StephenKMackSD's Blog

Should the attentive reader of Mr. David Brooks essay of May 17, 2012, titled How Change Happens, be surprised that he chooses the Wall Street Journal and the National Review as the sources of evaluations of the business practices of Bain Capital and Mr. Mitt Romney? Rather than the extensive and uncomplimentary reportage of his employers at the New York Times. A reader, relying on empirical evidence or something close to that ideal, might just search the New York Times data base for the pertinent stories, but Mr. Brooks' intent is ideological rather than reality based. Here is a link to one such story titled After a Romney Deal, Profits and Then Layoffs by Michael Barbaro of November 12, 2011. Mr. Brooks also uses as rhetorical frame the idea of 'creative destruction' borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter, an interpretation of Karl Marx, a small but important aside in the history of economics. Mr. Brooks is a brazen ideologue and propagandist who never tires of defending the vulgar dog eat dog that is the only real idea of Robber Capital. Conservatism demonstrates that it has fallen on hard times, when it relies on the blatant, yet transparent, propaganda of Mr. Brooks.

Political Observer

Mr. Brooks in his essay of May 17, 2012 appropriates his title from Edith Wharton's 1920 novel of the same name. Mr. Brook's meditation might better be called The Age of Cynicism: as it takes the careful, and quite precise political thought of James Madison, and just gives it enough of a rewrite to accommodate his political purpose. His introduction is rather long but bears it's fruit as a critique of the political campaign of President Obama, and he drags along for political purposes the institutionalized political cautiousness of Mr. Madison, re-imagined as both a simplistic cynicism about 'human nature' and the fallen-ness of man as a general proposition, expressed as we cannot be trusted in any context, not just the realm of the political. To this dubious set of assertions on the human condition, via an edited version of Mr. Madison, he manages to add a quite superfluous attack on the failed state of European Social Democracy, as an example of fiscal irresponsibility wedded to an endemic moral decay: a bit of a riff on the popular notion of the 'lazy,improvident southerners' of the Euro-zone North.  Adding an aside on the anti-democratic character of the European Union , a federation of states analogous to the United States of America, while not sharing all the attributes of our federation: all of this argumentative accumulation is in the hope of buoying this intellectual craft out of the shallows and into the deeper waters.I will report that ship foundered and sunk with all of it's precious cargo lost. The report heard is that Mr. Brooks was seen rowing to shore in a more modest conveyance, a small dingy.
Political Observer
                    

 

I’ve just finished a Reinhold Niebuhr biography by Richard Fox published in 1985. That I find Mr. Niebuhr repugnant as person and Christian Moralist is a statement of my prejudice, without apology. I felt that I wanted to understand who the man was and where he came from. Those questions are answered in some detail in Mr. Fox’s biography, although Mr. Fox seems to be satisfied with hagiography rather that critical engagement with Mr. Niebuhr as theopolitician. Niebuhr appears to be a religious and political conformist swept along from Socialism to Cold War Liberalism: always a little too anxious to prove his patriotism, his Americaness. Niebuhr has become the object of a cult headed by President Obama, perhaps because of the tough minded moralizing represented by Christian Realism: which could be more accurately named Christian Imperialism. It has something in common with the Protestant Christian Politics of Woodrow Wilson, with an emphasis on the necessary use of violence, to reach political ends deemed important enough to warrant it. In the name of the greater political good, even as necessary to emancipate, if only temporarily, man from his natural sinful and irredeemable self-hood. This cliché of the Christian Tradition reeks of the self-hating Augustine, and his successors, who institutionalized the persistent, morally destructive Christian anti-humanism. Imperial Politics with a thin veneer of carefully cultivated piety is an American tradition. I would call Niebuhr hopelessly Middlebrow: more about the care and maintenance of bourgeois political respectability and the self-exculpatory, as key to ex post facto rationalizations identified as ‘Philosophy’ . I was impressed, and moved by one person’s character in Mr. Fox’s biography of Reinhold, and that was the love, devotion and steadfastness of his brother Richard. Engaging with the ‘Philosophy’ of Mr. Niebuhr using the valuable historical frame provided by Mr. Fox will enrich my further reading.

Political Observer

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item5562860/Habermas/?site_locale=…

Read Peter E. Gordon’s review in The New Repulic:

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/zero-hour-jurgen-habermas#.T7e1YaGGfdo.twitter

 

 

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6585778/?site_locale=en_US

See this review in The American Conservative, quite surprising. Thank you to Arts and Letters Daily and  Kenneth B. McIntyre.

A review in the TLS of May 18,2012 by Mark Vernon titled New Causes brought me to this book. Mr. Plokinghorne is both scientist and theologin. 

Mr. David Brooks is a propagandist of certain talent and a man given to self-serving political characterizations, indeed he expresses a positive mania for renaming. Should we consider him a Nominalist? In his essay of May 7, 2012 titled The Structural Revolution, Mr. Brooks describes a philosophical/political conflict between the Structuralists and the Cyclicalists in matters economic. Please don’t confuse his Structuralists with that Parisian intellectual coterie, and the Cyclicalists, simply call it metaphorical/rhetorical clumsiness. Recall the Nutcracker Ballet in which the Mouse King and his army fight the Gingerbread men soldiers: it has some of that flavor, but not the charm of the Petipa libretto. One might also think of a marvelous Grandville illustration, as an act of wish fulfillment. Mr. Brooks little political fable does not even meet the quality these two Fabulists. But there is a certain talent at work here, some illustrative quotations:

A Structuralist defines the problem:

“There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.”

A Structuralist defines the Cyclicalists and their problems:

“Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.

The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.”

The unsurprising last two sentences. The Structuralist defines the Political Future:

“Make no mistake, the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable. The cyclicalists want to preserve the status quo, but structural change is coming.”

 

American Litterateur

 

 

 

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2012/0106/bk/book_brown_dissent.html

 

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012/may/08/text-sen-richard-lugars-two-primary-election-state/

Even if Sen. Richard Lugar represents the Eisenhower Republican in it's most compromised form, he still represented the political as the art of compromise,in the realm of civic actors who placed the preservation and well being of the Republic as the central concern of that practice of politics.The zelots that have taken over the Party since 1964 are just consolidating their position of political nihilism, as opposed to a civic patriotism based on the a priori notion of the good faith of the political 'other'. The Republic is now inert, indeed moribund, in the face of the political machinations of the New Democrats and Republicans who have surrendered to hate, fear, hubris and political subversion from within. NDAA represents the efficacy of the played out national melodrama concocted after 9/11 by the Bush Restoration and simply echoed, albeit muted in tone, by the Obama Administration. War and State Terror without compunction or even a window dressing of redress, is the stark reality of this Republic May 2012.

Publius