StephenKMackSD's Blog

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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A November 15, 2015 editorial titled ‘Time for engagement, not fearful retreat‘ Subtitle ‘Solidarity and thoughtful action are the only means to defeat terrorism’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fd4660a4-8b76-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b.html#axzz3rYGds6En

The rhetorical farming of this editorial : ‘civilised world’ vs ‘mindless barbarity’ and ‘Further co-ordinated action is demanded by all concerned outside powers to destroy this totalitarian menace on the ground.’ More bellicose rhetoric, framed as Western Rationalism’s response to Political Islam’s demonstrable irrationalism: a monument to the myth of Western political blamelessness!

Political Reporter

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The Financial  Times responded to the attacks in Paris with these three essay:

Philip Stephens’ essay of November 14, 2015 titled ‘There is no hiding place from global disorder‘ Subtitle: ‘Syria’s civil war transfers almost casually to the heart of one of Europe’s great cities’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/05938022-8ae9-11e5-a549-b89a1dfede9b.html#axzz3rYGds6En

A November 15, 2015 editorial titled ‘Time for engagement, not fearful retreat‘ Subtitle ‘Solidarity and thoughtful action are the only means to defeat terrorism’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fd4660a4-8b76-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b.html#axzz3rYGds6En

And 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

Mr. Stephens presents this argument in his second paragraph :

The refugees making their way across the Balkans to Germany and Sweden are running from violent sectarian chaos. The murders in Paris show once again how easily this violence can reach deep into the European continent. After this year’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket perhaps the latest crimes should not have been a surprise. The sense of shock this weekend is no less for that.

The empirical  failure of the National Security State apparatus to detect and foil the operations of ISIS terrorists is  glaringly absent from his essay. His attack is upon ‘global disorder’ a capacious looming monster of the title. ISIS is a real existential threat, as the Paris attacks make clear.

Mostly likely, there will be more such moments. The hard fact is that we live in an age of systemic disorder.

A departing European colonialism, Globalisation, identity politics, and technology are identified as the historical actors in  this melodrama of the ‘global disorder’ phenomenon. What remains off stage is the history of Western egregious political meddling that didn’t end with the departing colonial powers or with the post WWII emergence of the American Imperiam. Hollande’s declaration of war, the demand for answers and action and more foreshortened history. But surprisingly in his last two paragraphs Mr. Stephens offers something like what political wisdom might resemble, despite its bellicose rationalization :

The case for a more ruthless assault on Isis is a powerful one. Destruction of its strongholds in Iraq and Syria will not wipe it out — just as al-Qaeda survived the US march into Afghanistan — but you have to start somewhere. This time, though, the west must remember what it forgot after the attacks of September 11 2001. There are no military solutions.

Ending the Syrian civil war, and thus depriving Isis of its organising mission, requires a political agreement. Most probably it will be an ugly one. Almost certainly, it will require western leaders to retreat from past rhetoric. But Europeans will feel safer in their cities only when there is a settlement of sorts in Iraq and Syria.

Political Reporter

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Roger Cohen at The New York Times engages in a measured even a well reasoned  Western indignation about the Paris attack, yet still expresses a newly invigorated War Fever, as a solution to the vexing problem of ISIS. Instead of the current restraint we should engage in scorched earth?

William Kristol at The Weekly Standard doesn’t actually write about Paris but quotes at length from Mark Steyn’s essay “The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates.” And admonishes his readers to ‘Read, and re-read, the whole thing.’ Unlike Cohen, Steyn is a vulgarian whose essay is a collection of wise cracks, as might be said in another America era. The essay doesn’t have the high seriousness of Cohen’s war mongering but makes up for it with it’s pulp fiction toughness, and it’s unintentional comedy.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/steyn-paris-barbarians-are-inside-and-there-are-no-gates_1063890.html

For an antidote to these two writers see Andrew J. Bacevich’s essay ‘A war the West cannot win’

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/14/paris-attacks-andrew-bacevich-war-west-cannot-win/UVlV0AsL8ddnE8L5gJaTXO/story.html?event=event25

See also Vijay Prashad essay ‘We are in pitiless times’:

https://opendemocracy.net/vijay-prashad/we-are-in-pitiless-times

Political Observer

The Oxbridgers here at The Economist have missed the most important point of the Paris attacks: The utter failure of the National Security State apparatus to detect and foil this terrorist attack. In the face of the anti-democratic imperatives and the money spent on this network of agencies, and the domestic co-operation with other foreign agencies, the question arises to what end? To save the lives just lost in this terrorist attack?
This ignominious failure is in plain sight, but escapes the notice of the observers/reporters of this publication. The failure of the self-proclaimed experts/technocrats and the failure of the ‘Press’ to call them to account describes the problem! The Clash of Civilizations/The War on Terror are our 30 Years War.To use Mr. Hitchen’s least favorite metaphor the chickens have come home to roost.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21678512-capital-shocked-terror-sense-defiant-normality-day-after-horror-paris

Not since Michael Moynihan’s January 29, 2014 obituary of Pete Seeger titled ‘The Death of ‘Stalin’s Songbird’ at The Daily Beast have I encountered such inquisitional hyperbole as Mr. Bunch’s review of Trumbo. Read the Moynihan obituary to acquaint yourself with the genre as practiced at The Daily Beast :

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/29/the-death-of-stalin-s-songbird0.html

The Daily Beast editors assigned Sonny Bunch, executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon the task of ‘reviewing ‘ Trumbo. His credentials are impressive:

Sonny Bunch is executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, he served as a staff writer at the Washington Times, an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard, and an editorial assistant at Roll Call.

Impressive credentials if your politics are Neo-Conservative! The essay’s title gives the game away: ‘How Bryan Cranston’s ‘Trumbo’ Whitewashes Stalinism’. If one is a Neo-Con or a fellow traveler, it might do to be careful about resurrecting the political pasts of others, when discretion and circumspection as to the apologetics for the Soviet experiment might be politically inconvenient. On that see Murray Friedman’s The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the shaping of Public Policy for a description of the Left Wing radical political pasts of the Neo-Cons e.g.Irving Kristol and many others.

Mr. Bunch is a hired propagandist who quotes from Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical , Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939. Quite an impressive list of sources. Richard Schickel’s biography of Elia Kazan becomes the partial focus of Mr. Bunch’s polemic, and one which I read. I found that Kazan and Trumbo shared the political morality of the careerist: Kazan as friendly witness and Trumbo as FBI informant and, in reality, a victim of the Blacklist, who true to Hollywood Melodrama over came an injustice,  see this portion of Trumbo’s Wikipedia entry:

Academy Awards

Trumbo won an Oscar for The Brave One (1956), written under the name Robert Rich. The source of this pseudonym was revealed by his son, in his documentary film Trumbo, as a nephew of the producers of The Brave One – the King brothers. In 1975, the Academy officially recognized Trumbo as the winner and presented him with a statuette.

In 1993, Trumbo was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for writing Roman Holiday (1953). The screen credit and award were previously given to Ian McLellan Hunter, who had been a “front” for Trumbo.^[30] This was actually the second Oscar made for this category win as Hunter’s son refused to hand over his father’s Oscar.^[31]

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

What I came away with from the Schickel’s biography  is that Mr. Kazan didn’t let  the political indiscretions of his comparative youth get in the way of his career as movie director.

Then Mr. Bunch attempts to give contemporary political resonance to the Blacklist with this paragraph:

Yes, there’s no excuse for the blacklisting of communists by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as Scott Eckern, Orson Scott Card, and Brendan Eich should not be deprived of their livelihood for their political views—and those on the right should think twice before launching a boycott of Quentin Tarantino for his recent comments about police—the Hollywood Ten and other Communists should not have been shut out of the studio system for arguing in favor of an unpopular ideology.

‘Yes, there’s no excuse for the blacklisting of communists by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s.’ Given this categorical statement this final paragraph looks just like political rationalization allied to self-serving political hypocrisy.

But it wasn’t just an unpopular ideology that Dalton Trumbo and his fellow blacklistees were supporting with their membership in the Communist Party: They were backing Stalin and a murderous, totalitarian regime dedicated to bringing America into the Communist fold. And to overlook this fact, as Trumbo does, is to do a real disservice to history.

Political Reporter

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/05/how-bryan-cranston-s-trumbo-whitewashes-stalinism.html

The real point of the evening was that the ‘Debates’ need to be put back in the full control of The League of Women Voters, instead of the hands of the greedy Networks/Cable channels!

I’m sorry to say Mr. Luce has missed in his judgement of Jeb as a loser: he and Kasich seemed like the representatives of political rationalism, while the rest seemed like the Jacobins they are. Trump inhabiting a world of his own desperate imaginings, an unrelenting power fantasy: deporting 11 million people as Kasich pointed out wasn’t an ‘adult response’ to the problem i.e. it is an irrational response.

Cruz’s plan to eliminate 5 and or 4 federal agencies IRS,HUD etc. makes him the Robespierre of this episode of a continuing, yet utterly bizarre political melodrama. Even Rand Paul’s exchange with Rubio on that trillion dollar defense ‘expense’ put Paul in the position of political rationalism. It is hard to keep up with an ideologically fractured Republican Party! What ever happened to the political imperative of the 11th Commandment or the public relations savvy of Reagan’s handlers. Reagan only faltered when he stopped reading from the script, and lapsed into the extemporaneous. These Republicans don’t seem at all coherent, much less have a script.

Political Reporter

https://next.ft.com/content/e3ee9646-8836-11e5-90de-f44762bf9896

GreedIsGood,

Three well argued even elegantly written replies, but you’ve missed this revelatory essay:

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21677983-year-out-election-gop-looks-simultaneously-chaotic-and-enormously?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f1709

Title and subtitle explain much, but not all of this account, or better yet call it a long apology for The Republicans. The Oxbridgers employed by The Economist are nothing if not accomplished at the art of propaganda.

‘The trouble with being right:
A year out from the election, the GOP looks simultaneously chaotic and enormously successful’

In sum, the triumph of Reaganomics  as revealed truth, with the Economic collapse of 2008 subject to a Stalinist erasure, to engage in rhetorical foreshortening.

Links to GreedIsGood comments:

http://www.economist.com/comment/2930382#comment-2930382

http://www.economist.com/comment/2930385#comment-2930385

http://www.economist.com/comment/2930371#comment-2930371

After all the historical revisionism, triumphalism the final three paragraphs focus on the real problem with the Republicans, and their penchant for ‘reform’: meaning more Neo-Liberalism, failure upon failure equaling political nihilism!

An alternative view is that the party’s success in state and congressional elections has convinced those Republicans still interested in winning national power that the need for reform is less urgent than it is. A post mortem by the Republican National Committee into Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election found that the party was widely viewed as “scary”, “stuffy” and “out-of-touch”. But then, in a wave of anti-establishment rage, it swept the mid-terms in 2014, and whatever impetus for reform existed was lost.

Can it be regained before next year’s presidential election? It is otherwise hard to see how the party can carry out the necessary expansion of its base. In 2012 Mr Romney hoovered up the white vote, but lost because he won support from only 27% of Hispanics, the fastest-growing electoral group. To win next year, his successor will need to get around 40% of the wary Hispanic vote, reckons Mr Rubio’s pollster, Whit Ayres.

That would require the party not only to stop bashing immigrants, but also allay the wider concerns about its motives, indiscipline and intemperance. It is not only Mr Trump’s excesses that are hurting it. Political parties, like people, tend to get the reputations they deserve, and the Grand Old Party’s may yet shut it out of the White House next year.

StephenKMackSD