaten the construct of the Post-War Liberal Order.

Even  Le Monde has some harsh words for Macron as reported by Mr.Stothard :

Le Monde, the powerful French daily, last month complained that while “not a day goes by” without images of Mr Macron all over social media or on the news, they were not designed to “explain his policy” to the French people but to “sculpt his own image”.

For some enlightening  background on Le Monde and its reputation as a newspaper see this essay by Perry Anderson at The London Review of Books of September 2, 2004:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/perry-anderson/degringolade

Some informative excerpts:

The vitality of France’s culture under De Gaulle was not merely a matter of these eminences. Another sign of it was possession of what was then the world’s finest newspaper, Le Monde. Under the austere regime of Hubert Beuve-Méry, Paris enjoyed a daily whose international coverage, political independence and intellectual standards put it in a class by itself in the Western press of the period. The New York Times, the Times or Frankfurter Allgemeine were provincial rags by comparison.

…

More generally, a sense of cheapening and dumbing down, the intertwining of intellectual with financial or political corruption, has become pervasive. Press and television, long given to the incestuous practices of le renvoi d’ascenseur – is there an equivalent so expressive in any other language? – have lost earlier restraints, not only in their dealing with ideas, but with business and power. The decline of Le Monde is emblematic. Today, the paper is a travesty of the daily created by Beuve-Méry: shrill, conformist and parochial, increasingly made in the image of its website, which assails the viewer with more fatuous pop-ups and inane advertisements than an American tabloid. The disgust that many of its own readers, trapped by the absence of an alternative, feel for what it has become was revealed when a highly uneven polemic against the trio of managers who have debauched it – Alain Minc, Edwy Plenel and Jean-Marie Colombani – sold 200,000 copies, in the face of legal threats against the authors, later withdrawn to avoid further discomfiture of them in court.

La Face cachée du ‘Monde’, a doorstop of 600 pages mixing much damaging documentation with not a few inconsistencies and irrelevancies, unfolds a tale of predatory economic manoeuvres, political sycophancies and vendettas, egregious cultural back-scratching, and – last but not least – avid self-enrichment, unappetising by any standards. ‘Since Le Monde was founded,’ Beuve-Méry remarked after he retired, ‘money has been waiting below, at the foot of the stairs, to gain entry to the office of the editor. It is there, patient as always, persuaded that in the end it will have the final word.’ The media conglomerate erected by Colombani and his associates gives notice that it has taken up occupation. But, powerful a motive though greed at the top may be, the journalism they represent is too pervasive to be explained simply by this. A deeper focus can be found in Serge Halimi’s exposure of the interlocking complicities – across the spectrum – of establishment commentary on public affairs, in Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde (1997). What this sardonic study of mutual fawning and posturing among the talking heads and editorial sages of Parisian society shows is a system of connivance based at least as much on ideological as material investment in the market.

Mr. Mr.Stothard ends his essay with this :

Laurent Bouvet, a political science professor at Versailles University, says that building up the office of the presidency might not help Mr Macron push though his reformist agenda this year — but was proving popular for now.

“Macron has allowed French people to respect the presidency again,” Mr Bouvet adds.

Mr. Macron’s ‘reformist agenda’ is a euphemism for Neo-Liberalization of the whole of French political/civic life, nothing less : The Catastrophe awaits!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/42543a76-665a-11e7-9a66-93fb352ba1fe

As a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan I find his reputation as an American Pundit a function of his self-advertisement, wedded to his abysmal ignorance of American political, social history.  Some examples from Mr. Sullivan’s July 7, 2017 essay:

But the loyalty endures — even deepens. “For now, there’s no way out, only through, and through it together,” writes Rich Lowry, explaining why he, and his magazine, National Review, are now in favor of party over country. Lowry was, you may recall, a prominent Never Trumper, throwing the entire Buckley legacy against the parvenu narcissist during the Republican primaries.

‘…throwing the entire Buckley legacy against the parvenu narcissist during the Republican primaries.’ If anyone qualifies for the status of ‘ parvenu narcissist’ it is Wm. F. Buckley Jr.! Son of a Texas lawyer and very successful oil speculator, who moved his family east to Sharon Connecticut. ‘God and Man at Yale’ and ‘McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning’ prefigured?

For the particulars on the peripatetic Buckley Family and Buckley fils :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr.

And the notion of that ‘Buckley legacy’  is that Mr. Buckley somehow represented ‘Conservatism’s Virtue’ when his notorious 1955 essay on ‘Civil Rights’ which was once available for the internet reader, has been subject to political erasure, an old Stalinist strategy!  That essay rehearsed the the rationalizations of  Apartheid South Africa!

Mr. Sullivan then shifts his focus just enough to attack the ‘…conventional wisdom on the left.’ which, in sum, means an attack on the brilliant American scholar Michelle Alexander’s and her The New Jim Crow:

Here’s a book review I just came across that seems to me an intellectual shift. It’s a review of a new book by Fordham law professor John Pfaff, Locked In, about mass incarceration in America, and it upends a plank of conventional wisdom on the left. The book argues strongly against the notion that our vast and indefensible prison-industrial complex was deliberately created by an explicitly racist war on drugs that swept up nonviolent drug offenders, primarily black, from the 1980s on. The data don’t back it up:

Mr Sullivan presents the the fact that The New York Review of Books published  this essay by David Cole as a demonstration that that Review still has ‘Left Credentials’ :

In case you think I’m just rehashing a conservative critique of the excesses of today’s racial left, I should let you know that this review was written by David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU. It’s published by The New York Review of Books. And its aim is toward prosecutorial reform, rather than racial grandstanding. It seems to me we need more of the former, and a good deal less of the latter.

As a reader of The New York Review of Books for over forty years, I have observed a Rightward political shift, starkly demonstrated by this essay by Lincoln Caplan of December 5, 2013. A long quotation from this review is revelatory of the shift to the Right of The New York Review of Books:

For some very informative background on the notion/practice of ‘Judicial Restraint’ and the part this idea played in the career of Learned Hand. And his ‘evolution’ on the question of Brown v. Board, from support to opposition, see this New York Review of Books essay by Lincoln Caplan. He reviews Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand: 1897–1961 edited by Constance Jordan, with a preface by Ronald Dworkin.(Behind a pay wall)

Headline: Police braced for further G20 violence

Sub-headline: Scale of Hamburg clashes casts a pall over showcase for German diplomacy

“It looks like war,” one resident told German TV. “This has nothing to do with protest — it’s raw violence and destruction.”

The Rebellion Against The Elites continues in its starkest form, at the G20. Why is this a surprise? Its become a tradition to disrupt the cites in which these gatherings of that Elite take place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-WEF_protests_in_Switzerland,_January_2003

The movement is characterized by the massive citizen protests and alternative summits which have, for the last decade, accompanied most meetings of the G8, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. The movement came to the attention of many in the US when activists temporarily shut down the 1999 WTO Ministerial in Seattle. This represented, however, just one of a series of Global Justice protests,including those at the 1988 World Bank/IMF meetings in Germany,^[8] “IMF riots” beginning in Lima in 1975, over cuts in the social safety net presided over by IMF and other international organizations, and spreading through the world,^[9][10] and “water wars” in Bolivia and South Africa.^[11]

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

Those Black Block Nihilists become the object of  bourgeois anger, wedded to agonizing over their lawlessness destruction, while Capitalism in its Neo-Liberal phase is the very definition of lawless disregard for human lives, and the very survival of the planet. Austerity for the Lower Orders and massive profits for the Robber Barons of the dismal political present, and their servants in the Managed Democracies of the ‘West’ ! A quote from Voltaire is more than apt: “Ecrasez l’infame”

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/14f0397c-63c1-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614

The Financial Times assigns ‘reporter’ Mamta Badkar the task of ballyhooing the June Jobs Report. Of course, the comments section is closed, the editors of this Tory tabloid knows their readership.

Now, this essay features the usual graphs, that chart the rise and fall of the various economic indicators, and framed in the Techno-Speak of the current expression of the Economic Theology. Note that this theological vocabulary partakes of the philosophical mendacity of  Leo Strauss, and the arcane neologisms of the comparable vocabulary of Heidegger, mixed with a radical nostalgia for the ‘primordial language of the Greek Golden Age‘: Attic vs Demotic Greek in its crudest form.  In the case of the Financial Times their particular political nostalgia is for the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations,  rather than the historical Smith, that gives equal weight to The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  The Party Line of The Financial Times is that Keynes is in eclipse, yet the Trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman is demonstrably failed. Self apologetics the central motive of this political intervention, not to speak of a fear of their readership!

The very expression of ‘wages disappoint’ is utterly vacuous, given the fact that worker insecurity is one of the pillars of Neo-Liberalism. Even if the Greenspan quotation on that matter has become muddled, in its many misquotations and paraphrases, it expresses not just a contempt for workers of all kinds, it expresses Neo-Liberalism as representative of a class of Platonic Guardians, in sum a New Feudalism, in which Capital replaces the Royalty of the past, as the answer to the unending political/economic crisis of the Democratic West. The inability of those Economic Technocrats to bring back an utterly elusive economic prosperity, the Crash of 2008 has metastasized into a permanent crisis.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/7a3e1288-5cda-3da9-9209-1db03419bc27

Thank you Officer Mark McKibben for your call of July 3, 2017 letting me know that my brother was found dead. He had been homeless for some time, and we had lost contact for many reasons…

StephenKMackSD

http://mec.lacounty.gov/wps/portal/mec

One Neo-Liberal Grifter replaced by a more seasoned veteran, at running the con ! Or should they both be called ‘Creative Disruptors’, in Financial Times speak? Uber is not a ‘Internet Service’ but a taxi service, that seeks to avoid regulation by State/Municipal government of such services, in the public interest . ‘The Public Interest’ a totally outmoded notion in the Age of the collapse of that ‘Free Market Mirage’. That Public Interest, another holdover from a once functioning polity, that took the shared political/civic destiny of The Commonwealth as it foundation, not the Political Romantic vision of the Mont Pelerin Society capitalist apologists. 

Arianna Huffington as savior of Uber! Arianna almost out does that canny old self-promoter Norman Podhoretz, in his classic cynical declaration in  ‘Making It’ . Except that ‘Our Little Greek Girl’ lacks Mr. Podhoretz’s loathsome cynicism. Ms. Huffington is all emotive gush over life’s opportunities, while carefully maintaining her status as acolyte of Milton Friedman!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/142d3396-5de5-11e7-9bc8-8055f264aa8b

This reader just wonders at Mr. Evan R. Goldstein’s essay on Jonathan Haidt with the headline: ‘Can Jonathan Haidt Calm the Culture Wars?’ The wonder can be defined by the question: does Mr. Goldstein think that that some of the readership of  The Chronicle of Higher Education has a memory no longer that the Golden Age of Reagan? Because we’ve seen Mr. Haidt before, in the political guise of Ronald Reagan, who won the governorship of California in 1966 using anti-student hysterics: the Free Speech Movement of 1964 led by the Mario Savio. Mr. Haidt is a politician posing as a ‘Social Scientist‘!

BERKELEY – Ronald Reagan launched his political career in 1966 by targeting UC Berkeley’s student peace activists, professors, and, to a great extent, the University of California itself. In his successful campaign for governor of California, his first elective office, he attacked the Berkeley campus, cementing what would remain a turbulent relationship between Reagan and California’s leading institution for public higher education.

“This was not a happy relationship between the governor and the university — you have to acknowledge it,” recalled Neil Smelser, who was a Berkeley professor of sociology during the Reagan years. “As a matter of Reagan’s honest convictions but also as a matter of politics, Reagan launched an assault on the university.”

As the Vietnam War expanded and the death toll climbed, students at Berkeley launched a determined and, at times, confrontational attempt to stop the war with demonstrations and protests that eventually spread to college campuses across the country. Years later, much of the public came to agree with the students but in 1966, those opposed to the war were a distinct minority in America. Candidate Reagan capitalized on this.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml

Can a history of attacking students leave out the career of S. I. Hayakawa?

Student strike at San Francisco State College

In 1968–69, there was a bitter student and Black Panthers strike at San Francisco State University in order to establish an ethnic studies program. It was a major news event at the time and chapter in the radical history of the United States and the Bay Area. The strike was led by the Third World Liberation Front supported by Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the countercultural community.

It proposed fifteen “non-negotiable demands”, including a Black Studies department chaired by sociologist Nathan Hare independent of the university administration and open admission to all black students to “put an end to racism”, and the unconditional, immediate end to the War in Vietnam and the university’s involvement. It was threatened that if these demands were not immediately and completely satisfied the entire campus was to be forcibly shut down.^[7] Hayakawa became popular with conservative voters in this period after he pulled the wires out from the loud speakers on a protesters’ van at an outdoor rally.^[8][9][10] Hayakawa relented on December 6, 1968, and created the first-in-the-nation College of Ethnic Studies^[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa

The reader should not forget the careers and the propaganda interventions of Allen Bloom of ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ the 1987 bestseller? (Haidt even appropriates the Bloom rhetorical frame for his 2015 “The Coddling of the American Mind.”), the 1990 ‘Tenured Radicals’  by Roger Kimball? the 1991 book by Dinesh D’Souza Illiberal Education? The fomenting of political hysteria about the danger of Radical Students is a cottage industry for Right Wing! Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is just a more sophisticated/educated version of this reactionary type.

His academic specialization is the psychology of morality and the moral emotions.

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

Note also that Mr. Haidt studies the ‘psychology of morality’. It is not an investigation of morality, but of its psychology, which places it outside the exercise of moral evaluation proper, and into the realm of the Social Science, and renders it into a  quantifiable thing.  A business school might just choose such a highfalutin title as the ‘Psychology of Morality’ as cover for research into more effective advertising techniques, read manipulative propaganda whose bible is Edward L. Bernays who published his book called ‘Propaganda’ in 1928.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

Mr. Haidt simply politicizes those techniques in his ‘research’.   Look upon the ‘expert’, in sum a technocrat, the Social Psychologist to demonize the Radical Students, his credential are quite impressive. He appears to appeal to a political spectrum, yet that spectrum has been utterly distorted by the toxicity of the Neo-Liberal Mythology!  What do his critics say?

Neuroscientist Sam Harris criticized Haidt by arguing that Haidt’s defense of religion ends up justifying human sacrifice and superstition. In chapter 9 of The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt extends a comprehensive inquiry on the role of religion in society, concluding, merely, that the scientific community should recognize the evolutionary origins of religiosity, and accept its potential cognitive implications (p. 211).^[27]

Social psychologist John Jost wrote that Haidt “mocks the liberal vision of a tolerant, pluralistic, civil society, but, ironically, this is precisely where he wants to end up.”^[28]

Journalist Chris Hedges wrote a review of The Righteous Mind in which he accused Haidt of supporting “social Darwinism”.^[29] In his response, Haidt disagreed with Hedges’s reading of the book, most notably that Hedges took quotations from conservatives and inappropriately attributed them to Haidt.^[30]

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

How would a social scientist quantify that ‘psychology of morality’ except by interviews, and questionnaires that are both in need of a hermeneutics: a rational scientific interpretive matrix. Mr. Haidt’s ‘research’ provides the necessary cover for his attack on students:  the project of that hysteria mongering is not left merely to curmudgeonly Straussians or various Reactionary Ideologues, although that will continue, what this Social Psychologist offers is a ‘science based’ critique of the politically wayward malcontents, that is too mild a description of these political nihilists, at least in the view of Mr. Haidt!

Look to the notorious ‘Bell Curve’ as ‘Conservative Social Science’ in service to ideological ends. The search for bourgeois political respectability of Modern American Conservatism can also be seen in the careers of  judges like John Roberts and Niel Gorsuch: whose careers are in vivid contrast to the starkest examples of the person and the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork enjoys the status of Saint in  the Conservative Pantheon of  Martyrs. The fact that Bork resembled a character out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, made the imperative to be clean cut and respectable in appearance for both Roberts and Gorsuch. Bork taught the Neo-Confederate/Originalists a valuable lesson, at the least, present yourselves as within the respectable bourgeois political/judicial mainstream, and dress as if your are that. Deny all else, and chatter about the importance of stare decisis and other such articles of American Jurisprudential  Faith.

What of Mr. Haidt’s backers?

Haidt has a team of three staffers with him at NYU and three part-timers who work on a more ad hoc basis. Initial support for Heterodox Academy came from two small donors, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, best known for its support of the sciences, and the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, a tradition-minded backer of the arts and charter schools in New York City. This year the group received substantial support from Paul Singer, a hedge-fund billionaire active in Republican politics, which has allowed it to work with a Washington-area branding and public-relations firm. Haidt is cultivating a center-left donor and hopes to use those funds to rent office space and hire an executive director.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Gadfly/240311?key=2ZIPoiHsy9X3ZNGVLN4YvrK9ZZs1KWhBz010O-PCftXT1KFIDXHagaaR3q7QmshNZUZBRDV0YzJXemFoekJiQTIyelFpYjBXRVhNdS0zeV9TZVMwbHJHUFo5dw

The reader can only marvel at the supporters of Mr. Haidt’s Heterodox Academy! The Achelis and Bodman Foundation, supporters of Charter Schools and Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer. If Mr. Haidt is not a Neo-Liberal, his supporters are true believers, even practitioners of the political black art! Yet Mr. Haidt is a true Capitalist:  ‘He’s in such demand that he charges $30,000 per speech.’

Here an enlightening example of the Haidt intellectual process:

When he taught at Virginia, the psychology department hosted a weekly lunch presentation. One day the topic was women and math. The talk focused on how cultural messages girls receive dissuade them from pursuing math. Haidt proposed an alternative explanation: “We know that prenatal hormones influence the brain, changing all kinds of interests. Is it possible that girls are just less interested in math?” There was dead silence. “Wait,” he pressed. “Do you think hormones influence behavior?” More silence. “Nobody agreed, nobody disagreed, nobody would touch it,” he recalls. “That’s when I realized our science is suffering. Social science is really hard; it’s always multiple causal threads. If several threads are banned, then you cannot solve any problem.”

The perfect concatenation of The Atlantic Magazine, ‘The Aspen Ideas Festival’, David Petraeus, Jane Harman and Mr. Friedersdorf: in sum, America’s 30 Years War will continue until it’s apologists do what? Concoct a war against Iran? As the Devil that haunts the waking and dreaming life of these hacks, that are the natural inheritors of the paranoid fantasies of Samuel P. Huntington, and his ‘Clash’?  Everyone is not just a ‘potential enemy’ but an actual enemy: Carl  Schmitt’s Friend/Enemy crude political distinction becomes the central Dogma of The American National Security State? The question of AUMF raised by Harmon and the Constitution raised by Friedersdorf are an expression of what? The utter irrelevance of that Constitution: the imperatives of the American National Security State now rule as, not just primary, but of a pressing necessity: the Enemy is incapable of ‘rationality’, the theology of the Cold War re-framed for the more dire ‘Clash’.

Or will it be a war with Russia? that the New Democrats, Hillary Clinton and her allies at The State Dept. Victoria Nuland and Susan Rice, who would, if they could, bring that 30 Years War to a series of catastrophic denouements?

American Writer

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/david-petraeus-the-aumf-is-stretched-beyond-recognition/532443/#article-comments

A collection of ‘News Articles’ from The Financial Times :

Headline: Cristina Fernández to lead new alliance in Argentina elections

Sub-headline: Fiery populist’s comeback threatens to split opposition vote in legislative mid-terms

https://www.ft.com/content/3024e494-58ff-11e7-b553-e2df1b0c3220

Headline: Fernández eyes influential role in midterm Argentine elections

Sub-headline: Former president will have decisive impact on vote that may have economic implications

https://www.ft.com/content/b2404d44-503d-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

Headline: Argentina’s Mauricio Macri weathers storm as Peronists in disarray

Sub-headline: Floundering opposition struggles to challenge reform

https://www.ft.com/content/f580ec18-ea43-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539

Headline: Cristina Fernández charged in Argentina corruption case

Sub-headline: Former president suffers her biggest legal setback after public works accusations

https://www.ft.com/content/78c0dfa6-cc86-11e6-b8ce-b9c03770f8b

The lack of a legislative majority and the return of ‘fiery populist’ Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is causing political distress for Prat-Gay’s successor Nicolás Dujovne: he declares, as reported by Benedict Mander:

Mr Dujovne is confident that Ms Fernández will not return to the presidency.

“The principal tail risk is the return of populism, but that’s not going to happen,” he says. “Argentine society does not want to return to its past of authoritarianism, lies and corruption.”

Mr Dujovne‘s credentials are impressive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Dujovne

But nothing is more impressive than Mr. Prat-Gay’s CV, yet there is this:

Prat-Gay was appointed minister of financed in 2015, by president Mauricio Macri. In that capacity, he successfully ended the currency controls established by Cristina Kirchner and the sovereign default declared in 2001. He also helped to restore international relations, and the update of the figures of the wealth tax, which had not been updated in previous years in line with inflation. He had conflicting views of the economy with Federico Sturzenegger, president of the Central Bank of Argentina. By demand of president Macri, he resigned on December 26, 2016,^[15] and was succeeded by Nicolás Dujovne.^[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Prat-Gay

The Argentine Political Melodrama, as it unfolds in the august pages of  The Financial  Times is, in sum, about the Neo-Liberalization of an economic rogue state. That melodrama’s central conflict is between the Macri/Dujovne Righteous Reformers vs the utterly corrupt Fiery Populist Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. This has all the subtlety of a prime time television soap opera.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/eb97b124-5752-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f

Jonathan Bronitsky begins his review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s ‘The Genius of Judaism’ with generous assessment of his public career to date:

This was almost inevitably the destiny of a person who is brilliant, who inherited a massive fortune, who has been involved in a number of high-profile dalliances and marriages, and who has spent forty years in the international spotlight as a philosopher, filmmaker, war correspondent, playwright, columnist and human-rights activist. Lévy claims on his résumé, among other achievements, more than thirty books—including works of philosophy, fiction and biography—countless articles and multiple lifetimes’ worth of harrowing foreign adventures. He’s been hailed in the pages of the world’s leading publications as “a star,” “a phenomenon,” “a commanding figure,” “a fearless intellectual risk-taker,” even “Superman.” Perhaps the greatest proof of his stature is that he’s widely known simply as “BHL.”

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-vanity-bernard-henri-l%C3%A9vy-21306?page=show

Given the above Perry Anderson has a very different appraisal of Bernard-Henri Lévy in the September 2, 2004 edition of The London Review of Books:

The world of ideas is in little better shape. Death has picked off virtually all the great names: Barthes (1980); Lacan (1981); Aron (1983); Foucault (1984); Braudel (1985); Debord (1994); Deleuze (1995); Lyotard (1998); Bourdieu (2002). Only Lévi-Strauss, at 95, and Derrida, at 74, survive. No French intellectual has gained a comparable international reputation since. Lack of that is not a necessary measure of worth. But while individual work of distinctive value continues to be produced, the general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, far the best-known ‘thinker’ under 60 in the country. It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/perry-anderson/degringolade

Thomas Sheehan reviews M. Lévy’s ‘Barbarism with a Human Face’ and ‘Le testament de Dieu’ along with Alain de Benoist’s ‘Les idées à l’endroit’ and ‘Vu de droite’ in the New York Review of Books of  January 24, 1980. This adds not just philosophical insights, but necessary political context missing from the the linked review by W. Warren Wager. A short paraphrase by Mr. Sheehan, from the section dealing with Lévy’s ‘seven new commandments’ from  ‘Le testament de Dieu’ is instructive as to the beginning of Lévy’s ‘religious evolution’ ?

The choice, then, is the same as it was for Tertullian in the third century: Athens or Jerusalem. Lévy’s response is “Forget Athens.” In place of its supposed humanism (which in fact is the root of totalitarianism insofar as it subsumes the individual under the general) Lévy proposes “seven new commandments.” 1. The Law (Lévy’s stand-in for God, but not to be confused with any specific laws) is outside time and more holy than History. 2. There is no eschatological future; rather, every moment is the right moment for manifesting the Good. 3. The future is none of your business: act now. 4. Undertake no act that cannot be universalized for all men. 5. Truth, one’s own truth, is extraneous to the political order. 6. Practice resistance, without a theory and without belonging to a revolutionary party. 7. In order to engage yourself you must first of all disengage yourself. If we ask Lévy what all this might entail for day-to-day politics, he comes down on the side of a “liberal-libertarian” state, which would govern best by governing least.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/01/24/paris-moses-and-polytheism/

Next comes the assertion of M. Lévy of Judaism’s ‘universalism’ : Judaism is founded on the worship of Tribalism, and the key is the initiation rite of infant circumcision in the name of Yahweh. For all male members of the Tribe performed by a Moyle abiding by a Tradition.

Contrary to other religions, Lévy contends, Judaism’s “first commandment” is “the commandment of universalism,” “responsibility for the world,” the ethical directive to expose oneself “to the shadow of the outside world, the shadow of the Other, even the radically other,” a directive anyone, anywhere, anytime can promptly embrace. To be sure, this isn’t the thrust of Judaism; it’s the religion’s totality.

What follows is a protracted psychological analysis of the ‘a disillusioned radical soulfully seeking atonement.’ By way this :

The book is part of a very personal and protracted effort to construct and disseminate an outlook, a disposition, an anti-ideology capable of defeating the dogmas that deceived him during his youth. Lévy was educated at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1960s, “the bastion of the aristocracy of the revolutionary movement known as Maoism.” There in the French capital, in that topsy-turvy era, the leviathans of poststructuralism nourished his mind. Ginned up, he along with many of his classmates rallied behind the Khmer Rouge, the chic insurgency du jour, because the regime’s leaders had studied at the Sorbonne. Steeped in the theories of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Georges Canguilhem, the Khmer Rouge (purportedly) uniquely possessed the innovative knowledge needed to finally extinguish the oppressive quality of language, erase fascism from culture and fashion “the new man.” It would triumph because it would elude all the pitfalls that had derailed all previous Marxist enterprises. “We were sure,” Lévy writes, “that we were at the apogee of the age in which God had died. It had been beautiful. It had been huge.”

What the reader gets from Mr. Bronitsky is concerted effort to ‘explain’ M. Bernard-Henri Lévy, yet by his own admission Lévy’s ‘religion’ is in fact nonexistent. It is in fact a political position.

PERHAPS THE most surreal moment is Lévy’s confession on page 208 of his 230-page work: “I can barely read Hebrew. I do not say daily prayers. I do not follow the dietary laws. I am, moreover, a lay Jew who seldom visits synagogues and has not devoted so much time or energy to study.”

M. Lévy’s Islamaphobia is made clear by Mr. Bronitsky here:

Excusez-moi? (This comes after Lévy, who I would hazard does not possess a mastery of classical Arabic either, has authoritatively pronounced that Islam is divided between “throat-slitters” and the “enlightened,” that Islam needs “a Muslim Talmud,” and that fanatical imams are “the exception,” not “the rule.”)

Mr. Bronitsky also makes clear that any critique of Israel/Zionism i.e. BDS is prima facae Anti-Semitism:

Alas, eclipsed earlier in the book are novel insights into Judaism’s myriad contributions to French culture and Western civilization, as well as incisive reflections on anti-Semitism, namely its evolution and one of its most arresting contemporary expressions: the demonization of Israel.

M. Lévy is a Brand Name, he modeled his initials BHL after Yves Saint Laurent’s YSL Brand. He is the perfect French Philosopher for the collapsing Neo-Liberal Age. Perry Anderson’s withering comments of 2004 will echo long after Mr. Mr. Bronitsky’s maladroit apologetic is forgotten!

But while individual work of distinctive value continues to be produced, the general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, far the best-known ‘thinker’ under 60 in the country. It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?

Committed Observer

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-vanity-bernard-henri-l%C3%A9vy-21306?page=show