StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is a copy of page 100 and 101 of Cloaked in Virtue. I have provided a link to a copy that can be enlarged for easier reading :

https://goo.gl/WzYPNu

In this page and a half Xenos describes the Straussian method used in the interpretation of Spinoza’s Treatise and  Xenophon’s Hiero. But here is a description of the Straussian Method that applies to the whole of Strauss’ interpretive endeavors:

See this methodology, described by Mr. Xenos, used by two prominent Neo-Conservative thinkers/technocrats:

First, Mr. Fukuyama in this essay: ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’, I’m sorry to say is no longer available. A Google search provides a link that doesn’t work! In place of that, here is a link to my January 5, 2014 comment that provides some quotations from the essay and my replies:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/my-current-project-excerpt-from-a-reply-to-francis-fukuyamas-essay-the-decay-of-american-political-institutions-by-political-observer/

Second, Robert Kagan’s ‘Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire’:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117859/allure-normalcy-what-america-still-owes-world

Here are links to the three comments I wrote in reply to the Kagan essay. I suffered from the intellectual malady/ennui that Xenos so carefully describes/articulates/demonstrates in the latter part of  page 101, as I have posted above:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/on-robert-kagan-before-intellectual-exhaustion-set-in-by-political-cynic-part-i/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/kagan-on-the-resolute-courage-of-american-imperialists-part-2-by-political-cynic/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/on-robert-kagan-part-3/

StephenKMackSD

On the dubious question of ‘mis-remembering Reagan’

A quotation from his notorious ‘States Rights’ speech that opened his 1980 campaign, see this quotation that leaves no doubt, in terms of content and place, that Reagan was a Southern Strategist completely in the mold of Nixon :

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

On the question of Central America see these two books, one a political polemic and the other a ‘dispassionate reassessment’ according to Benjamin Schwarz of the Atlantic :

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/dirty-hands/377364/

Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador by Raymond Bonner
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp, £13.95, February 1985, ISBN 0 241 11392 X

Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992 By William M. LeoGrande

On the politically inconvenient ‘October Surprise’

Not only did Reagan deal with terrorists as president, as revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal, the preponderance of evidence now supports the charge that his campaign negotiated with Iranian hostage-takers while he was running for president in 1980, to delay the release of hostages before the election, which could have helped Carter win reelection — what was known as “The October Surprise.” Given that Reagan wasn’t president then, but was negotiating to thwart a president’s attempt to get hostages released, this is not simply questionable behavior, it is arguably an act of treason. Democrats’ reluctance to vigorously investigate Reagan’s misdeeds — the exact opposite of GOP attitudes toward Clinton and Obama — has left much of the true story still shrouded in mystery, but what we do know is damning enough in itself, and still cries out for a truly thorough investigation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/07/ronald_reagan_treason_amnesia_gop_hypocrites_forget_their_hero_negotiated_with_terrorists_he_was_just_really_bad_at_it/

‘Scott Walker is a formidable addition to the Republican field.’

Gov. Scott Walker is another Neo-Liberal in the mold of Mayor Emanuel of Chicago: utterly careless in the war against the Menace of Public Sector Unionism allied to an assault on Public Education: the cancel of tenure! The quotation from Arthur Brooks of The American Enterprise Institute and his book with the ludicrous title  ‘The Conservative Heart’: I’ve read his column at the New York Times and wondered at it’s complete political banality, steeped in the conservative bathos and third rate moralizing that David Brooks practices with greater fluency. One can only wonder at Gov. Walker’s popularity and his radical nostalgia, with Reagan acting as stand in for 1859, and the revival of the political career of Russ Feingold.

Political Cynic

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21657798-scott-walker-serious-addition-2016-field-blind-spot-about-changing

‘Club Med’ is a maladroit attempt at insulting the Greeks, it riffs off of the Profligate Southern Tier myth. See this from Forbes, carefully framed in the notion of inefficiency, after all it is Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/03/13/contrary-to-what-most-people-think-greeks-work-the-longest-hours-in-europe-infographic/
Headline:Contrary To What Most People Think, Greeks Work The Longest Hours In Europe [Infographic]
On the question of Free Market Neo-Liberalism as antithetical to democracy see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
Ms. Brown posits the notion of neoliberal rationalism, as the Market alternative to our shared republican tradition, our shared civic/political/ethical destiny.
Neo-Liberalism seeks to supplant the notion and practice of the shared fate of the commonwealth, the res public, the public thing, with the ‘values of the market’ i.e. the rapacious Social Dawinism of the likes of Hayek, von Mises, Friedman  and the vulgar pamphleteer Ayn Rand.
Also see  The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
J.G.A. Pocock, that traces the vital republican idea of the cultivation of civic republican virtue as one of the actual historical singularities that has shaped Europe and America.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/1729.html
‘ There is nothing antithetical to democracy whatsoever in economic neo-liberalism.’ The ‘values of the Market’ i.e. Neo-Liberalism, and it’s ally and creature Corporatism, are about political manipulation, in the name of the freedom to make profits, at any cost. Hayek’s polemic The Road to Serfdom should be considered as a biography of the dismal political present. All one need do is adapt the ‘esoteric reading’ of texts manufactured by Leo Strauss!
Just for good measure read Ms. Tett’s ‘A Debt to History’ ‘To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed’
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html
Due diligence,in future, should be your measure!
Regards,
StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6872342-2bd2-11e5-acfb-cbd2e1c81cca.html#axzz3g9ceZq1C

Mr Tusk said he was concerned about the far left, which he believes is advocating “this radical leftist illusion that you can build some alternative” to the current EU economic model. He argued those far-left leaders were pushing to cast aside traditional European values like “frugality” and liberal, market-based principles that have served the EU in good stead.

Those ‘traditional European values like frugality and liberal market-based principals’ could be stated with more clarity, if Mr. Tusk was more candid: the celebrated ‘frugality’ trades upon the moralizing cliche of the Virtuous Northern Tier as opposed to the Profligate Southern Tier. Please keep in mind Mr. Wolf’s break with ideological protocol in calling Germany/Merkel, the economic motor of  EU authoritarianism, a serial defaulter?

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/44c56806-a556-11e4-ad35-00144feab7de.html#axzz3g9ceZq1C

And don’t forget that the ‘liberal market-based principals’ that Mr. Tusk refers to are Neo-Liberal values, if such exists. We are in the seventh year of the watershed of that failed ideology, yet still it’s myths persist, it is a cancer that continues to metastasize. More Austerity for Greece is an invitation to political/ethical/human disaster for Greece and the EU: the political compromise of Tsipras sets the stage for the political ascent of Golden Dawn as a viable political alternative, with Spain’s Podemos just off stage. Does that render Mr. Tusk’s muted political hysteria correct? Or is it a fact that the EU, by it’s reliance on economic/political technocrats i.e. Neo-Liberals, is antithetical to the idea and practice of democracy? Is it an inescapable political reality that monetary union must embrace a complete political integration to even approach viability?

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6872342-2bd2-11e5-acfb-cbd2e1c81cca.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3g9ceZq1C

Mr. Weiss and his co-author Ms. Youssef have produced an impressive piece of propaganda, using Assad as their starting point, except that they eventually become immersed in quoting from their  dubious political allies:

Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

‘Funding

In 2011, ThinkProgress published FDD’s Form 990 documents[33] that revealed where FDD funding came from, from 2001 to 2004. Donors included:[31]

• Roland Arnall: $1,802,000
• Edgar M. and Charles Bronfman: $1,050,000
• Michael Steinhardt: $850,000
• Abramson Family Foundation (of Leonard Abramson): $822,523
• Bernard Marcus: $600,000
• Lewis Ranieri: $350,000

ThinkProgress concluded, “Most of the major donors are active philanthropists to ‘pro-Israel‘ causes both in the U.S. and internationally. With the disclosure of its donor rolls, it becomes increasingly apparent that FDD’s advocacy of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy is consistent with its donors’ interests in ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy“.[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Democracies#Funding

Frederic Hof, a Senior Fellow at the Washington D.C.-based Atlantic Council :

This group is a relic of the Cold War, that has seen a revival since the inception of the New Cold War, Mr. Weiss being a major voice in that revival, in response to ‘Russian Revanchism’

‘In February 2009, James L. Jones, then-chairman of the Atlantic Council, stepped down in order to serve as President Obama’s new National Security Advisor and was succeeded by Senator Chuck Hagel.[3] In addition, Council members Susan Rice left to serve as the administration’s ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke became the Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Eric K. Shinseki became the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Anne-Marie Slaughter became Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Senator Chuck Hagel stepped down in 2013 to serve as US Secretary of Defense. Gen. Brent Scowcroft served as interim chairman of the organization’s Board of Directors until January 2014, when former ambassador to China and governor of Utah Jon Huntsman, Jr.[4] was appointed.

The Atlantic Council has influential supporters, with former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen calling the Council a “pre-eminent think tank” with a “longstanding reputation”,[5] and former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) noting that the Council is “held in high esteem within the Atlantic community”.[6]

Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

‘The organization has strong ties to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and was founded by former AIPAC employee.[3]

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

But in the end this essay devolves into exploitable political emotionalism, provided by Syrian blogger Maysaloon. This emotional appeal is central to their propaganda enterprise.

Political Observer

Mr. Gelb’s essay is welcome, in the face of the predictable Republican/American Likudnik hysterics. But Mr. Gelb fails to mention the fact that if anyone has upset the nuclear balance of power in the ‘Middle East’ it is Israel, too inconvenient to his almost cheer leading of the agreement? Or his inability to describe/diagnose the Obama Policy Schizophrenia: peace overtures to Iran in defiance of the purchased loyalty of mad dog Netanyahu, and a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Adding to this is America inability to husband the actions of ‘serial defaulter’ Germany, in the person of Merkel and her IMF,EU confederates, attempting to rescue that monetary union from itself.

One can only hope that the Republican Old Guard will cede leadership to the fresh face of Sen. Tom Cotton, instead of the same tied parade of McCain, McConnell,Boehner.

StephenKMackSD

You have to just wonder,almost, at the screeching Republican/Neo-Con united political front on the Iran Agreement, and then compare it to the TPA/TPP alliance vote. The TPP was/is a state secret, yet the Republican Corporatists sided with the president on the issue of a total surrender of state sovereignty! Political conformity rules both houses of congress, so that the total political surrender to corporate power is amenable to both the New Democrats and the Republicans. While reaching an agreement with Iran takes on the coloration of the propaganda the Old Cold War: the Iranians are irrational,irresponsible and unfit custodians of  nuclear power/weapons, not to speak of their sponsorship of terrorists!
But the Republican amnesia on Reagan’s nefarious dealing with Iran,selling weapons to Iran, during the Iran/Iraq war and then giving the profits to the Contras is inconvenient!
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/
McCain is shopworn, but Cotton, the protege of Mansfield and Kristol, might just prove to be a more potent force, than the utterly sclerotic present leadership. Perhaps, if the old guard exercises any thing like leadership/vision, Cotton will be given the leadership position on this issue, under the careful guidance of his elders.

Political Observer

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/iran-deal-got-lawmakers-react-kill-deal-120083.html

Here is a quote from The Lacanian Delusion that describes Strauss with stinging accuracy!

“His style ,then, is specifically designed to ward off simplification, but more generally , to defy any translation that would gloss over the words at issue and in need of explanation, words that should therefore be left to their diamond like indivisibility or, in the final analysis,their foliage like obscurity.”

The Lacanian Delusion by François Roustang Oxford University Press 1990  page 19

StephenKMackSD

Central to the Neo-Confederate/Originalist political myth is Brown I and II, as an attack on American Feudalism: white male power as above any kind of challenge. See The Rehnquist Choice by John Dean for confirmation of that political connection. The rest of Mr. Troy’s polemic is, in a way relevant to an argument against the Supreme Court as an unelected body, but the Court has long since abandoned the interpretive primacy of ‘legislative intent’ as part of the due diligence of the Court, that it’s justices once exercised to determine the why and the how that defined that ‘intent’.

Mr. Troy fails to mention other inconvenient but relevant cases like Buck v Bell, Hirabayashi v. US,  Korematsu v. US or the cases I mentioned in my reply, Citizens United  and Shelby County v. Holder, that clearly demonstrate that race, gender and ethnicity, not to speak of economic power, have played a large part in the  history of Law in the US. And Mr. Troy’s ideological propinquity for that Neo-Confederate/Originalist ideology.

I sign my tweets StephenKMackSD! Here is my self-description in full:

‘Rootless Cosmopolitan( безродный космополит), Down at heels intellectual and would be writer. Avatar in honor of Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi.”

Rootless cosmopolitan (Russian language: безродный космополит, “bezrodnyi kosmopolit”) was a term used during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the Soviet Union after WWII. Cosmopolitans were intellectuals who were accused of expressing pro-Western feelings and lack of patriotism. The term “rootless cosmopolitan” is considered to specifically refer to Jewish intellectuals. It first appeared during the campaign in a Pravda article condemning a group of theatrical critics, but was originally coined by the Russian nineteenth-century literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lacked national character.^[1]

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

My reference is to Belinsky, although shaded in irony,  rather than to Stalin’s antisemitic attack on intellectuals, to be plain!

StephenKMackSD

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/how-to-restrict-the-lawmaking-power-of-the-supreme-court.html

Where does Mr. Troy actually begin his argument? Not in the first paragraphs larded with self-congratulation of the legal expert. Legal narcissism is the disease of the profession!  And the assurances that he knows his American Law, supported by apposite quotations. No, he begins with  Brown and Warren’s argued ‘sociology’. The usual dismissive canard of the political reactionary i.e. the odious Neo-Confederate/Originalist Party Line, favored by the adepts of The Federalist Society. If one needs to look for the ‘origins’ of Brown perhaps looking here might be revelatory:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Don’t tell me that the Preamble doesn’t have the force of Law. It sets the stage for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and as such expresses the Enlightenment Values that the Neo-Confederate/Originalists continually rail against!

We need to resort to history to see the rise of Rehnquist: John A. Jenkins’ book The Partisan provides that history.

http://www.johnajenkins.com/BookpageThePartisan.html

The rise of Scalia in this hagiography by Joan Biskupic titled ‘American Original’:

http://us.macmillan.com/americanoriginal/joanbiskupic

And for the primer on Supreme Court interpretation/explication, this is the  reliable text, unencumbered by the American Political Romanticism called Originalism: Minding the Law by Amsterdam and Bruner.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674008168

In this essay Mr. Troy proves himself to be adept at the legal propaganda, that places Warren and Brown at the center of the argument: eliding from the civic conversation the rise of the Neo-Confederate/Originalists and their backward looking, indeed radical, destructive political nostalgia, as an argument against a Supreme Court colonized by these Political Romantics. Would Mr. Troy dissent on Citizens United or Shelby County v. Holder?

Political Observer