It seems that Mr. Leith has left no highfalutin literary reference unused in his search for some applicable frame for President Obama, near the end of his second term: Homer, Milton and at its end Sophocles. Call this the a thick application of an Oxbridger education, or the pretense of one, to the pallid political mediocrity of President Obama. Leith’s hyperbole has an unintentional comic dimension. Or should the reader attribute this to the editors:

Barack Obama: a sulking Achilles or something else?

I read this essay yesterday. Because I am an American, I spent Thursday cooking a Thanksgiving meal for family. Not the usual turkey, but two Tri-Tips on the barbecue, on our small patio under the warm California sun, nearing 80°, a perfect Fall day for Southern California.

To some of us Obama has been a bitter disappointment. For all the rhetorical skill he brought to his campaign of 2008, which we believed was the real thing, not having been exposed to an intelligent and well spoken candidate since, I will confess, John Kennedy. What we got was a disappointing Neo-Liberal conformist, who brought us a collection of Clinton administration retreads, and Heritage Foundation Health Care instead of at least fighting for Single Payer. Not to forget his support for Victoria Nuland as birth mother to the Ukrainian Coup, and insuring that our 30 Years War against ‘Radical Islam’, Huntington’s ‘Clash’ made real, was properly funded in perpetuity, an exaggeration,yes! Mr. Leith puts a glossy finish on Obama, yet the end is just approaching, perhaps it would have been more prudent to wait till the transfer of power to Trump before pronouncing on Obama.

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/e9f17720-b224-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0

Mr. Ganesh opens his latest essay using the subjunctive mood of, ‘if only the left understood class as Kinsey understood sex.’ The Kinsey Reports were published in 1948 (Male) and 1953 (Female), and posited the idea of a ‘sexual continuum’ in regards to sexual orientation: Gay,Straight and all the bewildering varieties between these two points.

The trouble is that Mr. Ganesh engages in his own brand of reductivism, when he sights Marx as the Left’s root, its historical singularity. The ‘Left’, Marx and Marxism are static and unchanging, as presented by Ganesh.  Except that the ‘Left’ also expresses itself in many historical/political iterations and permutations, as in  the Kinsey continuum. Amartya Sen is his book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) talks about the very fluidity of  idea of ‘identity’ as prima facie expressive of multiplicity within an assumed singularity.

The idea/person of Marx serves quite nicely as a straw man, that can now be used, at will, to bolster his argument about the natural antagonism between Capital and Labor as a closely held belief of Leftists. Except that that natural antagonism can be historically demonstrated, as in the rise of Unions, and the battles that resulted, now subject to the Ganesh rhetorical re-description: as in the ‘needy’ can be described as subject to dispossession from a loss of ‘industrial pomp’ :

There are elegiac prose portraits of communities in Britain and America that are poorer than they were in their industrial pomp, but often no poorer than the worst urban areas were then and are now. Theirs is the rage of dispossession rather than the rage of unique hardship.

In sum, Mr. Ganesh adopts the rhetorical persona of Lord Henry “Harry” Wotton, a character from Oscar Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Wooten is given to such comments as ‘I can sympathize with everything except suffering’ and ‘There is something terribly morbid about the cult of modern sympathy’. To  describes Ganesh as a writer/thinker who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, is to extemporize on a aphorism of  Wilde. Ganesh willfully forgets the Economic Catastrophe of 2008 , its successor Austerity and the utter failure of that once mythical dogma of The Self-Correcting Market.

Give Mr. Ganesh a kind of credit for his labored final paragraphs featuring this puzzling aphorism: ‘The central fact of politics is scarcity.’ It might be more candidly phrased as ‘the collapse of Neo-Liberal policies produced  economic scarcity’. He  indicts the political class, that surrenders to the political blackmail of the ‘jams’ of various hues. Yet this is his pronouncement on both Labour and Tories:

In word and deed, under Labour and Conservative direction, the state has shown a Kinsey-ian sensitivity to the shades of material wellbeing that exist between rich and poor.

This report from The House of Commons Library offers some compelling statistics on poverty and low incomes :

In 2014/15:

• 10.1 million people were in relative low income BHC (16% of the population), up 500,000 from the year before.
• 9.4 million were in absolute low income BHC (15%), down 500,000 from the year before.
• 13.5 million were in relative low income AHC (21%), up 300,000 from the year before.
• 12.9 million were in absolute low income AHC (20%), down 700,000 from the year before.

Looking specifically at children:

• 2.5 million children were in relative low income BHC (19% of children), up 200,000 from the year before.
• 2.3 million were in absolute low income BHC (17%), about the same as the year before.
• 3.9 million were in relative low income AHC (29%), up 200,000 from the year before.
• 3.7 million were in absolute low income AHC (27%), down 100,000 from the year before.

Source: DWP Households below average income, 2014/15

http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN07096

One could almost imagine Ganesh inhabiting the Reagan persona of ’76 and ’80 and railing against ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’ myth, with a bit of careful tailoring for a British audience: substituting the ‘jams’ for those ‘Queens’! But the real villains are the politicians,  whose fear of being voted out of office by the ‘jams’, who are looking for the ‘free ride’ of additional benefits. Not to worry about possible repercussions from the actual poor.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/033b28bc-ad83-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24

Look at the surfeit of information available to the the reader of the Financial Times regarding French politics and its current political actors: Le Pen, Sarkozy,Fillon, Juppé :

Has the sun finally set on the American Empire? Or just a momentary lull in what? The reader looks to Mr. Kagan’s repetition of three sets of metaphors repeated with necessary variations on the themes:

return to normalcy

shouldering burden of global order, the question of US responsibility for global order , the end of the 70-year-old American world order, George HW Bush of New World Order, global involvement, internationalist , the world order business, What it does mean is a return to national solipsism, So what does the normal solipsistic superpower do?

Pat Buchanan rode “America First” (Willfully forgetting the pioneering work of Charles Lindbergh? SKMSD)

Mr Kagan’s screed is about the dashed hopes and dreams, more like schemes and machinations, of a triumphant Kagan/Nuland Foreign Policy, the might-have-been of a Clinton victory in 2016. Though Mr. Kagan can take solace in  the balm of self-congratulation, that lards his polemic. Also thank the editors of The Financial Times, for curbing the Kagan penchant for intellectual verbosity, as servant to the imperative of Staussian obfuscation.

Perhaps, we should file this sentence under a Kagan ‘Note To Self’ : Note to American hawks: there will be no bombing of Iran under a Trump administration.  

Mr. Kagan, in his final paragraph, dons the mantle of Tiresias:

How long can this new era last? Who knows? Americans after 1920 managed to avoid global responsibility for two decades. As the world collapsed around them, they told themselves it was not their problem. Americans will probably do the same today. And for a while they will be right. Because of their wealth, power and geography they will be the last to suffer the consequences of their own failures. Eventually they will discover, again, that there is no escape. The question is how much damage is done in the meantime and whether, unlike in the past, it will be too late to recover.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/782381b6-ad91-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24

Demetri Sevastopulo offers some valuable insights into Flynn’s surprising political beliefs about abortion and Gay Marriage. Yet the insights offered about Flynn that are telling, in connection with his management style, and his belief that his opinion on military matters, his area of expertise, as being key to policy considerations, don’t seem to warrant critique. Except that his abrasive style gets in his way. Would Colin Powell’s speculations, as related to military policy and foreign policy be treated in the same way? But Mr. Sevatopulo’s reliance on a single anonymous source dilutes the power of his essay. What the reader is left with is the fact of Mr. Flynn’s blatantly expressed  Islamophobia, and following the Financial Times New Cold War Party Line, being paid to sit at a dinner table with Mr. Putin, offers proof of his unsuitability.

The reader could compare Mr. Flynn with Hillary Clinton’s collection of Neo-Conservative Policy Experts, supporters  like William Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg , Robert Kagan and his wife State Dept. official Victoria Nuland, not to speak of the 50 former G.O.P. National Security Officials who signed this letter:

This offering a kind of political parity with Mr. Flynn’ impolitic expressions, yet mirroring the same Islamophobia, in the more acceptable rhetorical frame of bourgeois political respectability.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/e1f286fe-adb5-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122#comments

Notice first that the writers at the Economist open their essay with an illustration that takes it inspiration from two famous paintings, one American the other French, both illustrating the Revolutionary fervor of the Age of Democratic Revolution, to borrow from R.R. Palmer. It is a self-serving pastiche featuring Trump, Putin and Farage as leaders of the Rebellion Against the Elites, as the propagandists at The Financial Times have named The Populist Menace. The reader is in awe about The Economist’s writers who cobbled together this description of the politics of Ronald Reagan, in their opening paragraph:

When Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again!” he was echoing the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Back then voters sought renewal after the failures of the Carter presidency. This month they elected Mr Trump because he, too, promised them a “historic once-in-a-lifetime” change.

But there is a difference. On the eve of the vote, Reagan described America as a shining “city on a hill”. Listing all that America could contribute to keep the world safe, he dreamed of a country that “is not turned inward, but outward—toward others”. Mr Trump, by contrast, has sworn to put America First. Demanding respect from a freeloading world that takes leaders in Washington for fools, he says he will “no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism”. Reagan’s America was optimistic: Mr Trump’s is angry.

The reader is not confused by the hagiography of Reagan, as the model of the politically virtuous, contrasted with Trump as president elect, and a leader who bases his politics on anger. Some empirical evidence  about Reagan and his kind of politics put that ‘city on the hill’ and Dutch’s cultivated awe shucks demeanor into proper perspective.

Reagan opened his 1980 Campaign with a speech at the Neshoba County Fair, not far from where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. Call this what it is obscene pandering to a Dixiecrat audience!

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

 See more at: http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15599#sthash.xDihd1Fz.dpuf

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14—Few people realize it, but Linda Taylor, a 47‐year‐old Chicago welfare recipient, has become a major campaign issue in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential primary.

The Washington Star

Former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California has referred to her at nearly every stop, using her as part of his “citizens’ press conference” format.

“There’s a woman in Chicago,” the Republican candidate said recently to an audience in Gilford, N.H., during his freeswinging attack on welfare abuses. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.” He added:

“And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax‐free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

Mr. Reagan never mentions the woman by name. But the effect is the same wherver he goes. During his second campaign swing through the state last month, for example, he startled people in Dublin and Jaffrey and Peterborough and Salem and in all the other little towns where he appeared. They were angry at “welfare chislers.” Mr. Reagan had hit a nerve.

The problem is that the story does not quite check out.

The political virtue of Reagan, when compared to the benighted politics of Trump, seems to fade, as Reagan was all about covering his malign politics with Public Relations, unceasingly practiced. Even to the colors behind the candidate, when he appeared at the podium to give his acceptance speech. Where has that carefully plotted, planned stagecraft gone since Reagan?

The reader only need look to Trump’s appointing of  Jefferson Beauregard  Sessions III as Attorney General, as indicative of the Dixiecrat sympathies of the president elect. Sen. Sessions looks and sounds like a villain out of a post-Civil War melodrama. And the appointment of  Michael Flynn, a retired military-intelligence three-star general, as National Security advisor, makes obvious the rapacious xenophobia of Trump is to be institutionalized. These are the appointments made by the Ringmaster of the Apprentice Circus : an integral part of his crusade against ‘illegal immigrant Mexicans’  and the ‘Devil’s Spawn of  Muslims’ are about the realization of an idiosyncratic American Fascism. With The Wall,  he expects Mexico to pay for, being the most cogent symbol of  his benighted concept of  Fortress State America: America First of Charles Lindbergh infamy, realized, sans an actual hero.

The coming apart of the ‘Liberal International Order’, read the ‘Neo-Liberal International Order’, that The Economist has spent decades advocating. And after its collapse in 2008, rationalizing that collapse, and the destruction of the destruction Welfare State in the name of ‘Austerity’, while defending Robber Capital, amounts to the Party Line of the Economist’s maladroit apologetic. Add to this fictional  political landscape the New Cold War, as a necessary check on Russian revanchism, and Chinese political adventurism in the South China Sea, and the reader can put together for herself the raison d’être of this propaganda masquerading as editorial meditation on the current crisis of Western Democracies

Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21710249-his-call-put-america-first-donald-trump-latest-recruit-dangerous

My reply to guest-ajalease , added November 19,2016 6:07 P.M. PST:

For a moment I thought I was reading either Ross Douthat or David Brooks at the New York Times, such was the purposeful ideological misreading of the political present, as a failure of ‘Liberalism’ a political description of a ‘climate of opinion’, to borrow Auden’s phrase,  that no longer exists. It is Neo-Liberalism that became the currency of both New Labour and the New Democrats, with the rise of political opportunists Blair and Clinton. And that Neo-Liberalism crashed in 2008, and produced in its wake economic misery, that is of no concern to Ganesh and his coterie, if such a collective exists.

What brought me back to the reality of Mr. Ganesh’s exercise in disdain, for all those who are not Ganesh, was this paragraph:

Imagine that Hillary Clinton had swung 100,000 votes across three US states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. The world would now be stifling a yawn at the resilience of mainstream politics against reactionary stresses.

Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. But the startling statistic, ignored by Ganesh and his fellow ‘technocrats’, is that 46.9 % of voters who cast ballots in the 2016 election did not vote for either Trump or Clinton! An inconvenience to  political chatterers across the political spectrum. And therefore ignored as politically irrelevant, to the apologists for Free Market Capitalism and its corollary of the Self-Correcting Market. These two myths died in 2008, yet still are the motor of Capitalist Apologetics in the year 2016, that acts as backdrop to Mr. Ganesh’s wan polemic, aimed not at the dread Populists but at the Ghost of Liberalism Past.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/b26899a6-aa58-11e6-a0bb-97f42551dbf4#comments

My reply to @Urania C, posted November 17, 2016

@Urania C

I must dissent on your estimation of Roth’s anti-fascist novel The Plot Against America. It was the usual collection of Roth obsessions: masturbation, voyeurism, the joy and wonder of being Jewish, not to speak of coming of age in what amounted to a ghetto in pre-war New Jersey. (Can the Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah have played a part in the beginnings of Roth’s novel? As in a climate of opinion?)

Compare Plot to Portnoy’s Complaint  was a wonderful send up of his obsessions, with the extra added attraction of Psychoanalysis and his castrating mother! A brilliant satire! But in Plot the featured player is his own unrelenting narcissism, he makes his younger self the hero of the novel, and a winning  hero he is: Scout comes to mind in To Kill a Mocking Bird. Despite the muddle that results in keeping track of the younger self, as character and the older, political/moral conformist of Roth’s running commentary .

Compare Roth’s novel to popular entertainments like Cukor’s  1943 MGM potboiler ‘The Keeper of the Flame’. Starring the celebrated Tracy and Hepburn, playing their respective roles, as brave inquiring reporter, and the anguished wife of a politician secretly allied with Fascism. Script by Donald Ogden Stewart, who was eventually Blacklisted. Premature Antifascist? The great advantage of ‘Keeper’ is that it had two actors of high reputation, and a script that kept the melodrama moving. The only thing that keeps Mr. Roth’s novel moving is the character of his younger virtuous self. The question that nagged me while reading this counter-factual novel is how can he end it.

Also compare Plot with Elia Kazan’s parable  A Face in the Crowd . Script by the notorious friendly witness Budd Schulberg , call this ‘project’ the alliance of two friendly witnesses. But it offers a portrait of an American demagogue:his rise and fall offers  stark lessons on the abuse of power. Both these Americans were complicit, they knew the territory!   

I would argue that the most accomplished, compelling counter-factual, anti-fascist novel was written by Robert Harris, Fatherland. Although not located  in an American context, it is compelling reading, and his re-imagining of the world remade by a stalemate between the Allies and Hitler’s Germany, offers a kind of imagined verisimilitude, utterly absent from the tepid, and tepid is the apt descriptor, of Roth’s novel.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

To @Nobody’s  critics, please read this friendly history of Neo-Conservatism:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/american-history-after-1945/neoconservative-revolution-jewish-intellectuals-and-shaping-public-policy?format=HB&isbn=9780521836562

The title is instructive :The Neoconservative Revolution Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by Murray Friedman.

@Nobody simply repeats the historical, but discomforting facts about the Neo-Cons and Mr. Fukuyama

For further information on  Leo Strauss, The Neo-Conservative Founder and Philosophical Dramaturge, and his historical, philosophical,  and ideological methodologies see: Cloaked in Virtue Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy By Nicholas Xenos

https://www.routledge.com/Cloaked-in-Virtue-Unveiling-Leo-Strauss-and-the-Rhetoric-of-American-Foreign/Xenos/p/book/9780415950909

Mr. Fukuyama’s exercise in ‘Staussian History’ framed in the windy Hegelian rhetoric of ‘The End of History’ merde, has had the staying power of Huntington’s self-serving mythology of the ‘Clash’, that made enemies of all except those who were of the hallowed, but very narrowly defined ‘West’.

StephenKMackSD

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

Here is Simon Schama ranting at Melanie Phillips about the Trump victory:

Here is a link to my first comment on The Financial Times web site:

http://on.ft.com/2fPf5AO

A copy of my reply to @RiskManager:

Mr Schama declares Sen. Jeff Session’s remark about banker George Soros being demonstrative of ‘antisemitism’, the expression of the canard of  ‘International Banking Conspiracy’, which, in itself, might have a validity. Yet, then, Ms. Phillips calls out the ‘Left’ on Liberal Campuses, meaning the B.D.S. movement as an integral part of that rise,  no surprise!  B.D.S., Trump and the Populist Menace are part of the myth of a 5th Column in ‘The West’ that threatens an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism and its agents.

StephenKMackSD

But bowing to the judgment of the polls does not entail a suspension of dissent, especially, when, as in this case, the election involves shameless suppression of votes, the politicisation of the FBI and the cyber-interference of the Russians.

https://www.ft.com/content/eb87a71a-a7f9-11e6-8898-79a99e2a4de6

One would think that a Clinton ally would be more circumspect at making claims of skulduggery: voter suppression, FBI politicisation, and cyber-interference of the Russians, when the Podesta e mails provide extensive documentation of the skulduggery of the Clinton Campaign from its beginnings against Sen. Sanders!

Voter suppression has been quite the rage since the states controlled by Republican governors and state legislatures made state issued  I.D.’s mandatory, while limiting the hours of operation of rural DMV’s, when registering  to vote, in answer to the notion of Voter Fraud, not based on any verifiable data, but on hysterical Republican Party and Fox News propaganda. Comey like J.Edgar Hoover has power, and the Clinton Campaign attacks on his veracity had consequences, its called politics D.C. style! The Russian cyber-interference is, again, not based in fact but in the speculation of a loose collective of experts, and their speculation of Russian interference. That dovetailed with the evolving New Cold War narrative indulged in by Mrs. Clinton with desperate ferocity.

Mr. Schama’s righteous indignation is a thing to behold, and so much of what he says about Trump might have been more cogently argued, within a less hysterical charged frame. But he misses two very salient issues: Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College, and the stunning statistic that  46.9% of voters did not vote for either Trump or Mrs. Clinton. That statistic speaks to the fact that both these candidates were deeply unpopular with voters. Mr. Schama’s myopia is not only ideological, but an expression of his inability to examine the most relevant empirical evidence!

One can judge Mr. Schama by his statement of principals:

Calm down dear” my fellow interviewee instructed me on BBC Newsnight when, a day after the US election I dialled the vehemence up to 11. I paid her no heed.

Political Reporter