Evey time I go to the Daily Beast site two things happen, first I miss your deft editorial hand, expressed in the now long disposed of commentary on the Royals, and then I read the bellicose chatter of New Cold Warrior Michael Weiss with absolute dismay. Now, Mr. Tomasky is in his usual political spot, with his nose buried in Mrs Clinton’s ass. Its familiar territory, but the sagacious Leslie Gelb is missing, who was also fan and former employee of the Clintons, but he brought real world political and foreign policy experience to his essays. Mr. Tomasky was and still is a boring Neo-Liberal propagandist. But the balance between Gelb, Tomasky and your guest commentators, like my favorite Fake French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, added a kind of zest, a political yeastiness to your editorship at the Daily Beast.
Mr. Weiss has brought with him a coterie of New Cold War allies, writers who share his political romanticism, his bellicose and reactionary politics. I’m sad to say that The Beast has lost much of an appeal, vibrancy not to speak of its cutting edge, that your editorship made possible. I hope you are not offended by my honesty!
Mr. Quigley doesn’t quite write his essay, but stitches it together not with the aid of Mr. Stephens’ opinion pieces, but lets Mr. Stephens do the actual work. Stephens and his fellow pundits are following the Financial Times Party Line of The Rebellion Against the Elites, it has been the rallying cry of those respectable Neo-Liberals for sometime. It is endlessly repeated, in its various iterations, as if it were axiomatically true. That line of argument has become shopworn. Mr. Stephens does not represent a kind of political wisdom!
For an almost alternative view of the Brexiteers see Linda Colley’s essay at the FT:
Brexiters are nostalgics in search of a lost empire.
It would be folly for Britain to leave the EU but national pride runs deep, writes Linda Colley
But read the well written and argued essay as another iteration of that Rebellion posed as a political irrationalism of ‘nostalgia for a lost Empire’ . Ms. Colley is a more adept and fluent writer of Capitalist Apologetics in its Neo-Liberal incarnation. In the political world inhabited by Stephens, Colley, and most assuredly Obama, there can be no credible critique of the EU, a cartel with the thinnest veneer of democracy, or the looming victory of the Corporatism of the TPP and TTIP. Another headline/sub-headline from the FT is exemplary of the Obama position:
Obama gives powerful warning against Brexit
Barack Obama has delivered a stinging rebuke to supporters of a British exit from the EU, saying that if the UK left the 28-member bloc it would go “to the back of the queue” in seeking a trade deal with Washington.
Standing alongside David Cameron in Downing Street, the US president delivered a clear warning that Britain would be less secure, less influential and less prosperous if it votes to leave the EU on June 23.
Challenging Brexit campaigners who had told the US president to stay out of the debate, Mr Obama said: “I’ve not come here to fix a vote, I’m offering my opinion. You should not be afraid to hear an argument being made.”
Or this bit of Neo-Liberal fear mongering from Obama:
Obama tells young British adults to reject isolationism and cynicism
Barack Obama has told an audience of young British adults to reject pessimism, isolationism and cynicism in what might be seen as a coded call to vote in the forthcoming EU referendum.
“I’m here to implore you to reject the instinct to pull back,” the US president told a town hall-style meeting in London.
But read Mr. Johnson’s telling judgement of the EU, quoted at length by Quigley :
“This project is a million miles away from the Common Market that we signed up for in 1973,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “It is deeply anti-democratic—and much as I admire the United States, and much as I respect the President, I believe he must admit that his country would not dream of embroiling itself in anything of the kind. The U.S. guards its democracy with more hysterical jealousy than any other country on earth.” Mr. Johnson added: “For the United States to tell us in the U.K. that we must surrender control of so much of our democracy, it is a breathtaking example of the principle of do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do.”
Cameron lacked the political integrity and acuity to make the referendum about a reformation of the EU, by making ‘staying’ conditional on convening a democratically elected European Constitutional Convention. Whose charge would be to remake the EU into an actual democracy.
Could the ‘fresh thinking’ advocated by Mr. Quigley be a sub rosa advocacy for a Trump presidency?
If Mr. Douthat isn’t busy fussing/ fuming about the out of wedlock birth rate or just generally poking his nose into the unsupervised uterus’ of American women- I know! His penchant for patrolling the American female body and it’s morally clueless occupants, they are by Biblical writ lesser beings, in dire need of masculine tutelage, is irrepressible. Kant be dammed!
In today’s outing he focuses on The Reactionary Mind. Now, don’t let it bother you that this is the title of Corey Robin’s scholarly study with the same title. Mr. Douthat is a National Review Ironist which means he’s flatfooted, or just maladroit, you pick your favorite descriptor. The featured player in his essay is the Tenured Radical of 1990, Roger Kimball’s recycling of the political paranoia of Tail-Gunner Joe and Tricky Dick, reanimated by the political necromancy of Douthat assisted by Conservative scholars Shields& Dunn. The singular idea of the Shields &Dunn duo is the thesis of the seemingly inexplicable persistence of Left Wing scholars in the American Academy. Douthat essay is highlighted by an idea of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “reactionary patchwork.” as the plausible answer to Left Intellectual Phalanx, in lieu of a codified holistic reactionary response . A riff on Bakhtin’s Canivalization/phantasmagoria? Gómez Dávila is the one with the intellectual breadth to answer that question. Mr. Douthat’s intellectual reach is, to be charitable, limited. Yet he excels at the demands of the fluent and nearly credible propagandist/apologist: he is the nearly perfect pundit for The New York Times readership. David Brooks is that perfect pundit!
Now think back: Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone circa 1972, writing about The Stones or that infamous Grateful Dead Air Cal Flight from San Francisco to L.A., where Jerry Garcia passed around a Bowie knife, with lines of cocaine on it, to Pig Pen and his other band mates. The stewardesses looking the other way as all this transpired, it was a different time.With this proviso: If I recall correctly!
Mr. Ganesh’s tart even chilly appreciation of Prince the musician: his talent, his career as showman/innovator and Rock chameleon demonstrates to any doubters Ganesh’s literary ambition. That chill and tartness attempts to transcends the Fong-Torres model, yet his riff owes everything to that genre of Rock Journalism, as part of the New Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and America’s own Dandy Tom Wolf : part clown, part Literary Lion with Dixiecrat sympathies.
April 22, 2016 10:28 PM PDT:
Ganesh’s condescension is malign, its a character trait and a literary affectation. In this instance it renders him blind to the talent of Prince to move his audience to dance, to sing along to familiar tunes. As we all do to the Standards we grew up listening to: Gershwin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn. And singers like Nat Cole, Marvin Gay, Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross, the list is long. Ganesh calls Prince an ‘artisan’ when he was, in fact, a popular artist of the first rank!
The Panic of The Elites is in answer to The Rebellion Against The Elites. That Rebellion has been a political mainstay of the Financial Times for some months, to explain the rise of a subversive Populism of both Left and Right. And the journalistic voice of American Political Orthodoxy/Conformity, The New Your Times, has recruited Strobe Talbott to make the case for Britain staying in the EU, and its vital importance to the US, and to its readers. Mr. Talbott’s essay marks the beginning in America of the Panic,as chronicled by a coterie of Foreign Policy Experts.
This could be comic except that Mr. Talbott’s ineptitude in the Soviet economy’s transition from command to free market- it would be unfair to blame Neo-Liberal technocrat Talbott for Putin, but he shares a heavy burden of responsibility, for the immediate and long lasting effects of the ‘strong medicine’ used as an instrument of that transition, that lead to the rise of the Oligarchs and then to Putin. Perhaps Talbott’s obsession with Putin, and the fomenting of a New Cold War, in alliance with Nuland, Pyatt, Power and Rice and other political actors deeply involved in fomenting the Coup in Ukraine, are the order to, or as expiation for his practiced ethical/political incompetence. That is where the values of the Wasp Elite come into play. One can think of the Bundy brothers and the Alsop brothers, as exemplary of that Wasp Elite, and their mutual/synergistic influence on American Foreign Policy: the Bundy brothers as political actors, the Alsop brothers as their journalistic allies/advocates, not to speak of apologists.
In his essay Mr. Talbott sounds the alarm on the Brexit, as being partially financed by Putin, as an exercise of dangerous, unbidden political manipulation, that seeks to subvert Western hegemony, Talbott’s métier. Yet honesty might just demand a similar scrutiny to the NATO,US, EU and American NGO financing and helping with the Coup in Ukraine, as the same thing. An exercise in honesty that Mr. Talbott is incapable of even considering.
April 22,2016:
As Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out the EU began its political life as a cartel, that has evolved into a kind of not quite federation, with the trappings of democracy. The Greek Crisis of 2015, has demonstrated the need for a Reformation of the EU into an actual democratic institution. Mr. Talbott, like the good Neo-Liberal he is, fails to even address this central question of democratic reform, he simply repeats the Party Line or better yet the current political orthodoxy as axiomatically true.
Never fear you are at The Financial Times. The proof is Mr. Stephens opening paragraph larded with a list of the current political cliches, of the failed utopianism, of a codified Neo-Liberalism, while pointing the finger of accusation at all the other political bad actors: The Labour Party and its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a dinosaur whose revolutionary socialist ideas are relics of the 1970’s . And then comes the dismissal of the Tory Brexiteers, emotionally awash in the watershed of the collapse of the Empire, but notice the rather mild tone used to describe them. After all Mr. Stephens doesn’t want to alienate his core readership!
Leadership of Britain’s Labour party passed last year into the hands of the dinosaurs. The fight over Britain’s place in Europe threatens David Cameron’s Conservative party with a similar fate. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is a revolutionary socialist whose worldview calcified during the 1970s. The Tory Brexiteers who want to sunder the nation’s ties with Brussels are reaching back further to an English nationalism that imagined that nothing need change after the sun set on empire.
After a carefully massaged but complex historical description of those Brexiteers, persons, motives, real,speculated upon and or imagined, are explored without injury to his rhetorical frame. What the reader is finally presented with is the same Financial Times Party Line: The Rebellion Against The Elites. What never become a question under discussion is the utter bad judgements of The Elites over time e.g. their faith in Neo-Liberal Utopianism. The pertinent question might just be this:why wouldn’t there be a rebellion against these charlatans?
‘I well understand that Varoufakis has a grievance. But his discontent should be directed at his own State’s failings and past dishonest reporting of deficits and borrowings.’
Frankly the collapse of the codified Neo-Liberal Dogmas in 2008 is the proof of its bankruptcy. From Austerity to the dismal economic present, we are confronted with the utter failure of the myth of the Self-Correcting Market.
Merkel’s handling of the Greek Crisis proved beyond doubt that the ruling construct of the Virtuous Norther Tier vs the Chiseling Southern Tier was the rhetorical ground on which was predicated the natural German dominance, economic hegemony of EU policy.
Past Greek governments colluded with Goldman Sachs to hide their true debt levels:
‘Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt.Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn’t exceed 60 percent.’
Its time for a complete reconfiguration of the EU structure, not withstanding your examples of an operative democracy! Actual democracy or exit are the real choices, although the proviso of reform would be a better approach, that Mr. Cameron might have considered. A demonstration of Cameron’s political myopia? The Neo-Liberals are ideologically lined up for the EU, not to speak of the New Utopianism of the TPP and the TTIP. Look to President Obama as the prime apologist and advocate for another Free Market scheme wedded to Western National Security State paranoia, that defines Corporatism.
It is something that may animate the citizens of great powers or nations with raw memories of humiliation, but our benign history and retirement from the top table make us different. To keep tracking our place in the food chain would require an insecurity we have mostly grown out of.
‘…but our benign history and retirement from the top table make us different.‘ One has to admit that this portion of Mr. Ganesh’s essay challenges not just history, but the whole of Tory nostalgia for a glorious national/international past. Without the murderous, indeed exploitative history of Empire, what is Britain? Mention Mrs. Thatcher and the Malvinas, the so called Falklands, and the old imperial ardor returns! ‘Benign history‘ is a claim that won’t even begin to address the facts, but then the name of Lynton Crosby lets the reader know that we are in the political territory of Karl Rove: usable political cynicism wedded to myth making, in service to political ends. Hence this characterization of Obama’s politics: ‘His knack is for framing practical subjects as matters of national destiny.’Cameron’s slogan of ‘One Nation’ isn’t about a national destiny, of a shared destiny?
Look to the headline of this essay: Only economics matters in the Brexit debate
Then the sub-headline: No normal person, at least in Britain, cares about their country’s influence in the world
Economics are a part of the human endeavor, as it has evolved historically to the point of Smith and Hume’s exchanges, as in great measure the expression of human sensibilities. See Emma Rothschild’s book ‘Economic Sentiments:Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment’ here:
So the notion put forth in the headline that ‘economics’ is the expression of an historical singularity is not just wrong, but a distortion in service to Capitalist apologetics, we are reading The Financial Times. The sub-headline considers the question of the ‘normal person’s ‘ caring about their ‘country’s influence in the world‘. In both instances the Tories trade on a usable political nostalgia, for both Empire and a not just functioning Capitalism, but one that yealds prosperity for all : One Nation? Since the Crash of 2008 that prosperity is non-existent.
Sub-headline: We await his judgment on Labour under Corbyn, the malaise of Europe and technology’s dark potential
One reads these two claims/assertions with a kind of amused wonder at the Ganesh perception of McEwan, or is it more about a political projection of Ganesh as Tory apologist/advocate? Here is the appraisal of McEwan as grounded in doubt:
There is that scientific bent, which grounds him in doubt, evidence and other scourges of ideology.
Mr. McEwan constructs a character a protagonist Henry Perowne, the London neurosurgeon, and then proceeds to build a novel around him as central actor. This character has all the attendant beliefs,prejudices and assumptions of his class. Not to speak of his whole life experience, that are brought to bear in the novel, as the literary exercise of that genre. Ganesh’s assumption is that the McEwan character is a self-portrait of the writer:
It follows that he has a nuanced political orientation. He is a Labour supporter with a nervous eye on the relativism and identity politics that sizzles around the party — a man of the left who knows very well how much nonsense lives on the left.
Ganesh then makes certain claims about McEwan/Perowne as a ‘nuanced’ Labour supporter, who views with skepticism the twin evils of that political orientation, ‘relativism’ and ‘identity politics’. Not to speak of ‘anti-utopianism’:
More than anything, it is personal background that connects him to anti-utopian England.
Is there still an ‘England’ rather that Great Britain or the United Kingdom? Why would Ganesh use such an anachronism? Perhaps a nostalgic look back at a halcyon past? Anti-utopianism acts here a reference to Labour’s return to its Socialist roots, expressed in the negative.
More explanation/expatiation on the political character of McEwan/Perowne, not to speak of McEwan as author, over a career, that dovetails with the Tory Triumphalism of Ganesh:
The sensibilities he grew up with are those of core Britain: sceptical, practical, keen to get on. No wonder no rival sits more easily at the nexus of literary prestige and commercial appeal. He writes for a country he more or less personifies. If his provocative interventions over the years have had a theme — including those at the Royal Institution, uttered with campus radicals in mind — it is mistrust of stridency.
Note the presence of ‘campus radicals’ who specialize in ‘stridency’, and don’t forget the current master of the political expression of that ‘stridency’ Jeremy Corbyn.
We await his judgment on Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, the malaise of Europe and technology’s dark potential. The strangeness of their lives means that most novelists can only speak for themselves. McEwan, by dint of class and temperament, might be able to speak for England.
There can be no doubt that Ganesh favors McEwan as literary house cat. As a riposte to his political intervention, see an actual British literary lion Harold Pinter deliver his 2005 Nobel acceptance address here:
Mr. Bershidsky assures us as an ‘insider’ with many contacts in the Ukrainian Coup government, in its many iterations, that it is all those corrupt self-seeking Ukrainians, who are at fault for the 40% inflation rate of 2015? It’s not the picture of those pensioners reduced to penury that pricks your conscience, no! Its all those Western or Westernizing political/economic actors, bureaucrats, Neo-Liberals and other Free Market/Austerity riff-Raff, imported to save the Coup from itself- have failed to root out the endemic corruption of Post-Soviet life.
Like Pilate, he washes his hands of his record of support,his record of Coup Apologetics and Putin hysterics, that all have been for naught. Those Ukrainians are no longer worth his time! Even a call to the dull witted political hack Joe Biden led to what? his wholehearted support over the phone! Its called a kiss off Mr. Bershidsky ,as you well know. This isn’t your first nor will it be your last bad political bet. Except that you can’t seem to rid yourself of a certain residual guilt, of course not over the lives lost in pursuit of your shared ambition to check to evil Putin, and bring Ukraine into the Neo-Liberal fold. Where are Nuland, Pyatt, NATO, The EU and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies or your sometime allies Right Sector and Svoboda?
What eludes Mr. Cesca’s grasp is an understanding that Brooks is a propagandist. And the Pop Sociology of Marc J. Dunkelman, of The Watson Institute, is used as part of the central Conservative Party Line of the decay and degeneration of American life. A long quote from the W.W. Norton web page advertisement for ‘The Vanishing Neighbor:The Transformation of American Community’ is illustrative of the claims that must have impressed Mr. Brooks, or the members of his research team.
‘A sweeping new look at the unheralded transformation that is eroding the foundations of American exceptionalism.
Americans today find themselves mired in an era of uncertainty and frustration. The nation’s safety net is pulling apart under its own weight; political compromise is viewed as a form of defeat; and our faith in the enduring concept of American exceptionalism appears increasingly outdated.
But the American Age may not be ending. In The Vanishing Neighbor, Marc J. Dunkelman identifies an epochal shift in the structure of American life—a shift unnoticed by many. Routines that once put doctors and lawyers in touch with grocers and plumbers—interactions that encouraged debate and cultivated compromise—have changed dramatically since the postwar era. Both technology and the new routines of everyday life connect tight-knit circles and expand the breadth of our social landscapes, but they’ve sapped the commonplace, incidental interactions that for centuries have built local communities and fostered healthy debate.
The disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America’s economic woes and political gridlock. The institutions that were erected to support what Tocqueville called the “township”—that unique locus of the power of citizens—are failing because they haven’t yet been molded to the realities of the new American community.
This public relations of ‘a sweeping new look’, ‘identifies an epochal shift in the structure of American life’ or this claim about the root of the present American disorder: The disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America’s economic woes and political gridlock. What is elided from this narrative is the part played by the rise of Republican Nihilist politics, that can be traced from the Generation of Treason of post WWII to the 2008 election of Barack Obama.(Not forgetting the creation of the New Democrats as representative of the discarding of the New Deal tradition of FDR.) The claims of Mr. Dunkelman’s book and its exploitable apolitics, dovetails with the propaganda of Mr. Brooks: that elides from a potential, or actual political conversation the facts of the political/social present, and the rise of Republican Nihilist politics.
On page 72 of Michael Flavin’s bookBenjamin Disraeli: the novel as political discourse, Mr. Flavin paraphrases from Disraeli’s political novel Coningsby, about Conservatism: first a question: what will you conserve? and then an observation that the Party ‘offers no redress for the Present, and makes no preparation for the Future’ . How more apt might that question and observation be to the current Republican Party?
StephenKMackSD's Blog 
@Leftie @StephenKMackSD
Thank you for your prompt and informative reply.
‘I well understand that Varoufakis has a grievance. But his discontent should be directed at his own State’s failings and past dishonest reporting of deficits and borrowings.’
Frankly the collapse of the codified Neo-Liberal Dogmas in 2008 is the proof of its bankruptcy. From Austerity to the dismal economic present, we are confronted with the utter failure of the myth of the Self-Correcting Market.
Merkel’s handling of the Greek Crisis proved beyond doubt that the ruling construct of the Virtuous Norther Tier vs the Chiseling Southern Tier was the rhetorical ground on which was predicated the natural German dominance, economic hegemony of EU policy.
Past Greek governments colluded with Goldman Sachs to hide their true debt levels:
‘Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt.Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn’t exceed 60 percent.’
Etc.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html
Its time for a complete reconfiguration of the EU structure, not withstanding your examples of an operative democracy! Actual democracy or exit are the real choices, although the proviso of reform would be a better approach, that Mr. Cameron might have considered. A demonstration of Cameron’s political myopia? The Neo-Liberals are ideologically lined up for the EU, not to speak of the New Utopianism of the TPP and the TTIP. Look to President Obama as the prime apologist and advocate for another Free Market scheme wedded to Western National Security State paranoia, that defines Corporatism.
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
@Leftie @StephenKMackSD
Also,Perry Anderson offers some very real insights on the European question here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/perry-anderson/depicting-europe
SKMSD