StephenKMackSD's Blog

@Larchmont @Lund

Larchmont, I do find your reading of the political present fascinating, in its own way. It offers the Trump Party line without its necessary political context. Both you and Mr. Ganesh write in a style that is a pastiche of the feuilleton, refraction meets refraction. Except that Ganesh’s iteration is awash in his almost world weary cynicism of the hipster and his milieu of The City. What might the reader do with the empirical evidence of the politics of America since, say 2006?

The Democrats took the House in 2006 and Obama won the presidency  in 2008. But then in 2010 Obama lost the House: so much for the viability of ‘Hope and Change’. Its shelf-life was about 18 months. And even after his victory in 2012, Obama lost the Senate in 2014, the Republicans now controlled both Houses of Congress.

So what might the reader speculate about the time that Trump, and his allies in the House and the Senate, have to enact their Corporatist Agenda? Given the demonstrable fact of the impatience, indeed the fickle character, of the American Electorate.

After Randian political opportunist Paul Ryan finishes with Social Security and Medicare and his Privatization/Vouchers schemes. As companion to the notion of ‘Alternative Facts’, those enthusiastic supporters of Trump will find it hard to resist the revival of the New Dealers, in the Democratic Party: if the corrupt New Democrats can be successfully purged from the Party. Or the Greens offer an alternative to the failed Neo-Liberal paradigm offered by both mainstream Parties.

@Lund has cogently and succinctly described the new political atmosphere in America, as unwelcome as you find it. Also consider the fact that 46.9% of eligible voters did not cast ballots in the 2016 election. If anything that fact, and Trump’s exercise of political nihilism and his Caudillo style might just create an almost ‘revolutionary situation’. Even if that sounds like an exercise in hyperbole, in 2014 Trump seemed unimaginable!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

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

Reply #2

@Larchmont @StephenKMackSD @Lund

Larchmont, thank you for your comment. The fault of Obama was a total failure to live up of his proclaimed ‘Hope and Change’, that ended up being the same old Neo-Liberalism, draped in empty but edifying rhetoric. Attuned to the aspirations of an electorate ripe for something resembling hope, after 8 years of the bungler Bush The Younger, and his keepers/handlers Cheney and Rumsfeld, not to speak of the porcine Architect Karl Rove, the precursor to guttersnipe Andrew Breitbart.  In fact Obama’s one and two were, in sum,  the Bill Clinton Administrations 3 and 4. The ‘Decline’ you mention was/is the fact that the codified Neo-Liberalism ended in economic catastrophe. You should be thanking all those New Democrats and Republicans, who are dues paying members of the one true American political party: The Property Party, as Gore Vidal named it!

And thank you for your ‘sic passat gloria mundi’ as indicative of your stylistic/intellectual flourish, while for me the quote should be the more apocalyptic Fiat justitia ruat cælum!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Mr. Ganesh strikes a comic pose in his latest essay: He assumes the guise of that pearl clutching, porcine dowager Margaret Dumont, who is both attracted and repelled by the comic anarchy of The Marx Brothers. She is smitten with Groucho’s roguish banter and can’t seem to tear herself away from his attentions. Mr. Ganesh is enamored by Pop Culture and its Rock Idols, and the rise of the Populists who are both creatures of the mob, and subject to the vicissitudes of popular taste. Yet he discards his not so fleeting romance with the ephemera of popular taste in both politics and Rock Idols to write this aphorism, in praise of the good grey men of respectable bourgeois politics, with just a dash of cynicism to sweeten his weak decoction.

By the time reality is through with them, a reputation for dull competence will be precious stock in politics. The trick is not to forfeit it in the meantime for the transient glamour of the street.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/304df3ba-e15a-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a

@BLEX @Benign Brodwicz

The self-congratulation, indeed hubris of the religious apologist, meaning in this case the Christian branch of the benighted Abrahamic Tradition, is unsurprising! The only thing that saved Christianity from its own provincialism was a heavy infusion of the ideas of the  thinkers of Greece and Rome, that you hold in your sovereign contempt! Without that you would still be torturing and then burning heretics like Giordano Bruno.  Or just silencing scientists like Galileo. Thomas Aquinas’ model was Aristotle.

And as for this fragrant bon mot‘…neoliberalism has emotionalised and thus de-politicised its critics.’  Read Wendy Brown’s ‘Undoing the Demos: Neo-Liberalism’s Stealth Revolution’ for one of the most devastating critiques of your sacred, untouchable  Neo-Liberal Economic Theology:

http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BROW_UND.html

Or read ‘Hayek : The Good, the Bad ,the Ugly’

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2k7VDSS

Headline: The Tempting of the Media

For this reader of Mr. Douthat’s latest political intervention, I am strongly reminded of that 1977 American best seller, ‘The Totalitarian Temptation’ by  Jean-François Revel. This book, an exercise in verbose anti-communist polemics, was in dire need of a ruthless editing! That editing would have made this a collection of connected essays worthy of reading and re-reading.

If only by the use of the term ‘temptation’ as a singular ruling idea, employed in the  title. Except that Douthat was born in 1979 and perhaps missed Ms. Revel’s book. Mr. Revel was incapable, in his exercise of a well practiced indignant polemic, of imagining the very possibility of Perestroika and Glasnost. Yet is was realized, if even momentarily, by Gorbachev’s vision that he shared with many other ‘Reformers’. See ‘Voices of Glasnost’:

Utterly inconvenient for both the Old and New Cold Warriors, and Francoists like Douthat.

In Mr. Douthat’s political melodrama the protagonist is Trump, as ‘destroying of norms’, and his adversary, in his clumsy narration, is the American Press that they will become as he, destroyers of truth, in the name of an inherent political nihilism. He casts the critical press in the role of Trump’s opposition tempted by untruth.

As the press eases into covering President Trump, however, I have a different worry. Mainstream journalism in this strange era may be freer than the fearful anticipate, but not actually better as the optimists expect. Instead, the press may be tempted toward — and richly rewarded for — a kind of hysterical oppositionalism, a mirroring of Trump’s own tabloid style and disregard for truth.

This mirroring is a broad danger, applying to more institutions than the press. Trump comes to power as a destroyer of norms, a flouter of conventions, and everyone will be tempted to join the carnival — to escalate when he escalates, to radicalize whenever he turns authoritarian. The cycle of norm-breaking that began with Robert Bork’s defeated nomination or Newt Gingrich’s ascent (depending on your politics) may escalate on both sides of the aisle. Left-wing protest movements will be tempted more easily toward both absurdity and violence. Deep state institutions will be tempted to become more restive and politicized. Politicians will be tempted, like Marco Rubio talking about Trump’s manhood on the campaign trail, into surrendering their dignity in an effort to be at home in Trumpland.

Notice that Neo-Confederate/Originalist Robert Bork still retains his status as sacrificial offering to ‘Liberal Hypocrisy’. In Mr. Douthat’s speculations Mr.Bork shares with Trump the status of ‘norm-breaking’, instead of his actual status as defender of Dixiecrat Racism, as codified and white-washed by the Federalist Society: its Originalism as a defense of white male privilege/power. In sum, that Originalism is a radical political nostalgia. Its political corollary was The Southern Strategy of Nixon. And his successor Reagan, in his Neshoba County Fair speech, that was the first speech after receiving his nomination. Reagan voiced his unstinting support for ‘States Rights’. The Reaganites were adroit at the uses of political symbolism, and the ability to dismiss their critics, by denying its operative power. Also note the appearance of porcine Robespierre Newt Gingrich as an integral part of the virtuous Reactionary Pantheon.

In the role of Cassandra, Mr. Douthat stumbles as he points to the Journalistic temptation of ‘hysterical oppositionalism‘,‘alarmist journalism‘,‘liberal-leaning mainstream outlets‘ and the fact that that ‘Journalism’ will commit the political crime of  ‘it often does a demagogue’s work for him.‘ The  whole of Mr. Douthat’s essay echos, in its own verbose way, William Safire’s catch phrase written for Spiro Agnew : ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’. Mr. Douthat’s historical ignorance, allied to his fealty to his reiteration of one of the rhetorical actors in the  Christian Melodrama : temptation being the  key concept, to an understanding of the why of Journalism’s  attempt to thwart the exercise of Republican Virtue will fail. Given the fact of Trump’s demonstrated political nihilism, Mr. Douthat’s apologetic remains in the arena of New York Times political chatter.

Political Reporter

Headline: Painful truths: psychologists unpick the ethics of empathy

Sub-headline: Why putting yourself in others’ shoes can sometimes be a poor moral guide

The headline and the sub-headline are indicative of a publication that worships at the alter of  the Neo-Liberal Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, with a lesser position being occupied by Ayn Rand as protector and advocate for Greed. Is it surprise to be read Mr. Julian Baggini’s review of three books on ‘Empathy’ with just the merest mention of Hume? Or any of the thinkers of a very long tradition.

The ‘as if ‘ here is that we, the readers, are the windowless monads of Leibniz, or something akin to that imaginary creature. And that we are somehow strangers to the human world, in which the exercise of ethical judgement is beyond our ken. If our journey here on earth has taught us anything of worth, our misapplication of ’empathy’ is learned the hard way, by too many applications of ’empathy’ when it was unwarranted. Those hard lessons do not preclude the exercise of empathy, when we fell that it is deserved, even when we discover it is undeserved, again and again: it is part of valuable life lessons. Not to dwell on the negative, we see, we experience our ethical actions ,as not within an economic frame, but in actions based on our judgement, our experience. Not to speak of a faith based on our evolving rationalism wedded to our evolving sensibility.

Also unmentioned is the Adam Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’:

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305940/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments-by-adam-smith/9780143105923/#

Or even D.D. Raphael’s book ‘The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy’

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199213337.001.0001/acprof-9780199213337

Mr. Baggini seems properly skeptical of the value of ‘Brain Scans’ and the contribution that ‘Science’ can make to ethical decisions. Its unclear what exactly ‘Rational Compassion’ might be, other than the ethical territory explored 250 years ago by Smith and carefully explored and explicated by Mr. Raphael.

Philosophical Apprentice

https://www.ft.com/content/0f3e15c2-dc07-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6

The most important ‘meeting’ at Davos  was the one between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in 1929. See Peter E. Gordon’s book ‘Continental Divide’ for the particulars of this truly momentous meeting/debate, between the two most prominent German philosophers of their time.

That ‘meeting’ is beyond the interest of Mr. Rachman, but he seems very impressed with the whole spectacle of Davos 2017, and the mutterings, overheard conversation, or just off the record comments of the participants, to one of the media’s respected pundits.

Like Mr. Wolf, Mr. Rachman expresses a muted hysteria about the end of ‘the Atlantic alliance’  in his essay. Yet the German economic powerhouse headed by Merkel, and Germany’s economic capo, the European Central Bank, seem to be in a much better position to defend themselves, from the mythical, not to speak of the looming Russian hordes, about to invade Europe, at least as narrated by Samantha  Power, Victoria Nuland, and the rest of the Clinton surrogates and their Neo-Conservative allies. The fact that America does not want to relinquish its foothold in Europe, can be attributed to the simple fact that America is an Empire, and it won’t let go of its claimed protectorate.

You can only marvel at the speech by Huckster Arianna Huffington on Gender Equality, praised in a tweet by @UN_Women, who failed to check Ms. Huffington’s record for exploiting both genders. The fact that her ‘citizen reporters’, at Huffington Post were unpaid isn’t important enough.

And who can forget Tom Friedman interviewing John Kerry? Friedman is that improbable, yet happy combination, of the obsequious, of sanctimonious pretension, the sagacity of Mrs. Malaprop, and the timing of a Borscht Belt comic on the skids:

Mr. Rachman would have written a more believable, more reasoned essay, had he followed and listened to Sec. Kerry, he is a believable  advocate/salesman for the Obama Neo-Liberal agenda, and the shopworn notion of America as the indispensable nation.   Instead Rachman extemporizes on the perpetual theme of The Financial Times: decline and decadence the twin shibboleths of a shopworn Conservatism. The reader of Rachman’s essay would benefit from viewing the Kerry interview to its end.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/73cc16e8-de36-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6

In Martin Wolf’s essay of Jan 17, 2017, he engages in the intellectual plunder of Benedict Anderson’s path-breaking  book ‘Imagined Communities’to frame his Ne0-Liberal hand-wringing. His seemingly perpetual state of mind and spirit. And the Tribalism that afflicts us, even in the crisis ridden political present of ‘aggrieved nationalism’.*   But this could or might be checked by commerce. Except that that ‘commerce’ has done nothing of the sort.

Another way exists to achieve prosperity: commerce. The balance between commerce and plunder is complex. Both require strong institutions supported by effective cultures. But war requires armies, underpinned by loyalty, while commerce requires security, underpinned by justice.

https://www.ft.com/content/5c7c6a26-db0a-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1dce

But judge the final sentence:  ‘But war requires armies, underpinned by loyalty, while commerce requires security, underpinned by justice.’ This last part of the sentence is  breathtaking myopic on its face : while commerce requires security, underpinned by justice.’ The reality that the Chinese are better more profitable and efficient Capitalists than anyone in the  ‘West’, is a fact that cannot be overcome, even by the wan propaganda here at The Financial Times.

But the ‘Imagined Communities’ are under threat from the practice of commerce itself, as it undermines this sense of that ‘Imagined Community’, conceived as an independent singularity. Mr. Wolf has yet to realize that Cosmopolitanism, the notion of a ‘World Community’ in the Age of the Internet, is already a fact. Ulrich Beck’s trenchant idea of ‘global domestic politics’, as part of the fact of an actual ‘Re-imagined Community’ eludes the grasp of a thinker moored where? The answer is not reliant on the  un-moored status enunciated by Teresa May, but on the notion of ‘identity’ as a pluralism of ‘identities’, as argued by Amartya Sen in his Identity and Violence. We can be British, European, Labour, Tory etc., etc.

I find Mr. Wolf’s ‘defense’ of his conception of pluralism to be too little to late, woefully tardy, after the unstinting  advocacy of Neo-Liberalism, that has been the Party Line of this newspaper, since the rise of both Thatcher and Reagan and the glaring object lesson of the Economic Collapse of 2008, and the economic doldrums visited upon us into 2017.

It used to be that Capitalist Apologists would point to the Soviet Union as the primary example of an egregious Utopianism gone wrong. For those with open minds ‘Voices of Glasnost’ presents a collection of vivid, compelling  and revelatory portraits of ‘Communist Reformers’. Can the reader count on such a  publication featuring portraits of Neo-Liberal Theologians?

For a well written and argued alternative to Mr. Wolf and the Financial Times Capitalist Apologetics, read Wolfgang Streeck’s 2014 essay ‘How Will Capitalism End’:

https://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end

* Is ‘aggrieved nationalism’ the replacement for ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ Party Line at The Financial Times?

Old Socialist

This is how the president of New America pronounces on the possibility of Trumpism: ‘The world awaits America’s new social contract’. The ‘as if’ here is that Trump and his team of Corporatists are capable of even entertaining the mere notion of a ‘social contract’. For the American people this is destined to become the realization of Trump Nihilism. Allied to the unslakable ambition of the lupine Paul Ryan. Undeterred by that reality, Slaughter’s use of History, and the windy abstractions of the Policy Thinker, are employed to try to soften the blow of Trump’s un-reflective political opportunism, by wreathing it in policy laurel.

The political evolution/maturation of Ms. Slaughter from bellicose policy thinker allied to the Neo-Conservatives/New Democrats, to her Feminism, that has led to her status as Political Philosopher has been instructive. I can’t exactly pinpoint what that notion of  ‘instructive’ is or resembles, although the example of Trump looms large. If that even resembles cogent argument, rather that an example of intuition: the blend of reason and sensibility?

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/144718c0-dce3-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6

Since the departure of gossip queen Tina Brown, The Daily Beast has come under the partial leadership of Neo-Con Michael Weiss, and it shows.  Leslie Gelb, a former Clinton employee/protege, is also disappeared.  While still  employed is  New Democrat Michael Tomasky, a vocal Clinton fellow traveler, which amounts to Neo-Conservatism Lite. The newest addition to The Daily Beast’s menagerie is Matt Lewis. His latest essay:

Headline:Betsy DeVos Fight Demonstrates Donald Trump’s Serious About Changing Washington

Sub-headline: At its heart, her nomination is about a changing America, and a proxy war coming to a head in the U.S. Senate.

In Mr. Lewis’ world view Betsy DeVos is of ‘ A revolutionary leader will have to balance pushing school choice with making the trains run on time.’ Call Ms. DeVos and her ilk the unholy matrimony between Corporatism, an American idiosyncratic version of Fascism, and the deeply reactionary politics of The Theocons ,as Damon Linker describes in his book. The alliance between God and Mammon, in American life, is a remarkable example of American political/religious ingenuity, destined for ignominious failure. Or to put it the most vulgar terms Jesus and Ayn Rand are not political bedfellows.

In Mr. Lewis’ ebullient pre-inaugeration mood, celebrating the victory of  Trump, and the DeVos hearings as the opening of a  ‘proxy war’, he forgets Obama’s loss of the House in 2010, and the loss of the Senate in 2014. To judge from the 2010 defeat, the ‘Hope and Change’ political mantra had a short lived popularity with the electorate, and the 2014 loss of the Senate, can be, and is viewed by ‘Conservatives’ like Lewis, to be a repudiation of the whole of his presidency. Judging from the discontent of those coal miners , how much time can Trump count on? Is 2018 the date? If the  New Democrats can dig themselves out of the wholesale corruption they are steeped in, probably too much to ask. Are the Greens finally to come into their own, as the natural alternative to New Democratic corruption?

Old Socialist

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/18/betsy-devos-fight-demonstrates-donald-trump-s-serious-about-changing-washington.html

In the watershed of the Trump victory in the 2016 election the Neo-Liberals masquerading as the ‘Liberal Elites’ , are desperately looking for scapegoats. Here is Stephen Metcalf’s January 10,2017 essay,  at The New Yorker, titled ‘Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Argument for National Pride’ , which certainly qualifies as the most convoluted, and intellectually pretentious attack on ‘The Left’, as yet presented in this unrelenting campaign.

Rorty’s only issue with identity politics was that the left, having worked so hard to transfer stigmatic cruelty away from received categories like race and gender, had done too little to prevent that stigma from landing on class—and that the white working class, finding itself abandoned by both the free-market right and the identity left, would be all too eager to transfer that stigma back to minorities, immigrants, gays, and coastal élites. (Hence the viral prophecy.)

So much of what Rorty wrote was confined to the philosophical essay, and it was composed of a series of critical evaluations of the whole or parts of a very long and complex Philosophical Tradition.

As Metcalf interpolates Rorty, or his usable rhetorical facsimile, the ‘white working class’ was deserted/betrayed  by both the ‘free-market right’ and the ‘identity left’. What is strategically absent from this argument is that the New Democrats, the Clintons and their free market allies, the Republicans, made alliance that codified a Reaganite Agenda: Welfare Reform, Financial Reform, and a Crime Bill. In sum the dismantling of the protections of the New Deal Welfare State and its successors.

Welfare Reform ludicrously and  euphemistically called  Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA)

Financial reform: Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) ,Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 i.e. the repeal of Glass-Steagall

Crime Bill:  Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

The 2008 Economic Collapse is the result of the Free Market Theology that both the Republicans and the New Democrats supported, as the answer to what? One wonders in 2017 at  the utter absence of the return of prosperity! what of the Myth of ‘The Self-correction Market’? Those technocrats, like Larry Summers, have been proven  catastrophically wrong. The Neo-Liberal blight has come to rule both Parties, so the blaming of ‘The Left’ for  ‘white working class anger’ is an act of self-serving misdirection, as  it was the New Democrats, who with the eager help of Republicans, dismantled the welfare state protections of the New Deal. That New Deal was built on the allegiance of the whole of the  working class! The rarefied atmosphere of ‘philosophical tradition/debate’ has rendered  Mr. Metcalf myopic to the of jejune concerns of the quotidian world.

Instead of solving these problems, Rorty thought we could ditch them, just as Descartes had ditched the problems of thirteenth-century scholasticism, and at a similarly low cost to the progress of human knowledge. The cheerfully non-philosophical way to ditch them was to ignore them, like most healthy people do. The slightly more philosophical method was to notice that people argued from, rather than to, their moral intuitions—an observation that may encourage us to accept that truth is at best a matter of consensus, not an observable fact of the world. The most philosophical way to abandon them was therapeutically: one could relive the philosophical past the same way an analysand relives her emotional past. By drawing, inch by agonizing inch, an unconscious pattern to the surface, one might discard it forever.

According to Mr. Metcalf’s last sentence, of this paragraph, Rorty eschews the philosophical tradition and engages in its stead the  methodology of  Psychoanalysis:

The most philosophical way to abandon them was therapeutically: one could relive the philosophical past the same way an analysand relives her emotional past. By drawing, inch by agonizing inch, an unconscious pattern to the surface, one might discard it forever.

The Melodrama of Psychoanalysis that Metcalf presents as Rorty’s borders on the comic, even the ludicrous, as Rorty was always the sober rational Pragmatist: the psychoanalytical strum und drang- more deliberate misapprehension? And on the question of the negative influence of Nietzsche in the thought of Foucault, consider Ronald Lehrer’s  book ‘Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: On The Origins of A Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Metal Functioning’ as demonstrating that Freud too fell under the spell of Nietzsche, but in a good way. If one believes in Psychoanalytic Science or in its status as an elaborate pseudo-science that generations of scholars, among them Frederick Cruz, have unmasked. See ‘The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute‘ of 1995, Unauthorized Freud of 1998, and Follies of The Wise of 2006. For a more lengthy discussion of the Freud critics, see my essay:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/eli-zaretsky-on-political-freud-a-comment-by-philosophical-apprentice/

Around the same time Rorty completed his metaphysical therapy, and was reinventing himself as a general-interest writer, his peers in the English department were replacing the categories of mind and world with language and text. They were, in other words, reproducing the epistemological conundrums that had bedeviled modern philosophy since Descartes. Instead of ditching the old neurotic patterns, literary theory repeated them ad nauseum. Problems of knowledge became problems of interpretation. The glamour of its European intellectualism aside, this meant only that literary theory knocked back and forth between the assertion that nothing can be known—versions of this skepticism are found in Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant—and the assertion that skepticism can be vanquished when knowledge is reconstructed upon a new foundation.

One can only marvel at this sentence by Metcalf:

Around the same time Rorty completed his metaphysical therapy, and was reinventing himself as a general-interest writer, his peers in the English department were replacing the categories of mind and world with language and text.

Rorty was never a ‘general-interest writer’ this is dismissive of what Rorty became. He realized that philosophy was a literary genre, and when he realized that he became a better philosopher and writer. On the question of  ‘language and text’ see ‘Philosophy as Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’ in ‘Consequences of Pragmatism’. ‘From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida’ in Contingency, irony and solidarity*.Two Meanings of “Logocentrism”: A Reply to Norris’ in ‘Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory’  and ‘A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals : Derrida on Marx in ‘Philosophy and Social Hope’.  Call Rorty’s advocacy/defense of Derrida to be completely consistent over time.

Rorty was a man and thinker of his time. Perhaps he never encountered Marshall McLuhan’s prescient idea of the Global Village, perhaps it seemed like Pop Sociology of the Television Age. Or Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitan notion of ‘global domestic politics’, that was ushered in by the Age of the Internet.

Some of us on ‘The Left’ read ‘The Machiavellian Moment’ by J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Identity and Violence, The Illusion of Destiny’ by Amartya Sen and ‘Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil’ by Ulrich Beck.  These three books put the ‘patriotism’ advocated by Rorty, as interpolated by Metcalf, and the ‘Leftist’ singularity of ‘Identity’, in their proper places. We owe our allegiance, not to the state, but to a republican tradition, that is now expressed as Cosmopolitanism, as embracing the whole of sentient beings, rather that a fealty to a state. And to the realization of that belief. Metcalf as apologist for the losers of the 2016 American election would call this Utopianism, or something more dismissive. Yet the New Democrats were/are corrupt to their core, and even now cling to that corrupt leadership, and their party regulars seeking scapegoats where they can. Rorty as interpolated by Metcalf does their bidding.

Old Socialist

*Added January 16,2017