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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Never fear at The Financial Times the Brexit hysterics are becoming more and more strident as the date of the vote approaches: Mr. Schama produces a model of it’s kind, although more historically and intellectually sophisticated: complete with a shameless coda that features the murder of  Jo Cox whose British Values of tolerance, acceptance and inclusiveness are strangers to the pages of a publication, that celebrates with ethical abandon the threadbare apologetics for a failed Free Market, and it’s pernicious seepage into the now abandoned practice of the primacy of civic life, replaced by worship of the entrepreneur as economic, historical, political, ethical singularity. See Wendy Brown’s ‘Undoing the Demos’ from MIT Press:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

For an antidote to Mr. Schama’s polemic read Amartya Sen’s ‘The dark shadow: The Brexit proposal springs from panic and would certainly be terrible news for Britain’s economy – but it carries a threat even greater than that.’ Though I disagree with Sen and Schama there is much to admire, respect and even assent to in Sen’s approach in terms tone, argument, and style. Some selective quotes are revelatory:

The remedies that are needed (on which I have written elsewhere: see “What happened to Europe?”, the New Republic, 2 August 2012) would need policy changes and institutional reforms, but not any rejection of the idea behind a united Europe.

That political unification has fallen way behind the ill-thought-out financial moves is a sad fact. The EU’s policy priorities need to be scrutinised and reworked – a process to which Britain can contribute, and from which it can benefit along with other Europeans.

The message of Brexit would have huge implications, given where the world is at this time. The Polish philosopher Leszek Koakowski has rightly asked, “If we would like the EU to be more than just a place for money temples of banks and the stock exchange, but also a place where material welfare is surrounded by art and is used to help the poor, if we want freedom of speech, which can be so easily misused to propagate lies and evil, as well as be used for inspiring works – then what is to be done?”

There was no conflict between innovative British ideas and broader European thinking, nor between British and European identities (there is no reason for us to be incarcerated in one identity – one affiliation – per head).

The proposal of Brexit is born out of panic, and it is as important to see that the reasoning behind the panic is hasty and weak as it is to recognise that wisdom is rarely born of fright. In his Nexus Lecture, called “The Idea of Europe”, given a dozen years ago, George Steiner wondered about the prospects for Europe playing a leadership role in the pursuit of humanism in the world. He argued: “If it can purge itself of its own dark heritage, by confronting that heritage unflinchingly, the Europe of Montaigne and Erasmus, of Voltaire and Immanuel Kant may, once again, give guidance.” Brexit would certainly be a bad economic move, but the threat that it carries is very much larger than that.

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

Sen is as usual an eloquent defender of the Enlightenment Tradition, and  he quite sensibly touches on the primary question of the lack of democracy in the EU in his essay.  Mr. Schama relies on the ‘faceless bureaucrats’ trope, but the issue of the democratic reform of the EU was not even considered by Mr. Cameron, as an advocate/defender of the Neo-Liberal status quo.

For cogent and enlightening comments on The Failure of the Elites , another rhetorical/political staple at this publication, read this interview titled: ‘Michael Sandel: “The energy of the Brexiteers and Trump is born of the failure of elites”The political philosopher on markets, morality and globalisation.’ The last question of the interview and it’s telling answer:

JC What are the limits to markets? And what is the alternative to market triumphalism, especially when moderate social democracy is in crisis?

MS The only way of reining in the uncritical embrace of markets is to revitalise public discourse by engaging in questions of values more directly. Social democracy has to become less managerial and technocratic and has to return to its roots in a kind of moral and civic critique of the excesses of capitalism. At the level of public philosophy or ideology it has to work out a conception of a just society, it has to work out a conception of the common good, it has to work out a conception of moral and civic education as it relates to democracy and ­empowerment. That’s a big project and it hasn’t yet been realised by any contemporary social-democratic party.

A revitalised social-democratic response to the power of markets would also try to come up with institutions for meaningful self-government – forms of participatory democracy in an age of globalisation, where power seems to flow to transnational institutions and forms of association. It’s important also to find ways to promote participatory democracy. This requires political imagination and political courage. It’s a long-term project that remains as a challenge, but until we make some progress in that bigger challenge, I think that democratic politics will still be vulnerable to the backlash that we’re witnessing, with Brexit in Britain, some of the populist political movements in Europe, and Trump in the United States.

There is an alternative – but the alternative is to go beyond the managerial, technocratic approach to politics that has characterised the established parties and the elites, to reconnect with big questions that people care about.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/06/michael-sandel-energy-brexiteers-and-trump-born-failure-elites

Political Observer

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In his essay on Mr. Wilentz, framed by the career of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,a for rent public intellectual, who reveled in socializing with movers and shakers, and apprenticed himself to JFK, and who became chronicler of The Camelot Crushed mythology, Michael Beschloss produces this puzzling comment:

For instance, Wilentz’s affinity for happy political combat on behalf of left-of-center goals is consonant with the former secretary of state’s presidential announcement speech a year ago this month

Without doubt Mr. Wilentz is a New Democrat i.e. he is a Neo-Liberal just as the Clintons are, so the notion that he pursues ‘left-of-center goals’ is an expression of comic miss-apprehension or myopia, calculated or not.

Then make way for the appearance, in this melodrama, of the ever bellicose Mrs.Clinton: I’m tougher that any man in the room!

In her remarks, delivered at a rally in New York’s Four Freedoms Park, honoring Franklin Roosevelt, she called her program the “Four Fights.”

We have a kind of proof that both Wilentz and Schlesinger are/were Party Loyalists: not to the New Deal Tradition, but to the Democratic Party remade in the image of Reagan i.e. the New Democrats. A demonstration of the political propinquity of Wilentz and Schlesinger, or proof that in Isaiah Berlin’s conformist term they were clubable. ( Note that it was a term in the masculine almost exclusively, except for Schlesinger’s close friend Marietta Peabody Tree)

Both Wilentz and Schlesinger testified before Congress in Clinton’s defense during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings in 1998.

There is more from Wilentz, as narrated by Beschloss, which demonstrates the wilful distortion of history by Wilentz. Disregard : Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act,Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the end of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Mr. Wilentz qualifies as a certifiable apologist for the Reaganite policies of the New Democrats. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were the political enactors of what Reagan could not do: begin to dismantle the Welfare State and the political institutions constructed by the New Deal, rationalized by this self -exculpatory Neo-Liberal apologetic,  “reverse the trend toward inequality, overseeing dramatic decreases in unemployment and increases in real wages.” 

Then, with Ronald Reagan, came what Wilentz describes as the most powerful “demonization” of government since Reconstruction, accompanied by a large increase in the income accruing to the haves at the top of American society. He credits Bill Clinton with being “able to outfox” the “increasingly radical” Republicans in Congress during the mid-1990s by using those powers available to a president to “reverse the trend toward inequality, overseeing dramatic decreases in unemployment and increases in real wages.”

Almost Marx

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You have to wonder at ‘Modern Conservatism’ ! Disraeli used his novels to express his evolving ideas about the practice of politics, and it’s philosophical foundations. How arresting is the fact of this kind of genius? it inspires a kind of awe, even if of one disagrees with Disraeli’s evolving notions of the exercising of the benevolence of a landed aristocracy as foundational, one has to acknowledge his mastery in both politics and literature. He and Plato were both political thinkers and literary practitioners. There were others, of course.

Then look at Mr. Ferguson and his attack not just on Marxism but on Social Democracy, although not in the least surprising. What has escaped Mr. Ferguson’s ken is the utter failure of his favorite hobbyhorse, Neo-Liberalism , or is this part of his propaganda strategy? I’m being deliberately obtuse.

Since the collapse of the codified Neo-Liberal Dogmas in 2008 there has been no return in ‘Western’ economies of anything resembling prosperity, another  strategic absence in Mr. Ferguson’s polemic. The absences in his screed are more important to his retrograde defense of Neo-Liberalism, in his hectoring lecture to the young supporters of Sen. Sanders.

Like so many of  imported British ‘Conservative Thinkers’ like Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Ferguson suffers not just from self-serving ideological myopia, but a strategically necessary, even a cultivated  tone deafness. Take the question of the supporters of Sen. Sanders, they are young and Mr. Ferguson produces the statistical data to prove that. Sanders appeals to the posited insurgent mood of disaffected youth, yet he misses the voter like me, a retired, not by choice but by circumstance, voter. I’m the inconvenient exception to his Conservative  youth paranoia, and it’s chronicler Alan Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind. I’m nearing seventy one and disaffected from the brutal necessities of Mr. Ferguson’s Neo-Liberalism. The failure of which: Bail Out followed by Austerity, and the dismal economic present stand in stark contrast to the Free Market Catechism Mr. Ferguson repeats as Revealed Truth. I’m surprised that Mr. Ferguson hasn’t become an advocate of TPP and TTIP or Free Trade as it’s propagandist call it, perhaps I have missed this, as the successor to the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Utopianism.

Almost Marx

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My reply to @Critique

@Critique

The motion that is maladroitly touched upon in your comment is that Hillary is a Feminist instead of what she shares with Trump: they are both Corporatists, political and ethical opportunists, in short Trump is a fascist with your Feminist heroine just one step behind him. Her foreign policy stance is ‘I’m tougher than any man in the room’, her AIPAC speech demonstrated, and her promise to invite the loathsome Netanyahu to the White House her first month in office.

Why else would Ms. Slaughter, a rationalizer of necessary American Imperial violence, be brought on board to sing the praises of her sister in arms, well almost, Slaughter equivocations are her stock and trade. Not to speak of her ‘pivot’ to being a newly minted Feminist, after her misbegotten, not to speak of destructive reign, as Foreign Policy Expert.

But comfort yourself with the ‘caveman’ chatter as compensatory. As a caveman I’m seriously contemplating voting for Dr. Jill Stein in November, please fell free to do the same!

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

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What might a reader make of this?

‘This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.’

The Lumina Foundation has $1.4 billion in assets. One can only wonder at that kind of money, and the pressing question of its source, as inconvenient as that might be for The Atlantic and Bill & Melinda.
Or this:

‘The coddling of students’ minds has resulted in grave restrictions of free speech on campus—but academic leaders are also to blame.’

We are in the territory of Bloom and  D’Souza, of the paranoid demonization of students by Prof. Cole. ‘Coddling’ is the key word in the Reactionary Political Lexicon, or just call a reliable cliche!   The Rebellion Against the Elites, a Financial Times propaganda staple, to describe the rise of Right and Left Wing Populism, hasn’t reached the professor, as a possibly more salient argument than just the usual shopworn demonization: Oh! those ‘Kids’ from Bye Bye Birdie, with an impasto of political hysteria. Paul Lynde’s version had a decided comic edge.

Political Observer    

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It is surprising how much Mr. Tanenhaus’ Neo-Liberal equivocations/self-apologetics reminds this reader of David Brooks sociologically garnished chatter. Mr. Brooks defends a sclerotic Conservatism/Neo-Conservatism, Tanenhaus defends an equally sclerotic Neo-Liberalism: and his means of attack against Sen. Sanders is to charge him with the crime of being as ‘… bracingly ascetic in the manner of the old revolutionaries.’ You get it, he’s throwback to the Bolsheviks.
Now the editors at The Economist, in their war against backbencher and or Left Wing arriviste Jeremy Corbyn, were much more effective propagandists. They illustrated one of their polemics against Corbyn, by re-purposing an old Socialist Realist Painting, from the early Soviet period, a portrait of Lenin addressing the New Men and Women of The Revolution, by superimposing the Union Jack and the head of Corbyn  into the image and produced a ‘new’ image, a ‘new’ piece of usable  anti-Corbyn political propaganda: redolent of Anti-communism’s attack on Soviet Socialist Realism as kitsch and the Cult of Personality, as a present political reality in British civic life.
Mr. Tanenhaus doesn’t have the imagination, the skill, the resources, to execute such a bold act of appropriation/reinvention. So instead we are served a potted history of failed dissidents as object lessons. Sen. Sanders has been corrupted by power, almost?

Democratic Socialist

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As I have aged I have been radicalized by the rise of Neo-Liberalism from Reagan, to the stolid iteration of that trans-generational swindle exercised by Obama. I am a Democratic Socialist and have reached my tolerance level for an utterly bankrupt utopianism, dubbed Neo-Liberalism and promoted by Hayek/Mises/Friedman and my personal favorite the notorious sociopath Ayn Rand. And the rise of the New Democrats: the Clintons and their epigones.
For a revelatory history of that misbegotten ‘idea/construct’ see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos from MIT Press.
I am disappointed with Sander’s loss! But, as he has said on many occasions, this is not primarily about him but about building a movement within the Democratic Party. To put it simply it is about re-invigorating the New Deal tradition in the Party, and to, there is no other way to put this, my thought only, to purge the Neo-Liberals out of the party, or at the least to supplant their capture of the Party apparatus. Those Neo-Liberals can rebuild the Republican Party which is committing a protracted mass suicide. Hillary’s unsparing bellicosity and her kowtowing to Netanyahu belong elsewhere!
What to expect at the convention: there will be a knockdown drag out on BDS. Cuomo has fired the first salvo with his decree, and Zogby and West will wage a battle in the Rules Committee on the very question of Free Speech, and the ugly McCarthyite techniques of Hillary and her political surrogates: it will get ugly! And then the Myth of The Bernie Bros. will be exercised in a Convention surrounded by demonstrators and Network and Cable television to exploit the situation.Those Bernie supporters will be pissed about the high handedness of the Clinton operatives, who traded on bad faith and their ruthless control of the party apparatus, that will contribute to a tinderbox political environment! Will it be Chicago 1968? The media, like Viacom Hack Leslie Moonves, are looking for an exploitable political event, to sell more toilet paper and hemorrhoid cream, its all about television’s aging demographic.  One can only hope for the appearance of toxic Ayrian princess Megyn Kelly, along with ‘Fox News’ sidekick Megyn McCain, whose career was built on nepotism. It will be Hillary, Meg & Meg the very dregs of the by now sclerotic Feminist Revolution. And, as usual, AIPAC stooge Wolf Blitzer will chair the CNN coverage, a great deal to look forward to. As my favorite media critic and Murdoch biographer/hagiographer Michael Wolff would say, Great Television! Have I been too harsh? Probably not harsh enough.

Democratic Socialist

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