It has been some time since we have read Mr. Caldwell in the pages of The Financial Times. As background to reading Caldwell on the American Trump phenomenon, and to further the readers knowledge of his idiosyncratic Neo-Conservative world view, in The Age of Terror, one could not find a better critic than Marxist Historian Perry Anderson. Here is a excerpt of Anderson’s reviews of  Caldwell’s book ‘ Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West’, the last three paragraphs of that review are instructive:

In nevertheless suggesting that Europe is confronted with an all but revolutionary danger to its traditional being, Caldwell not only overstates the problems that Muslim minorities – which still amount to no more than about five per cent of the population of Western Europe – present to the EU, but unusually for such a cogent writer, falls into contradiction with himself. On the one hand, he declares that “the conditions unifying Europe culturally have not been better for decades, and Islam is part of the reason why. Renewed acquaintance with Islam has given Europeans a stronger idea of what Europe is, because it has given them a stronger idea of what Europe is not”. On the other hand, he pronounces Europe to be “a civilization in decline”, in which many Europeans already feel themselves exiles in their own homelands, as the number of immigrants rises around them, and an alien creed looms ever larger.

His final word is that “Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like ‘majority’ and ‘minority’: mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthed by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter”.

Both judgements cannot be right. But they can be, and are, equally mistaken. Europe is neither being galvanized into a new sense of unity by the reemergence of Islam as its historic adversary, nor demoralized by the superior faith of its Muslim immigrants. If it has cause for disarray, that lies elsewhere, in the combination of servility and resentment it regularly displays in its role as camp-follower of the American hegemon. So far as its relations with the world of Islam are concerned, the best thing that could happen to Europe would be for it to be evicted, bag and baggage, from the Middle East, along with its overlord. That would be a revolution worthy of the name.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/portents-of-eurabia#full

‘The bogeyman of Islamism’ is no stranger to Mr. Caldwell!

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eaf0fdb2-3f8d-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140b0.html#axzz4DHFZtDuW

Monsignor Douthat’s remit as Opus Dei operative in American Life is to patrol the wombs of American women, to prattle on about ‘out of wedlock births’ the Mortal Sin of abortion and the general Moral Decline, as some of the obsessions  of ‘Conservative Thought’. But don’t forget the Opus Dei specialty of, that dovetails with the American Puritan Tradition, the search for the heretics within the body of believers. The Salem Witch Trials and the Spanish Civil War are stark object lessons in that commonality, no matter how starkly antithetical that relationship may appear- one a seeming project to eradicate evil agents of the devil from a religious body,based solely on ‘Spectral Evidence’,  and the other to eradicate the souless political  agents of Communism from the political body, to engage in reductivism. Monsignor Douthat now continues that tradition of the search for and the eradication of the heretical, on an intellectual plane, with his ‘The Myth of Cosmopolitanism’. He opens his essay with this paragraph:

Now that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

Followed by this telling self-description of his status as a member, in good standing, of a elite free of the taint of the cosmopolitan contagion

Well, maybe. But describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.

He thereby establishes his credibility, as an objective commentator on the heresy of that cosmopolitanism. Followed by a lengthy and utterly self-referential not to speak of self-serving definition of what that cosmopolitanism is, beginning here :

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds…

Monsignor Douthat continues his scattershot attack on his chosen targets of the heresy of Cosmopolitanism, in it’s various iterations, garnished with jejune personal references, a list of marginal Literary authors , the high political melodrama of the Brexit,  yet the absence of even a mention of the name Kant demonstrates/secures the Monsignor’s status as incurious American Provincial.

I  can think of at least one current book on Kant and Cosmopolitanism: Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism, The Philosophical Ideal Of World Citizenship as a most valuable commentary/evaluation and compact source, of the latest scholarly explorations of Kant’s idea of cosmopolitanism:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/eighteenth-century-philosophy/kant-and-cosmopolitanism-philosophical-ideal-world-citizenship

American Writer

Here is where Mr. Sullivan’s essay actually begins, in his natural habitat, the cocktail party of movers and shakers in Washington D.C.

‘And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December, and saw,…’ One can only wonder at what office party? He is one of America’s elite pundits.

The admixture of quotations from Plato and his self-serving interpolations of the Master, reeks of ‘Straussian scholarship’, that opens his essay, mere window dressing to his staged political hysterics about Mr. Trump as the end of ‘Democracy’.  Mr. Sullivan sounds the warning, while carefully eliding from the essay his stark complicity in the rise of the American Caudillo. Amply demonstrated by this quote:

‘And as I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread.’

Mr. Sullivan has watched too many movies, or more likely too much television. But this partial quotation raises the question of Mr. Sullivan’s judgement, if it exists:

…and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates…

In the end the opponents of Mr. Trump were reduced to the utter dregs of American Politics,  Rubio and Cruz: so much for Mr. Sullivan’s judgement if any doubt remained of his status as myopic prattler, or by another name as Neo-Conservative redux. But then more of Plato:

Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.

Mr. Sullivan’s selective reading of The Master leaves out the most salient, and perhaps the most important point about Plato, he was no democrat, but an advocate of The Philosopher Kings, as the only way to protect against the mortal political danger of too much democracy. Mr. Sullivan in his maladroit way presents himself as a contemporary iteration of that model of political leadership, in his role of conscious stricken pseudo-technocrat, bemoaning the rise of Trump and Trumpism. But he cannot be brief about his dismissal, his exercise of contempt for The Rebellion Against The Elites, as so aptly named by the Financial Times, as part of their propaganda campaign against Left Wing backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, Le Pen and other continental iterations against a catastrophic Neo-Liberalism- Mr. Sullivan lacks curiosity  and the intellectual range to make that kind of connection. Trump and his epigones happened for the reason that the Neo-Liberal economic policies advocated by Sullivan, and other members of that Elite, collapsed in 2008 and prosperity has yet to return, except to the 1%.

Eric Hoffer makes an appearance in the essay, The True Believer , who was  a willing, and the most able apologist for the Vietnam War, that Lyndon Johnson could scare up from  America’s intellectual class. Some of us are old enough to recall his White House appearances. Sinclair Lewis’ ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ makes its obligatory appearance , but not Phillip Roth’s engaging ‘The Plot Against America’, perhaps too laden with nostalgia and  self-celebration of  Roth as child-hero, not to speak of the political inconvenience of Charles Lindbergh in the dual role of an actual American Hero and as an  American Fascist. Trump is a bully and a coward and the  Circus Ringmaster on The Apprentice. A role that cemented in the public mind his status as Leader.

I have tried to be as brief as possible in my comment, and realize that I can’t answer every part of Mr. Sullivan’s rambling essay, brevity and succinctness are literary strangers to our author.

Political Observer

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Sam Rye posted a link to Mr. Taibbi’s compelling essay at the very stogy, not to speak of Corporatist Financial Times:
http://on.ft.com/292vrCK

Mr . Rye makes the soundest kind of argument that Mr. Taibbi makes a case of more cogency -not beholden to the current apologetics for the Cold War relic of the EU, nor its being mired in Neo-Liberalism and the Myth of Germanic Virtue.

Read Gideon Rachman’s essay:

‘I do not believe that Brexit will happen, There will be howls of rage, but why should extremists on both sides dictate how the story ends?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f2aca88-3c51-11e6-9f2c-36b487ebd80a.html?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#ft-article-comments

More of the same of Elite contempt for the democratic process.

For valuable insights on Rogoff see this essay from the now suspended publication of The New York Times Examiner, the site is still up and a valuable resource:

https://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/reinhart-and-rogoff-are-not-being-straight/

And as for Mr. Sullivan as some kind of pundit, see this on his unseemly, not to speak of ugly, defense of the Bell Curve ( I know old business, but a revealing insight into Sullivan’s self-serving myopia) :

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/741423/andrew_sullivan_revives_racist_%22bell_curve%22_argument–here’s_why_he’s_wrong

In both the Rogoff and Sullivan consideration as reliable sources of opinion, they both have a verifiable records of bad judgement , not to speak of lack of honesty and worse.

What Mr. Taibbi describes here as  the political arrogance of the Elites, via Platonic chatterers and apologists, for that Elite as knowing better than the Electorate: look to the Constitutional Exceptionalism of Carl Schmitt, as documented in ‘The Enemy, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt’ by Gopal Balakrishnan In Chapter Eight titled ‘The Crisis of Political Reason’.

Political Reporter

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-reaction-to-brexit-is-the-reason-brexit-happened-20160627

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My replies to Peter_Akuleyev

Headline: I do not believe that Brexit will happen

Sub-Headline : There will be howls of rage, but why should extremists on both sides dictate how the story ends?

Gideon Rachman is in high dungeon at the Brexit vote and as ever he voices the rage and anguish of the plutocrats and oligarchs, that their ideological hobbyhorse, the EU, has been dealt a crippling blow: from ‘extremists from both sides’: Mr. Rachman needs a refresher course in what defines the Democratic State:

But there is no reason to let the extremists on both sides of the debate dictate how this story has to end. There is a moderate middle in both Britain and Europe that should be capable of finding a deal that keeps the UK inside the EU.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f2aca88-3c51-11e6-9f2c-36b487ebd80a.html#axzz4Csgx5yw1

Perhaps one might view the vote as the integrating third term in the dialectic of The Rebellion Against the Elites/ The Failure of the Elites to place it within Hegelian parlance. Those ‘extremists of both sides’ and others made up a majority! The political facts are more than clear, yet that can’t interfere with the Capitalist Utopianism, that is the political/intellectual mooring of Mr. Rachman’s faith in what? Certainly not in the democratic process!

Enter this movie melodrama, as per Mr. Rachman’s rhetorical frame, Rupert Harrison with something that resembles political sense, rationality and perhaps, by accident?, something like a regard for the democratic process: all framed in an enlightened economic policy advocacy.

Headline:  We now need a proper roadmap to quell corrosive uncertainty

Sub-headline:  Control and sovereignty, not immigration, were main drivers of Leave vote, writes Rupert Harrison

The nature of that map should reflect the reality — the UK is to leave the EU — but it should also reflect the narrow nature of the vote. It is significant that the polling evidence since the vote suggests that control and sovereignty, not immigration, were the main drivers of the Leave vote. The right aim, therefore, should be some kind of “European Economic Area minus” deal.

Perhaps my enthusiasm was a bit premature, although for The Financial Times, Mr. Harrison’s political/economic rationalism is a refreshing change from the relentless  Brexit Hysterics. But Mr. Harrison offers the hope, that rationality will prevail, in the midst of the current manufactured climate of crisis, and at its headquarters at The Financial Times.

The final challenge is political. The Conservative party must now conduct a leadership contest, decided by party members, in which the contenders will be asked to set out their stall for the UK’s future relationship with Europe. That is not the ideal environment for cool, rational planning in the national interest. To avoid unrealistic promises, the leadership candidates could each be given access to official support from the civil service to help develop their policy platform. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010-15 provides a possible precedent.

The people have spoken, now we need to figure out exactly what they have said and find a way to make it happen without causing too much damage.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/61687770-3c7a-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140b0.html#axzz4Csgx5yw1

Should my faith in Mr. Harrison’ economic/political rationality be modulated,informed even nullified by this revelation?

‘The writer, a former chief of staff to George Osborne, is chief macro strategist for multi-asset strategies at BlackRock.’

Almost Marx

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My comment @Voice

I’ve been expecting Bagehot’s comment on the Brexit, but I wonder where he has been, and what he has not been reading? The Rebellion Against The Elites has been the Party Line at The Financial Times, the once sister publication to The Economist, since the improbable rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the incarnation of the evil of Old Labour i.e. The Party before Neo-Thatcherite Blair. What the writers and editors, at The Financial Times, elided from that ‘Rebellion’ thesis was to mention it’s political/rhetorical twin The Failure of The Elites, and their hobbyhorse of Neo-Liberalism: it’s collapse and the  eight years of economic decline that have followed. Cameron was still in Austerity mode after his victory: a way to cement his trustworthiness with the electorate? Add to the conversation the idea that while the Utopianism of Soviet State Capital was in near total collapse, the West began it’s infatuation with Free Market Utopianism.
Also elided from the political polemic that Bagehot constructs is the stark object lesson of the Greek Crisis:  Merkel, the European Central Bank, and other EU political actors rode roughshod over the Greeks. And trumpeted themselves a part of The Virtuous Northern Tier. Note that Germany defaulted four time in the 20th Century, reported by Gillian Tett at The Financial Times:

To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

As the crucial election looms in Greece later this month, newspapers have been full of pictures of demonstrations (or riots) in Athens. But there is another image hovering in my mind: an elegant dining hall on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html

Bagehot’s search for an apt historical analogy proves fruitless, or perhaps the better descriptor is labored, yet the garnish of certain historical points of interest are apposite,while not being wholly convincing, if my own thought process doesn’t confuse the issue. Bagehot writes the crudest kind of psychoanalysis of the Brexiteer voter, a kind of Pop Psychohistory , reinforced by British stereotypes, as an alternative to the etiolated Freudian vocabulary :  the momentary mania of ‘For now Brexiteers will congratulate themselves for unleashing the inner anarchist’ and the hope of one of the elites’ apologist that  ‘worldly scepticism—must and will reassert itself.’ 

Philosophical Apprentice

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21701266-englands-vote-brexit-exposes-anarchic-streak-otherwise-pragmatic-people

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Headline: ‘Brexit deals a grievous blow to the international order’

Sub-headline: ‘The repercussions in Europe will be incalculable, writes Tony Barber’

To what international order does Mr. Barber refer ? The Neo-Liberal order collapsed with a deafening crash in 2008. It’s taken eight years for the news to reach the Elites at The Financial Times, by way of  Mr. Cameron’s bad political bet? Not to gloat, but what a gross political miscalculation, even maladroitly career ending for Cameron. The perpetually repeated Party Line of this newspaper of The Rebellion Against The Elites, indulged in with abandon by the editors: was the writing on the wall, to those willing to read the message, no matter how obscurely spelled out, in the rise of the dreaded ‘Populists’ of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’? Should we note the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as indicative of that political discontent? Or the treatment of the Greeks by Germany, a four time defaulter, headed by Merkel and her political confederate the European Central Bank? This, the starkest kind of object lessons, about the judgement of ‘The Virtuous Norther Tier’, as the real arbiters of the ruthless cartel called the EU, the precursor of the projected European Super State? But Mr. Barber in his opening paragraph strikes a Cassandra like pose: hysterical melodrama is never amiss:

Make no mistake about it. Britain’s vote to leave the EU is the most damaging blow ever inflicted on the liberal democratic international order that was created under US auspices after 1945. Pandora’s box is well and truly open.

Or the second paragraph mentioning ‘Moscow, Pyongyang and the hiding places of assorted terrorists.’ The friends/allies of Britain and the current political monsters are invoked :

All Britain’s allies and friends, from Australia, Canada, India, Japan and the US to London’s 27 EU partners, urged British voters to vote Remain. It is hard to think of anyone beyond Britain’s borders who will rejoice at the referendum result outside Moscow, Pyongyang and the hiding places of assorted terrorists.

Mr. Barber, in the remainder of his essay, continues his role as Cassandra, yet in this incarnation of the role, Mr. Barber conceives himself as Prophet, whose readers eagerly await his pronouncements of doom.

A modest proposal: might the EU, in light of Brexit,  call for a European Constitutional Convention, in which all member states, Britain being an invited guest/participant, engage in a full scale debate about the  ‘reform’ of the union into an actual democracy. Or, at the least, begin a dialogue about such institutional reform, as a beginning to realize the actuality of union based upon functioning democratic principles, backed by the force of law. The stunning lack of political imagination, nor a persistent ideological myopia, of both The Financial Times and Mr. Barber could not be more starkly demonstrated!

Political Reporter

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Congratulations to the editors at the Financial Times, your political desperation has reached a kind of denouement, in Mr. Gavin’s  historical meditation on  Henry VIII and his break with the Catholic Church, over his divorce and his eventual confiscation of church property, that enriched the English treasury. Does it seem farfetched, even a tortured view of the Brexiters as arch-reactionaries? Here political nuance is sacrificed to another imperative! Neo-Liberalism in its various iterations, not to speak of its permutations resembles a kind of Theology, a faith in a set of abstractions yet utterly disastrous in its consummation.The EU is an integral part of the realization of that faith in Free Markets.

But Mr. Gavin being a gifted huckster, with an impressive elite education and a string of ‘hits’ has almost made a connection, even if it falls short: propaganda needn’t hang together as argument, but its imperative is to sound notes that connect with the emotion of an audience of readers. The question then becomes has he succeeded?

Political Reporter

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I’m working my way through Prof. McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics, second edition. There is no more elegant, erudite a writer on The Dismal Science.( Economists, like Lawyers, are by nature self-celebrants.)  Yet the reader comes to her last paragraph, in this  essay, and is brought up short by this apologetic for the dismal economic/political present.

The outcome is the neo-socialism of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK’s opposition Labour party, panic over inequality and anger against high capitalism. That way lies further regulation of the most regulated sectors of the economy, slow growth, social upheaval and a revival of old-style socialism. Let’s not.

Not forgetting her demonization of both Tony Judt and David Garber, ‘Occupy Wall Street guru’- in the eighth year of the economic doldrums, precipitated by the collapse of 2008, the myopia of this celebrant of The Bourgeois Virtue is glaring.  And don’t forget Mr. Milton Friedman as virtuous abider of  “embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom”. The Chicago Boys were the political/economic/ethical instrumentality of Pinochet? The dismissal of Jeremy Corbyn, the political nostalgia for a failed Socialism, and by inference Thomas Piketty, is unsurprising. Yet the codified Neo-Liberal dispensation in the past/present more that qualifies as an even more catastrophic failure- where might one seek a solution?  more ‘High Capitalism’ as enunciated by Lloyd Blankfein’s ex cathedra pronouncement of ‘were doing God’s work’ ? This earlier turgid paragraph provides a psychological sketch as to the irrationalism of Capitalist Dissidents:

Such anecdotes have a legitimate scientific use. They remind us of the existence of certain categories: that it is possible to overpay executives or that children might be stolen. And anecdotes about public opinion tell us what people think. As 19th century jurist Henry Maine sensibly argued, public distaste for fraud implies the existence of general trust: “If colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no surer conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the average of the transactions.” Muckrakers tend to draw the opposite, and erroneous, conclusion — that fraud is typical of the whole barrel.

Almost Marx

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