StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is the concluding paragraph of Mr. Bromwich’s wan, almost apology, for Mrs. Clinton, he seems torn. Trump is such an easy target, he is always the Ringmaster of television fame. But Bromwich is a writer of the school of Murray Kempton, who married his talent as a political moralist, with a writing style that sometimes was hard to decipher, as to meaning, although it resembled a kind of poetry, at least to my younger self. Bromwich is easier to understand, his is a self-consciously literary style: sometimes arresting, at other times expressing superfluous garnish. But he seems to descend, in this last paragraph, into the demotic, that is surprising for such a practiced stylist.

The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/10/on-the-election-i/

American Writer

A reader must approach with caution Mr. Wolf’s review of Wolfgang Streeck’s book ‘How Capitalism Will End’. The opening paragraph is demonstrative of Mr. Wolf’s defensive posture. The first sentence has the ring of the King James Bible about it, quite extraordinary!

Cometh the hour, cometh the cliché. In the case of Wolfgang Streeck, an influential German sociologist who is emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, that cliché is “the end of capitalism”. Countless intellectuals, including Karl Marx, have forecast the imminent or at least inevitable end of capitalism. Capitalism has always survived. This time, argues Streeck, is different. Capitalism “will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way”.

https://www.ft.com/content/7496e08a-9f7a-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2

The Streeck quote seems  to ring true in his observation of ‘about to die from an overdose of itself’. Mr. Wolf, for obvious strategic reasons, continues to call what he defends as Liberalism, yet what he defends with the solemness of a theologian, is the Neo-Liberalism of  Hayek/Mises/Friedman menage.That Neo-Liberalism is still foundering in the wake of its collapse in 2008. Indicative of that is that the growth sector,  in the American economy, is low paying service jobs. Yet Mr.Wolf soldiers on trying to quell one of the many intellectual manifestations of The Rebellion Against the Elites.

Compare Mr. Wolf’s continuing argument that ‘liberalism’ is wedded to democracy with the fact that the Chinese are far better Capitalists than its practitioners in the ‘West’ . Democracy seems utterly superfluous to a high functioning Capitalism. Given this fact, the reader just might look to the TPP and the TTIP as the natural successors of the failed Neo-Liberal Utopianism, as a form of Steeck’s  postulation of a Capitalism overdosing on itself: this being the seemingly ineluctable Corporatism of our collective future? A quote from Mr. Wolf’s August 30,2016 essay seems pertinent, as he speaks in the discarded vocabulary of civic republicanism, rather that the desiccated  cliches of Markets and Entrepreneurs:

A natural connection exists between liberal democracy — the combination of universal suffrage with entrenched civil and personal rights — and capitalism, the right to buy and sell goods, services, capital and one’s own labour freely. They share the belief that people should make their own choices as individuals and as citizens. Democracy and capitalism share the assumption that people are entitled to exercise agency. Humans must be viewed as agents, not just as objects of other people’s power.

Yet it is also easy to identify tensions between democracy and capitalism. Democracy is egalitarian. Capitalism is inegalitarian, at least in terms of outcomes. If the economy flounders, the majority might choose authoritarianism, as in the 1930s. If economic outcomes become too unequal, the rich might turn democracy into plutocracy.

https://www.ft.com/content/e46e8c00-6b72-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c

For some informative background on the Crisis of Capitalism and possible remedies to the failure of it ‘disruptive spirit’ see:

https://www.ft.com/content/8552919a-955b-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b

And on The Corruption of Capitalism viewed through the Financial Times lens:

https://www.ft.com/content/ca43edee-8bdd-11e6-8cb7-e7ada1d123b1

On the rising poverty rate in Britain, a direct result of Neo-Liberal political policy, see this BBC essay:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-32812601

On the rise of once thought eradicated communicable diseases in Britain:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/23/fever-pitch-why-old-fashioned-infections-are-making-comeback

Political Observer

Additional information:

Headline: Third of UK population ‘fell below the poverty line’ (20 May 2015)

Sub-headline: Almost a third of the UK population fell below the official poverty line at some point between 2010 and 2013, figures show.

Around 19.3 million people – 33% – were in poverty at least once, compared with 25% of people across the EU, the Office for National Statistics found.

But only 7.8% were defined as being in “persistent income poverty” in 2013 – less than half the 15.9% EU average.

Pensioners and single parent families were found to struggle the most.

The ONS records someone as being in poverty if they live in a household with disposable income below 60% of the national average, before housing costs.

Persistent poverty is defined as being in poverty in the current year and at least two of the three preceding years.

Summing up the findings, the ONS said: “Studies reveal that although some people are stuck in poverty, the majority of ‘the poor’ consist of a constantly changing group of different individuals.”

The report added that although “poverty persists only for a relatively small minority, evidence suggests that those who have already been in poverty are more likely to experience poverty again in the future than those who have never been in poverty”.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-32812601

Headline: TB and scarlet fever: why Victorian diseases are making a comeback (Monday 23 May 2016 )

Sub-headline: Despite 100 years of medical advancement, old-fashioned infections are creeping back into Britain. Should we be worried?

…

Scarlet fever is not the only Victorian disease making a comeback. Thirty-four cases of gonorrhoea resistant to the antibiotic azithromycin were reported in England between November 2014 and April of this year. Fortunately, the bacterium remains sensitive to the other drug used in first line therapy, ceftriaxone. “However, if azithromycin becomes ineffective against gonorrhoea, there is no ‘second lock’ to prevent or delay the emergence of ceftriaxone resistance, and gonorrhoea may become untreatable,” Public Health England warned last month.

Then there are the diseases against which most of us received childhood vaccinations – measles, whooping cough and tuberculosis – that have had outbreaks in recent years. What is going on? Broadly speaking, there are two reasons why such diseases are making a comeback: because the pathogens that cause them are constantly evolving; and because inadequate numbers of people are being vaccinated.

Take the 2013 outbreak of measles in south-west Wales, which killed one man and hospitalised 88 people. “Measles is a very infectious virus, so you’re relying on maintaining very high levels of immunisation within the population to stop it circulating,” says Dr Matthew Snape, a paediatrician and vaccines expert at Oxford university hospitals NHS trust. In the wake of the MMR vaccine scare, uptake of the vaccine fell to only 67.5% in Swansea, compared with about 94% beforehand.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/23/fever-pitch-why-old-fashioned-infections-are-making-comeback

The Financial Times is fortunate to have Mr. Stubb, or Mr.  90%, as one of its stable of writers/propagandists. Whose made to measure definition Liberalism is puzzlingly simplistic, or just politically self-serving? ‘… who believe in a combination of democracy, market economy and globalisation.’ This in not a definition of Liberalism but of Neo-Liberalism: the project of that Neo-Liberalism is to supplant democracy, and its concept of the shared destiny of the Commonwealth and the vital role of citizenship, with the pallid and vacuous concept of the Entrepreneur, as stand-in for the irreplaceable role of citizen, as the vital actor in the life of the polis.

Mr. Stubb presents himself as “academic federalist”, “in practice a functionalist” in terms of his participation as EU bureaucrat.

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

While ignoring Yanis Varoufakis’ telling insight that the EU stated life as a cartel, with the trapping of democracy, and continues to be just that. Should the reader take that “in practice a functionalist” as a declaration of his settlement with the facts of the EU, as institutionally failed in terms of democratic practice?

True to form Mr. Stubb warns about what the  Financial Times has characterized as The Rebellion Against the Elites, as the threat to the rational, not to speak of the  ‘Vital Center’,  as New Frontier poodle Schlesinger described it. A quote in defense of that ‘Center’

The litmus test for the moderate centre in 2016 is how it treats the current populist movements.

If that ‘moderate centre’ be represented by The Financial Times and it writers, that ‘litmus test’ is about a concerted, not to speak of an unrelenting campaign of hysteria mongering. Instead of coming to term with the fact of their advocacy of Free Market Utopianism, that crashed in 2008, as a explicable cause of  the rise of the dread ‘Populists’ !

Mr. Stubb concludes his essay with an expression not of a ‘Liberal Internationalist Faith’ but of an actual Neo-Liberal Internationalist Faith in Neo-Liberal Rationalism: tautology comes to mind. But also the political facts of the TTP and TTIP, as the active subversion of the ‘rule of law’ and the Nation State, as the vital frame of the ‘rationalism’ Mr. Stubb celebrates. Indeed, Corporatism is the political end point of that Neo-Liberal Utopianism.

Liberal internationalists should not lose faith. At the end of the day it is a question of how we adapt to change and whether we have the courage to defend freedom and democracy. In the cacophony coming from social and mainstream media this will not be easy. The desire to go with the perceived flow is tempting.

I believe human beings are rational; we are able to figure out what is best for us. If history is anything to go by, authoritarian rule, protectionism and nationalism will fail in the long run. But in the short run they can do a lot of damage. Democracy, the market economy and globalisation are worth defending. To survive they must adapt to a world revolution happening faster than any before.

https://www.ft.com/content/b4029c5b-f9a6-3459-9f17-639aa9cabb6f

Old Socialist

1. ‘A man who just got the official endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan is close to becoming president of the United States.’
2. She’s running against the Kremlin—…
3. She’s running against Julian Assange…
4. And she’s running against a rogue FBI director about whom more devastating information came out Wednesday morning.

Despite Mr. Tomasky’s 5 Reasons Not To Panic, his opening paragraphs reek of a paranoid defensiveness. He extemporizes on the  perennial theme/claim of The Paranoid: everyone is against me.  Mr. Tomasky simply sharpens the argument by engaging in the self-serving reductivism of just 4 Clinton Enemies: Trump,Putin, Assange and Comey. (Recall Nixon’s Enemies List?) And an eclectic list it is, even accusing Mr. Comey of being a ‘rogue FBI director’, shades of J. Edgar Hoover in his prime? A political operative as supposedly savvy as Mrs. Clinton, or her surrogates, including that paragon of New Democratic virtue Rep. Nancy Pelosi, have attacked the FBI Director. Who may only serve a ten year term, but who has a certain discretion in the wielding of his power: if his putative integrity is so frontally attacked, what might he do? The question has been answered!

Call Mr. Tomasky’s intervention what it is, the panic, indeed the desperation, of a political establishmentarian grasping for something resembling a legitimate argument.Should the reader gauge the Tomasky desperation by the brazenness of his attack on Comey?

Yet in his 5 Reasons Not To Panic, Mr. Tomasky returns to rational argument and is quite convincing, though not wholly so. Tomasky should have consigned the first part of his essay to the wastebasket, and led with the rational arguments. Consider that Tomasky is a writer for The Daily Beast, now in the firm grip of Neo-Con Michael Weiss, a specialist in fomenting politically usable hysteria.

Political Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/02/five-reasons-not-to-panic-about-hillary-clinton-right-now.html

@Confucius @Sam

Not to see the parallels between The Manchurian Candidate as a product of American Cold War paranoia, and the political present, if only to realize that an integral part that Old Cold War paranoia is being replayed, although in a different key. And at the same cartoonish level of  a Hollywood ‘thriller’ steeped in the political machinations of bad political actor, ‘The Red Chinese’ who

‘brainwash’ the son of a prominent right-wing political family, who becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchurian_Candidate_(1962_film)

Hollywood has always been a servant of the American Party Line of Exceptionalism, since its beginnings.  @Sam points in the right direction, although I would not speak for him. What we are witnessing is the free play of the paranoia of the New Cold War, Putin as the New Stalin and Trump as his dupe. Clinton is using this cartoonish version of Putin as the point of accusation in regards to Trump, as her loyalty is with her Neo-Conservative Cabal of supporters: Nuland,Kagan,Kristol, Goldberg etc. She and they are War Mongers/Russophobes.

For more ‘evidence’ of Trump as Russian Dupe see Franklin Foer’s essay at Slate:

Teaser:

Headline : Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

Sub-headline:  This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html

First posed as a question, evolving into a chance discovery by a team of ‘computer scientists’ and other experts, of Trump’s involvement with nefarious Russian Bankers, and then Putin enters, by inference. I have foreshortened it here, out of necessity, as it is long and complicated essay, but my point is that the inventors and users of Stuxnet, America and Israel, don’t have clean hands, those ‘computer scientists’ are a capacious category for a reason. What is on display is the power of the paranoia mongers, the authors of the  Old and New Cold Wars, is not a political constant, but ebbs and flows in our common political life, according to the needs of those political opportunists.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/39da343a-9f4b-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf-content=176399557:601697173

This is an astounding paragraph coming from Mr. Luce, who plays a staid political conformist, in the pages of The Financial Times, and recites with a certain rhetorical flair, the cliches of the current iteration of the political orthodoxy, as if they were newly minted truths!

James Comey, the FBI director, was panicked into issuing his statement by the opposite fear — that if he had held back Republicans would have accused him of working for Mrs Clinton. Mr Comey, the fearsome sentinel, has over-reached. Public servants should never take actions that could sway a presidential election. His lapse was a result of Mr Trump having already singled him out as part of a “rigged system”. In a country so viscerally divided, neutrality is treated as collusion. On Friday Mr Comey was hustled into making an error.

https://www.ft.com/content/a4380390-9d23-11e6-a6e4-8b8e77dd083a

One can only ask on what empirical evidence does Mr. Luce base this utterly speculative set of assertions? Or should we just call it political fiction, in service to a political end, and or Mr. Luce jumping on the bandwagon driven by Eric Holder and his Washington Post opinion piece?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-james-comey-is-a-good-man-but-he-made-a-serious-mistake/2016/10/30/08e7208e-9f07-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html?postshare=8671477921245499&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.13cdb12874bf

That sets up Comey as political fall guy, rather than Luce’s melodramatic ‘fearsome sentinel’ nonsense straight out of a Comic Book Universe of stock heroes and villains. On the face of the charge of being ‘panicked’ or subject to ‘over-reach’ or ‘hustled’ seems so out of character for the good grey Mr. Comey – He and Luce share a veneration for political conformity, except that Comey seems authentically to possess an actual gravitas, where for Holder and Luce it is a political pose, a role to be invested in rather than practiced. So much more to be said on Mr. Luce’s rhetorical intervention, my patience for cleverly framed propaganda has reached its limit, at least for today.

American Writer

After Mr. Schama’s praise of Mrs. Clinton in the pages of the Financial Times :

…will managerial omnicompetence be enough to see her and the US through what is shaping up to be the ugliest crisis of political legitimacy to afflict the republic since the civil war?

https://www.ft.com/content/3b323e04-9b8b-11e6-8f9b-70e3cabccfae

What might Mr Schama mean by ‘managerial omnicompetence’? Should the reader put Maureen Dowd’s extemporizing in the same class as Mr. Schama’s? Ms. Dowd’s expressed a similar thought in the Neo-Liberal patois of ‘purest brands’ about Obama, Comey and Lynch, as the ultimate expression of ‘Free Market Virtue’ and guardians of The Law. No matter that this ‘argument’ is awash in the incommensurables made famous by ‘Liberal Chatterbox’ Isaiah Berlin.

In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch — and jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/the-clinton-contamination.html?_r=0

Schama’s rhetoric  is closely linked to an apologetic rhetoric, while David J. Lynch and Catherine Belton frame it in terms of Political Melodrama, starring  Trump as ally of the Russians, Putin, who have given Wikileaks, in the person of Julian Assange, the Hillary Clinton e mails, as a act of the subversion of an American election. One might just observe at this point, that even if true, the American National Security State has an established record for doing the same, and worse, in terms of interference in the domestic affairs of other nations for well over a century (viz. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823). This being irrelevant to New Democrat Reid’s manufactured political hysterics i.e. ‘explosive evidence'(compare this assertion to McCarty’s List of Names?) in defense of an utterly corrupt Party Machine and its candidate: from Latin candidatus ‘white-robed’.

Note too the comments of Eric Holder on the matter, and recall that he and President Obama gave de facto pardons to Wall Street Bankers and Investment Houses, as part of the project of political healing.  The egregious record of FBI mendacity and subversion of the Constitution remains in the territory of politically motivated erasure

The Financial Times and their reporters David J Lynch and Catherine Belton do a workman like job in reporting and providing relevant statistical data, yet the central theme of that reportage highlights Reid’s hysterical claims of Russian meddling as having centrality.

The allegations by Mr Reid that Mr Trump has inappropriate ties to Russian leaders has been pursued by Democrats for months, with several calling on the FBI to disclose whether they are investigating the Republican nominee for being in the Kremlin’s sway.

Mr Reid, who is retiring from Congress, wrote: “I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public … and yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.”

What I am presenting is not conclusive, but consider the arguments and the speculation of the reportage of David J Lynch and Catherine Belton, not to speak of the political toxic hysterics of desperate political actors: Clinton, Holder, Reid and Comey as part of a continuing loss of political legitimacy of our two Party state. In which both of these Party’s are mired in corruption, wedded to nihilism, and where the tradition of the cultivation of civic republican virtue is consigned to the cynical derision of Party hacks.

Publius

https://www.ft.com/content/19a3c8e8-9ebf-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2

Any cliche about Putin The Terrible not written here can be attributed to the exigencies of moving forward in Mr. Stephens’ attempt to promulgate a ‘New Pragmatism’, in regards to Putin. Look at it as a means to an end, first Stephens must establish with The Financial Times reader his fealty to the current Political Orthodoxy, as his in order to. Also notice the mechanistic framing of the idea of ‘reset’. There is much to choose from in this regard, my choice is this excerpt, from his essay is this fragment of a Putin armchair psychological profile :

‘Mr Putin craves respect. Russia, Mr Obama said, was no more than a “regional power” whose revanchist military intervention in Ukraine was evidence of weakness rather than a demonstration of prowess. Russian actions were “a problem”, but not the biggest threat to America’s national security. You could hear the screams of anguish in the Kremlin.

The assessment was at once right and wrong. By almost every metric — economic, demographic, social or technological — Russia faces inexorable decline. The US president, though, underestimated Moscow’s willingness to use its still formidable military. Mr Putin is a leader ready to take risks at a time when the west prizes caution above all else. Mr Obama missed, too, the link between adventurism and hurt national pride. If Mr Putin wants anything on the global stage, it is to be treated as the leader of a power that can sit down as an equal with the US and China.’

In sum, Mr. Putin suffers from an ‘inferiority complex’ enacted on the World Stage, in this maladroit exercise in analysis at long distance. For readers with memories that reach back to the short-lived era of the Psycho-Biography will note the similarity of this iteration, in miniature, sans the cumbersome Freudian lexicon.

Mr. Stephens reaches almost firmer ground with this recitation of the political crimes of Putin:

True, the Russian president still has admirers in the west. They extend beyond Mr Trump. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour party, has spent a political lifetime marching against wars fought by the west. He cannot bring himself to condemn the Russian slaughter of civilians in Aleppo. He is in the company of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, and pro-Moscow fascist parties in Hungary and Greece. Far left thus meets far right.

It is evident to just about everyone else, however, that the interventions in Ukraine and Syria are expressions of a broader Kremlin strategy. Regime survival and hostility towards the west are two sides of the same coin. Support for populist parties of left and right in Europe, the subversion of democracy in formerly communist states and the cyber attacks on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign are all of the same piece. Mr Putin’s target is the liberal international order. He wants a great power carve-up that restores Russian suzerainty over its near-abroad and flatters its relevance in global affairs.

Yet, what Mr. Stephens  leaves out of his made to measure narrative is that America and its European arm NATO, and its EU partners use of the same strategies that he accuses Putin of using e.g. The Ukrainian Coup aided by the The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies as a vital political actor in the fomentation of that Coup, and the utterly notorious American use of the Stuxnet virus against the Iranians . And not to forget Putin’s allies, call them his collaborationist, in the ‘West’ like Jeremy Corbyn. The ‘Liberal  International Order’ is not in decline but is suffering from the exhaustion of its legitimacy.

Mr. Stephens offers these four strategies in regards to Putin

Resolve, Consistency, Engagement,  Respect

This sounds like something that George F. Kennan offered, during the latter part of his career, after some time had passed, and events led him to reconsider his ‘Long Telegram’. Yet, Mr. Stephens cannot emancipate himself from the habit of mind of the New Cold Warrior, and the all important job of currying favor with The Financial Times reader.

To say that Russia is weak in most of the dimensions of power is to state the obvious. That does not mean it is wise for a US president publicly to confront a thin-skinned Russian president with the uncomfortable reality. Dissembling has a place in diplomacy. The sadness is that if Mr Putin continues to pretend Russia is a great power it will eventually cease to be a great nation.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e7db344c-9aca-11e6-b8c6-568a43813464

Headline: The assault on Aleppo is a moral test for the west

Sub-headline: Will anyone stop Russia turning the city into another Grozny, asks David Gardner

A perfectly executed piece of propaganda, with the central character being Putin The Terrible. And judging from Mr. Gardner’s very impressive CV, his credibility to be a ‘Moral Judge’ about ‘Western Responsibility’ for the carnage in the ‘Middle East’ i.e. Syria, should be un-challegable?

The history of Western Imperialism that predates from well before Sykes-Picot, the Americans being the latest fellow travelers of that mendacious and self-serving exercise in Western Paternalism, leaves no doubt as to the motives of the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) zealots, and their political propinquity with the Neo-Conservatives, and their abject worship of Mars. To put it in Pascalian terms Mr. Gardner places his wager on this misbegotten alliance.

But the rhetorical frame must, of necessity, be framed in moral terms for the ‘Western Reader’: suffering from a debilitating fatigue, the root of which is that The War on Terror is now thirteen years old, and its adjunct the Drone War have fostered the  growth of ISIS, and the Caliphate, as credible answer to an utterly pernicious and destructive Western interventionism. What Mr. Gardner and his allies miss and or elide from their narrative is that ISIS and its precursors are anti-imperial in nature.

Samuel P. Huntington’s prescient rhetorical intervention of 1993, framed it as a ‘Clash of Civilizations’, he was subject to his own WASP paranoia of the Other, which dovetailed with his status as operative and defender of the American National Security State. Not seeing that Islam is an integral part of the Abrahamic Tradition: meaning that the ‘they’ that he points to is really a part of the ‘us’ and not in least ‘alien’.  Huntington’s ‘Clash’ was the Cold War projected onto the world i.e. everyone was not just a potential enemy.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/83b52ae0-9a9d-11e6-8f9b-70e3cabccfae

Headline:The war for America’s conservative soul

Sub-headline: The leadership crisis afflicting the Republicans is a broader problem across the west

The reader is inclined to muse, or even be mildly amused, over the political theology of the ‘conservative soul’ in America being subject to a ‘war’ from within, it echoes in its own cartoonish way, what my brothers and sisters used to sing about at Youth Night, at the local Baptist Church, in the benighted 1950’s :that standard of America’s ‘Old Time Religion’ of Onward Christian Soldiers. It is suggestive of a mentality and world view popular in American life: the melding of reactionary politics and Fundamentalist Religion. The glaring contradiction of Christ throwing the money changers out of the temple, only sharpens the telling contradiction, that Randians like Paul Ryan now lead the ‘Legitimists Faction’ against the Trump Political Nihilists. The Republicans are destroying themselves from within. Which leads to the question: what ever happened to that expression of solidarity, that acted as a political imperative, used as a rhetorical cudgel by Reagan of the 11th Commandment? never speak ill of another Republican.

What is left out of the thesis that Mr. Luce presents is that of the collapse of the Neo-Liberal policies that came into vogue in the Thatcher/Reagan era, and then were codified under New Democrat Bill Clinton, that have had catastrophic effects on the American economy. And that the economic collapse of 2008, and the failure to right the economy in the ensuing years, are the proximate cause of the rise of The Rebellion Against the Elites, the favorite  Financial Times cliche, that Trump and his followers embody. But that 2008 Collapse engulfed Europe as well. All this evidence of the collective economic misery remains outside Mr. Luce’s descriptive rhetoric, it being utterly inconvenient to his ‘History Made to Measure’. What the reader gets is tawdry political/theological melodrama, in place of anything resembling actual confrontation with the readily available empirical evidence.

After this protracted exercise in political cliche, Mr. Luce turns his attention to political gossip and pointless speculation, which does offer some meager insights, expressed as possibilities, freighted with Political Manichaeism.

Philosophical Apprentice

https://www.ft.com/content/b4c307b6-97b8-11e6-a1dc-bdf38d484582

My reply:

@camus_deferral @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment. I must say I’m taken aback by your one dimensional view of ‘Mr. Luce  et al’ as some variety of  cynics, who take their responsibility as keepers of  the current Political Orthodoxy as somehow trivial. Or as a costume they don and take off at the end of their work day. Also I’m struck by your highfalutin screen name, that expresses a kind of intellectual/literary sophistication, that looks like a mirage given your nearly trivial reply. Luce and the other apologists for a Capital in its current 1%/99% asymmetry has proven itself untenable. That is understatement. To engage in reductivism that is an explanation for the rise of Trump and the European Populists. The rhetorical monument to Bourgeois Political Respectability that is the Financial Times is not in the least interested in the comments of its readers. But yet the comments section remains, perhaps for the reason that the comments are more informative and insightful than the essays that are commented upon. That being one of the reasons I still subscribe. I will say that a great deal of the time my posted response to FT columnists and editorials is about my own explanation to myself as to the what,why and wherefore of those essays. And also it is an exercise for me in attempting to be succinct about telling a story framed in a polemic style. The Financial Times and its writers consider themselves to be both the authors and guardians of rational civic discourse. Call what is written here by its real name, propaganda.

Reply number 2

@camus_deferral @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment and your armchair psychological analysis. You echo the Freudians of not so many decades ago, who are now out of fashion thanks to many writers and thinkers, like Frederick Cruz.  And his polemics in the New York Review of Books, that  critically examined the claims of  ‘Psychoanalytic Science’ and forced his defenders to a new claim of Psychoanalytic Metaphysics.

I’m 71 so my ‘alienation’ is a fact for many reasons, yet existentially my writing is the ‘cure’ that keeps the prospect of, and even the reality of your proffered ‘paranoia’, at arms length: it is my creative outlet no matter its shortcomings. No matter what these publications and their owners may think of me, and the others who post comments, like yourself, I model myself after Karl Kraus as told  by Paul Reitter, not to speak of my  reading that started in the 1970’s with Wittgenstein’s Vienna, while at university :

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo5568079.html

Speaking of ‘highfalutin’! The critique of the Popular Press using its articles, editorials and columnists as sources of the ever evolving, mutating Political Orthodoxy was/is the practice of both Kraus and Chomsky.

Best regards from your ‘almost paranoid’

StephenKMackSD

Reply number 3

@RealNga4Life @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment. The political world is complex, and the job of the critic is to examine that complexity to the best of her/his ability. This seems like an elementary point, but is the central to the duty of the critic. So the ‘density’ of my comment tries to tease out of Luce’s reductivism, something like a cogent critical reply. Foucault’s insights were framed by an ideological claim, as far as I can interpret from having read his essay  ‘What is Enlightenment’ and few of the lectures.

Also of great help to me as reader was/is Gary Gutting’s ‘Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960’ and Ferry and Renaut’s ‘French Philosophy of the Sixties, An Essay in Antihumanism’ all the above must confirm your opinion of my Foucauldian ‘density’. See my comments to @camus_deferral. To quote Sammy Davis Jr. I gotta be me!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD