StephenKMackSD's Blog

Not being a reader of The Wall Street Journal, I wanted to become acquainted with Mr. Stephen’s career in journalism. Mr. Stephens has been hired by the New York Times as its newest columnist, who makes this declaration to his readers that might be considered a statement of Mr. Stephens’ ‘journalistic principals’ :

“What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it.”

(Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/introducing-our-new-columnist.html)

An internet search led me to this 2006 interview by Brain Lamb of  Mr. Stephens on C-SPAN, I have provided a link to a transcript of the interview :

https://www.c-span.org/video/transcript/?id=8039

Video of the Stephens interview:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?194550-1/qa-bret-stephens

Some telling quotes from Brian Lamb’s 2006 interview of Mr. Stephens. Mr. Stephens believes his life has been dominated by ‘ total serendipity’.

LAMB: Give me four or five things that the Journal editorial board stands for?

STEPHENS: Well, I can – I’ll only give you two of them, free men and free markets, or I should say free people and free markets. The sense is we support democracy, human rights, the human rights agenda, the democratization agenda, and we believe that capitalism, free markets, the free movement of labor, services, capital, goods are good for the world. And those are the things that we advocate.

I think we sometimes surprise people who have a stereotype view of what the Wall Street Journal is about by being, for instance, a very pro-immigration paper for opposing the construction of this wall along the southern border, for being supporters of – for being supporters of NAFTA and other free trade agreements.

…

On Pope Benedict’s Islam Speech:

STEPHENS: Well, I basically liked the speech in the sense that it’s a very subtle, meticulously drafted, in some ways kind of cunning speech that went well beyond the headline criticism of not Islam necessarily but a element, a streak within Islam which is jihadist, which is violent, which finds too many expressions today, to talk about broader issues of the correspondence, the relationship of faith and reason.And he – I’m not a Catholic so I’m certainly no theologian – but he makes the argument that the New Testament really is a syncretic product, the product of a kind of broad conversation that took place between Athens and Jerusalem in the – before Christ and then in the early parts of this anno – you know, of this era. And that central to the Christian idea are John’s words “In the beginning there was the Word.” The word he uses is logos which means reason or argument. And that connects faith-based or faith-centric beliefs views of the world with the kind of rational but really what he means to say is philosophic traditions of Athens which were curious about the world, which believed in syncretic methodologies which (INAUDIBLE) questions.

 

And this means that the West or as Benedict is saying, the West really sustains itself in this kind of critical and constructive dialectic between belief and reason. This is what makes the West what it is in its best sense, on the one hand sort of tolerant pluralistic but also morally grounded.

 

Now when that equate – when that relationship is sundered, when there’s a sense that faith has nothing to do with reason or reason has nothing to do with faith Benedict would argue you run into really very serious problems. And his critique extends not just to an Islam which he interprets as having theological elements which sunder that connection but also trends within Catholicism, within Christianity and within modern secular enlightenment sort of thinking that do pretty much the same.

 

So what he ends up arriving at, I mean I’m really doing it no justice, people really should read the speech – but what he ends up arriving at is the saying that in order to have a really critical cultural dialog, particularly for a West – for the West – with Islam, you have to understand that faith and reason really do have to be able to have some kind of conversation. There really have to be some baseline beliefs that make that conversation possible.

 

And I think that was – that was really quite interesting and really well worth saying. And it’s a pity that it got almost entirely missed in the hysteria and controversy and I would say laziness on the part of many journalists who just wanted to say, OK, here the Pope has gone off the deep end again and we have another kind of Danish cartoon situation. I think the Pope was doing something really subtle and important and it deserved people’s attention.

…

On Stephens intellectual mentor Leon Kass:

STEPHENS: That was – that was long after I’d studied with him. He’s a medical doctor and Ph.D. I think in biochemistry and has always had an interest in medical ethics, bioethics.

 

But when I was at the University of Chicago I knew him as my professor who taught me Genesis, Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics, Plato’s Meno, Descartes, (INAUDIBLE), and I did my undergraduate thesis for him on two speeches, fairly obscure speeches by Abraham Lincoln on the relationship between democracy and technology, which is an issue that profoundly interests him. So it was a – it was a good marriage, so to speak, between the two of us.

 

Leon had a – was a contributor to Commentary and movie editor. And I had written kind of on a lark when I was a sophomore in college just as a thought exercise a book review. I had read a book on anthropology and I thought this is a really good book and I thought I wonder what it would like to actually write a review of it and sort of model it on reviews that I was reading in magazines. And I really did this for my own sake.

 

And I showed it to my father and he said, “Oh, this great. You should – you should submit it to Commentary.” And I did when I was – I must have been 19 years old. And they published it. They edited it but they published it and that was amazing.

 

And then I also had a summer internship at the London Times when I was in college. But my real journalism career, I mean if I can go back before then, began in boarding school

…

STEPHENS: That was – that was long after I’d studied with him. He’s a medical doctor and Ph.D. I think in biochemistry and has always had an interest in medical ethics, bioethics.

But when I was at the University of Chicago I knew him as my professor who taught me Genesis, Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics, Plato’s Meno, Descartes, (INAUDIBLE), and I did my undergraduate thesis for him on two speeches, fairly obscure speeches by Abraham Lincoln on the relationship between democracy and technology, which is an issue that profoundly interests him. So it was a – it was a good marriage, so to speak, between the two of us.

Leon had a – was a contributor to Commentary and movie editor. And I had written kind of on a lark when I was a sophomore in college just as a thought exercise a book review. I had read a book on anthropology and I thought this is a really good book and I thought I wonder what it would like to actually write a review of it and sort of model it on reviews that I was reading in magazines. And I really did this for my own sake.

And I showed it to my father and he said, “Oh, this great. You should – you should submit it to Commentary.” And I did when I was – I must have been 19 years old. And they published it. They edited it but they published it and that was amazing.

And then I also had a summer internship at the London Times when I was in college. But my real journalism career, I mean if I can go back before then, began in boarding school

STEPHENS: I think – first of all, I think that there was a sincerely belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that if you sort of look at what people were saying before, the evidence that was available to everyone, the fact that President Clinton had acted against – in 1998 had launched missile strikes at Iraq against what he thought was a – were – was a WMD capability. I think there was first of all the sincerely conviction that Saddam had these things.

Second of all there was the belief that he was just the kind of guy who would – who would use them.

Thirdly, I do think that the democracy agenda really did start to become much more relevant in the days after September 11th when you said, you know, you have – you have here conditions which create a culture and whether Saddam Hussein was or was not – and, you know, apparently he was not actually connected to the bin Laden or the planners of this attack – he was, in a sense, part of, you know, a kind of element, symbol of this culture in which they swam and someone needed to take a very big swing at that.

And also, I think that there was – there was this point too, which is important today – Saddam had essentially been flouting the U.N. for a dozen years. He had been evading sanctions, the sanctions – the notion that you could have maintained a sanctions regime indefinitely I don’t think is plausible. And he was a kind of symbol of a certain kind of Arab radicalism which fed into the larger malfunction or dysfunction of the – of the Arab and Islamic world and to make an object lesson of him was not a useless exercise.

It would have – I wonder what, for instance, someone like John Kerry would be saying if Saddam Hussein were still in power. I bet he’d be saying, you know, this president – well I mean I don’t want to put words in Mr. Kerry’s mouth but I bet someone out there, some current critic of the war would be saying this president has allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in place while he brutalizes his people, almost certainly works on weapons of mass destruction programs, and plots against his neighbors.

I think, you know, if I can boil it all down to one point, the weapon of mass destruction in Iraq was Saddam Hussein. He was a weapon of mass destruction when it came to the Kurds. He was a weapon of mass destruction when it came to the Iranians, when it came – when it came to the Kuwaitis. He was a weapon of mass destruction when it came to the Palestinians, remember he used to fund Palestinian suicide bombers. He helped make the Middle East a deeply dysfunctional and unstable place and getting rid of him was important.

Now talking about what happened after the war is a different – is really a different subject, whether it could have been handled differently. Those are all legitimate criticisms. But the original decision to go to war I think was right.

STEPHENS: Well, I mean for all the obvious reasons, schoolbook reasons, save the Union, emancipated the slaves, but I think it’s fought the Civil War, chose to fight the Civil War which is something that I think is relevant today because Douglas wouldn’t have fought the Civil War. Buchanan wasn’t going to fight the Civil War.

It’s more than that. Lincoln, of all our presidents, was in a sense a genuine – had a genuinely philosophic cast of mind. And you see that in all of his speeches beginning at a very early age when he was in his, I think late 20s or 30s he gave a speech to the Lyceum, a kind of school in Illinois. And you imagine – have to imagine sort of early 19th Century dusty hinterlands Illinois, you know, very far from the metropolises of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, even farther from London, or Paris, or Rome. But he gives a speech which is a reflection and sort of a – it’s a reflection on political psychology. And the essence of it – and I’m really, again, I do it no justice – but the essence of it is the generation of America’s founders found their psychological satisfaction in building something, in creating a republic. What would their sons find, their children, find their psychological satisfaction in? Well, perhaps in destroying things.

So the political problem becomes how do you maintain through the generations people who will find their deepest sort of their deepest political and psychological satisfactions in maintaining institutions rather than creating ones of their own. And that’s a really serious political and philosophical problem and it’s one that really is something that goes back to other thinkers before Lincoln.

And it’s incredible to see Lincoln talking about these issues in the 18 – I guess this would have been the 1830s, late 1830s, maybe early 1840s – and then developing as the crisis of the house divided unfolds all the way up to the Civil War. And people cite Lincoln, they’ll cite the Gettysburg Address, or the second inaugural address, or passages the better angles of our nature from the first inaugural, as evidence of Lincoln’s rhetorical mastery and the kind of poetic sense that infuses his prose.

But what is less appreciated, I think, is a kind of philosophical mastery of the issues, of questions like, you know, is the statement all men are created equal something that was an artifact of its time and of that generation or did it have – was it permanently true, and could it survive and be defended when there were huge economic interests that defended slavery as well as a kind of creeping cultural relativism that said well, it’s OK if, you know, not all people are really created equal and blacks are different, they’re inferior, you know, the philosophical defense of the south that you get from John Calhoun all the way on to – all the way on to I guess Robert E. Lee and Alexander Stephens and the rest of the Confederacy.

You know and that issue in a sense is really alive today. I mean because if you’re going to – you know there is a – there is a sense very prevalent in the academy that cultures are relative and things which we find abhorrent, practices that we find abhorrent, are OK if they’re practiced by other cultures with other value systems.

You know now that cultural relativism tends to break down when you actually get into the nitty-gritty of what nasty practices other cultures engage in. You know, female circumcision, are you OK with that, you know? The kind of rape culture in Pakistan, are you really OK with that or is that just a kind of what Pakistanis can do? Burning widows in – at least in 19th Century India, are you really OK with that?

When you actually sort of I think press people who speak about cultural relativism on the specifics they tend to get a little queasy. But it’s still out there. It’s still a part of our daily conversations.

And you sort of look at what Lincoln was dealing with – different subjects but really the same conversation.

LAMB: At what age did you become editor of the Jerusalem Post?

STEPHENS: When I was 28.

LAMB: Why did you do that and how long were you there?

STEPHENS: I was there for a little under three years. I – before that I had been in Europe working for the Wall Street Journal Europe out of Brussels. And kind of – again, I keep using the word serendipity – kind of serendipitously an editor of mine asked me to fill in for a colleague and start doing some of our editorial coverage on Israel-Palestine. And in the summer of 2000 after the breakdown of the Camp David talks but before the beginning of the Intifada Arafat was moving the idea of unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state. This is all ancient history but at the time it was – it was the topic.

So I – so my editor said well listen, can you go out there and really do a story about the Palestinians and what kind of state they would get, not territorially so much as politically and socially, if, in fact, Arafat declared one. So that was really my first time in Israel as a reporter. And I spent most of my time in, you know, Gaza, and Ramallah, and Hebron, talking to Palestinians really at kind of all the levels, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders of Hamas, political figures, political figures, you know, you sort of name it.

And I wrote a piece that really stressed the point that there was a kind of real dysfunction at the heart of Palestinian society and government that was being largely neglected by the focus on the peace process and the question of borders and land. And the piece – essentially the drift of the piece is this was not going anywhere good, that there was enormous internal violence within Palestinian society and that was probably going to flip out.

And that piece appeared I think on the 20th of September 2000 and a little more than a week later the Intifada began.

Now I kind of – I take pride in that particular article because even three days before the Intifada began I think no one was predicting that it would start or certainly that it would last as long as it did.

Anyway, after the Intifada began I started really going out to the area pretty frequently and so my total surprise was called up by the publisher of the Jerusalem Post, whom I’d never met and …

LAMB: Why?

STEPHENS: Because I think that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid cut very unattractive political figures. I know neither of them so again, this impression is a surface one. But you get the sense when you’re listening to Pelosi that she – that she’s dreading the follow-up question because she doesn’t know. There is a kind of shrillness about her style of politics as well as – as well as Harry Reid’s’ and also a bit of a hollowness.

I remember some months ago now Pelosi came out with this contract for America’s security. So you know you take a look at this document and it’s kind of – it’s pablum, it’s, you know, increase benefits for veterans, and check ports, and everything you’ve sort of heard endlessly on cable TV and on talk shows. And it doesn’t come across as particularly informed and particularly serious.

And I do think the Democrats have to do a better job of getting seriously aboard the war on terror and saying – and my colleague Peg Munin (ph) said this very well. She said, “This is how we’re going to do it better.”

And you hear that occasionally from Democrats but what you really hear, I mean the kind of broad meta message is we’re going to get out of Iraq, and we’re going to sort of – it’s going to be a kind of come-home-America moment. And I think that’s not a good message for the Democrats to have.

You know I did one column on a book called “With All our Might” which is a compilation of essays put together by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute. And Will is a card-carrying new Democrat, part of the movement that really helped create the Clintonism, if you will. And one of the points that he makes in our book – in his book is that, you know, our honor and our interests as Americans say that we have to stick it out in Iraq, we have to make this succeed, we can’t retreat in a moment of defeat and humiliation and ignominy because the consequences will be really very serious. And it’s a good thing to hear Democrats like Marshall say just that. I think that message has to get across more broadly.

One thing that I am heartened by is what seems to be Joe Lieberman’s strength in Connecticut. It displays a kind of I think healthy instinct among voters. But you want Democrats just like Joe Lieberman, certainly critics of the administration, certainly, you know, true to their Democratic values on social and economic policy, but who at least are willing to be a bit bipartisan beyond the water’s edge on the great issues of the day and to be the kind of Arthur Vandenberg’s – Vanderberg’s of their – of their era.

You know the Republicans during the Truman administration who said we’re not going to retreat into isolationism, we’re not going to do what we did after the First World War, we are going to participate in Harry Truman’s cold war, we’re going to participate in containment, we are going to support the institutions, the broad structures that carried America through the Cold War. And there has to be that kind of basis of bipartisan consensus and people who really walk the walk like Lieberman I think in order to succeed in the war on – in the war on terror.

I mean this book by Marshall that I mentioned, I could read it and I could say I disagree with this, I disagree with this, and this guy’s wrong, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but at least the basic spirit of it, the gist of it I think was absolutely right and absolutely important for the country and for the Democratic Party.

Weicker’s tense relations with establishment Republicans may have roots in receiving strong support from President Nixon in his 1970 Senate bid, support repaid in the eyes of his critics by a vehement attack on the White House while serving on the Watergate Committee. Later, his relations with the Bush family soured, and Prescott Bush Jr. (the brother of the then Vice President) made a short-lived bid against Weicker to gain the 1982 Republican Senate nomination.^[8] Finally, conservative animus spilled into overt support for Joe Lieberman in 1988, both from national sources such as National Review (publisher William F. Buckley Jr., and his brother, former New York Senator James Buckley, both endorsed and campaigned for Lieberman in 1988), but more importantly, from rank-and-file Connecticut Republicans irate with Weicker’s effort to make the local party more liberal and prevent the nomination of conservatives to state office, and the poor showing of Weicker-backed candidates in the 1986 elections. Weicker was defeated in the 1988 election by less than 1 percent of the vote, owing in large part to defections by Republicans to Lieberman.^{[citation needed]}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_P._Weicker_Jr.

“The people are the sea that the revolutionary swims in”: attributed to Mao Zedong. What can this quote have to do with Daniel Davies cynical and self-congratulatory essay, on Obama’s reported speech that cost $400,000.Who is/was worth such a sum, except Bill Clinton , or ‘Rent a Former Head of State’ Tony Blair?

An analysis might read that Wall Street Bankers acts as the stand-in for ‘people’ and Obama as the stand-in for ‘revolutionary’. I know that this ‘argument’ is hyperbolic, even satiric on its face, Mr. Davies deserves nothing less! As everyone knew, by the end of his second term, that Obama was a Corporatist Front-Man, e.g. his de facto pardon of Wall Street Bankers. Unless you were/are a New Democrat who holds office.

All the reader need do is follow this link to view the Frontline Analysts web page:

http://www.frontlineanalysts.com/about/

That demonstrates that Bernays, Goebbels and generations of Madison Ave. hucksters have corrupted the political dialogue in Western Democracies, perhaps the whole of world politics.  That made ‘Public Relations’ specialists like Mr. Davies possible. An example of the quality and depth of the thinking of Mr. Davies: ‘Politics really is showbusiness for ugly people.’  To paraphrase Truman Capote, Mr. Davies essay wasn’t writing, it was typing, or maybe just dictation?

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/35802190-2c06-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c

Prof. Tooze engages in an interpolation of the Anderson arguments, so the reader of his ‘review’ of ‘The H Word’ is somehow supposed to accept that the ‘Liberal Order’ is an historical actuality, rather than a usable intellectual construct, in the service of Neo-Liberal apologetics. An example:

Once again, by the time it was theorised, hegemony was in crisis. As the Bretton Woods monetary system collapsed, stagflation set in. Was this an inevitable side effect of America’s loss of leadership? Did the world economy really need a dominant centre? With Europe recovered from the destruction of the war and with Japan booming, might co-operation and co-ordination not be enough? That is precisely what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their followers in Europe — Helmut Kohl, Bettino Craxi and, eventually, François Mitterrand too — would deliver. As America’s position was relativised, what emerged was not chaos but something more all-pervasive: liberal hegemony reborn in the form of the market revolution or, as we have learnt to call it, neoliberalism.

Does the above paragraph represent the thoughts, the ideas of Prof. Anderson or, again , the interpolations of Prof. Tooze? The reader of Prof. Anderson always knows where he stands, on his thoughts and ideas, and his interpretations of the historical data. Would that Prof. Tooze was as transparent a writer. Note the position of Neo-Liberalism in this paragraph, last, and that its appearance, in the argumentative frame, is in the lower case: so as to relegate it to the rhetorical territory of near irrelevance.

Prof . Anderson’s ‘American Foreign Policy and its Thinkers’ is for want of a more accurate descriptor an historical/political tour de force. Prof. Anderson’s candor is always evident! Prof. Tooze’s ‘review ‘ of ‘The H Word’ for some reason reminds me of ‘The Age of Fracture’ by Daniel T. Rogers. The book is brilliant in its first seven chapters, and then sinks into a rather disheartening academic playing it safe, in his epilogue.  The pressing question that arose, in my mind, upon reading the first seven chapters of Rogers’ book was: how could/should/might a political/moral actor conduct them-self in light of the insights that Rogers offers in those chapters? Also, how can ‘The Age of Fracture’ determine such pressing moral and political questions/quandaries?

I’m sorry to say that Prof. Tooze’s ‘review’ is tinged with an apparent, disappointing, yet carefully modulated mendacity.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/2367a896-29b5-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c

Of the usual Sullivan Political Free Association, I choose the section in which he opines on the French election , with some asides.

Read first Mr. Sullivan’s May 1, 2016 essay here :

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

This essay partakes of the usual Straussian intellectual strategy, of self-serving rhetorical bloat, as the in-order-too, of wearing the readers attention down to the point of producing a usable intellectual/critical fatigue. This ‘art of confusion’  is practiced by both Fukuyama and Kagan,  when the publishing periodical is friendly.

You will see Sullivan’s  ‘prediction ‘ that Trump may win the presidency in 2016. Aided by among others Eric Hoffer. Now Mr. Sullivan isn’t acquainted with Mr. Hoffer’s own temptation towards the authoritarianism of Lyndon Johnson: Mr. Hoffer was one of the only ‘public intellectuals’ that LBJ could find to support his murderous political adventurism in Vietnam. Mr Sullivan relies on not just his own historical ignorance, but the ignorance of his readers. Mr. Sullivan does not count on the fact that some of his readers remember Mr. Hoffer, in the very negative way for his vocal support for the Vietnam War, and his kowtowing visit to the Whitehouse. This puts Mr. Hoffer’s judgements on Fascism in a dubious light, except to those unacquainted with the  American history of that era, Mr. Sullivan being one among many.

Then watch this October 24, 2016 interview of Mr. Sullivan by Brian Williams, in which he supports, a support awash in disdain, if not outright contempt, Mrs. Clinton. It’s just 4: 43 seconds long, hardly time for a Sullivan windup and pitch, given the logorrhea of his May essay!

http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/andrew-sullivan-on-why-he-s-now-for-clinton-792816707665

Sullivan’s Cassandra like prescience on Trump as political inevitability in May, and his October ‘Conversion’ to Mrs. Clinton render his political predictions null set.

All this leads, in a roundabout way, to Mr. Sullivan’s support for Macron in the French election, as the Neo-Liberal Golden Boy: who stumbled badly and was outsmarted by the dread Le Pen, at a Whirlpool factory in Amiens that is about to be closed, as reported at The Financial Times. The careful reader will read the comments section, this section of the newspaper is often times more informative and enlightening that the actual news story/propaganda/editorial : a Greek Chorus to the Financial Times Melodrama :

https://www.ft.com/content/6e7d30d8-2a7f-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

American Writer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/sullivan-maybe-america-wasnt-crazy-to-elect-donald-trump.html

Among the collection of cliches that Mr. Ganesh repeats, and or reworks, for the occasion of his essay, published on April 24, 2017: these first two stand out as demonstrative of  a purposive misdescription, and historically tinted mendacity.

Mr Macron stands for openness against closedness.

Macron is like Obama in that he offers the promise of change: ‘openness’ , and quite candidly offers the mirage of The Free Market, a new phenomenon in French politics? His is not the Speed and Shock of Fillon, but simply a less austere version of that political mirage.

The period between his birth in 1977 and the crash has entered the record as the Liberal Age.

That ‘Liberal Age’ is a fictional creation of Mr. Ganesh. In 1975 Thatcher became the Leader of the Opposition, and in 1976 Reagan began his campaign for president using the notorious ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’ i.e.  unapologetic racism: both of these events were the harbingers of the soon to be Neo-Liberal Age. The facts of history places Ganesh’s assertion of a ‘Liberal Age’, into the arena of a self-serving re-writing of history, named propaganda!

Then Mr. Ganesh hints at the political present by this act of backward historical projection, in this sentence fragment:

Voters were sick of postwar corporatism but-…

The collapse of Keynesianism, as Western economies and their Imperialism reached the point of slow motion fracture and or collapse,  led to the mirage, that Hayek and his allies presented, as an answer to the Road to Serfdom of the Soviets.  As a feudalism based on the singularity of ‘The Market’ , as the answer to every question that presents itself to an electorate. Mr. Ganesh lacks the necessary historical knowledge, and honesty, to even confront the fact that, the rise of the dreaded Populists, can be traced directly to the collapse of Neo-Liberalism’s dogmas translated into political policy and action

Then he presents a long and self-satisfied defense of ‘The Cult of Personality’, as the key to the politics of the present. First presenting Tony Blair, and then Macron, and his Neo-Liberalism Lite, as its central political actors. In sum, Mr. Ganesh is just another Stalinist!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/bc9b3f4a-28c6-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

The Whirlpool Visit will become, for both candidates and observers of that process, emblematic of the French Campaign : Macron, a Free Market apologist/Rothschild Banker/Elite Educated technocrat, first meets with the Union, and then promises,when the political heat is at full blast, to help the about to be fired workers, that he might assist them to negotiate a better ‘severance package’, while he is being booed.

In the news story Macron  assures  the crowd ‘that arguing his government would use the free market for the benefit of all.’ This sounds like an echo of Macri’s Argentinian Austerity that has proven to be such a hard sell, to put it mildly. Or even like the Party Line of the New Democrats, not to forget Obama called Macron to give his political blessing to the campaign.
And then dunderhead Attali, points in the proper Neo-Liberal direction,  a riff on that  old Schumpeter standby  ‘creative destruction’? With sad-sack Ferrand bringing up the rear, with too little too late. Its almost comic except that lives are at stake. And Le Pen is meeting with the workers! The FT reporters/propagandists called Le Pen’s political maneuver an ‘ambush’ , but really just that old British standby called one-upmanship.

The Financial Times presents the latest polling data that project Macon is at 61%. A few more of these kinds of displays of the complete ignorance, not to speak of utter tone deafness, about the lives of actual voters by Macron, and his poll numbers will sink like the proverbial stone, and rightly so. Or should the reader wait for a Le Pen victory on election night, and have the ‘technocrats’ of the  Neo-Liberal Press wonder, or more like agonize, as to the why of the loss of their Golden Boy Macron?

But wait the French Political Melodrama plays on as a comedy, based on the canny use of  ‘corrective optics’ as political handlers call it :

A few hours later, Mr Macron turned up at the factory gate. His staff said it was at the unions’ request, not because of Ms Le Pen’s visit. But the impression of being upstaged by a rival more in tune with an angry public has added to Mr Macron’s wobbly start to the final 10 days of campaigning

…

The former Rothschild banker was given a rough ride by Whirlpool workers who chanted “Macron get out” and “Marine president” as black smoke wafted from burning tyres. Earlier in the day, Ms Le Pen had been taking selfies with beaming employees under a blue sky.

Nonetheless, Mr Macron spent 45 minutes talking to crowd, insisting that shutting down borders, as Ms Le Pen had promised, would do more harm than good. “I am not going to make any false promises. I will not engage in demagoguery.”

Tensions abated slightly after the centrist politician vowed to force Whirlpool’s management to agree to better severance conditions and said he would fight to find a buyer for the appliances factory.

https://www.ft.com/content/6e7d30d8-2a7f-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

Political Reporter

The reader of Mr. Gapper’s latest essay can’t help but smile, or even chuckle, at his British Exceptionalism, and its focus on The City as the wellspring of the myth of British Prosperity, but only for very select population of that capital city. And his singing the praises of the presumed winner of coming French election Emmanuel Macron, a leader whose historical moment has come. Although the Speed and Shock Neo-Libralism of Fillon, would have been the preference of The Financial Times and it stable of like minded ‘reporters’.

M. Macron is a man without a party structure with which to govern, but in the political fantasy Mr. Gapper spins, using Tony Blair’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics as its argumentative fulcrum. Although Blair like Bill Clinton has become the object of widespread contempt for rank opportunism. Mr. Gapper’s fulcrum relies on an outdated political nostalgia.  Mr. Macron becomes the hero of a France about to enter into the hallowed precincts of Neo-Libralism Lite. Gapper describe Macron as a centrist technocratic leader, instead of just another product of the French educational aristocracy, who is identified as the winner of the June election: foresight or wishful thinking?

The sobering fact that Fillon and Mélenchon, each at a little over 19% each of the vote,  combined with the power of the rest of the contenders, in that election, all have the power and the necessary political structures in place to stymie that ‘Reform’. That Macron may offer, which is sure to offend the political sensibilities of the ‘coddled French workers’, the present and soon to be mythical enemy of the forward march of Neo-Liberalism à la française.

Although nothing quite compares with the unintentional comedy of this headline, and sub-headline on the same page as the Gapper essay. Authored by the redoubtable Poisonous Dandy Janan Ganesh.

Macron shows how political talent can trump the zeitgeist

For liberals the way back to power can happen in a flash with a class act

https://www.ft.com/content/bc9b3f4a-28c6-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/bbf10244-29b3-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3637657.html

https://books.google.com/books/about/Jean_Monnet.html?id=cAWLQgAACAAJ

StephenKMackSD

Any political cliche not articulated in this essay is just an oversight, to the apotheosis of Macron! Made apparent in the glut of ‘news stories’ vying for the attention of readers of this newspaper. This inane headline a glaring example, which could be used to describe almost any front runner, in hindsight :

The irresistible rise of Emmanuel Macron

That collection of cliches: the revenge of victims of Globalization i.e. ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’, the defense of the Neo-Liberal Order, rather than that propaganda staple of the post war ‘Liberal Order’, and the political fiction of Macron as ‘Centrist’. While he is defined by the Neo-Liberalism Lite of The Clintons,Blair and Obama:  Macron’s recent, highly publicized conversation, with the former president establish his credential as an ersatz Centrist/Neo-Liberal!  That ‘Center’ has been corrupted by the Free Market fiction, that began with the political rise of Thatcher and Reagan, that reaches into the political present. Political myths produce more finely honed myths, in the interest of the temptations of the end point of attaining political power.

In the mood of celebration, here at The Financial Times, the question that is avoided at all costs is how is Macron to govern, without a party structure, if he is elected ? How can a reader be sure that Le Pen won’t win, given that the American polls announced that Clinton would be the winner and were proved to be wrong, even though she won the popular vote: do the French have an institutional impediment to too much democracy like the Electoral College? This election makes evident the fractious nature of French politics: Fillon and Mélenchon both getting 19% of the vote as just an example. Macron’s projected  Neo-Liberal ‘reforms’ will lead to trouble. That is a given!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/3ee0885e-286b-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

I, like a great many, will read the comments on the French election results at The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, the American political gossip sheet Politico, and for a change of pace, the journalistic sink hole of The Daily Beast. But take the opportunity to read the informative, not to speak of revelatory essay by Chris Bickerton, on Macron and the decline of the Socialist Party, as a political force in French life. He makes his arguments concisely, cogently, there is no rambling melodramatic chatter, as the framing device adopted by the the Neo-Liberal apologetic press.

https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/macron-is-a-symptom-of-frances-problems-not-a-solution-to-them/

Macron will now become the political darling of that press, as Obama once was, until his his ‘Hope and Change’ devolved into more of Neo-Liberalism Lite.

StephenKMackSD