All that is missing from this wan political melodrama is The Donald tying poor Hillary to the train tracks, in all the grey herky jerky of a silent film, from the last century. Mrs. Clintons ‘problems’ are of her own making. Her obscene embrace of lupine Netanyahu as part of her ‘I’m tougher than any man in the room’ Foreign Policy – it is even rumored that Victoria Nuland is her pick for Secretary of State. Ms. Nuland showed her ability to rationalize and even lie with ease on the question of American involvement in the 2014 Ukrainian Coup,which makes her a perfect choice for Mrs. Clinton’s administration: Nuland is an expert at breaking things and finding less than plausible reasons for American political mischief. All of this edifying, to say the least.

On the utterly laughable notion that some how the Obama appointed Attorney General will indite Mrs. Clinton adds another dimension, if that is the right descriptor, to this attempt to diagnose the problems of Hillary’s campaign.

One more point of interest on the coming convention is that the question of BDS will make for more compelling political theater. After Gov. Cuomo’s BDS proclamation, one can see the New Democratic machine, the Clinton wing in full command of it’s operatives, running smoothly in terms of enforcing political conformity. Yet the floor fight at the convention on the BDS issue, with the presence of Zogby and West on the platform committee – poor Mrs.Clinton she is plagued not just with Sen. Sanders and his insurgents, but the volatile ‘firebrand’ Cornell West. One can only hope that CSPAN will cover this convention from gavel to gavel, as the Sanders supporters plan to have thousands outside the convention. Will it be another 1968 in Chicago? Will Hillary and her surrogates part the sea of dissidents? Oh! the dependability of political melodrama. Great Television!

Democratic Socialist

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6cc74254-2cb2-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3c95.html?ftcamp=engage/email/us_election/topics/9/crm&utm_source=topics&utm_medium=email&utm_term=us_election&utm_campaign=9#axzz4B5rT094r

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

This essay reads as if it’s main ideas were hastily written on a napkin, over a hurried lunch, complete with the equivocating asterisk. Well, because the writer isn’t quite convinced that Trump is a fascist, in the sense that Mr. Paxton might agree with in terms of ‘impending genocide’. Yet for all the words written about the subject of fascism what is utterly absent is its American political context. That context being the American nation and the whole of the Western Hemisphere.

In the American state political context the names of Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and America First are absent. Why? They are the political precursors of Trump! Not to speak of the post war history of The Republicans, who have been engaging in, and or, flirting with political necromancy since their ‘Generation of Treason’  sloganeering of post World War II. The  McCarthy/Nixon/McCarren/Mundt political alliance used this as a political war cry against The New Deal. Then came Goldwater of the infamous: radicalism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Quickly followed by the Dixiecrat migration of ’64 and ’65, after the passage of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.  The election of Nixon and his ‘Southern Strategy’, followed by States Rights advocate Ronald Reagan.Then Came Bush I and his Willy Horton race baiting , and then Neo-Reaganite Bill Clinton whose ‘Welfare Reform’ , ‘Financial Reform’ and ‘Crime Bill’ were monuments to Republican political/moral paranoia, and cemented the fact that the New Democrats were betrayers of the New Deal, in the name of scheming ambition.The New Democrats as the not so sub rosa allies of the Republicans. Not to forget, Bush II and his unalloyed economic incompetence, wedded to an irrepressible war mongering. The Republican political nihilism inaugurated by McConnell/Boehner and McConnell/Ryan as a ‘political strategy’ adapted in the face of the losses of 2008 and 2012. All of the foregoing set the political stage for Trump.Not to speak of the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal dispensation, and the inability of Western Capitalism to recover something like prosperity. Trump rides the tide of that ignominious failure!

In terms of the Western Hemisphere the most celebrated, nearly mythical of fascists was Juan Peron. See Peron: A Biography by Joseph A. Page:

http://www.amazon.com/Peron-Biography-Joseph-Page/dp/039452297

Peron was a Caudillo, the strong man, who enters the political frey and through his domination of that situation bring order out of chaos, the means deemed unimportant. In a sense he is the precursor of the 1976 Argentine Coup, a junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera and Brigadier-General Orlando Ramón Agosti that led to the Dirty War and the loss of 30,000 lives. Certainly not a ‘genocide’ but can only be viewed as politically motivated mass murder. One can only marvel that one or more of the Oxbridgers at The Economist are being maladroitly Eurocentric, while attempting to educate their readership on an American problem.

Sullivan, whose self-reported political evolution from Thatcherite, to Neo-Conservative, to Neo-Liberal, has been the subject of his narcissistic, self-exculpatory chatter: don’t forget his championing of the Bell Curve! His is not just tone deafness, but an inability to see that racism is endemic in American life and institutions, nor to see it in himself. Kagan is an unapologetic Neo-Conservative, meaning he is bona fide war monger and an apologist for a Zionism in it’s seemingly endless destructive terminal stage. Each of these two thinkers/writers/propagandists has, in their own way, contributed to the Trump phenomenon, although they would vigorously deny any such responsibility.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/05/trump-and-1930s

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

Headline: A Misplaced Mea Culpa for Neoliberalism

Sub-headline :  The International Monetary Fund should stick to its knitting and tackle the decline in productivity

Opening paragraph:

As an all-purpose insult, “neoliberalism” has lost any meaning it might once have had. Whether it is a supposed sin of commission, such as privatisation; one of omission, such as allowing a bankrupt company to close; or just an outcome with some losers, neoliberalism has become the catch-all criticism of unthinking radicals who lack the skills of empirical argument.

As it progresses this paragraph builds up into a  kind of hysterical  lashing out of a true believer confronted with a heretic! But note that a critique of Neo-Liberalism is never a rational, a reasoned exercise.Read this from the IMF essay and see how carefully its writers frame their critique of Neo-Liberalism:

There is much to cheer in the neoliberal agenda. The expansion of global trade has rescued millions from abject poverty. Foreign direct investment has often been a way to transfer technology and know-how to developing economies. Privatization of state-owned enterprises has in many instances led to more efficient provision of services and lowered the fiscal burden on governments.­

However, there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected. Our assessment of the agenda is confined to the effects of two policies: removing restrictions on the movement of capital across a country’s borders (so-called capital account liberalization); and fiscal consolidation, sometimes called “austerity,” which is shorthand for policies to reduce fiscal deficits and debt levels. An assessment of these specific policies (rather than the broad neoliberal agenda) reaches three disquieting conclusions:

•The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries.­

•The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda.­

•Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects.­

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/pdf/ostry.pdf

As a Democratic Socialist/Unthinking Radical I was ready to engage, not without some shame, in a bit of schadenfreude, but I found the essay conventional, a bit too academically respectable. Or should I say too much the product of a Think Tank, whose main job is to cultivate both political and economic conformity, while challenging the current orthodoxy: a precarious balancing act. But what is of most interest is that even the most tepid criticisms of the Neo-Liberal dispensation is subjected to some rational argument, but not without resort to petty bickering chatter from one of the Vaticans of that very Neo-Liberalism. One can only wonder what the Oxbridgers at The Economist will make of this essay, perhaps Bagehot will reprise his politically strategic nostalgia for the year 1899:

Few places, in 1899, better encapsulated Britain’s industrial pomp than Oldham. Its skyline was the Manhattan of its day: a forest of smoke stacks emanating from the cotton mills, the Pennine hillsides freckled with mansions housing the country’s largest concentration of millionaires.

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21678227-oldhams-election-campaign-microcosm-social-democracys-woes-trouble-labourland

The very pressing question in 2016, the eighth year of the present Economic Depression, is how shall we judge the fruits of Neo-Liberalism, by what empirical standard do we assess the economic present? The Financial Times has an answer: angry  defensive accusation against the economic heretics, no matter how well placed.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ae448fcc-23fa-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html#axzz4BSqz1OPK

I’m beginning to catch up after my brief absence of thirteen days, by reading The Financial Times with Martin Wolf’s essay from May 17, 2016 titled ‘Failing elites are to blame for unleashing Donald Trump’. Mr. Wolf demonstrates his bad judgement by quoting at length from Andrew Sullivan, possibly the most politically myopic, to use the most charitable term, of the Thatcherite, Neo-Conservative, Neo-Liberal, in his various iterations,  political commentators that have made America  home. America warms to British Reactionaries, we provide a safe haven for a thinker with an accent we find disarming, even when the politics are unseemly. Sullivan and his championing of the Bell Curve at The New Republic,a stunning object lesson of the unseemly! And for those who are old enough to recall Mr. Sullivan’s tenure at The New York Observer, where his obsession was with maintaining ideological conformity on the 9-11 question, or his support for the Iraq War, place him in the category of The Failed Elites per Mr. Wolf’s own standard!         

‘Andrew Sullivan, the conservative commentator, recently wrote: “In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.” He is right.’

‘Mr Sullivan calls on Plato, the greatest of anti-democratic philosophers, in aid. Plato, he reminds us, believed that the more equal a society became the less it would accept authority. In its place would come the demagogue who offers simple remedies for complex problems.’

‘The presumptive Republican nominee is the pied piper of the enraged and the resentful.’Mr Trump is the pied piper of the enraged and the resentful. He has risen, argues Mr Sullivan, as the man who will “take on the increasingly despised elites”. Moreover, the media revolution has facilitated this rise by erasing “almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse”. ‘

There are many more politically honest ‘reporters’ on the Trump phenomenon than Mr. Sullivan or Mr. Wolf.

And don’t forget the obligatory Putin as political monster of the moment woven into the narrative:

By exaggerating crises or creating them, a would-be despot can pervert judicial and political systems. The presidents of Russia and Turkey are skilful exemplars.

The first two lines of the following paragraph seem a far echo of Disraeli’s defense of a landed aristocracy’s benevolent paternalism, although Mr. Cameron’s ‘One Nation’ also a borrowing from Disraeli is pure Lynton Crosby/Karl Rove political opportunism! What is the requirement for a ‘healthy republic’  if not equality? Mutual sympathy is not an idea born and nurtured by conservatives, except for Disraeli’s policy prescience, but rather by David Hume and the Adam Smith of the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and ‘The Wealth of Nations’ viewed holistically by Smith as his unrealized ‘Science of Man’: who both viewed Capitalism as emancipatory, and inexorably tied to those moral sentiments as a means out of a persistent feudalism.

‘A healthy republic does not require equality, far from it. But it does require a degree of mutual sympathy. Sudden wealth from new activities — conquest in ancient Rome, banking in medieval Florence — can corrode social bonds. If civic virtue vanishes, a republic becomes ripe for destruction.’

Why is it a surprise that in the eighth year of the failure of Neo-Liberalism, that Trump should appeal to desperate voters, who have watched all efforts by Elites to bring Western economies back to prosperity have failed.  The notion that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio are somehow representative of a ‘political rationalism’ demonstrates Mr. Wolf’s bad judgement again. Cruz a nearly unhinged theocrat and Rubio a rabid Neo-Conservative!

‘It must be sobering to Republican elites that their base chose Mr Trump over Ted Cruz and Mr Cruz over everybody else. The party elite played populist games, notably in their adamant refusal to co-operate with the president. Those better at such games have defeated them.’

Is the  self-apologetic hidden in the last paragraph a surprise? ‘Some of what has happened was right and so should not have been avoided. But much of it could have been.’ Neo-Libralism was an economic/political necessity, even an inevitability and I was right to champion it might be the Wolf self-justification. And a sub rosa justification for the dismantling of the Welfare State, although we see the fact that one million Britons are living in abject poverty, as evidence of the utter failure of Neo-Liberalism. And Mr. Cameron’s One Nation takes its place as so much cynical public relations chatter :

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/million-live-extreme-poverty-uk-160427143528526.html

Mr Trump has called forth new political possibilities. But it is not mainly an excess of democracy that has brought the US to this pass. It is far more the failings of short-sighted elites. Some of what has happened was right and so should not have been avoided. But much of it could have been. Elites, particularly Republican elites, stoked this fire. It will be hard to put out the blaze.

Political Cynic

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f27340fc-1848-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e.html#axzz4A9BUBXd8

The dismal record on Charter Schools!

http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/

Another Ohio Charter School Scandal–Becoming Routine 

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/11/the_ugly_charter_school_scandal_arne_duncan_is_leaving_behind_partner/

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/01/exposing_the_charter_school_lie_michelle_rhee_louis_c_k_and_the_year_phony_education_reform_revealed_its_true_colors/

http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/05/13/ohio-accosted-on-charter-school-scandal-records.htm

On the utter bankruptcy of Neo-Libralism i.e. the collapsed fiction of The Free Market:

Undoing the Demos, Neo-Liberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

Hayek: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

StephenKMackSD

Ironic: Vietnam decision-making system worked

‘Les Gelb, a former Brookings fellow and co-author of the 1979 Brookings Institution Press book The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked—which is being re-released this month as a Brookings Classic—discusses the influence the Vietnam War has had on how the U.S. handles wars and the need for American pragmatism in foreign policy decision-making today. “What made this country great was Americans using their pragmatism, solving problems, and realizing there were certain problems they couldn’t solve–at least, not solve them right away,” Gelb says.’

http://www.brookings.edu/research/podcasts/2016/05/ironic-vietnam-decision-making-worked

Listen to this brief podcast and wonder at the above quote about American pragmatism, problem solving etc. It was Daniel Elsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers, not Les Gelb who supervised the Pentagon Papers project, who stood by, who did nothing like the good,loyal technocrat: he assures the listener that he is not infected by politics. Except for his unstinting advocacy for Mrs. Clinton when he worked for The Daily Beast, I regularly read his essays.

There is no Irony here, but plenty of self-apologetics in the guise of the musings of an old policy hand. Here an example of Mr. Gelb’s irony & pragmatism in another key:

4 decades after war ended, Agent Orange still ravaging Vietnamese

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force sprayed more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides over parts of southern Vietnam and along the borders of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The herbicides were contaminated with dioxin, a deadly compound that remains toxic for decades and causes birth defects, cancer and other illnesses. To this day, dioxin continues to poison the land and the people. The U.S. has never accepted responsibility for these victims, and it’s unclear when this chain of misery will end.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24751351.html#storylink=cpy

Political Reporter

The emerging Party Line for the New Democrats is that ‘we’ must unite behind the Neo-Conservative, in all but name, Hillary Clinton. To fight the Fascist menace of Trump. But before the celebration of unity begins:

Clinton’s Hawk-in-Waiting

If Hillary wins the White House, expect Victoria Nuland to be at her side.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clintons-hawk-in-waiting/

And don’t forget that Ms. Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, has some thoughts on the Trump phenomenon:

This is how fascism comes to America

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html?tid=sm_tw

To identify the Nuland/Kagan alliance as pernicious, poisonous, or even the more descriptive murderous, can only be characterized as the exercise of a demand for honesty. A something utterly absent from American political discourse, especially in the festering political moment of a presidential campaign.

Political Reporter

One has to wonder out loud as to where Mr. Garton Ash has been. David Caute’s book ‘Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic’ was published in July of 2015. Which is a searching historical case study of the how of Mr. Berlin’s practice of tolerance was exercised in reality. Note that Mr. Garton Ash compares the Great Man to the  tattered Mr. Hitchens. Rhetorically canny this  comparison of a very rare sort: ‘…Hitchens exemplified courage; Berlin, tolerance.’  The ability of The Berlin acolyte to perceive with clarity ?  But just sample the rhetoric of Mr. Garton Ash on Berlin (Not quite in the category of the worshipful Michael Ignatieff!):

‘Rather, it is a matter of temperament, character, habits of the heart.’

‘Yet Berlin was one of the most eloquent, consistent defenders of a liberal­ism which creates and defends the spaces in which people subscribing to dif­ferent values, holding incompatible views, pursuing irreconcilable political projects —…’

‘Berlin personified not merely tolerance but also an extraordinary gift for empathy, that ability to get inside very different heads and hearts which is a distinguishing mark of the liberal imagination.’

‘It takes a certain quiet fortitude to maintain your intellectual independence when all about you are becoming partisan.’

Note the quotation of Judge Learned Hand that Mr. Garton Ash makes use of later in his essay:

‘In a speech delivered in 1944, explaining what the United States was fighting for in the Second World War, to an audience that included many newly created American citizens, Judge Learned Hand declared: “What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”

The same Learned Hand that attacked the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision:

https://goo.gl/uBZ9oD

I find Judge Hand’s argument for ‘Judicial Restraint’ unconvincing, or more pointedly a defense of Jim Crow i.e. Separate but Equal ! But his opinion helped to shape the coming resurgence of States Rights, under the more moderate sounding idea of Originalism. And the formation of the Federalist Society as  a professional organization of Conservative Jurisprudence, that specialized in the manufacture of Anti-Warren Court political hysterics. The Party Line on Brown v. Board constructed by the Federalist Society was that the decision represented Sociology rather than Law, an act of political de-legitimization on the nine to nothing decision. That party line also paved the way for Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. Five names synonymous with liberty.

Mr. Garton Ash continues, given the Hand pronouncement on the spirit of liberty:

Who can doubt that Berlin was filled with that spirit of liberty? But Hitchens was filled with a spirit of liberty too.Though they tend to distrust, even to despise each other, both these spirits are indispensable. Each has its characteristic fault. A world composed entirely of Hitchenses would tend to intolerance. It would be a permanent, if often amusing, shouting match, one in which there would be neither time nor space to understand — in the deepest sense of understanding, involving profound study, calm reflection, and imaginative sympathy — where the other person was coming from. A world composed entirely of Berlins would tend to relativism and excessive tolerance for the sworn enemies of tolerance.

Mr. Garton Ash’s self-willed ignorance of Mr. Berlin’s unsavory record of intolerance leads him to this overstatement:

A world composed entirely of Berlins would tend to relativism and excessive tolerance for the sworn enemies of tolerance.

At this point Mr. Garton Ash’s essay, or more accurately his two man melodrama, becomes intellectually more palatable, even interesting in the postulation offered by Ralf Dahrendorf’s idea of Erasmians, Mr. Berlin being one of this noble breed of thinkers/actors/advocates. Again the melodrama becomes heightened with the replacement of the Berlin and Hitchens protagonists,  with the more historically suggestive protagonistic relation of Erasmus and Luther. Does the blackballing of Isaac Deutscher by Isaiah Berlin rise to the level of the actual historical drama of the conflict between Erasmus and Luther? As suggestive as this might appear, in terms of producing dramatic interest, rather than the exercise of an historically based honesty about the conduct of Berlin – the reader is at an impasse! Mr. Garton Ash has produced an apologia for Mr. Berlin and this re-description adds an ersatz metaphysical weight to the ideological pettiness exercised by Berlin. The exercise of candor demands that the reader recognizes Mr. Garton Ash’s intent, no matter how intellectually beguiling his subterfuge.

The description of Mr. Berlin provided by Mr. Garton Ash:

Berlin was not notable for his courage. This was a weakness he struggled with. In a letter to a close friend, written when he was already a highly re­spected, middle-aged man, he wrote, “I wish I had not inherited my father’s timorous, rabbity nature! I can be brave, but oh what appallingly superhuman struggles with cowardice!” And in an essay on his beloved Turgenev, he evokes “the small, hesitant, self-critical, not always very brave, band of men who oc­cupy a position somewhere to the left of center, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on their left. … “

Mr. Hitchens is Mr. Garton Ash’s perfect antagonist, malicious and politically self-serving, while David Caute, a colleague of Berlin at All Souls College, Oxford, provides a more historically objective perspective on the conduct of Mr. Berlin in situ. 

Political Cynic

http://chronicle.com/article/Two-Spirits-of-Liberty/236355

Should a regular reader of the Financial Times be at all surprised by the the title of John Paul Rathbone’s essay ‘Demise of Brazilian leftism will reverberate across the Americas’ or the sub-headline: ‘Latin Americans no longer tolerate corruption as they once did’ ?  Mr. Rathbone doesn’t offer ‘Global Insight’, but the usual Financial Times’ party line of the dangers of ‘Leftism’ real, imagined, conjured out of an abundance of imagination/magical thinking! But consider this line of argument as a functional apologetic for the eighth year after the financial collapse of 2008, and the various failed iterations of Austerity.  But what does the Economist, a once sister publication to the FT, have to say about the issue of the impeachment of Rousseff, some selective quotes:

How she exits the Planalto, the presidential palace, matters greatly. We continue to believe that, in the absence of proof of criminality, Ms Rousseff’s impeachment is unwarranted. The proceeding against her in Congress is based on unproven allegations that she used accounting trickery to hide the true size of the budget deficit in 2015. This looks like a pretext for ousting an unpopular president. The idea, put forward by the head of the impeachment committee, that congressmen deliberating Ms Rousseff’s fate will listen to “the street”, would set a worrying precedent. Representative democracies should not be governed by protests and opinion polls.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695391-tarnished-president-should-now-resign-time-go

The failure is not only of Ms Rousseff’s making. The entire political class has let the country down through a mix of negligence and corruption. Brazil’s leaders will not win back the respect of its citizens or overcome the economy’s problems unless there is a thorough clean-up.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21697226-dilma-rousseff-has-let-her-country-down-so-has-entire-political-class-great?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/thegreatbetrayal

The Economist argues that the corruption of Brazilian politics is real and needs to be addressed, but that the impeachment is not the proper political vehicle to address the pervasive problem. I have relied here on Glenn Greenwald’s essay from the Intercept :

Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal Is Installed

Mr. Greenwald has lived in Brazil for eleven years, while Mr. Rathbone files his report from Miami. Mr. Rathbone, as he widens his political perspective including other  Western hemisphere nations, and quotes from  Kevin Casas-Zamora of the Inter-American dialogue, a Washington think-tank:

Michelle Bachelet (Co-Chair, Chile), Carla A. Hills (Co-Chair, United States), Enrique V. Iglesias (Co-Vice Chair, Uruguay), Thomas F. McLarty III (Co-Vice Chair, United States), David de Ferranti (Treasurer, United States), Peter D. Bell (Chair Emeritus, United States), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Chair Emeritus, Brazil), Ricardo Lagos (Chair Emeritus, Chile), Alicia Bárcena (Mexico), Brian O’Neill (United States), Francis Fukuyama (United States), Pierre Pettigrew (Canada), L. Enrique García (Bolivia), Jorge Quiroga (Bolivia), Donna J. Hrinak (United States), Marta Lucía Ramírez (Colombia), Marcos Jank (Brazil), Arturo Sarukhan (Mexico), Jim Kolbe (United States), Eduardo Stein (Guatemala), Thomas J. Mackell Jr. (United States), Martín Torrijos (Panama), M. Peter McPherson (United States), Elena Viyella de Paliza (Dominican Republic), Billie Miller (Barbados), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Dialogue

A very distinguished assortment of respectable of politicians, Neo-Liberal and otherwise, Business people, academics and even the utterly notorious Straussian Mr. Fukuyama.

The strategy here is to enumerate the sins, indeed misdeeds of a Leftist government, and then widen the focus to include the other failed or failing states, as object lessons. All this designed to appeal to a readership who are in the thrall of the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Neo-Liberalism, heavily garnished with the literary/political chatter of sociopath Ayn Rand: it is a reliable formula!

Political Cynic

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6c58ffc4-18a3-11e6-b8d5-4c1fcdbe169f.html#axzz48dz7jIDN

You have to find something quite arresting about Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay. It sounds like some old club-man complaining, or better yet grousing, to his fellows in the wainscoted interior of an exclusive club in some bad old Hollywood movie. Please note the irony, that a club in that world would have been off limits to Mr. Ganesh, except as unseen cleaning staff.

Mr. Ganesh defends inequality in the mode of the political cynicism of the Karl Rove/ Lynton Crosby technocrat, that has become the position of the defenders of the political present even though it  ‘locks newspaper columnists in their thirties out of the propertied classes’. A case of special pleading?

One can see with a startling clarity that the Conservatism of Disraeli, based in the exercise of a benign political paternalism, of a landed aristocracy, has been discarded for the highly garnished dog eat dog of the Free Market Utopianism, even as it continues to fail. Such an uncomfortable truth doesn’t intrude in Mr. Ganesh’s almost reverie on the ‘globe-dazzling city’. Compare that with Carlos Fuentes’ comment on ‘the great rotting meat pie of Madrid ‘.

American Writer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/764df464-15cc-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e.html#axzz48M4UsfN0

My reply to PeninsulaCat

PeninsulaCat, thank you for your comment.

@StephenKMackSD That’s a really stupid comment and quite derogatory.

My comment is directed at Mr. Ganesh’s belief that he somehow belongs within the Conservative fold. And I chose quite carefully to place my argument within a satiric context.In fact, Ganesh seems, at times, to inhabit and

extemporize on the cartoon character Colonel Blimp. But more to the point here is an Economist essay by Bagehot from March 1, 2012 on the question framed by the editors of that publication as: ‘David Cameron’s race problem’

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2012/03/conservative-party-and-ethnic-minority-voters

‘Last autumn the Runnymede Trust, a research body, published the largest-ever survey of British voting by ethnic background. In 2010, this showed, only 16% of ethnic minorities voted Conservative, compared with 37% of whites. Mr Cameron’s party did best among voters with Indian roots, of whom one in four voted Tory. It did best of all among Asians such as Mr Uppal whose families fled persecution in east Africa four decades ago.

But overall, Labour enjoyed a crushing dominance among ethnic-minority voters—even among British blacks and Asians whose affluence, or robust views on crime and public spending, might make them natural Conservative voters. Or even their views on immigration: in Tory-sponsored focus groups, researchers find minority voters frankly ferocious towards asylum seekers on benefits or eastern Europeans “stealing British jobs”.

Conservative strategists know that seemingly overlapping political beliefs can be trumped by deeper clashes of values. They have studied the cautionary tale of Republicans in America and their wooing of devout, family-minded, hard-working Hispanics (who are Republicans but “just don’t know it”, in the words of Ronald Reagan). In the 2004 presidential election some 40% of Hispanics voted for George Bush junior, a man with rather liberal views on immigration. That support collapsed when Republican policies took an angrily nativist turn.

Some clashes look similarly intractable for British Conservatives: disagreements with some Muslims over the threat posed by radical Islam, for instance, or with those blacks who tell researchers that the police are their enemy.

The Conservative Party was at 16% of British ethnic minority voters as of 2012.

The remainder of your argument on inequality, is just that your argument, that does not even touch the made to measure political fatalism of Mr. Ganesh, by way of the Rove/ Crosby technocratic chatter that exalts ‘winners’ over ‘losers’, ‘producers’ over ‘drones’ etc. Yours is a fatalism born from your experience and your acceptance of what you cannot change. Ganesh doesn’t just accept that political fatalism, he revels in it, as an acceptance of one of the cornerstones of an utterly amoral, politically nihilistic  Neo-Liberalism.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD