StephenKMackSD's Blog

Don’t need Roth’s weak parable starring the nearly unseen Lindbergh, heavy melodrama allied to an authorial nostalgia, as teetering armature! You’re not old enough to recall Jimmy Stewart in that 1957 blockbuster apologia for Lucky Lindy, directed by Billy Wilder? I’m tired of Republicans of all stripes condemnation of fascist bully boy Trump, he’s all yours, from the ‘Generation of Treason’ to capo Karl Rove: a culmination not an aberration. The really unpleasant truth is hard to face, for a Party whose raison d’etre is political nihilism. Neo-Cons,No-Nothings,Theocrats,Dixiecrats and Free Market Grandees, better knows as thieves.  ‘At long last sir, have you no shame?’

The title is the giveaway: ‘Liberalism’s Gun Problem’
Allied to this is the notion that gun violence ‘drives liberals into a fury’: deliberate mis-characterization, not to speak of ideologically fueled and deliberate misapprehension, that puts the onus on ‘Liberals’ to come up with the solution for the problem of gun violence. Another as if: that the problem of gun violence is a problem for ‘Liberals’ to solve, rather than a persistent,vexing problem of our polity, our collective national life. First put the onus on ‘Liberals’, then demonstrate that the solutions, using the French and Australian models as not viable, but then to demonstrate his political desperation, Mr. Douthat adds the non sequitur of Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk as bait, ‘a mix of Bloombergist police tactics’. The essay ends in a kind of nonplussed political nihilism, which simply reinforces the status quo as a political inevitability.

Political Reporter

The sun set on Britain as international political/moral actor, of import, a long time ago, yet Mr. Rachman engages in a kind of rhetorical version of political nostalgia, not exactly mirroring that of Niall Ferguson’s nostalgia for Empire, but continuing the deeply held notion, that is indeed a fiction, of British Indispensability.

American Exceptionalism rules all Foreign Policy debate in America, even as other political actors are on the rise, like China and India. Declinism is an idee fixe of the Ferguson world view, steeped in a ersatz political nostalgia for a lost world dominance.

What are ‘British Values’ ? Supporting the new 30 Years War? Spending on War while cutting the Welfare State to the point of being able to drown it in a bathtub, to paraphrase American Grover Norquist? Hilary Benn and Mr. Rachman are part of a long tradition of political nostalgics, who find the political world refracted through a failed Neo-Liberalism, and its ally the myth of a hegemony lost, a very powerful mythology.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dfeac05c-9a87-11e5-be4f-0abd1978acaa.html#axzz3tMInA3po

One can approach Mr. Peter Wehner’s essay as a defense of ‘Moderate Conservatism’ or what might be judged as the party since the end of WWII, except that what is missing from this potted history are some inconvenient facts about the Party:

‘Trump is the culmination of Republican Party mendacity. The beginning of Trumpism can be traced from the ‘Generation of Treason’ Anti-New Deal propaganda offensive of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren Cold War alliance. And from Goldwater and his allies, who purged the Republican Liberals from the Convention in 1964, the Dixiecrat mass migration to the Republican Party in 1964 and 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to the New Nixon of 68: The Southern Strategy, that even pitchman Reagan embraced in his first speech after his nomination at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980.  And then to the Willy Horton hysterics confected by Lee Atwater & Bush I. And the rise of political capo Karl Rove of Bush II.’

Somehow this little precis doesn’t quite prepare the reader for these rhetorical/stylistic gems, this one dipped in purple:

The understandable frustration of many has transmogrified into a mindless attachment to a political harlequin. Something has gone awry in the party.

Of all the ‘reasons’ enumerated in the paragraph below, I would submit the most glaring ‘reason’ for the rise in the dreaded ‘populism’ is the utter failure of the ‘Free Market’ in 2008, an inconvenient fact that is anathema to Neo-Liberals, both Republican and New Democrat.

This anger is, in some respects, justified. Political institutions have long been unresponsive to the challenges many Americans face, including stagnant wages, rising tuition and health costs, a byzantine tax code, high debt levels and mediocre education.

One thought on this paragraph: education is, to use a favorite trope of the Neo-Liberal, the ‘personal responsibility’ of each political actor, over a lifetime. Education does not end at the attainment of a Bachelors, Masters, or PhD, but is a the work of a lifetime!

Hence the appeal of an outsider such as Mr Trump, especially among male blue-collar workers, many of whom have borne the brunt of globalisation.

In the above sentence ‘globalisation’ acts as a maladroit stand in for the failed Neo-Liberal/Free Market delusion. And what has followed this collapse, seemingly endless Economic Stagnation, seven years after this catastrophe. One might ask when does the mechanism of the Self-correcting Market begin?

Mr Trump has also tapped into something that resonates with many of these Republicans: illegal immigration. This has undermined the rule of law and depressed the economic prospects of some low-skilled workers.

Xenophobia and ‘low-skilled workers’ are two concerns of The Republican Party: consider the anti-immigrant question in California in 1994, backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson of Prop 187:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_187

This  not anything resembling the exercise of tolerance, in sum, the Republican stance on immigration ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ is a matter of public record, that even Mr. Wehner’s flaccid apologetics can’t mask!

It would be nice to chalk up his success to temporary insanity — an episode of Trumpmania that will end on its own. But a figure like Mr Trump does not appear ex nihilo. He is the product of certain intellectual and political habits that have taken hold over the years: a lazy anti-government ideology, prizing emotivism over empiricism, and conflict in pursuit of lost causes. This is not conservatism; it is splenetic, embittered populism. These habits of thought are discrediting the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Now would be a good time to begin to break them.

Trump is not a political abberation but the culmination of Republican No-Nothingism that has been an unacknowledged component  of the Party, as it is denied by its apologists like Mr. Wehner.  But there are more charaterizations of Trump and Trumpism:’lazy anti-government ideology’, ‘prizing emotivism over empiricism’,’splenetic, embittered populism’ but the sine qua non of Republican self-spologetics, the self-exculpatory, a comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan:

These habits of thought are discrediting the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Now would be a good time to begin to break them.

Here is a telling excerpt from Reagan’s opening speech of his presidential run of 1980, at the Nashoba County Fair, not many miles from where Civil Right workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered,that should leave no doubt as to his alligence to The Republican Party of Mr. Lincoln:

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/23462a72-98e8-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html#axzz3tMInA3po

In Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh runs in the American presidential race of 1940 and wins. Could another American writer imagine Donald Trump as that kind of a likely presidential candidate? Lindbergh was heroic and admired, even idolized by millions around the world, an aviation pioneer, handsome and dashing to boot, schooled in tragedy, who remained a steadfast American patriot, at least in his own reckoning.

Perhaps Trump is better suited to the movies, more in the mold of Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, rather than The Spirit of St. Louis, starring another American icon Jimmy Stewart as Lindbergh?

Since the anonymous writer of this essay mentioned Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, I thought Mr Roth’s antifascist literary/historical polemic, a re-imagination of America in 1940’s, seemed a more politically resonant,  pertinent to the Trump candidacy.

The writer’s contempt for the candidate and his audience couldn’t be more plain. Yet calling Mr. Trump’s  very receptive supporters ‘wrinklies’ seems an exercise in contempt, that attacks a portion of the readership of this publication. Or don’t journalists realize the truth of that old saying don’t bite the hand that feeds you?

The title of the essay ‘The greatest show on earth’ trivializes the Trump candidacy as a kind of joke. It’s too bad Trump uncannily resembles Mussolini strutting in his television Boardroom, passing out the rough justice of Vulture Capital with the admonition your fired. This is the definition of ‘Leadership’ as confected for the small screen.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21679429-mr-trumps-support-will-not-collapse-he-still-long-shot-republican

Niall Ferguson proves himself to be the natural successor to Samuel P. Huntington, whose paranoia embraced all of the world’s Civilizations, except our own naturally superior Western example. Huntington in his last book titled ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ posits the notion that American Anglo-Protestant virtue is being threatened by Latino immigration. Mr. Ferguson trades in the same kind of paranoia mongering but with the refugees fleeing the ‘Middle East’ as the New Barbarians about to sack Rome. Ferguson penchant for drawing melodramatic historical parallels that reinforce his Neo-Imperial ambitions makes his essays almost comic, in a perverse way. The inconvenient fact is that these refugees are the watershed of the Western ‘War on Terror’ and the drones used, with absolute disregard for any human value. This is irrelevant to Ferguson’s idee fixe of Western Virtue facing obliteration, by means of a subversive contingent of Muslim refugees, bent on our destruction from the inside, a Muslim 5th Column. The Barbarians sacked Rome with an army, in Ferguson’s telling the refugees play the part of a Trojan Horse in his speculative melodrama.
Here is a quotation from his essay that demonstrates a facet of the Ferguson posturing hypocrisy:

‘ But it is also true that the majority of Muslims in Europe hold views that are not easily reconciled with the principles of our modern liberal democracies, including those novel notions we have about equality between the sexes and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities.’

One need only recall Mr. Ferguson’s comment on Keynes sexuality and its negative relation to economic thinking  to see that not all of we Westerners share a tolerance ‘of nearly all sexual proclivities’ !

Political Reporter

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/16/paris-and-fall-rome/ErlRjkQMGXhvDarTIxXpdK/story.html

Bagehot is a talented writer as his unsparing polemic against Jeremy Corbyn demonstrated:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2015/11/corbyn-labour-and-paris#commentForm
In this essay he uses his power to evoke various melodramatic scenes from the National Security State files, in defense of :

‘This state of affairs is regrettable, not least as it makes it harder for the country to take the initiative and exercise international leadership.’

And this :

‘Britain’s evolution from a “force for change” to a “force for order” (in the words of Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank) makes sense.’

Bagehot has what can only be described as a highfalutin notion of the British State in 2015. ‘Exercise of international leadership’ and ‘evolution from a “force for change” to a “force for order”’   As far as one can judge from recent events America and Russia are providing ‘international leadership’ no matter how maladroit that ‘exercise’ may appear. As Britain acts as part of a nearly fictive European Coalition of the Willing, to use a discarded rhetorical frame.

Two instances of Bagehot’s practice of British self-inflation, as indispensable international political actor:

‘If Britain is to play this role—as a networked, surgical power—it should do so properly.’

‘At a time when Britain is putting ever more emphasis on its distinctive knack for gathering and disseminating knowledge, reacting quickly and forging alliances, it is odd that it should let one of its most relevant and admired global assets go to seed.’

Then Bagehot tells, quite inconveniently, on himself as not an ‘objective journalist/commentator’ but as part of the technocracy of the National Security State apparatus, or at the least one of its employees:

‘A recent report (to which Bagehot contributed) published by Chatham House, another think-tank, proposed a long-term doubling of the proportional diplomatic budget to 0.2% of GDP; a totemic target to sit alongside the defence and aid ones. A savvy SDSR would pay such suggestions heed: in an age of uneasy coalitions, asymmetric threats and scrambles for information, the word in the ear can be as decisive as the gun in the hand. ‘

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21678822-britain-must-start-thinking-its-diplomats-part-its-defencesand-fund-them-accordingly

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Before reading Bagehot’s utterly predictable attack on Political Apostate Jeremy Corbyn, read his, at times, illuminating essay here on the by-election in question, as political litmus test for Mr. Corbyn:

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

A few highlights,like this bit of manufactured political nostalgia for 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.

Or this bit of Oxbridger casual snobbery :

A party once confined to the comfortable gin-and-jag belt around London is now a serious presence in the bitter-and-bus-pass belts around Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle.

This is surprisingly insightful:

Excessive this may be, but playing out on the streets of Oldham is a story repeated across Europe; a suspicion of political elites borne of stagnant living standards, doubts about globalisation borne of deindustrialisation and in particular hostility to immigration borne of shifting demographics and pressures (however unrelated) on housing, wages and services. Support for nativist parties, ranging from Britain’s blokeish UKIP to France’s hard-right National Front and Hungary’s overtly racist Jobbik, is squeezing traditional social democratic parties more comfortable discussing redistributive social policies than flags, nationhood and identity. UKIP plans to squeeze Labour hard on this in Oldham, concentrating its campaign on immigration, defence and Mr Corbyn’s obvious ambivalence towards patriotic symbols from the armed forces to the royals.

But in ‘Labour’s sensibles are starting to push back—but they should push harder’ Bagehot presents an estimation of the political character, or lack thereof, of Mr. Corbyn. Note the the rhetorical frame of ‘ugly blend of sanctimony and moral relativism’ in sum he is not one of us! The ‘Political Other’ in our midst.

Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the ensuing debates has cemented the impression—as if any cement were needed—that Labour’s newish leader is out of his depth, ambivalent about things that should be clear and craven to the ugly blend of sanctimony and moral relativism whose sudden metastasis through his party propelled him to its leadership in September.

The Failure of Thatcherism/Blairism as the twin harbingers of economic/political catastrophe is well established, except for the apologists for that ignominious failure. For an informative discussion of Hayek,  his epigones and the mirage of a particular form of regressive economic/political utopianism, see this issue of  Critical Review  titled Hayek : The Good, the Bad, the Ugly:

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2015/11/corbyn-labour-and-paris#commentForm

The fact that Mr. Stephens recites, with attention to a complex  set of ideas, almost all the cliches of the current iteration of bourgeois political orthodoxy, displays an enviable kind of talent, with the proviso that  any absent idea is just an oversight!

‘Europe’s complacency’, ‘corrosive moral relativism’, ‘ the fault of the west in general and the US in particular.’Saddam Hussein as a victim, Hugo Chávez a hero and Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a bulwark against Nato expansionism.’, ‘Listen to Jeremy Corbyn’, ‘Or that the caliphate replaces liberty with theocratic intolerance, subjugates women and murders homosexuals.’, ‘Even Fidel Castro thinks it is time to move on.’, ‘Enlightenment’,’ Mr Putin’, ‘NATO’,’Edward Snowden’s revelations’, ‘The original sin was the assumption that the end of the cold war did indeed mark the end of history.’ (For shame, Mr. Fukuyama!), ‘the financial crash of 2008’, ‘Russia’s revanchism'(one of the cornerstones of The New Cold War), ‘’What is required is a readiness to fight.’

Underlying all this, call it a bellicose polemic,  is the Old Cold War and Huntington’s ‘Clash’, both monuments to Western/US Paranoia wedded to the self-exculpatory: we are innocent of the crimes we have been accused! In fact, like the good Stalinist we are without blame, except we haven’t destroyed the voluminous historical evidence! A proclamation of our political/moral virtue will have to do.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bf5b3a42-8de9-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b.html#axzz3rlN7BSax

Gideon Rachman’s November 16, 2015 essay titled ‘Do Paris terror attacks highlight a clash of civilisations?‘Subtitle ‘Multiculturalism is not a naive liberal aspiration — it is the reality of the modern world’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/96b9ed08-8c46-11e5-a549-b89a1dfede9b.html#axzz3rlN7BSax

As much as Mr. Rachman denies the power that Mr. Huntington’s cultural paranoia has on the apologists for Western Civilization, as not just primary, but the measuring device that places all other Civilizations in a subordinate position. Despite the admonition of President George W Bush the ‘Clash’ has had remarkable staying power as idea and also as  a kind of sub-text that underpins so much of respectable bourgeois political opinion.

Mr. Rachman goes on to describe the various national iterations of anti-Muslim prejudice,Islamic radicalism indeed a realization that within the more moderate forms of Islam there is a growing  discontent:

Mr Erdogan has been labelled as “mildly Islamist” by The Economist and others. But there was nothing mild about his statement in 2014 that westerners “look like friends, but they want us dead, they like seeing our children die”.

The War on Terror has been waged with utter contempt for Muslim lives, if we are honest. The essay ends with a short resume of the No-Nothing Republican’s stance on the refugee problem: what escapes Mr. Rachman’s grasp, or is simply inconvenient, is that the Dixiecrat Migration to the Republican Party brought with it a virulent racism, that has metastasized over time. Also Mr. Rachman’s faith in Western Liberalism redemptive power is misplaced, recall that the Vietnam War was pursued by Liberals, another political inconvenience.

Quite obviously Mr. Rachman has missed the scholarship of Ulrich Beck whose books ‘Cosmopolitan Vision’ and ‘Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil’ offer not a vision of ‘Multiculturalism’ but about a Cosmopolitanism, that enjoys the status of being already existent in the world, as an unacknowledged fact of contemporary life.

Political Reporter

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