StephenKMackSD's Blog

@L

The particulars on StephenKMackSD: 71 year old queer white male, born and came of age in Southern California, attended Public Schools, Compton College and Long Beach State College in the 70’s. I have, since I dropped out of High School, been an avid reader, with an interest in politics and Intellectual History/Philosophy. I am intellectually ambitious and opinionated! I am on Twitter,Facebook and have a blog. I also sign my name to every one of my comments, and use pseudonyms on my blog posts to give my polemics an ironic edge, at least that is my aspiration.

I see you’ve been busy riding herd on the ‘nonconformists’ here at the FT comments section, congratulations as one commenter to another. You are a stern taskmaster! The Neo-Liberal Dispensation is in an advanced state of decay, except to those obsessed with a nostalgia for a Feudalism re-imagined by the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Coterie, or better yet The Mont Pelerin Society.  Filtered through the political prism of both the Tories and New Labour.

The remainder of your comment taken up with your fictional description of the lesser political beings, who represent the marginal and the undeserving: the losers in the failed Neo-Liberal/Corporatist Project who are that 99% that both Occupy Wall Street and Picketty chronicled.

One of the most unattractive British traits, I’ll just assume your British, as you speak with a kind of authority for places and people, is a  class bias that is all pervasive. Not to speak of shocking to an American, who is used to a self-serving hypocrisy about social/economic class . In 1958 Eugene Burdick and William Lederer book ‘The Ugly American’ was published:

In one vignette, a Burmese journalist says “For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious.”^[6]

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

Not a perfect analogy, yet the American colonial mind set shares certain commonalities with class/caste bias. But serviceable given the dismissive, even contemptuous, character of your reply to my comment.

StephenKMackSD

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

It has been almost two years since the rise of Corbyn, I recall that at The Economist, the once sister publication of The Financial Times, featured as illustration to an essay about Corbyn, using an old Social Realist painting of the Soviet revolutionary period, that had Corbyn’s face superimposed over the face of Lenin. That a Left-wing Social Democrat could seriously be compared to Lenin was preposterous. Yet he represents the political watershed of the failure of the Neo-Liberal Dispensation. Now in its desperation to smear Mr. Corbyn, the Financial Times now compares him to the irrationalist politics and person of Trump! The menace of Corbyn morphs, at will, in the propaganda churned out in Corporatist newspapers, magazines and television.

Corbyn is not Trump, nor his politics, but a call to the Labour Party to return to its reason for being: meaning that the Thatcherism Lite of Tony Blair, and his supporters across the political spectrum, have been discarded, in favor of a Party that represents the interests of the working class, rather than the interests of Crony Capitalism, in its various iterations.

Never fear the Blair wing of the Party will fight on, proven by Mr. Ganesh’s premature, pre-election victory lap in the pages of this newspaper. Yet this is a political time in which the polling, at least in both the Brexit vote and the America election, have proven to be wrong.

What is lost in this essay is the opportunity that this ‘snap election’ represents for Corbyn to further consolidate his leadership of Labour, and to appeal for more citizen participation during the next crucial seven weeks. To rebuild the Party, into a Party of and for the people, instead of what the New Labour stalwarts offer: more of Neo-Libralism Lite. This election represents another opportunity to rebuild the Party, that is lost on the writers at The Financial Times, in their project of not just censuring of the burgeoning  dissident elements within the Party, but of a campaign of purging those elements, that has not yet met with success. The question arises, how is it that Corbyn continues to flourish, even within a Labour colonized by Neo-Liberals?

The realization that Corbyn practices the ‘long game’ of building the party, he knows how to accomplish this through patient work over time: this defines his career. He also understands that this is not about ‘The Cult of Personality’ the most dangerous  manifestation of politics gone wrong. The building of a strong Party with opportunities for younger leadership to rise within the party structure. This seems, on its face, elementary!

‘Class Warfare’ is the rallying cry, the shibboleth, used to defend the failed Neo-Liberal model by its myriad defenders: Thatcher vs. The Miner’s Dictatorship Melodrama its political urtext!  It has been nine years since the Crash of 2008, yet the ‘Self-correcting Market’ of the ‘Free Market Mythology’ has yet to manifest itself. How long must the electorate wait for its Manifestation/Resurrection?

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/94d10f0e-25b9-11e7-a34a-538b4cb30025

Headline: Theresa May can now secure her mandate on Europe

Sub-headline: Hopes of a reversal or dilution of last year’s referendum are definitively dashed

‘Seven Weeks to Victory’ should be the headline of this essay, when has Tory Hubris been proven wrong?

Mr. Genesh’s usual bile and gall has been reduced to jejune political aphorism, allied to feline purring, in adoration of the political wisdom/virtue of Teresa May. Her coronation as a legitimized leader of the Tories will be the ‘snap election’ : this strategy the brain child of May and her Rovian adviser Lynton Crosby.

The rhetorical frame of  ‘comparable nuisances’ is the trivializing notion of the political opposition, within her own party, yet the starkest of object lesson of David Cameron is elided from the self-satisfied purring of Mr. Ganesh. The certainty of the victory of May is Ganesh’s central dogma, yet even if May wins this ‘snap election’, by whatever margin, the inexorable political rise of Corbyn, or someone like him, will be ignored by Ganesh: in his celebration of a political ascendancy, that has stalled for want of viable alternative to an utterly sclerotic Thatcherism, whether Tory or New Labour. What does the rise of Corbyn signal to the political establishment, if not that? I forgot! the Party Line here at The Financial Times, The Rebellion Against The Elites.

Even ‘bothersome colleagues’ cannot interfere with the ‘vision’ of May: take this as clue to the authoritarian character of the Ganesh Political Vision. ‘The Strong Man’ needn’t be a man, as the towering political thuggery of Mrs. Thatcher proved beyond doubt.

Ganesh even engages in Hegelian pastiche, that adds a kind comic relief ,to his kowtowing adoration of May.  Note also the underlying tone of the decisionism of Carl Schmitt. Not to speak of the primacy of markets, the Neo-Liberal fiction in a state of collapse.

‘To assume that Mrs May is nearer to the second remains as durable a myth as her supposed indecision. Power might reveal a more thoroughgoing conservative than the markets realise.’

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/092d84d4-2427-11e7-a34a-538b4cb30025

http://www.politico.eu/article/uk-general-election-2017-theresa-may-takes-on-the-saboteurs/

@pcatbar @StephenKMackSD @Jenkins

Thank you for your comment.

polemic (n.) 1630s, “controversial argument or discussion,” from French polémique (16c./17c.), noun use of adjective meaning “disputatious, controversial” (see polemic (adj.)).

polemic (adj.) 

1640s, from French polémique (from Middle French polemique) “disputatious, controversial,” or directly from Greek polemikos “of war, warlike, belligerent; skilled in war, fit for service; like an enemy, stirring up hostility,” from polemos “war,” of unknown origin. Related: Polemical (1630s)

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=polemic

StephenKMackSD

Following in the footsteps of David Cameron, Teresa May calls for a vote on ‘advice’ from Rovian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Based on her fealty to the democratic process? Are the Tories capable of making a bad bet followed by another? Or will her hunch pay off? You say: quite a ballsy move for a PK (preacher’s kid)!To frame in vulgar American terms.

The vote will become a plebiscite on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, or any other of a number of issues? In a time of rising Populism, the dread successor to a failed Neo-Liberalism, as propagandized in the pages of this newspaper, but will this be the end of Corbyn? What of Farage, SNP, not to speak of a number of other persons and issues that this vote will bring to the fore? 

Is May’s move part of a plan to short circuit the opposition, by risking a seemingly chaotic move, in a kind of caricature of the Peronist political trope, of fomenting usable chaos, and exploiting the disequilibrium that will ensue? Crosby as Rovian is capable of what? Shall we look to the Rove strategy of starting a gossip campaign, like the one used against Ann Richards in the Texas governorship race of 1994? Or is that anathema to May’s Anglican virtue?

The Financial Times is in full propaganda mode, with argument aided by the garnish of charts and graphs, as reinforcement of the notion that there is no need for its readership to panic, as everything is under control.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/21e1e2ec-241b-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16

It’s been sometime since I’ve read Mr. Sullivan, yet I still recall his days at The New York Observer, where he used his regular column to foment War Hysteria after 9/11. And to attack anyone who dared deviate from his self-constructed Party Line, passing judgement on the ‘acceptable narratives’ about the attack and the proper response to it. He and Christopher Hitchens were the Inquisitors who kept guard on the evolving Party Line, against America’s Fifth Column, as they played their respective roles as Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn.

Should I go back to Mr. Sullivan’s enthusiasm for ‘The Bell Curve’ in the 90’s as demonstrative of a certain animus/myopia on the question of race?

Mr.Sullivan’s political evolution/de-evolution from Thatcherite to Neo-Conservatism to Neo-Liberalism is well known, at least, to those of old enough to have followed The Sullivan Political Melodrama, through all its ideological permutations. But he does return to the home ground of sclerotic Thatcherism, in his attack on Sen. Sanders. It is testament to the staying power of his prejudices.

And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/why-do-democrats-feel-sorry-for-hillary-clinton.html

The consistent theme of Mr. Sullivan’s latest essay is exasperation: that others can’t see what he sees, in the case of Clinton, Trump and Dr. Dao. This essay is an extended rant,  that you might watch on ‘Fox News’, Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. The essay is bereft of anything resembling style, or even argumentative coherence, its just intemperate chatter, garnished in one sentence by the desperate exercise of profanity.  For the real practitioner of bile and spleen, on the level of near poetic inspiration, read Janan Ganesh at The Financial Times, he can write with polemic brilliance that, at his best, is unmatched.

Political Reporter

The perpetual intellectual obfuscation, here at The Financial Times, is again striking, although the idea of a ‘liberal elite’ remains a central dogma of their Party Line.There is no ‘liberal elite’,there is only the utterly disreputable, not to speak of an utterly failed Neo-Liberal elite, or their fellow travelers.

‘The soul-searching of leftwing intellectuals such as Mr Foessel in part mirrors that of liberal elites across the western world, who are struggling to understand the populist surge that swept Donald Trump to victory in the US and the UK out of the EU.’

https://www.ft.com/content/35eb38fc-1e02-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229c

What we in America get of French Intellectuals is the highfalutin chatter of Bernard-Henri Lévy, in the pages of that journalistic sink-hole The Daily Beast. Lévy and editor Michael Weiss are political allies. Lévy’s latest essay at the ‘The Beast’ is a ringing denunciation of Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which reads like the notes for a speech due for declamation before an adoring multitude. See my full comment on the Lévy essay here:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2017/04/14/the-nouveaux-philosophe-lives-bernard-henri-levy-on-the-political-danger-of-jean-luc-melenchon-a-comment-by-committed-observer/

Lévy presents himself modeled after haute couture Yves St. Laurent’s, YSL becomes in a dull-witted act of ‘branding’ BHL: Lévy does not enjoy the status of Sartre or Camus for a reason, he is product of the Market, not of the intelligentsia. But most assuredly Lévy has a penchant for war mongering, rather surprising for a war correspondent, who witnessed carnage at second hand.

Sartre’s great antagonist,and classmate, was Raymond Aron, author of The Opium of Intellectuals (1955), can the reader name a BHL antagonist recognizable to the English speaking reader? Perhaps another indication of BHL’s irrelevance as thinker, who does not enjoy respect as intellectual/moral leader?

Should the reader look to France’s most celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq for a reason that is indicative of ‘loss of influence’? Read Adam Shatz’s review of ‘Michel Houellebecq’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France…’ titled Soumission.  Shatz can’t quite bring himself to call Houellebecq an Islamophobe:

Michel Houellebecq’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France is a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender. It’s 2022, a charismatic Islamist politician called Mohammed Ben Abbes has become president, and France has fallen under his spell. Houellebecq’s timing could hardly have been better: Soumission was published on 7 January, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The novel was hailed by the right as a prophetic warning, a fictional cousin of Eric Zemmour’s anti-Muslim tirade, Le Suicide français, and attacked by the left, in the words of Alain Jakubowicz, as ‘the best Christmas gift he could have given to Marine Le Pen’. Both Houellebecq’s admirers and his detractors assumed that he still believed Islam was what he’d once called it: ‘the stupidest religion’. But Houellebecq has had second thoughts, and although his novel is deeply reactionary, it is not Islamophobic.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/adam-shatz/colombey-les-deux-mosquees

Mr. Michael Stothard provides a fascinating, if all too brief, sketch of the French political/intellectual scene. Yet the coverage of French life, its politics and its thinkers, needs to be expanded if the notion of ‘Premium’ is to have any meaning at all!

Committed Observer

In his latest essay at The Daily Beast, M. Lévy pronounces, not on the danger of populist Le Pen, but on the danger of Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Perhaps pronounces is the wrong descriptor. M. Lévy’s essay reads as if it were to be declaimed before the masses, like he did for those assembled for ‘Ukraine: Thinking Together’ Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014. The reader is confronted with statements, and the spaces left for the interruptions of applause, after each revelatory comment: the delivery of his moral exhortations is everything, they must have room to breathe. Applause is the indispensable garnish to this generation’s political dinosaur, the intellectuel engagé.

M. Lévy finds the perfect home at The Daily Beast, as Neo-Conservative Michael Weiss is his natural ally. Tina Brown published  Lévy as part of dressing up her gossip sheet as somehow  serious, respectable journalism. Weiss and Lévy are political fellow travelers. Note also that Le Pen has ‘courted’ Jews:

Headline: France’s Far Right, Once Known for Anti-Semitism, Courts Jews

PARIS — For years, France’s far-right National Front was synonymous with anti-Semitism. Its founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, was notorious for anti-Semitic outbursts — including a comment that the Holocaust was just a detail of history.

But since Mr. Le Pen’s daughter Marine took over the party’s leadership in 2011, the National Front has attempted a remarkable about-face: Today, the party positions itself as a champion of French Jews.

Although Ms. Le Pen, one of the front-runners in the coming presidential election, still alludes to anti-Semitic stereotypes on the campaign trail, she now promises that her party will be the protector of French Jews.

It is a surprising twist that has resonated with some French Jews who feel abandoned by what they see as the government’s tepid response to the anti-Semitic violence that has plagued the country for years.

Is it that in the  ‘West’ now governed by Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and its various permutations and intellectual  successors, that the Jew is the known ‘other’?  While Islam and its followers, and their politically radicalized faction, now constitute that ‘other’ that is now cast as the villains to be feared, hated, inveighed and warred against? Even as they are part of our communities and the shared Abrahamic Tradition.

The reader can count on many things from M. Lévy,  his inexhaustible pretentious verbosity is ever-present !

Committed Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/14/france-could-get-a-dangerous-far-left-surprise-on-election-day.html

Added April 16,2017:

The Impostor

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7196517/Bernard-Henri-Levy-caught-out-by-fake-philosopher.html

Here is the central conceit of Mr. Kuper’s essay:

Almost all the refugees I’ve met since 2015 want to work their backsides off in exchange for the life that the laziest westerner regards as his birthright —…

Not to take anything away from the achievements of the refugees mentioned in his essay, (how many people know someone with a double Masters?) but Mr. Kuper has more important business, a target worthy of  his contempt: the coddled lazy western worker is the real star of this Capitalist Morality Play! The contemporary thinkers, of present and former colonial empires, need to learn to practice at the least circumspection, or better yet cultivate a rhetorical modesty, as a strategy in the face of a refugee crisis they enabled.

I live in San Diego, California and the refugees I see everyday are the gardeners, the housemaids and the dishwashers, that are chronicled in the work of the most prominent practitioners of the artist as social critic/moral conscience, Ramiro Gomez. See a report on his work here:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/11/473384990/gardens-dont-tend-themselves-portraits-of-the-people-behind-las-luxury

America is a nation of immigrants, slaves and slave holders, not to speak of unapologetic land thieves, so the value of the ambition and will to succeed, of the refugee, legal and otherwise, is the American Story!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/ea7c9414-1f01-11e7-a454-ab04428977f9

Donald Trump has done the right thing at last. Syria’s agony will not soon end, but after years of global hand-wringing the US has finally taken a stand for basic norms of humanity and morality. Calculation of certain risks versus uncertain gains were swept away by a visceral response to evil.

Despite her attempts  at political self-rescue, enunciated as Feminism,  Ms. Slaughter cannot, even will not, surrender her addiction to an unapologetic ‘Wilsonian Idealism’. Meaning an unrepentant bellicosity, framed by the ersatz moralizing of American Exceptionalism. More than ever Steve Breyman’s essay remains stingily pertinent to Ms. Slaughter’s recidivism!

https://www.nytexaminer.com/2014/05/the-aptly-named-anne-marie-slaughter/

Publius

https://www.ft.com/content/441ee618-1de3-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229c

‘It is easy for foreigners to read imperial nostalgia into something much more parochial. The terminal point of empire is introspection, not a restless desire to do it all over again. Introspection is bad enough but the British cannot be guilty of that and the opposite at the same time. Outsiders are free to fault us, if they pick the right fault.’

https://www.ft.com/content/a9c45baa-1dc6-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229c

The usual Ganesh self-congratulatory polemical chatter gives way to the above paragraph, and the part that I find truly fascinating, which I have italicized, and emphasized by making it bold : ‘the British cannot be guilty of that and the opposite at the same time.’ The reader is tempted to say, that somehow Mr. Ganesh has missed  the fact that the ‘British’ are more than capable of partaking of this combination of Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ and Orwell’s ‘Double Think’!

American Writer

P.S. Imperial neuroses? The Age of Freud is no more!