StephenKMackSD's Blog

The opening gambit of this editorial travesty, begins with the depiction of Putin as looming black monster, with red eyes in the shape of fighter jets, on the cover of the utterly staid ‘newspaper’ The Economist. One can only wonder at where anything like editorial standards reside at this newspaper! After all this screeching anti-Putin Hysteria  on the cover, the reader is barraged in rhetoric awash in the cliches of the current political orthodoxy.The Oxbridger Brain Trust’s desperate bid for attention, with that cartoonish cover, have now recovered a fragment of their sang-froid, and managed to conceive this telling question, with the addition of some almost insightful speculation:

What should the West do? Time is on its side. A declining power needs containing until it is eventually overrun by its own contradictions—even as the urge to lash out remains.

What those Brain Trusters now offers looks like what those Old Cold Warriors, like George F. Kennan, who eventually settled upon in terms of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear miscalculation would be the worst kind of all. Hence the talks need to include nuclear-arms control as well as improved military-to-military relations, in the hope that nuclear weapons can be kept separate from other issues, as they were in Soviet times. That will be hard because, as Russia declines, it will see its nuclear arsenal as an enduring advantage.

But this next paragraph is in line with the unslakable bellicosity of Hillary Clinton, and her coterie of Neo-Conservative acolytes:

Another area of dispute will be Russia’s near abroad. Ukraine shows how Mr Putin seeks to destabilise countries as a way to stop them drifting out of Russia’s orbit (see article). America’s next president must declare that, contrary to what Mr Trump has said, if Russia uses such tactics against a NATO member, such as Latvia or Estonia, the alliance will treat it as an attack on them all. Separately the West needs to make it clear that, if Russia engages in large-scale aggression against non-NATO allies, such as Georgia and Ukraine, it reserves the right to arm them.

An alternative view on ‘Russian revanchism’ from July 7, 2016

Headline: The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia

Sub-headline : Massive military exercises and a troop buildup on NATO’s eastern flank reflect a dangerous new strategy.

For the first time in a quarter-century, the prospect of war—real war, war between the major powers—will be on the agenda of Western leaders when they meet at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, on July 8 and 9. Dominating the agenda in Warsaw (aside, of course, from the “Brexit” vote in the UK) will be discussion of plans to reinforce NATO’s “eastern flank”—the arc of former Soviet partners stretching from the Baltic states to the Black Sea that are now allied with the West but fear military assault by Moscow. Until recently, the prospect of such an attack was given little credence in strategic circles, but now many in NATO believe a major war is possible and that robust defensive measures are required.

…

The United States, of course, is deeply involved in these initiatives. Not only will it supply many of the troops for the four multinational battalions, but it is also taking many steps of its own to bolster NATO’s eastern flank. Spending on the Pentagon’s “European Reassurance Initiative” will quadruple, climbing from $789 million in 2016 to $3.4 billion in 2017. Much of this additional funding will go to the deployment, on a rotating basis, of an additional armored-brigade combat team in northern Europe.

As a further indication of US and NATO determination to prepare for a possible war with Russia, the alliance recently conducted the largest war games in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Known as Anakonda 2016, the exercise involved some 31,000 troops (about half of them Americans) and thousands of combat vehicles from 24 nations in simulated battle maneuvers across the breadth of Poland. A parallel naval exercise, BALTOPS 16, simulated “high-end maritime warfighting” in the Baltic Sea, including in waters near Kaliningrad, a heavily defended Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-and-nato-are-preparing-for-a-major-war-with-russia/https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-and-nato-are-preparing-for-a-major-war-with-russia/

Then comes this utterly specious admonition: Above all the West needs to keep its head. The editors of this publication should have followed their own advice.

Above all the West needs to keep its head. Russian interference in America’s presidential election merits measured retaliation. But the West can withstand such “active measures”. Russia does not pretend to offer the world an attractive ideology or vision. Instead its propaganda aims to discredit and erode universal liberal values by nurturing the idea that the West is just as corrupt as Russia, and that its political system is just as rigged. It wants to create a divided West that has lost faith in its ability to shape the world. In response, the West should be united and firm.

Then comes another astounding assertion: Russian interference in America’s presidential election merits measured retaliation. It is an American Tradition to interfere in the ‘domestic political affairs’ of any nation within the Western Hemisphere, as a defense against foreign interference, within the purview of the American Nation State, since the promulgation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine: call this hubris! Another monument to American ‘interference’ is the Ukrainian Coup of 2014, another inconvenience to the committee that crafted this ‘editorial’.  What the Russians might have done, is the  construction of the desperate defenders of the political status quo: Obama and his anointed successor Hillary Clinton and their New Cold War, now reaching another denouement. This ‘editorial’ is both execrable and amateurish, which leads me to amend my thought about the Oxbridgers being it’s authors, they have a way of reminding we lesser beings, of our natural intellectual inferiority, by larding their essays with apposite quotation and paraphrase. That rhetorical absence leads this reader to the conclusion that an American must have written this essay. That is composed of flat declarative sentences without a trace of anything resembling verve or style!

Old Socialist

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709028-how-contain-vladimir-putins-deadly-dysfunctional-empire-threat-russia

Headline: After Obama: The future of US foreign policy

Sub-headline: Robert Zoellick on the key strategic decisions facing the next president

Mr. Zoellick is described by The Financial Times as ‘The author served as US trade representative and US deputy secretary of state during Republican administrations, as well as president of the World Bank’ Yet there is more to it than that, this well footnoted entry from Wikipedia clarifies his politics as Neo-Conservative, and his being the past president of The Wold Bank, establishes his economics as Neo-Liberal :

In a January 2000 Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Campaign 2000: A Republican Foreign Policy,” he was one of the first of those now associated with Bush’s foreign policy to invoke the notion of “evil,” writing: “[T]here is still evil in the world—people who hate America and the ideas for which it stands. Today, we face enemies who are hard at work to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, along with the missiles to deliver them. The United States must remain vigilant and have the strength to defeat its enemies. People driven by enmity or by a need to dominate will not respond to reason or goodwill. They will manipulate civilized rules for uncivilized ends.”^[40] The same essay praises the “idealism” of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.^{[citation needed]} Two years earlier, Zoellick was one of the signatories (who also included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John R. Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Bill Kristol) of a January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton drafted by the Project for the New American Century calling for “removing Saddam [Hussein]‘s regime from power.”^[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zoellick#cite_note-40

Mr. Zoellick strikes a more measured tone of the technocrat/oligarch with long experience in positions of power. He cultivates, in his rhetoric, bourgeois political respectability, as the primary function of his seriousness as political/economic actor, or in the Neo-Liberal jargon as policy entrepreneur. Mr. Zoellick is measured and historically sophisticated, more so than Mr. Rachman:

https://www.ft.com/content/07d0ce80-944d-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b

As he is allotted more space in which to make his arguments, and polling numbers are central to those opening arguments. Here is his diagnosis in two succinct paragraphs:

The US public may be distilling impressions that pose a strategic challenge for the next president. The 70-year-old security and economic order that the US helped establish after the second world war — and adapted in the years that followed — is fracturing under stress. After a long era of great-power peace and improved economic fortunes, many have taken the international system for granted.

A century-old order in the Middle East has broken down into a brutal struggle for power between tribes and sects. Arabs, Iranians and Turks manipulate the warring factions as they strive for local hegemony. Countries across the region have stumbled repeatedly as they have tried to establish modern market economies.

https://www.ft.com/content/8ae3274e-916b-11e6-a72e-b428cb934b78

Begin an analysis with this sentence fragment: A century-old order in the Middle East has broken down… Mr. Zoellick is utterly ignorant of the Sykes-Picot Agreement? as part of Western European political meddling in the region named ‘The Middle East’ by those imperialists ?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement

The root cause of that break down of ‘century-old order’ is that very agreement, in its utter ignorance of the history and makeup of that ‘region’ as exercised by corrupt self-seeking Western Imperialism. In fact consider policy technocrat Zoellick as the natural inheritor of Sykes-Picot in the political present. Also, is the destiny of all persons, all nations to be a part of a ‘modern market economies’? Those economies  have utterly failed in ‘The West‘ but Zoellick soldiers on as a former World Bank President must!

Mr. Zoellick then turns his attention to these other pressing questions that he extemporizes upon at length:

Clinton’s appointments

Admirer of ‘strongmen’

Europe left to the Europeans

Careful what you say

There is so much more to be said, on this essay, that seeks to answer so many more questions of import. I have tried to address just one facet of this capacious exercise in technocratic chatter: a reader can see clearly that this could have been published in the pages of Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs.

Political Observer

Mr. Gideon Rachman column of October 17, 2016

Headline : A distracted America in a dangerous world

Sub-headline: The next three months will be a perilous time from Mosul to the South China Sea

The three paragraphs that open Mr. Rachman’s essay can only be described as hysterical fear mongering:

‘The assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul that began this week underlines the fact that the next three months will be a perilous period in international politics. Fighting is intensifying in the Middle East. Tensions are rising between Russia and the west. And relations between China and its Asian neighbours are getting edgier. All this is happening while the US is diverted by the Trump-Clinton melodrama and the transition to a new president.

For Russia and China — two countries that are openly unhappy with the US-dominated world order — a distracted America will look like an opportunity. Both Moscow and Beijing regard Hillary Clinton with suspicion and believe that her probable arrival in the Oval Office would herald a more hawkish US foreign policy. They may be tempted to act swiftly, before she has a chance to settle into the White House.

A temporarily preoccupied America might not matter much in normal times. But big and dangerous decisions are looming. In the Middle East, the bombardment of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian government forces has led to a near-breakdown in relations between Moscow and the west. Without a common diplomatic project to hold them together, the two sides may slide into outright confrontation in Syria. Further sanctions on Russia are in the offing and the west’s military options are also being reviewed.’

https://www.ft.com/content/07d0ce80-944d-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b

Mosul, The Russians under the leadership of Putin, and The South China Sea are the seats of Mr. Rachman’s vexation that transmogrifies into  hysteria and that ends with a scolding of Obama for his ‘Foreign Policy weakness’:

‘As Mr Obama prepares to pack his bags in the White House, he may look back wryly at the foreign-policy goals that he set eight years ago.

There was to be a “reset” that would lead to better relations with Russia. There would also be a new and closer working relationship with China. And there would be an end to war in the Middle East. None of those policies has come to fruition. Instead, Mr Obama will be fortunate if he can negotiate his last three months in office without presiding over a major international crisis.’

These last two paragraphs are in sum an incantation, a devout wish that a catastrophe be visited upon Obama and the American nation. This is masked in speculative thinking about potential threats, but the animus is clear.

Almost Marx

Nothing so steadfast as American Hypocrisy, yes capitalized, and getting New Democrat Vice President Joe Biden to deliver the threat of an act of aggression against Russia, featuring Putin The Terrible, is awash in comic book melodrama, rivaling that of the Marvel Universe. Biden plays his part in that Universe as bungling actor on the world stage, doing the bidding of the Neo-Conservative Cabal, led by it’s latest dupe President Obama!

Headline: Biden hints at US cyber revenge on Russia

Sub-headline: Obama deputy signals retaliation over perceived election meddling

‘US vice-president Joe Biden has suggested the Obama administration may launch a retaliatory cyber strike against Russia in response to what Washington believes to be interference by Moscow in this year’s election.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning, Mr Biden said “we’re sending a message” to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the election-related hacking. “He’ll know it.”

“We have the capacity to do it. It will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that have the greatest impact,” he told NBC.

This week the White House said the US would respond in a “proportional” way to the attempt to interfere in the election and that sanctions and covert action were under consideration.

https://www.ft.com/content/2d9c73fa-935b-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b#comments

On the question of outright interference in the domestic political affairs of other nations, let the inquiry begin with America’s promulgation of a Foreign Policy dominated  by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, unabashedly announcing its Hemispheric Hegemony, as Foundational to the American State: all else falls in line of this declaration, if historical honesty be a guiding principle of an unbiased inquiry. Except to those who willfully try to re-write or erase from American History this principal! One of America’s latest and most blatant examples of interference in the the domestic affairs of another nation is the Ukrainian Coup of 2014. NATO was an active participant in that Coup, so James Stavridis as ‘NATO supreme allied commander’ until 2013 must have played some role in the plotting of the Coup strategy, that led to the overthrow of duly elected President Yanukovych. So his announced ‘expertise’ on curbing ‘Russian Aggression’, and the means and methods of curbing their cyber attacks, does not come from the stance of an impartial spectator, but from a participant in, at the least, the early planning stages of that Coup. His position is one of an active partisan in this melodrama. He is an advocate and defender of the American National Security State: a Machiavellian of the Prince rather than The Discourses? Or should the reader look to the notion of the ‘response with a firm hand’ as dull witted paternalism?

Headline: How to Win the Cyberwar Against Russia

Sub-headline : Vladimir Putin’s brazen attack on U.S. democracy demands that the Obama administration respond with a firm hand.

The basic facts about Russia’s election-year hacking of the American political system are clear. For more than a year, the Russian government has repeatedly infiltrated the computers of both parties’ presidential campaigns to steal data and emails to influence the outcome of the election. In response, the Obama administration has promised a “proportional” response against Russia.

What’s much less clear is what a “proportional” response could mean. This is an unprecedented situation for the American national security establishment — which means the Obama administration’s response will set a precedent for future foreign-directed cyber-plots.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/12/how-to-win-the-cyber-war-against-russia/

For Mr. Stavridis the announcement of Putin’s guilt becomes fact by its mere announcement. It is The Part Line and he is nothing if not a political conformist. He is then able to opine on that ‘firm hand’ and the how of its application. But nothing quite compares to the cultivation of political paranoia: The Salem Witch Trials, the First and Second Red Scares, the Japanese Internment and the current Islamophobia. Its a hallowed American Tradition and Mr. Stavridis makes his investment in that Tradition:

The Russians have managed to cling to a veneer of deniability, at least in public, by relying on a clever pattern of cut-out agents, ranging from Russian cyber-criminals to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This is a version of the hybrid warfare we’ve seen used so effectively in the attacks in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea — essentially using the cyber-equivalent of the unmarked soldiers (so-called little green men) that led the fight into Ukraine.

Then the reader comes to Ivo Daalder essay:

Headline: The best answer to Russian aggression is containment

Sub-headline:  Its greatest vulnerability is its economy, so strong sanctions will hurt, writes Ivo Daalder

‘What, then, would be an effective response to Russia’s behaviour? The answer is a strategy of containment.

In 1946, the American diplomat George Kennan argued that containment was the necessary response to a Soviet system that was driving towards external expansion because of internal weaknesses. Bringing Moscow into the family of nations, as Franklin Roosevelt had attempted to do, was bound to fail. Outside pressure would lead to the internal change necessary to modify external Soviet behaviour, Kennan said.’

Are we so historically ignorant as not to know the other most famous advocate of ‘Containment’ George F. Kennan? of the Long Telegram and and the X article? a link to a PDF of the X article:

http://www.historyguide.org/Europe/kennan.html

The 1947 Foreign Affairs essay is behind a pay wall here:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct

And Walter Lippmann’s reply to the Kennan essay here:

https://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/lippman.html

What is most important is that Kennan was to eventually repudiate the idea and practice of his ‘Containment Theory’ over the rest of his very long career. For a discussion of the life, thought and career of Mr. Kennan, and the Gaddis biography see the Journal of Cold War Studies, Fall of 2013, link here:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jcws/15/4.

The fact of that repudiation, or the reader just might consider it an evolution of his thought on the Soviet Union, is a fact that is unmentioned by Mr. Daalder, it being historically inconvenient!

Mr. Daalder offers this as ‘evidence ‘ of the guilt of the Russians:

On October 7, the US intelligence chief General James Clapper announced that the Kremlin’s “senior-most officials” had authorised hacks into the emails of US individuals and institutions to interfere in the election process. This followed a decision by John Kerry, secretary of state, to end a bilateral effort to negotiate an end to the brutal fighting in Syria and his accusation that Russian military actions in Aleppo amounted to war crimes.

The source: ‘US intelligence chief General James Clapper announced’ establishes the factual character of the charge? Then the indictment of Putin:

In turn, President Vladimir Putin ended participation in an agreement with the US to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium. And then Moscow shipped nuclear-capable missile systems to Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Poland and the Baltic states, posing an immediate threat to America’s most exposed Nato allies.

This shows how badly relations have deteriorated since the illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine in early 2014. So far, neither Washington nor its European allies have produced a coherent response to Russia’s increasingly dangerous behaviour.

Nato has taken some steps to bolster the defence of its allies in the east, and European members have begun to reverse the decade-long slide in defence spending and capabilities. The US and Canada joined the EU in imposing sanctions on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine and the downing of a Malaysian airliner in July 2014.

https://www.ft.com/content/258cffe0-9171-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923

Whoever fired the Buk missile, that brought down MH17, has yet to be established, except to those who believe the ‘announced’ guilt of the Russians: more political theology!   Kaliningrad being evidence of an intensification of The New Cold War, and the prima facie guilt of Putin. But The Financial Times offers the reader all she/he needs to know about Mr. Daalder: ‘The writer is president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former US permanent representative to Nato.’

Here is an alternative view:

Headline: The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia

Sub-headline : Massive military exercises and a troop buildup on NATO’s eastern flank reflect a dangerous new strategy.

For the first time in a quarter-century, the prospect of war—real war, war between the major powers—will be on the agenda of Western leaders when they meet at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, on July 8 and 9. Dominating the agenda in Warsaw (aside, of course, from the “Brexit” vote in the UK) will be discussion of plans to reinforce NATO’s “eastern flank”—the arc of former Soviet partners stretching from the Baltic states to the Black Sea that are now allied with the West but fear military assault by Moscow. Until recently, the prospect of such an attack was given little credence in strategic circles, but now many in NATO believe a major war is possible and that robust defensive measures are required.

…

The United States, of course, is deeply involved in these initiatives. Not only will it supply many of the troops for the four multinational battalions, but it is also taking many steps of its own to bolster NATO’s eastern flank. Spending on the Pentagon’s “European Reassurance Initiative” will quadruple, climbing from $789 million in 2016 to $3.4 billion in 2017. Much of this additional funding will go to the deployment, on a rotating basis, of an additional armored-brigade combat team in northern Europe.

As a further indication of US and NATO determination to prepare for a possible war with Russia, the alliance recently conducted the largest war games in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Known as Anakonda 2016, the exercise involved some 31,000 troops (about half of them Americans) and thousands of combat vehicles from 24 nations in simulated battle maneuvers across the breadth of Poland. A parallel naval exercise, BALTOPS 16, simulated “high-end maritime warfighting” in the Baltic Sea, including in waters near Kaliningrad, a heavily defended Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-and-nato-are-preparing-for-a-major-war-with-russia/https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-and-nato-are-preparing-for-a-major-war-with-russia/

Anakonda 2016 and BACKSTOPS 16 looks like American/NATO aggression. ‘A parallel naval exercise, BALTOPS 16, simulated “high-end maritime warfighting” in the Baltic Sea, including in waters near Kaliningrad’, this might just provide necessary background to Mr. Daalder assertion of: ‘And then Moscow shipped nuclear-capable missile systems to Kaliningrad,’ ?

Political Observer

Call this essay an episode of Mr. Ganesh’s Collection of Shopworn Cliches:

look back in anger, stiff upper lip, emotional self-reliance, softies, toughening up, sensitivity training, Newisms (where neologism ought to be), lost world , a quiet soul, sentimental, machismo, normal,  generation, retrograde, no-nonsense, refusal to commune, wellbeing, emotional expressiveness, nervous voters, hunkering down, grin-and-bear-it

The arbiters of the new post Brexit public morality are Teresa May’s ‘stiff upper lip’ or Stoicism, and  Noel and Liam Gallagher’s morality, borne of years of violent child abuse from their father, as they witnessed the violent abuse of their mother. Call it Pop Culture Social Dawinism,that is a continuing theme of the Ganesh Weltanschauung. All of this delivered in the Ganesh patois of contemptuous dismissal: he  riffs on a theme once favored by the now defunct aristocratic ethic of another era, now the province of Tory chatterers. 

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/3da6f970-916f-11e6-a72e-b428cb934b78

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times_They_Are_a-Changin%27_(album)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_61_Revisited

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Harding_(album)

I owned four of the five Dylan Albums I’ve posted links to. I wasn’t impressed by John Wesley Harding, so I didn’t purchase it. The direction he was moving in was of no real interest to me in 1967 and after. I had other things to deal with: going back to school left little time nor money for such luxuries as a ‘sound system’. And with exposure from my personal reading Dylan seemed at the same moment to be derivative and original, especially the liner notes on some of the Albums read like a combination of Allen Ginsberg and E.E. Cummings. But a great many  artists begin their lives, as artists, in a derivative mode and evolve as they mature. Joni Mitchell’s churlish remarks about Dylan can be attributed to her feeling of being  under-appreciated, yet she is one of the greatest popular artists of her or any other generation. Leonard Cohen is in a class by himself!

For just a small span of time Dylan seemed like the ‘Voice of a Generation’ born of the Civil Rights struggle, and his self-reinvention as the new Woody Guthrie, that resonated with the American Folk revival of the early 1960’s. That is until he evolved into a ‘Rock Star’ for another brief moment and then, for me, he faded into the background in the Celebrity Culture dominated by Television, Radio and Print of the pre-internet era.

Does Dylan ‘deserve’ the Nobel Prize? Here is a link to the other recipients of that Literature Nobel:

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

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/0ea7c466-920e-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923

One wonders at what ‘Trump’s insights’ might be, or more pointedly, what they might mean, or if those ‘insights’ even exist, except as a form of desperate political apologetics. From a former speech writer for Bush The Younger, whose career as pundit has faded, into a kind of  obscurity, in the pages of an Atlantic magazine drowning in a surfeit of articles. Here is an example of what Mr. Frum might be writing about:

Their guy exposed the weakness of would-be Republican powerbrokers and veto-wielders, from the pro-life movement to the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

‘Trump’s insights’ are defined here by political seer Mr. Frum:

But for all Trump’s many faults and flaws, he saw things that were true and important—and that few other leaders in his party have acknowledged in the past two decades. Trump saw that Republican voters are much less religious in behavior than they profess to pollsters. He saw that the social-insurance state has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right, not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism about their personal futures—and the future of their country. He saw that millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by the too generous label of “political correctness.” He saw that the immigration polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the 1910s don’t make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.

Here are the issues according to Mr. Trump, from part of his web site called  ‘Issues’. A collection of short videos on the topics listed below.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/issues

1. The Establishment
2. Trade War
3. Making Deals With Congress
4. Law Enforcement Respect
5. First Day In Office
6. Competent Leadership
7. Drug Epidemic
8. Live Free Or Die
9. The 2nd Amendment
10. Political Correctness
11. Self Funding
12. Illegal Immigration
13. Unifying The Nation
14. Education
15. The Military
16. Jobs
17. Life Changing Experiences
18. The Economy

These eighteen short videos trade on Mr. Trump’s extensive experience in television, where he played the decisive executive, who never tolerated under-performance from his apprentices. Using the swift justice of ‘your fired’, as his dismissive retort to those who didn’t meet his standards, in his Social Darwinist Circus: the survival of the fittest, defined by the Great Leader Trump!

I see absolutely nothing of what Mr. Frum intuits as the ‘insights’ of Mr. Trump, but just a collection of Mr. Frum’s own thoughts about what used to be called ‘Reform Conservatism’. Or has Mr. Frum been hired to write some political speeches for Mr. Trump? I would have to say that Mr. Trump is a gifted propagandist, from the evidence offered in his collection of videos: the short punchy admonition his strong point, with no need of Mr. Frum’s help!  What Frum offers is a way forward to a Party after the Trump defeat.

Perhaps Mr. Frum’s temperate tone in the long quoted passage above can be attributed to his self-conception as Wise Party Elder , no need for insult when council is your aim. Especially when being admonished about the coming defeat of Trump, and what might be the best strategy in that defeat. Defeatism, as an operative political strategy,  is always an unwelcome consideration in a Party long out of power. Even the consideration that President Obama has governed as an uninspired moderate Conservative is no balm to the defeated Republicans. But behold, what the reader gets is a misplaced Conservative Triumphalism over the Populist Tide, or as the Financial Times editorialists dubbed it ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’.

The United States in the 1930s—and western Europe after the Second World War—defeated revolutionary communism not only by standing against subversion, but also by building social-insurance states that alleviated the discontents on which communism battened. By mitigating the terrors of unemployment and poverty and the anxieties of sickness and old age, our grandparents transformed proletarians into conservatives. It’s our job now to do the same thing with the dislocations caused by mass migration and the economic rise of China and India. Successful conservatives know when to yield a little in order to preserve more. If Republicans can take just that from the strange career of Donald Trump, we may yet owe him and his supporters some thanks.

Old Socialist

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-to-rebuild-the-republican-party/503282/

One only confronts this kind of exercise in self-congratulation in the pronouncements of Donald Trump. Or his predecessors like Mitt Romney, John McCain or Bush the Younger. Not a James Russell Lowell to be found! In either the Democratic or Republican Party nor at The Atlantic. The editors point to their antecedents’ endorsement of Lincoln and of LBJ as some kind of exercise of ‘sound political judgement’. On LBJ, recall the Vietnam War? Recall the reign of the cliche of ‘The Best and The Brightest’? Refer to McNamara, the Bundy brothers and their supporters in the popular press: the Alsop Brothers?These men dubbed The WASP Ascendancy by Joe Alsop, warmonger-in-chief! You could use a reading list:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/#article-comments

Mr.Meyerson joins the ranks of Tomasky,Krugman, Conason and the other ‘white liberal’ males, whose non-stop shaming of the dissenters in their ranks, is reduced to the public shaming of the young (millennials): echoing the paranoia of Allen Bloom and the other Neo-Cons of two decades ago! The ‘enemy’, in the midst of our political virtue, is identified as our own children, powerful use of the cliche of  ‘millennials’!

I’m 71 and I’m voting for Stein! So tired of the same old political hacks, like Meyerson, constructing polemics that act as almost sub rosa apologetics for the the unstable, foundering Neo-Liberalism of the political present. Their present huckster-in-chief a  shop-worn Hillary and her collection of sycophants. It isn’t the ‘millennials’ who are the betrayers, but the defenders of a tribalist politics that Meyerson and fellow travelers defend, with unslakable ferocity, as the treason from within the sacred Party. Call them what they are, political Stalinists, who hold their ‘Show Trials’ in the popular press!

Almost Marx

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/millennials-support-jill-stein-and-gary-johnson

http://prospect.org/article/what%E2%80%99s-millennials%E2%80%99-support-jill-stein-and-gary-johnson-all-about

By Jürgen Habermas

Edited by Shierry Weber Nicholsen

Introduction by Richard Wolin, pages xxii-xxiv

Valuable Insight on Carl Schmitt’s theory of the friend/enemy distinction on page 34: