StephenKMackSD's Blog

The American reader well over fifty will be vividly reminded of the era of Joe McCarthy and his zealous allies Nixon, Mundt and McCarren in the year 1952 , judging from the headline of this ‘news story’ awash in the current Anti-Russian hysterics! But read further to find the sections of this long quotation that I have italicized:

A group of intelligence experts, including a former head of MI6, has cut ties with fellow academics at Cambridge university, in a varsity spy scare harking back to the heyday of Soviet espionage at the heart of the British establishment.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and former master of Pembroke college, Stefan Halper, a senior foreign policy adviser at the White House to presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and Peter Martland, a leading espionage historian, have resigned as conveners of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar — an academic forum for former practitioners and current researchers of western spycraft — because of concerns over what they fear could be a Kremlin-backed operation to compromise the group.

Mr Halper said he had stepped down due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group”.

Sir Richard Dearlove, and Peter Martland resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because of ‘because of concerns over what they fear could be a Kremlin-backed operation to compromise the group.‘ And Stefan Halper stepped down due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group”. 

The empirical evidence to substantiate the charge of ‘unacceptable Russian influence’ :

Sir Richard and his colleagues suspect that Veruscript — a newly established digital publishing house that has provided funding to set up a new journal of intelligence and to cover some of the seminar’s costs — may be acting as a front for the Russian intelligence services.

They fear that Russia may be seeking to use the seminar as an impeccably-credentialed platform to covertly steer debate and opinion on high-level sensitive defence and security topics, two people familiar with their thinking said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sam Jones, Defence and Security Editor of The Financial Times answers my above question, without equivocation:

The Financial Times has been unable to independently substantiate their claims — and no concrete evidence has been provided to back them.

There is no empirical evidence to substantiate the charges of the three ‘experts’ who have reigned. Under the rubric of speculation, since this is the raison d’être of this essay/news story , not to speak of the New Cold War, could these three be Neo-Cons or fellow travelers, to stay within the patois of the Cold Warriors of the past?  This does not qualify as a front page  ‘News Story’, but meets the criteria of New Cold War hysterics. More from Mr. Jones:

Reliable evidence of Russia’s information war to back up such assertions has been in short supply, however. Indeed, the dispute at Cambridge revives uncomfortable memories of cold war fearmongering — and has sharply divided dons at the intelligence seminar.

The portent of the potted history of the 1930’s, and the subversion of Cambridge Five, acts as suitable substantiation of the secret callabos in our midst, this is about belief transmogrified into the politically usable! Except that Mr.Jones uses the Cambridge Five as mere diversion. For a much more entertaining and enlightening fictional recreation of the Cambridge Five, with Anthony Blunt as the fictional character Victor Maskel read the brilliantly realized novel by John Banville, The Untouchable.

This News Story ends in a very pedestrian way :

‘The seminar is “entirely unclassified” Prof Andrew pointed out, adding that the new Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism was not formally affiliated to the gathering.

Some of the academics the FT spoke to suggested that the dispute over the seminar might be tinged by an element of competition: Sir Richard and his colleagues who have departed from the seminar run a separate organisation — the Cambridge Security Initiative — which pursues a similar, though more commercially-oriented, agenda.’

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/d43cd586-c396-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354

How many times must readers be presented with the maladroitly expressed Straussian pessimism of Mr. Fukuyama, as having some kind of objective value? Mr. Fukuyama is part of a coterie of Political Romantics, who view themselves as the natural inheritors of the mantle of Plato’s Philosopher Kings. The Neo-Conservatives are the pioneers of using Plato’s ‘Noble Lie’ as integral part of their political/moral platform, with a strong assist from Carl Schmitt, Strauss’ political ally.

See  Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss,The Hidden Dialogue by Heinrich Meier (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3637206.html)

Here are three examples of the recurring themes of Mr. Fukuyama:in his 20013 American Interest essay attacks the whole of the meliorist politics of the American 20th Century!

Headline: The Decay of American Political Institutions of December 2013

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/

Headline: America in Decay, The Sources of Political Dysfunction of September/October 2014

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2014-08-18/america-decay

 Political Order and Political Decay,From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama published  in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

http://us.macmillan.com/politicalorderandpoliticaldecay/francisfukuyama/9780374535629/

The Fukuyama diagnosis of The Decay of American Political Institutions and its various iterations, carefully elides from a narrative history of America, the rise and the catastrophic collapse of the Neo-Liberal model of governance, of the economy and the polity. Where the evolution of republican values and practices were supplanted by the stunted, desiccated singularity of the Market, and its actor the entrepreneur.That attempted to replace the shared civic destiny of the commonwealth, and the citizen as the bearer and practitioner of civic republican virtue*. With the Market as epistemic singularity and the entrepreneur as its actor.What lends verisimilitude to the latest riff on his recurring theme, is the appearance of Trump on the American political scene.Yet he revels in the Political Orthodoxy of the current moment, as is he were part of respectable bourgeois politics, and even acts the role of trusted political commentator, rather than what he is a verbose political ideologue. Some selective quotation from his essay demonstrates his adherence to that current Political Orthodoxy:

‘The success of populism in 2016 should thus not be shocking. The financial crisis of 2008 was the responsibility of an economic elite, but it was ordinary working class citizens who lost their jobs as a result. With neither party offering the white working class a home, economic marginalization coincided with marginalisation in a political system that favoured those with money and status. The real surprise ought to be that the populist uprising did not come sooner’.

Not to name The Financial Reforms of 1999, as the one of the harbingers of the 2008 Collapse,  signed by Bill Clinton, and supported by the New Democrats and Republicans alike, as the dawn of a new age of prosperity, rhetorically reduced to the workings of an anonymous ‘economic elites’ is self-serving political equivocation, and acts rhetorically as an apologetic for an utterly bankrupt Neo-Liberalism.

Then the reader confronts what can only be described as the highly reduced rhetoric of American paranoia/propaganda, about the perpetually bad political actor Vladimir Putin. A collection of the current overworked cliches, produce at will  by the US/EU/NATO political troika and its fellow travelers called ‘Journalists’ and or ‘Pundits’.  About the Putin mendacity, not to speak of evil doings, to rival the murderous Joseph Stalin! Putin is the star of The New Cold War, a melodrama legitimized by Fukuyama and other ‘Journalists’ and or ‘Pundits’.

But whereas the internet has democratised access to information, it has not necessarily improved the quality of information—and it has exacerbated the effect of selective truths or even outright mis-information on politics. One has only to look at Russia to see how this works within an authoritarian state. Vladimir Putin has been perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of bad information. He has created new narratives out of whole cloth, such as the idea the Ukrainian nationalists were crucifying small children, or that the Malaysian airliner MH-17 was shot down by Ukrainian forces. Such propaganda has been startlingly effective within Russia: whereas many citizens were dismissive of official news sources back in the days of the former Soviet Union, they have responded far more positively to the nationalist line promoted by today’s Kremlin. When it comes to international relations, the ambition is not necessarily to promote a positive view of Russia, but simply to scramble the politics and upset the governance of his rivals. Hence the Russians gave support to the “Leave” forces in the Brexit referendum and the secessionists in the Scottish referendum before it, and in an even more daring assault on democracy Putin intervened in the US election campaign, where—according to the US intelligence community—Russian hackers stole information from the Democratic National Committee, hacked the email account of the Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and dribbled what they found out through Wikileaks to try and damage Clinton. Some well-informed commentators have even been highlighting the vulnerability of electronic voting machines, raising the spectre of even more direct distortion of democracy.

 Two other consideration come to mind: the intellectual practice of Strauss, and his acolytes is to use verbosity to exhaust the reader’s patience, and draw attention away from what might be key argumentative points, that become lost in a thicket of words, sentences and paragraphs. Which then becomes points of contention when critics examine a work for argumentative consistency, not to speak of cogency, which then become points that the author can assign to misunderstanding, predicated  upon the misunderstanding/mendacity on the critic’s part: the Staussian is perpetually subject to misunderstanding, due to the ignorance or mendacity of his/her critics.

Publius

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/america-the-failed-state-donald-trump

* See ‘The Machiavellian Moment:Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition’ by J.G.A. Pocock

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/1729.html

As frightening as Bolton is, The Brookings Institution headed by ‘Russia Hand’ Strobe Talbott, who exemplifies the ‘ethos’ of the New Cold Warrior, if you’ll pardon the misuse of the word ‘ethos’, were/are still a clear and present danger the teetering and mythical ‘Liberal International Order’, as Bolton and his fellow travelers.

The coterie of Neo-Liberal war mongers who supported Mrs. Clinton, e.g. Victoria Nuland and porcine Spartan Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg are part of larger circle of equally dangerous war mongers, who masque their bellicose propensities behind the self-congratulatory ‘Responsibility to Protect (R2P)’, call this high-minded sloganeering, but as utterly toxic as Bolton, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Of high-minded chatter coming from Brookings, Tom Wright, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy provides the necessary respectable bourgeois chatter steeped in the present iteration of Political Orthodoxy:

‘”Normally he would be seen as an extreme outsider and pushing in a direction a lot of traditional foreign policy types would be uncomfortable with, but in this administration … some people may see Bolton as a steadying force,” said Tom Wright, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution.’

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/john-bolton-state-trump-232573

Political Reporter

December 15,2016 8:03 AM PST:

Be sure to read Greg Thielmann’s essay at LobeLog titled ‘Bolton: A Prime Mover of the Iraq WMD Fiasco’. Mr Thielmann worked with Mr. Bolton, so his estimation of and insights into Bolton as political actor are invaluable. Thank you to Trita Parsi for posting the link on twitter!

Bolton: A Prime Mover of the Iraq WMD Fiasco

Headline: With Trump, the US foreign policy framework is at risk

Sub-headline: America has been a voice for liberty, open doors and leader of the free world

The estimable Mr. Zoellick appears regularly in the pages of The Financial Times, in this instance , as defender/advocate for ‘Liberty’ and ‘Open Doors’ and America as indispensable. In breathless tones Mr. Zoellick  constructs a nearly perfect political melodrama, in which no political cliche masquerading as American History , television style, is almost brought to life, for the black and white 21 inch world of 1959!

Some pre-World Bank political/economic advocacy of Mr. Zoellick’s past, may interest the more astute, curious reader: who should direct their attention to Gavan McCormick’s essay ‘Koizumi’s Coup’ in the New Left Review 35, September-October 2005, as uncomfortable as that may be, for the diehard Capitalist Class of readers, for a collection of insights into Mr. Zoellick not as advocate for  ‘Liberty’  and  ‘Freedom’ but as Neo-Liberal political actor and Capitalist Bureaucrat: president of the World Bank from 2007 to 2012.

‘The office of the us Trade Representative has played an active part in drafting the Japan Post privatization law. An October 2004 letter from Robert Zoellick to Japan’s Finance Minister Takenaka Heizo, tabled in the Diet on 2 August 2005, included a handwritten note from Zoellick commending Takenaka for the splendid job he was doing. Challenged to explain this apparent us government intervention in a sensitive domestic matter, Koizumi merely expressed his satisfaction that Takenaka had been befriended by such an important figure. When Bush raised the Postal Savings System with him in New York in September 2004, Koizumi is said to have replied: ‘Shikkari yatte ikitai—I will do my utmost’. It was tantamount to an absolute commitment, and the President duly expressed his satisfaction.

It is hard to overestimate the scale of the opportunity offered to us and global finance capital by the privatization of the Postal Savings System. Its aim, as the Japan External Trade Organization puts it, is

to develop a banking and business culture that can efficiently allocate capital according to market mechanisms and the basic tenets of modern credit analysis . . . It marks a definitive shift from an approach that relied upon allocated government funding to an autonomous and flexible system based on market principles. [4]

‘Privatization would lead to the development of ‘more sophisticated and efficient financial and capital markets’, as Japanese savings were directed into the private sector. As a result, jetro hopes that households will become ‘far more receptive to a wider range of investment instruments’. At that point, ‘Huge amounts of pent-up household capital would be moved into private financial markets’. In the us, about 50 per cent of the population are share-owners, and 36 per cent trade them; the respective figures for Japan’s 127-million-strong population are 10 and 3 per cent. ‘It’s a big space for us to grow into’, as one broker puts it.

The pss has long been the main—undemanding—customer for Japanese Government Bonds. Privatization would break this link, and the private and overseas investors who would henceforth be the main bond purchasers would have the virtue, jetro suggests, of subjecting state expenditure to more rigorous disciplines. Foreign investors:

are less likely to be forgiving about chronic budget deficits. They will also need to perceive a risk–reward ratio that effectively balances the ability of jgbs to provide stability, liquidity, diversification and Yen exposure with the interest rate offered. This transition will be difficult and the resulting upward pressure on interest rates does hold the potential to slow down economic recovery in Japan.

The implication, then, is a prolongation of high unemployment levels and a further deterioration of the social fabric, while rising interest rates compound the crisis of Japan’s fiscal deficit. By way of reassurance, jetro cites a study by Christian Broda of the New York Federal Reserve and David Weinstein of Columbia University which argues that, given the 2017 deadline, Japan’s government officials ‘have ample time and latitude to meet their obligations via higher taxes or reduced benefits and services’. [5]

None of these issues were publicly argued during the election campaign. Nor was there any serious scrutiny of the implications of Japan Post privatization for the future of postal delivery and local branches, especially those in remote regions which often serve as a focus for social services. Under the proposed legislation, once the functions are separated into four discrete companies in 2007, employees will lose their civil-servant status and branches will have to operate according to market principles. The role of the Postal Savings System in providing back-up for the innumerable family shops and small businesses that still form the backbone of a distinctively Japanese daily life was also ignored; they are likely to be obliterated once local savings are invested according to the dictates of global capital.

https://newleftreview.org/II/35/gavan-mccormack-koizumi-s-coup

Mr. Zoellick is not a defender of ‘Liberty’ or ‘Freedom’ for all, but for a special class of political actors, entrepreneurs,  who destroy public institutions under the banner of ‘reform’, allied to political mendacity and duplicity as strategic tools: that places profit above the public good, the raison d’etre of the Neo-Liberalism of the Hayek/Mises/Friedman troika. The collapse of that Neo-Liberal practice, as it ramified over time, ushered in the Republican political nihilism, after the Obama victory in 2008. Which was predicated on an ersatz  Hope and Change, and the subsequent appearance of the Tea Party  Jacobins, that were the immediate precursors of Trump, and his base in an exhumed Know-Nothing politics.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/e6112b5c-c159-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a#comments

What you advocate in your essay at Social Europe, For A European Political Economy Of Trust  could very easily be called Neo-Liberalism Lite! The old order of Keynesian economics, the dreaded Welfare State, and other such anachronisms don’t appeal to a generation Neo-Liberal technocrats, who have embedded themselves into positions of power as bureaucrats and or dependable members of the ‘Press’: Martin Wolf, Gideon Rachman, Edward Luce at The Financial Times or David Brooks, Arthur C. Brooks , (president of AEI), and Thomas Friedman at The New York Times, the paper of record!
One finds the idea of trusting Robber Capital, as utterly naive, or just disingenuous, given the Collapse of 2008, and the current state of Western Economies. Although the 1% are doing very well, there has been no ‘trickle down’! Lethargic fails to adequately describe the problem, for the 99%! For me the Brexit was about the fact that the EU will not ‘fix’ itself, because Merkel and her political capo, the European Central Bank, can’t confront the fact that four times in the 20th Century Germany defaulted:
https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0
Friedman’s speech:

Click to access friedman.pdf

The moral high-ground is a mole hill!
Ms. Tett’s column of 2015 reporting on Benjamin Friedman’s after dinner address is revelatory of the German/ECB self-serving myopia. And Yanis Varoufakis’ telling observation that the EU started as a cartel with the trappings of democracy describes the problem of the EU with telling accuracy. But J.G.A. Pocock’s comment in The London Review of Books is perhaps the shortest and most cogent summation:

J.G.A. Pocock

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

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

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

Not to forget Amartya Sen’s essay at the NewStatesman, a man and thinker I greatly admire for his Identity and Violence , a book that is a brilliantly argued rejoinder to Huntington’s WASP paranoia of The Clash of Civilizations. I may not agree with his European Idealism, he is deserving of a dispassionate reading.

It cannot be said that the European ­Union is doing particularly well at this time. Its economic performance has been mostly terrible, with high unemployment and low economic expansion, and the political union itself is showing many signs of fragility. It is not hard to understand the temptation of many in Britain to call it a day and “go home”. And yet it would be a huge mistake for Britain to leave the EU. The losses would be great, and the gains quite puny. And the “home” to go back to no longer exists in the way it did when Britannia ruled the waves.

We live in a thoroughly interdependent world, nowhere more so than in Europe. The contemporary prosperity of Europe – and elsewhere, too – draws on extensive use of economic interconnections. While the unacceptable poverty and inequality that persist in much of the world, including Britain, certainly call for better-thought-out public engagement, the problems can be addressed better without getting isolated from the largest economy next door. The remarkable joint statement aired recently, by a surprisingly large number of British economists, of many different schools, that Brexit would be an enormous economic folly, reflects an appreciation of this glaring reality. Apart from trade and economic exchange with Europe itself, Britain is currently included in a large number of global agreements as a part of the European Union. Britain can do a lot – for itself and for Europe – to correct some of the big mistakes of European economic policies.

The Brexit-wallahs, if I may call the enthusiasts that (without, I hasten to add, any disrespect), sometimes respond to concerns of the kind I have been expressing with the reply that Britain can surely retain the economic interconnections with Europe, and through Europe, even without being in the European Union. “Isn’t that what Norway largely did?” Norway has certainly done well, and deserves credit for it. But the analogy does not really work, not just because Britain is a huge economy in a way Norway is not, but much more importantly because quitting is not at all the same thing as not joining. Britain’s extensive economic ties with Europe, and a great many EU trade agreements that go beyond Europe in the multilateral global economy, are well established now and disentanglement would be a very costly process – a challenge that Norway did not have to face.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2016/06/dark-shadow

StephenKMackSD

Headline: U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections

By Dana Priest, Ellen Nakashima and Tom Hamburger September 5

‘U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said.

The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates ­cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia’s ability to spread disinformation.

The effort to better understand Russia’s covert influence operations is being coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. “This is something of concern for the DNI,” said Charles Allen, a former longtime CIA officer who has been briefed on some of these issues. “It is being addressed.”

A Russian influence operation in the United States “is something we’re looking very closely at,” said one senior intelligence official who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Officials also are examining potential disruptions to the election process, and the FBI has alerted state and local officials to potential cyberthreats.

The official cautioned that the intelligence community is not saying it has “definitive proof” of such tampering, or any Russian plans to do so. “But even the hint of something impacting the security of our election system would be of significant concern,” the official said. “It’s the key to our democracy, that people have confidence in the election system.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/intelligence-community-investigating-covert-russian-influence-operations-in-the-united-states/2016/09/04/aec27fa0-7156-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.8722de8fef5f

Headline: Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says  By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANEDEC. 9, 2016

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

This ‘news story’ reads as if it were a strategically leaked, by the Obama Administration, so packed is it with details that has the ring of truth, or something resembling it, e.g.

‘Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.’

If you read the quoted paragraphs these ‘reporters’ write as if they were reporting a news story based on carefully gathered empirical evidence, rather than the speculation of anonymous  U.S. government operatives, whose true motives are propagandistic! The Paper of Record is, after all, a stenographer to the powerful, meaning writing apologetics for the current Administration.  Which feeds the the rampant paranoia mongering of  New Democratic Elite like Harry Reid and Christine Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi:

Headline:  Nancy Pelosi’s daughter leads electors demanding intel briefing on Russia’s ties to Donald Trump

December 12, 2016

 If the Russians have meddled in an  American Election, one can only marvel at the political hysterics of Americans, who cry crocodile tears over this breach of their sovereignty. One need only look at the last 71 years of American history, to view the utter hypocrisy, wedded to a self-willed political  myopia, of the citizens of the American National Security State and its record as ruthless Hegemon:

The 1953 Iranian Coup, the Dominican Republic  Coup of 1963, Vietnam. This interspersed, in no particular order, of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador etc., etc. To the fall of the Soviet Union, and its rehabilitation to a Market Economy, that precipitated the rise of the Oligarchs : the KGB victors.  To the calamitous ‘War on Terror’, Our 30 Years War, from 2001 to its current iteration. Not to forget the 2014 Ukrainian Coup stage managed by Nuland and Pyatt!

Political Observer

Mr. Beinart has perfected the art of ‘Liberal’ bourgeois political chatter, that hews to the current iteration of Political Orthodoxy. Along the way the names of Kissinger and Kennan are dropped, and the idea of ‘Civilizational Conservative’, and other foreshortened forms of this idea, are used as garnish for his essay. Yet not one mention of the notorious Samuel P. Huntington and his two books ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ and ‘Who Are We’ that just might be considered as the part of the founding principals, in a highly vulgarized form, of both Trumpism and the ‘Alt-Right’ Know-Nothings.

Mr. Huntington’s galloping paranoia of the ‘Other’ was established in ‘The Clash’ and  particularized in ‘Who Are We’, in the the form of the imagined Mestizo Hordes that are invading the sanctity of the English speaking, Anglo-Protestant Virtue of America. Mr. Huntington political sensibility is that of a Henry Adams, Cosmopolitanism is an active subversion of an imagined ‘purity’: The Other, slaves, built the America that was never purely Anglo-Protestant. And the genocide against Indigenous Peoples was part of the sacred idea/practice of Manifest Destiny. The inconvenience of History!

Political Observer

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/the-conservative-split-on-russia/510317/

Trump’s ‘five fateful foreign policy choices’ headline begins this essay, but just one sentence of Mr. Rachman’s dependable, and infrequently modulated political melodrama, demonstrates a certain repetitive political myopia, my apologies to the reader for this clumsy description, yet I think it an apt characterization of the Rachman rhetorical strategy:

The incredulity and alarm that Mr Trump’s appointments have caused in the Washington establishment are compounded by his disdain for the government’s own experts.

The technocrats that are in a ‘state of alarm’ are the ‘experts’ some of whom date back to the debates/debacles of the 1960’s to the dismal present : the Cuban missile crisis, the Dominican Republic  Coup of 1963, Vietnam. This interspersed, in no particular order, of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador etc., etc. To the fall of the Soviet Union and its rehabilitation to a Market Economy, that precipitated the rise of the Oligarchs and the KGB victors.  To the calamitous ‘War on Terror’, Our 30 Years War, from 2001 to its current iteration. The record of this dismal list of failures, of this coterie of ‘experts’, is  American History!

The Trump Strategy can be viewed in his Apprentice television circus: to cultivate a usable disequilibrium, in his opponents, and be aware, that in the mind and ‘moral world view’ of the Caudillo, the Strong Man, everyone is an opponent! That is what puts Paul Ryan’s attempt to ‘tutor’ Trump, in the practices of American politics into the realm of black comedy. Not forgetting the strong element of schadenfreude: a personal confession!

Trump is the issue of a Republican Party, that made political nihilism its operative strategy, since 2008. And now the strategic thinkers, who practiced this political necromancy, are shocked,surprised, aghast at the rise of someone like Trump. And the New Democrats have proved themselves to be utterly corrupt, in their support for Hillary Clinton, a candidate committed to the Neo-Liberal status quo. Although she leads in the popular vote by 2.5 million votes.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/fa9ed50e-c04d-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a

Ms. Chassany’s descriptive analysis of the French political contest is awash in the indispensable polling numbers favored by a class of the pseudo-technocrats, whose corollaries in the American election, were proven to be, not exactly wrong, but wide of the mark. Even though Clinton leads the popular vote by, at last count, 2.5 million votes, she lost in the Electoral College.

Ms. Chassany’s essay takes as its point of departure the possible ‘lurch to the left’ of the French Socialists in the person of the ‘fiery leftwinger’ Arnaud Montebourg. The villain of the piece has been identified, to be compared to the, in sum, Neo-Liberal ‘Mr. Valls, a social democrat’: the political infection of the ‘Free Market Mythology’ is rampant across the desiccated political spectrum of an equally mythical ‘West’.

Define Mr. Valls’ and his politics as that of: ‘the instigator of President Hollande’s midterm shift in favour of tax cuts, deregulation and a measure of labour market flexibility.’… ‘The 54-year-old is also a strict secularist, backing controversial local bans on burkini swimsuits…’

But, here is a telling paragraph that lets the Financial Times reader know the full extent of the nihilism of ‘many leftwing  voters’:

‘“The problem for Valls is that for many leftwing voters, the primary is an opportunity to punish the outgoing government, not to choose the best presidential candidate,” says François Miquet-Marty, head of ViaVoice, a pollster. “The Socialist party could go the way of the Labour party by nominating someone like Montebourg, who is to the left of the party’s centre of gravity. This could result in the party splitting up.”’

Mr. Valls looks to be a ‘social democrat‘ with a great deal in common with the Marinetti-Thatcherite Fillon, except for the exaltation of ‘speed’ and ‘shock’ in his politics that seeks ‘to eradicate French gloom’ .

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/7a5396a4-be05-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

I recall asking my mother what ‘without portfolio’ meant, when I was seven or eight years old, as I looked at one of her copies of Ladies Home Journal. This popular woman’s magazine, for generations of women, had as one its writers, Claire Boothe Luce and her column was called Ambassador Without Portfolio, or a title something like that. What brought this memory back to me, was that when I read Mr. Kuper’s essay on Ms. Huffington, I was reminded that what Mrs. Luce and Ms. Huffington have in common was their shared and very canny ability at self-promotion.

Mrs. Luce was a talented writer, who married well, and wrote ‘The Women’ for the stage that became a Hollywood  film. Mrs. Luce was a very conservative Roman Catholic and an even more conservative Republican. And a rabid Anticommunist, like her husband of the Time-Life empire. Henry Luce was a powerful force in controlling public opinion, before the age of the Internet, and Time magazine was his very powerful instrument of enforcing his world view, while demonizing those who dissented. Compare his influence to the Hearst family nation- wide, the Chandler family in Los Angeles and Robert R. McCormick of Chicago. The present ‘Time’ is a pale ghost of what it once was under Luce’s management. The only time one sees Time mentioned on the internet is when its editors. of this ‘News Magazine’, name their ‘Person of the Year’: this year’s pick Donald Trump!

Ms. Huffington built her American ‘brand’ on her biography of Picasso, and her long time status as acolyte of Milton Friedman. Then Ms. Huffington, once a pillar of Conservatism,   morphed into that ersatz political category of Progressive. And launched her Huffington Post on the unpaid labor of her stable of writers. And then sold it to AOL and declared it was ‘just a business’, rather that a political instrument to elect fellow ersatz Progressive Barack Obama. In her latest book,  Ms. Huffington now offers her fellow overachievers advice on getting more sleep, enabling their continued triumph in the dog eat dog world of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a4322038-bc09-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080