StephenKMackSD's Blog

Never before has a German government been this unpopular after only one year in office as that of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

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Jul 02, 2026

Never before has a German government been this unpopular after only one year in office as that of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The far-right AfD is capitalizing on this.

Voters’ expectations could not have been higher when Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his government coalition of center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) took office on May 6, 2025.

Economic recovery was to be the top priority. Within just a few months, citizens would feel that Germany was moving forward, the Chancellor promised in his first policy statement, while also holding out the prospect of major reforms to be made in the autumn of that year.

After one year in office, the Chancellor has been forced to admit that a country like Germany cannot be steered in a new direction within just a few months. His centrist coalition is prone to conflict and the arduous search for compromises has slowed it down more than expected. The economy is failing to gain momentum. Throughout the country, disappointment with the government’s performance is palpable.

AfD on the rise

Overall, 86% of respondents in the latest ARD-Deutschlandtrend survey by pollster infratest dimap say they are dissatisfied with the government. The pollster conducted a representative survey of 1,303 eligible German voters between May 4 and May 6, 2026. This level of dissatisfaction marks a record: Never before in the history of the “Deutschlandtrend” — which has been conducted every month since 1997 — has a federal government been rated so negatively after one year in office.

Only 44% of respondents believe that Merz’s government should remain in office until the next general election scheduled for 2029. But what would happen if early fresh elections were held?

According to the Deutschlandtrend poll, the ruling coalition would lose its majority. For the first time, there is a clear majority in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — a party of which several regional chapters are classified as right-wing. At 27% nationwide, it has reached a new record high.

Compared to April, the conservative CDU/CSU bloc has lost two percentage points, dropping to 24% and second place. The SPD remains at 12%, the socialist Left Party remains at 10% and the environmentalist Greens have improved slightly to 15%. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the business-oriented Free Democrats (FDP) are polling below the 5% thresshold to enter parliament.

The AfD performs even more strongly in regional polls in the eastern federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. A new state parliament is set to be elected there this September, and the AfD is currently polling at 41%, far ahead of the incumbent CDU at only 26%.

Can Merz pull off a turnaround?

Chancellor Merz sees no alternative to the coalition with the SPD. But difficult negotiations lie ahead. Following the presentation of a draft bill for healthcare reform in April, the next task is the reform of the pension system, which is scheduled to be discussed before the summer recess.

By the end of the year, a major income tax reform is to be drafted, aimed primarily at providing relief to low- and middle-income earners. However, it is yet unclear how to finance such cuts. The SPD advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy, a stance rejected by the Union.

The economy, social security issues, and curbing irregular immigration remain high on the voters’ agenda. Yet, according to the Deutschlandtrend survey, they show little confidence that the government can make much progress in these areas.

While in June 2025, just over half of respondents still trusted the new conservative-led government to boost the economy, that figure has now dropped to only 25%.

The impact of geopolitics

In interviews marking the first anniversary of his administration, Merz argued that no chancellor before him has had to contend with conditions as difficult as his own. He argued that, in light of global crises and wars, the world currently finds itself in a historic state of emergency.

However, voters are unwilling to accept these challenging circumstances as an excuse for the government’s performance: Six out of 10 respondents consider the government’s actions to be inadequate.

Only 16% of those surveyed said they are “somewhat satisfied” with Chancellor Merz — the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a chancellor. Eight out of 10 people criticize his communication style.

Finally, a look at two aspects of foreign and security policy. The German Navy is deploying two of its vessels to the Mediterranean. The minesweeper Fulda has set sail from Kiel, and the supply ship Mosel, which is currently operating in the Aegean Sea, is being prepared for a potential deployment.

Should an international naval mission be launched in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran following the cessation of hostilities, these ships are intended to be ready for action on short notice. According to the Deutschlandtrend poll, one in two respondents believes it is right for the Navy to participate in such a mission.

While the relationship between US President Donald Trump and Chancellor Friedrich Merz initially appeared quite harmonious, distinct differences of opinion have recently emerged.

German voters support Merz in standing his ground and asserting his own viewpoints. Across the entire political spectrum, the consensus is that the German government should stick to its positions — even if doing so risks antagonizing Trump. Only one in five respondents favors a more restrained approach by Germany in foreign policy disputes, aimed at avoiding any provocation of Donald Trump.

This article was translated from German.

Sabine Kinkartz Reporter and author

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-far-right-afd-benefits-from-discontent-with-merz/a-77094216

Almost Marx comments Posted on November 12, 2016 by stephenkmacksd

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Jul 01, 2026

Beware the Straussians! Intellectual bloat, windy and self-serving re-descriptions of the past, the political present and predictions on our collective, benighted future, by the stern guiding hand of the self-appointed Philosopher King! One need only read Mr. Fukuyama’s ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’ in which he attacks the whole of the America’s melorist politics of the 20th Century. A sample of Mr. Fukuyama’s ex cathedra pronouncements, on Brown v Board, as an example of his concern for the proper functioning of American State institutions:

So familiar is this heroic narrative to Americans that they seldom realize how peculiar it is. The primary mover in the Brown case was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a private voluntary association. The initiative had to come from private groups, of course, because state governments in the South were controlled by pro-segregation forces. The NAACP pressed the case on appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. What was arguably one of the most important changes in American public policy thus came about not because Congress, as the representative of the American people, voted for it but because private individuals litigated through the court system to change the rules. Later developments, like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, were the result of congressional action, but even in these cases enforcement was carried out by courts at the behest of private parties.

No other liberal democracy proceeds in this fashion. All European countries have gone through similar changes to the legal status of racial and ethnic minorities, and women and gays in the second half of the 20^th century. But in Britain, France or Germany, the same results have been achieved through a national justice ministry acting on behalf of a parliamentary majority. The legislative rule changes might well have been driven by public pressure, but they would have been carried out by the government itself, not by private parties acting in conjunction with the judiciary.

The idea and practice of ‘redress of grievances’ as legitimate, is subject to Mr. Fukuyama’s ideological myopia. Compare Mr. Fukuyama’s extensive comment on Brown to Learned Hand’s ‘evolution’ on Brown, that was his realization that ‘Judicial Restraint’ and the proper functioning of the legislative branch, in reforms like Brown, were of more import than marking the end of the legitimacy of segregation, as a legal imperative. See this informative review of ‘Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand’ by Lincoln Caplan in the December 5, 2013 edition of The New Your Review of Books (Behind a pay wall):

That ‘proper functioning of a legislature’ as the vanguard of reform was never going to happen! But the issue of ‘Judicial Restraint’ gave a white judiciary an intellectual/legal rationale for the status quo. And for the manifest injustice of ‘separate but equal’, visited upon generations of black children, since the collapse of Reconstruction. The Federalist Society and its political allies called Brown ‘sociology’, willfully forgetting this declaration by the Founders:

‘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.’

Like the Good Straussian Mr. Fukuyama writes History Made To Measure, so his collection of cliches beginning with the ‘International Liberal Order’, that in reality is a ‘Neo-Liberal International Order’ in collapse since 2008. That was the fertile ground that gave Populism and its leaders like Trump, Farage and Le Pen their raison d’être. Much more to be said about this self-serving intervention!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/6a43cf54-a75d-11e6-8b69-02899e8bd9d1

Addendum, added November 12,2016 1:37 P.M., a long quotation from that New York Review of Books essay by Lincoln Caplan, as referred to in my original post.

For some very informative background on the notion/practice of ‘Judicial Restraint’ and the part this idea played in the career of Learned Hand. And his ‘evolution’ on the question of Brown v. Board, from support to opposition, see this New York Review of Books essay by Lincoln Caplan. He reviews Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand: 1897–1961 edited by Constance Jordan, with a preface by Ronald Dworkin.(Behind a pay wall)

Hand was a career-long champion of strict judicial restraint. His fundamental belief was that, in our American democracy, judges and especially justices of the Supreme Court should defer to Congress and uphold statutes unless they served no practical purpose, because he doubted “the wisdom of setting up courts as the final arbiters of social conflicts.” James Bradley Thayer, a Harvard Law School professor and favorite teacher of Hand’s,³ articulated this guiding stricture. The standard-setting liberal Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Hand’s hero) and Louis Brandeis relied on this view in the first decades of the twentieth century when they dissented from Supreme Court rulings that struck down social legislation because, the Court’s conservative majority thought, the statutes were anti-business.

In 1958, when Hand was eighty-six and called by The New York Times “the most revered of living American judges,” he summed up his case for strict restraint in The Bill of Rights, the prestigious Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School, delivered over three nights. By then, Earl Warren had been chief justice of the Supreme Court for five years. As Gerald Gunther explained, “The achievement of social justice through invocation of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment was well on its way to becoming the justices’ central preoccupation.”

Hand’s lectures made the case for judicial enforcement of them only “on extreme occasions.” He contended that there was no basis in the text of the Constitution or in its history for the Supreme Court to hold acts of government unconstitutional, especially statutes passed by Congress and state legislatures.

It was not, he wrote, “a lawless act to import into the Constitution such a grant of power,” for “without some arbiter whose decision should be final the whole system would have collapsed.” But justices and other judges, he advised, should use this power only when that was essential—when a governmental act violated the clear “historical meaning” of the amendments in the Bill of Rights—or they would function as a super-legislature. “For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians,” he said famously, “even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.”

The lectures were an attack on judicial activism but also the Warren Court. In 1954, Warren had led the Court to the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Every justice then on the Court, as the legal historian Michael Klarman noted, “had criticized untethered judicial activism as undemocratic.”⁴ But the justices recognized that America was a transformed nation in its views about race and that history compelled the Court to find segregation of public schools unconstitutional.⁵ In a short opinion, Warren stated that principle.

Among liberal and centrist legal thinkers, the question was how broad a principle of equality the Court had actually stated. In his lectures, however, Hand staked out a very conservative position. The Brown ruling was unacceptable because it was second-guessing of legislative choices by the states, even though that put Hand on the wrong side of history.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/judge-who-shaped-our-law/

As Brown is considered to be simultaneously, ‘sociology’ and a betrayal of the hallowed ‘judicial restraint’: this set of claims became the central founding myths of The Federalist Society.

StephenKMackSD

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jul 01, 2026

In May 1944, Learned Hand delivered a brief but timeless address in New York on “the spirit of liberty.” Freedom, the great Second Circuit jurist warned, cannot be safeguarded by constitutions, laws or courts. Nor can there be freedom wherever “men recognize no check upon their freedom” — a road down which it becomes “the possession of only a savage few.”

Instead, the judge said, the spirit of liberty lay in a combination of humility, curiosity, generosity and restraint. It was “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” the one that “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.” It was an elusive spirit, one that could exist only “as the conscience and courage of Americans create it.” Yet it was also one “for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying.”

Hand gave his speech on the eve of D-Day. What is — or ought to be — the spirit of liberty on the eve of our 250th anniversary?

It is the spirit of public example, beginning with the character of the president; of presidential character defined by modesty, composure and integrity, which are necessary to offset the vast and sometimes terrifying powers of the office; of leadership that ensures the faithful execution of laws by submitting to them fully, transparently and unto the smallest detail; of statesmanship that never mistakes grandiosity for greatness, or rhetoric for reality, or monuments for meaning

…

The Judge Who Shaped Our Law

Lincoln Caplan

December 5, 2013 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/judge-who-shaped-our-law

…

Hand’s lectures made the case for judicial enforcement of them only “on extreme occasions.” He contended that there was no basis in the text of the Constitution or in its history for the Supreme Court to hold acts of government unconstitutional, especially statutes passed by Congress and state legislatures.

It was not, he wrote, “a lawless act to import into the Constitution such a grant of power,” for “without some arbiter whose decision should be final the whole system would have collapsed.” But justices and other judges, he advised, should use this power only when that was essential—when a governmental act violated the clear “historical meaning” of the amendments in the Bill of Rights—or they would function as a super-legislature. “For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians,” he said famously, “even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.”

The lectures were an attack on judicial activism but also the Warren Court. In 1954, Warren had led the Court to the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Every justice then on the Court, as the legal historian Michael Klarman noted, “had criticized untethered judicial activism as undemocratic.”

But the justices recognized that America was a transformed nation in its views about race and that history compelled the Court to find segregation of public schools unconstitutional.In a short opinion, Warren stated that principle.

Among liberal and centrist legal thinkers, the question was how broad a principle of equality the Court had actually stated. In his lectures, however, Hand staked out a very conservative position. The Brown ruling was unacceptable because it was second-guessing of legislative choices by the states, even though that put Hand on the wrong side of history.

Gunther attributed Hand’s extreme position to Felix Frankfurter, who, though younger by a decade, had authority as a longtime Harvard Law School professor. They had a memorable correspondence for fifty years, with Frankfurter signing off “Ever yours” and Hand, “Thine.” Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Frankfurter to succeed Benjamin Cardozo on the Supreme Court in 1939 and sustain a liberal vote but, by the time of the Brown ruling, Frankfurter’s fierce adherence to judicial restraint had repositioned him as a conservative.

While Frankfurter joined the unanimous decision in Brown, he was deeply conflicted about it. In the internal deliberations about the case, he emphasized that he could not say that the Fourteenth Amendment “meant to abolish segregation.” But as Klarman put it, he abhorred segregation more than he scorned basing a legal decision on politics.

As if he could turn an activist ruling into a restrained one, however, he persuaded Warren that the Court should take a gradualist approach, with implementation of the order to desegregate public schools the responsibility of local authorities—with no deadline. One district after another refused to obey the Court, which hardened Frankfurter’s conservatism and invigorated Warren’s liberalism. Brown introduced a new era of expanded authority and activism for the Court. Frankfurter blamed Warren and his “self-willed self-righteous power-lust.” That was the backdrop for Frankfurter’s goading of Hand, who took the ultra-restraint, anti-Brown position of his lectures.

…

In June 1954, after Frankfurter sent Hand a copy of the Brown decision, Hand wrote the justice that he would have reached the same result: “It is difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment meant to cover such interests as a separation by race in so primary an activity as education.”

In other words, Hand’s initial view aboutBrown was that state laws calling for segregated public schools violated the historic meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, making them unconstitutional even under his conception of judicial restraint.

But in September 1957, months before Hand’s Holmes Lectures, Frankfurter and Hand exchanged a series of letters that seemed to help change Hand’s mind about Brown. The justice asked the judge:

I hope you can spare time and energy, and that your inclination will move you to do so, to tell me with particularity what you would do in my place were the constitutionality of the conventional [anti-]miscegenation statute before you. I ought to put only one qualification in your disposition of the problem: you are to accept loyally the Court’s decision on school segregation.

(In Frankfurter’s place, Hand would have had to accept Brown as a fresh precedent.)

One of the phony claims made at the time to undermine the authority of Brown in the face of southern disobedience to the ruling was that its real purpose was the “mongrelisation” of the races, by putting blacks and whites side by side in the classroom and then legalizing marriage between men and women of different races. The Supreme Court ducked this controversy, rejecting several cases that challenged anti-mixed-race marriage statutes, and waited until 1967 to strike them down.

Hand expressed uncertainty about the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the breadth of the reach of its clause guaranteeing equal protection of the laws—uncertainty about how much that history justified his “thinking that the Amendment was passed in a spirit of extreme, indeed extravagant, egalitarianism in favor of Negroes.” But he went on, “If what I have said is true, I cannot see how we can possibly say that it does not deny ‘equal protection’ to Negroes to forbid their marriage with Whites.”

Frankfurter responded that Hand’s “reasoning and the conclusion to which it led you make me extremely uncomfortable” and rebuffed Hand’s understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment as if it were unsupported by history or interpretation and a threat to Frankfurter’s independence as a justice. How could Hand say that “color is absolutely barred as a basis of ‘classification’ allowed by ‘equal protection’? Is the answer that IT IS!! the iron intellectual prison within which the Fourteenth confines me?”

Frankfurter did not acknowledge that Hand’s view about the breadth of the Fourteenth Amendment’s reach was a respectable one. He did not acknowledge that rigid racial discrimination, exemplified by slavery, was the paradigm for the kind of denial that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits.

Hand wrote back to Frankfurter, “I suppose I must say something about all this in my goddam lectures.” “All this” turned out to include saying that Brown was unacceptable. Before this exchange with Frankfurter, Hand’s view had been that the ruling was correct and that he supported it. In The Bill of Rights, by contrast, as Gunther summarized, Hand said that “Brown constituted impermissible second-guessing of legislative choices.” In Hand’s words, the Court assumed “the role of a third legislative chamber.”

…

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/judge-who-shaped-our-law

Political Observer !

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Jun 30, 2026

Friday:

Cancer does funny things to time. Both to the person who has it and the family of those with the illness. It feels as if I have lived every moment with Jill over the past 14 months. There have been moments when I have wished it was me who had cancer and not her. Not just out of some misplaced heroic altruism, but because it felt as if it would be easier to bear.

Living with and loving a person with cancer is to be given daily reminders of what it means to experience loss of control. It’s like being in a half world that is part of the real one yet also separate. Time bends. Some days almost slow to a standstill, when it feels as if you are experiencing every moment and not necessarily for the better. Others, usually the good ones, seem to race past as you struggle to keep hold of them. Recovery also sometimes feels glacially slow. It is seven months since Jill’s operation and five months since she finished the last round of chemo but there are still times of the day when she feels rubbish.

We have been told it may take at least a year before she is properly her old self again. But there have been some upsides. Cancer has brought us closer together. We haven’t just done the hospital stuff together – I feel as if I know every inch of the Marsden in Sutton and Fulham – but we have got to have the important conversations that other couples might not get to have because they feel they have all the time in the world, so why spoil the moment? As a family – I’m including our children here – it feels as if we have said everything that needs to be said. Whatever happens, there will be no regrets. And things are looking up. Jill is a lot stronger than she was even a couple of months ago, and bizarrely you do even get used to the two-month cycle of PET scans, MRIs and blood tests. As the oncologist recently said to us: “You must always bank the wins when they come along.” Because one day you may lose.

So, with that in mind, we are planning to enjoy our summer. Jill recently realised she hadn’t spent a night away from home – apart from the time she was in hospital – for over a year. This will change. We are going to America to see our daughter. Jill is coming to Buxton for the night towards the end of July where I am doing an event in the opera house as part of the festival. We are planning on visiting friends. Life is restarting.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/26/digested-week-another-pm-bites-dust-surprisingly-moving

Political Observer.

Jun 27th 2024.

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Jun 29, 2026

The Reader might ask the Economist Oxbridger Cadre, what went wrong with Kier Starmer?

…

That is the negative case for voting Labour, but there are positive arguments, too. The first is that the party has been transformed. Since the last election Sir Keir Starmer has expelled Mr Corbyn, rooted out many of his fellow travellers and dragged Labour away from radical socialism. The Economist disagrees with the party on many things, such as its plan to create a publicly owned energy provider. But elections are when voters mete out rewards as well as punishments, and Labour’s reinvention deserves credit.

The second positive reason to back Labour is its focus on growth. The party is right in its diagnosis that nothing matters more than solving Britain’s stagnant productivity. Its young, aspiring, urban supporters will give it permission to act in ways that the Conservatives have avoided. The most obvious of these is building more houses and infrastructure, and forging closer relations with Europe. The party of public services may also have more latitude to reform them than the Tories would.

The question that hangs over Labour is how radical it will be in pursuit of growth. It has run a maddeningly cautious campaign, choosing to reassure voters rather than seek a mandate for bold change. It does not help that Sir Keir, having been in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before ejecting him, seems to turn with the wind. Having strenuously avoided the subject in the campaign, a Labour government will need to raise taxes (as would a Conservative one if it was not to wreck public services). For all these reasons, having failed to set out a vision to steer by, prime minister Starmer could more easily be blown off course by events or sidetracked by growth-stifling left-wing preoccupations, such as beefing up workers’ rights, stamping out inequality and doling out industrial subsidies.

This is Oxbridger shit! ‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood’ it reminds the reader of English Civil War 1642–1651 and of Oliver Cromwell who ruled from December 16, 1653, until his death on September 3, 1658.

Sir Keir’s answer to this criticism of him as a campaigner should be his determination and competence in office. His method is to work relentlessly towards a goal, ratcheting up pressure as he goes. After years of post-Brexit Conservative ideological lurches, that in itself will be worth something. If Labour also succeeds in overhauling the planning regime, strengthening ties with Europe, giving fiscal power to cities, focusing the Treasury on growth and rationalising the tax system, the picture will brighten and Britain will be better off. Sir Keir and his party have earned the chance to try.

Newspaper Reader.

Political Observer on the malleability of The Technocrats who advise Presidents !

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Jun 29, 2026

What reader can forget Cass Cass Sunstein?

Cass R. Sunstein, a partitioner of ‘The Kahneman Methodology’?

Posted on April 12, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader engages is some revelatory Political Archelogy.

Mr. Sunstein latest political intervention on behalf of another Academic/Technocrat should not surprise. Daniel Kahneman represents the virtue of seeking ‘a consensus’ of a kind, with his critics in an Academic World, consonant with the adversarial, is presented as a virtue?

I’ll offer a selection of Sunstein’s 1093 word argument.

Our all-American belief that money really does buy happiness is roughly correct for about 85 percent of us. We know this thanks to the latest and perhaps final work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who insisted on the value of working with those with whom we disagree.

Professor Kahneman, who died last week at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision making and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. He should also be remembered for a living and working philosophy that has never been more relevant: his enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This enthusiasm was deeply personal. He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).

Back to that finding, published last year, that for a strong majority of us, more is better when it comes to money. In 2010, Professor Kahneman and the Princeton economist Angus Deaton (also a Nobel Prize winner) published a highly influential essay that found that, on average, higher-income groups show higher levels of happiness — but only to a point. Beyond a threshold at or below $90,000, Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton found, there is no further progress in average happiness as income increases.

Sunstein offers this as an object lesson of the ‘Kahneman Methodology’:

Eleven years later, Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found exactly the opposite: People with higher income reported higher levels of average happiness. Period. The more money people have, the happier they are likely to be.

What gives? You could imagine some furious exchange in which Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton made sharp objections to Dr. Killingsworth’s paper, to which Dr. Killingsworth answered equally sharply, leaving readers confused and exhausted.

Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.

Jeremy Waldron in The New York Review of Books offered a review of October 9, 2014 of two books by Cass Sunstein:

Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism

by Cass R. Sunstein

Yale University Press, 195 pp., $25.00

Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas

by Cass R. Sunstein

Simon and Schuster, 267 pp., $26.00

I’ve made some choices for The Reader, that she may not agree with, so feel free to comment! But Waldron seems to be right on target in his criticisms of these books!

…

Employers sometimes try to educate people to make better choices, offering them retirement-planning seminars, for example. But the lessons of these seminars are soon forgotten: “Employees often leave educational seminars excited about saving more but then fail to follow through on their plans.” And so Sunstein and Thaler suggested a different strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—the position that obtains if the employee does nothing. Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?

Resetting the default position this way is what Thaler and Sunstein call a “nudge.” It exploits the structure of the choice to encourage a more desirable option. The decision is not taken entirely out of the employee’s hands. She can still change it and revert to a strategy of no contributions or diminished contributions to her retirement funds. But in that case she has to make an effort; this is where she has to overcome her inertia.

Nudging is an attractive strategy. People are faced with choices all the time, from products to pensions, from vacations to voting, from requests for charity to ordering meals in a restaurant, and many of these choices have to be made quickly or life would be overwhelming. For most cases the sensible thing is not to agonize but to use a rule of thumb—a heuristic is the technical term—to make the decision quickly. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” “Choose a round number,” “Always order the special,” and “Vote the party line” are all heuristics. But the ones people use are good for some decisions and not others, and they have evolved over a series of past situations that may or may not resemble the important choices people currently face.

Here begins Waldron’s critical analysis:

Nudging is about the self-conscious design of choice architecture. Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture, setting up one that when matched with the given heuristic delivers the desirable outcome. That’s what we do when we nudge.

All of this sounds like a marketer’s dream, and I will say something about its abusive possibilities later. But Sunstein and Thaler have in mind that governments might do this in a way that promotes the interests of their citizens. Governments might also encourage businesses and employers to use it in the interests of their customers and employees. The result would be a sort of soft paternalism: paternalism without the constraint; a nudge rather than a shove; doing for people what they would do for themselves if they had more time or greater ability to pick out the better choice

…

Mr. Waldron ends his review here:

…

There’s a sense underlying such thinking that my capacities for thought and for figuring things out are not really being taken seriously for what they are: a part of my self. What matters above all for the use of these nudges is appropriate behavior, and the authorities should try to elicit it by whatever informational nudge is effective. We manipulate things so that we get what would be the rational response to true information by presenting information that strictly speaking is not relevant to the decision.

I am not attributing informational nudging to Sunstein. But it helps us see that any nudging can have a slightly demeaning or manipulative character. Would the concern be mitigated if we insisted that nudgees must always be told what’s going on? Perhaps. As long as all the facts are in principle available, as long as it is possible to find out what the nudger’s strategies are, maybe there is less of an affront to self-respect. Sunstein says he is committed to transparency, but he does acknowledge that some nudges have to operate “behind the back” of the chooser.

It may seem a bit much to saddle Cass Sunstein with all this. The objections about dignity and manipulation that I’ve been considering can sound hysterical. It is perfectly reasonable for him to ask: “Is there anything insulting or demeaning about automatic enrollment in savings and health care plans, accompanied by unconstrained opt-out rights?” The strategies he advocates, when used wisely and well, seem like a sensible advance in public regulation, particularly when we consider them nudge by nudge.

Still, it is another matter whether we should be so happy with what I have called “nudge-world.” In that world almost every decision is manipulated in this way. Choice architects nudge almost everything I choose and do, and this is complemented by the independent activity of marketers and salesmen, who nudge away furiously for their own benefit. I’m not sure I want to live in nudge-world, though—as a notoriously poor chooser—I appreciate the good-hearted and intelligent efforts of choice architects such as Sunstein to make my autonomous life a little bit better. I wish, though, that I could be made a better chooser rather than having someone on high take advantage (even for my own benefit) of my current thoughtlessness and my shabby intuitions.

Here is Sunstein’s reply to Waldron’s critical analysis and Waldron’s reply:

In response to:

It’s All for Your Own Good from the October 9, 2014 issue

To the Editors:

I am most grateful to Jeremy Waldron for his generous and clear-headed review of my books Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas [NYR, October 9]. Waldron worries that nudging poses a risk to autonomy and dignity, but it is important to see that nudges are meant to promote both of those values. Disclosure of relevant information (about the terms of a school loan or a mortgage, for example) is hardly a threat to human dignity. When people are asked what they would like to choose, their autonomy is enhanced, not undermined. (Active choosing is a prime nudge.) A GPS certainly nudges, but it does not compromise what Waldron favors, which is “a steadfast commitment to self-respect.” Waldron is right to worry about the risk of manipulation, but the whole idea of nudging is designed to preserve freedom of choice, and in that sense both autonomy and dignity.

Cass R. Sunstein

Robert Walmsley University Professor

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jeremy Waldron replies:

I appreciate this clarification. Many nudges simply involve an improvement of the decision-making environment and of the information available to choosers. Professor Sunstein is right that there can be no objection to that. But in his book, the term “nudge” also comprises attempts to manipulate people behind their backs, using their own defective decision-making to privilege outcomes that we think they ought to value. I think both of us should be concerned about that and about a world in which that more sinister sense of nudging becomes a widespread instrument of public policy.

This Issue

October 23, 2014

The Reader might think to herself, that Sunstein has ‘evolved’ in light of his praise of for the ‘Kahneman Methodology’?

Final thought: ‘Conspiracy Theories’ is/was a mask to hide the role that The American National Security State played in the assassination John Kennedy. The test of fealty to this lie, was professing a belief that only ‘crackpots’ believed in these ‘theories’. Arlen Spector was its apologist till the end!

Newspaper Reader

Iran is in fill control of the Strait of Hormuz, and does not have ‘truce jitters’, but is in full controll, to the shagrin of Trump and and his familiar JD Vance. ‘Semafor Flagship’ ……..

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Jun 29, 2026

Political Observer on the political toxin of generations!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 29, 2026

Can it even surprise that John Podhoretz is the son Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter? Who can forget Normans claim to fame was ‘Making It’ ? His telling Jackie Kennedy to ‘fuck off’ was the epitomie of the class biass of a born political nihilist, on the make. Even the New York Review of Books republished this poisoned pen nililism.

Podhoretz mines the toxin of the Jewish Victimhood narritaive via ‘How the Left Abandoned the Jews’ & ‘The victories of anti-Israel democratic socialists aren’t a break from Democratic politics. They’re the culmination of a 40-year ideological shift that party leaders tolerated—and often encouraged’

How might the reader think about this ‘Jewish Victimhood Narrative’ refracted in the face of the continuinuing Gaza Genocide and the War in Lebanon? How can a comfortable American citizen clain the status of victimhood at such a remove? The Editors provide the preamble to the Podhoretz victimhood narritive:

In the week since New York City’s primaries—when three democratic socialist, staunchly anti-Israel candidates swept to victory—we’ve published a series of stories examining what the results mean for the country, and in particular, for Democrats, some of whom say they don’t recognize their own party any more.

This weekend brought a visceral illustration of the new mood we’ve been trying to capture. On Friday evening, California state senator Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s joined for 22 years. At the entrance, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish, openly gay man.

His offense? His stance on Israel—specifically, his refusal at a campaign event to declare that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” He later reversed course, but no matter. The damage was done.

If you haven’t seen the video, we encourage you to watch it. It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.

How, exactly, did we get here? According to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the DSA-style antisemitism now permeating large parts of the Democratic Party did not emerge overnight. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, tolerated and emboldened by leaders who declined to confront it. And if we ever hope to understand it, Podhoretz writes, we must go back to the very beginning. —The Editors

Editor: Nothing quites prepares the reader for retelling of ‘American History’ via the lens of John Podhoretz at a mere 3872 words ! This telling excerpt offers a mere glimpse of the Podhoretz methodology:

…

Conventional American politicians in both parties loathed the resolution—and under U.S. pressure in the wake of the end of the Cold War, it was rescinded in December 1991. But the animating idea behind the resolution had already gained purchase in academic journals and university departments. In 1989, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw devised the theory of “intersectionality,” according to which all political oppression stemmed from an imbalance between the powerful and powerless. Its application to the Middle East conflict was obvious: Israel was powerful, the Palestinians powerless, and therefore Israel was, by definition, an oppressor.

It became the most influential sociopolitical theory of our time. And it dovetailed nicely with the dominant book about the modern Middle East. That was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a jeremiad against the imposition of Western ideas on non-Western cultures. Said was an English professor at Columbia by day but moonlighted as an official of the Palestine National Council, and was a critic of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the left.

The ideas (and disciples) of Crenshaw and Said were disseminated throughout the academy in the 1990s and 2000s. They became the default view in political science and Middle Eastern studies departments and on tenure committees. Those who preached the intersectional anti-Zionist gospel had the loudest voices on campus and the greatest influence on the college-educated Americans who came their way. Even as the Clinton and Bush administrations were widely viewed as friendly to Israel, and even though the halls of Congress were populated by friends of Israel, the next generation of American political activists was being trained in darker and uglier ideas.

…

Political Observer.

Political Observer from June 6, 2015.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 28, 2026

Posted on June 6, 2015 by stephenkmacksd

The Economist supplies Western propaganda as answer to Putin Propaganda? The New Cold War with Putin as The New Stalin has reached the point of no return. Are we continually ruled by manufactured crises?

What should we readers think of Poroshenko’s new laws?

Reported on here:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/ukraine-anti-communist-laws-stir-controversy-150601054437645.html

Under the headline:

‘Ukraine’s ‘anti-communist laws’ stir controversy

A raft of laws passed recently praise far-right groups that fought in WWII and ban the display of Soviet symbols’

Or here at a news source bound to rankle Economist readers:

http://rt.com/news/209563-ukraine-foreigners-government-posts/

Under the headline :

‘Poroshenko aims to change laws to allow foreigners into Ukrainian govt’

Or this from Russia Insider/Financial Times:

‘http://russia-insider.com/ru/ukraine_business/2015/01/27/2781

Under this headline etc.:

‘Kiev Begs IMF for More Money

The IMF has been reluctant to increase its own $17bn commitment, arguing that it has been carrying a disproportionate financial burden. It has been trying instead to muster new money from other international donors. Why doesn’t Soros just write a check?’

Add this from the FT by Larry Summers:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ff3634fc-fa44-11e4-a41c-00144feab7de.html#axzz3cBxHe74N

Under the headline:

‘Reform-minded Ukraine merits debt reduction’

To The Economist editors: Do better than this tired recitation of the shopworn Party Line on Putin i.e. apologetics for US/NATO/EU political adventurism as the in order too of placing ABM’s at the border of Ukraine/Russia. And the imposition of Austerity in Ukraine: the advancement of the Neo-Liberal nightmare is ‘The Free Market’.

Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21652339-vladimir-putin-concocts-new-story-ukraine-leaving-west-wondering-what-he-up

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/26/digested-week-another-pm-bites-dust-surprisingly-moving

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 28, 2026

Digested week: Another PM bites the dust and it’s surprisingly moving.

John Crace

Monday

Hard to believe, but in my 12 and a half years as the Guardian’s political sketch writer, I am about to embark on my seventh prime minister. There was a time when we Britons took the piss out of the Italians for their rapid turnover of prime ministers. Now the laugh is on us.

When I first started in the lobby in 2014, there had been only four prime ministers in the previous 23 years. We’ve now churned through four in four years. The lineup of former prime ministers at the Cenotaph parade on Remembrance Day gets longer and longer. In a decade or so there will be only a handful of people who can recognise Liz Truss.

Keir Starmer’s resignation was slightly different from the others. He wasn’t being forced out as a result of a lost election or by a strong opposition. His departure had nothing to do with the Tories and was triggered by Labour winning a byelection. There was also something quite bashful about his resignation speech. Normally broadcasters and other media are given a heads-up when the prime minister is due to speak, with the lectern brought out on to Downing Street half an hour before. This time, though we all knew it was coming, Keir dashed out moments after the lectern was in place. Almost as if he wanted to get the speech over and done with, with as few people watching as possible.

Like almost every resignation speech, Keir’s was surprisingly moving. There’s something about witnessing the passing of power, the moment when the politics becomes personal, that touches me every time. Maybe it’s me that’s the softie. The one exception was Boris Johnson’s resignation speech. The one in which he accepted responsibility for nothing, blamed others for his departure and told the country we would all regret it. Oddly, we haven’t.

You can’t help wondering just how long the country will give Andy Burnham. Voters have become increasingly unforgiving if promises aren’t delivered immediately. It feels only a matter of weeks before some broadcasters start shouting: “When are you going to resign, Mr Burnham?”

…

Friday

Cancer does funny things to time. Both to the person who has it and the family of those with the illness. It feels as if I have lived every moment with Jill over the past 14 months. There have been moments when I have wished it was me who had cancer and not her. Not just out of some misplaced heroic altruism, but because it felt as if it would be easier to bear.

Living with and loving a person with cancer is to be given daily reminders of what it means to experience loss of control. It’s like being in a half world that is part of the real one yet also separate. Time bends. Some days almost slow to a standstill, when it feels as if you are experiencing every moment and not necessarily for the better. Others, usually the good ones, seem to race past as you struggle to keep hold of them. Recovery also sometimes feels glacially slow. It is seven months since Jill’s operation and five months since she finished the last round of chemo but there are still times of the day when she feels rubbish.

We have been told it may take at least a year before she is properly her old self again. But there have been some upsides. Cancer has brought us closer together. We haven’t just done the hospital stuff together – I feel as if I know every inch of the Marsden in Sutton and Fulham – but we have got to have the important conversations that other couples might not get to have because they feel they have all the time in the world, so why spoil the moment? As a family – I’m including our children here – it feels as if we have said everything that needs to be said. Whatever happens, there will be no regrets. And things are looking up. Jill is a lot stronger than she was even a couple of months ago, and bizarrely you do even get used to the two-month cycle of PET scans, MRIs and blood tests. As the oncologist recently said to us: “You must always bank the wins when they come along.” Because one day you may lose.

So, with that in mind, we are planning to enjoy our summer. Jill recently realised she hadn’t spent a night away from home – apart from the time she was in hospital – for over a year. This will change. We are going to America to see our daughter. Jill is coming to Buxton for the night towards the end of July where I am doing an event in the opera house as part of the festival. We are planning on visiting friends. Life is restarting.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/26/digested-week-another-pm-bites-dust-surprisingly-moving