StephenKMackSD's Blog

Thomas Drake  (Credit: Tony Powell)

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/07/nsa_whistle_blower_obama_worse_than_bush/?sou…

As a preface to my comment about Mr. Brooks latest essay: the misfeasance of American Public Intellectuals to fully address the failure of Reconstruction, and the attendant racism that pervaded that effort: the integration of freed black slaves into American society as autonomous citizens was a failure. Jim Crow and other forms of institutional and societal racism and indentured servitude and slavery by another name continued, legal and illegal. We could look to three historical occurrences that are precipitating factors contributing to the decay of the inner cities: the mass exodus of the middle class whites to the suburbs, in order to live a post-war dream, the exodus of poor black southerners to the North looking for a better life and the post-war discontent of black soldiers that fought the Nazis and came home to Jim Crow north and south. Just to name but three of many reasons. That is the legacy we live with daily. Mr. Brooks takes as his subject the thought of James Q. Wilson as exemplary of the necessity of American Public Intellectuals to assume the role of Public Moralist, surely a backhanded defense of his intellectual position. Mr. Brooks titles his essay,The Rediscovery of Character, after an essay by Mr. Wilson and you can read it here. (One might, in the spirit of polemic, title this essay of Mr. Wilson as An American Mandarin Intellectual views the great unwashed.) Read the enlightening opening paragraph:

“The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry. An obvious indication of this shift has been the rise of such social issues as abortion and school prayer. A less obvious but I think more important change has been the growing awareness that a variety of public problems can only be understood–and perhaps addressed–if they are seen as arising out of a defect in character formation.”

The reason that you must read this essay by Mr. Wilson is that it sounds all the notes of the endlessly repeated policy imperatives, as morally necessary, to post-Reagan conservatism. It is laid before you in fourteen short pages. And the argument is breathtakingly redundant and reductive, in the areas of school,welfare, the economy and crime: proper moral behavior is the sine qua non in the Conservative world view to optimal functioning in these human endeavors. The definitional frame of ‘moral behavior’ is quite restrictive: no out of wedlock births etc. in the lower orders. All this is argued in a cartoonish version of cost benefit analysis bordering on the bizarre.

On the title, The Rediscovery of Character, Mr. Brooks has a penchant for this kind of high flown moralizing chatter, in fact bloated Platonisms are his intellectual bread and butter. Mr. Wilson’s essay was published in the journal Public Interest in 1985. If the curious reader finds it of concern, that the publication of this essay was in that journal, then it might be of equal interest that Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were it’s founders, in 1965, and a list of it’s contributors is instructive: Charles Murray, Samuel P. Huntington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks and James Q. Wilson among others. Mr. Moynihan is a public thinker and politician who made famous such plangent metaphors as ‘benign neglect’ and this telling observation: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Should even the incurious reader find a demonstrable ideological bias here? The dithering of white conservative public intellectuals on the moral condition of the urban poor, i.e. black folk, might be worthy of concern except for their dismal record when it come to policies that could have had any ameliorative effect. Except, of course, the tired bromides of the ‘Free Market’ that are endlessly conjectured about as ‘serious’. Those policy prescriptions have the effect of showing moral/political concern that fits neatly into the notion that Conservatism is engaged with the welfare of all Americans. On the level of enacted, effective policy it is nonexistent. But on the level of propaganda, Mr. Brooks meditation on the moralizing political thought of Mr. Wilson could not be more timely or propitious as the 2012 Presidential race moves to the foreground, while the narrative of inequality of the 1% and the 99%, of Occupy Wall Street, has taken hold of voters disillusioned with both Conservatism and the New Democrats. Since 1980 the urban poor, black folks, have been the subject of the manufactured contempt,hostility and fear of both Conservatives and their New Democratic sub rosa allies. But with nearly 147 million Americans at or uncomfortably near the poverty line in 2012, Mr. Brooks’ tribute to Mr. Wilson’s politically inflected scholarship and posited moral leadership might prove as futile as his advocacy of the latest book by Mr. Charles Murray.

Political Observer

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12582

One can only read on in silence at the latest essay by Ross Douthat at the New York Times titled The Scholar and the Rascal. In it he compares the public careers of the staid scholar and Conservative public intellectual James Q. Wilson to that of Mr. Andrew Breitbart. Jay Rosen was so impressed by it that he tweeted about the virtue of the essay, as an example of conservative opinion worthy of attention. Mr. Douthat can be praised for one reason, but a very important one, the sheer audacity of his well timed post mortum propaganda in service to the rehabilitation of the reputation of the heedless moral/political nihilist Mr. Breitbart. Although it is hard to think of the act of comparison as audacious, it is the disparity between the public careers of the chosen protagonists, that makes his act of comparison in service to the rewriting of history, of a hasty but politically necessary political rehabilitation, using the white wash of rhetoric, so effective and for that reason very dangerous. The tradition of manufactured political hysteria in it's modern iteration goes back to Nixon, McCarthy, Roy Cohen and their allies, although separated by time, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Their allies in the press Walter Winchell and Matt Drudge and many others, served as verifiers of the necessary propaganda assertions, although not based in any verifiable actuality. Congratulations to Mr. Douthat are in order, he has quite effectively inaugurated the public rehabilitation of the career and person of Andrew Breitbart, whose tool kit included libel, slander, prevarication, exercised without remorse or compunction, truly a monument to the bastard god of American Careerism and his twin Narcissus.

American Litterateur       

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=31310

In praise of structural reform is the February 27, 2012 edition of the Economist Blog titled Free Exchange authored by R.A. The essay has an imposing graphic/chart as it’s introduction yet it manages to express the slangy anecdotal qualities that is the signature style of the blog. The chart is perhaps a hold over from the stogy world of statistical data favored by the old hands at the Economist, while the blog itself argues in the patois of the web. Although the essay never emancipates itself from the Neo-Liberal project, post the 2008 crash, of Austerity as the next logical step after the failure of the calamitous Free Market experiment. Advocated, now, by the same public intellectuals who argued that the Free Market was the key to our future economic prosperity and our emancipation from the economic/ethical burden of New Deal Romanticism and the Welfare State. Austerity and Structural Reform have now replaced the Free Market as the passport to our radiant future. It isn’t so much economics, rather it is a benighted vulgarized Social Darwinism, a blend of the thought of Hayek and Friedman framed by the chatter of the tireless pamphleteer Ayn Rand. And the author rhetorically establishes her/his position as the moderate position, the mean between two extremes, without articulating what the extremes might be, but letting the reader supply those unarticulated but implied definitions. The keys to understanding this commentary are that the care and maintenance of bourgeois political respectability is the first order of this essay and its corollary, that the debate is ruled by the master idea of the unchallengeable natural superiority of a triumphalist capitalist collectivism.

Almost Marx

In his recent essay,Jeremy Lin and the Political Economy of Superstars, at Project Syndicate, Professor Rogoff takes his starting point by sharing his thoughts on the astounding rise of the seemingly indefatigable wunderkind, Mr. Jeremy Lin, in the NBA. His essay is part gushing fan letter and part Cassandra, tarted up for the occasion. This rather swiftly evolves into a long meditation on the ‘inflated’ nature of the salaries of demonstrably delinquent sports stars. But the question that nags at Professor Rogoff is the why of the tolerance of Americans toward those inflated salaries for athletes, contrasted with the lack of tolerance for the salaries of the leaders in business, who manage to escape Professor Rogoff’s careful scrutiny of questionable personal and financial conduct. The delinquent NBA players whom he takes as his subject remain an almost denatured abstract argumentative quantity, yet he plays on the vaguely remembered misconduct of various professional athletes his readers supply. It is clearly obvious that the good professor expresses a glaring and troubling class bias.

The professional athlete must in a proscribed time period produce results i.e. points to win the game. How simple can it be to fathom that existential reality? Results are of the utmost importance, they rule the lives of the players. The entertainment value that professional sport offers and delivers is seeing the very best and most productive players compete against each other. Can any witness to the events of the last four years and even in the last twelve years honestly express any admiration for the leaders of American Capital? Some names occur: Ken Lay, Angelo Mozilo, Lloyd Blankfein,Robert Rubin, to name but a few of the stalwart capitalists and utterly failed leaders of the virtuous class that Professor Rogoff backhandedly defends: in his attempt to council his fellow citizens on the dangers of the political power wielded by the professional sports franchises.

A quotation from the essay is instructive:

“Yet many of these same fans would almost surely argue that CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, whose median compensation is around $10 million, are ridiculously overpaid. If a star basketball player reacts a split-second faster than his competitors, no one has a problem with his earning more for every game than five factory workers do in a year. But if, say, a financial trader or a corporate executive is paid a fortune for being a shade faster than competitors, the public suspects that he or she is undeserving or, worse, a thief.”

Capitalism and it’s leaders failed and continue to fail the Commonwealth, the Republic. What more is there to say except that our writer has limited, even myopic perception. Professor Rogoff is a bit tardy, although he manages to sound a more reasonable, less hysterical tone than David Brooks, who offered his usual bloated, cliché ridden political moralizing in the New York Times of February 16, 2012, as The Jeremy Lin Problem. Our problem, at this historical moment, is not the inflated salaries of sports stars, but the continuing malfeasance and acquiescence of government, and the complicity of bankrupt public intellectuals, in the face of the pathology of Robber Capital, no matter how attractively garnished is the repast set before us.

Almost Marx

Here is Jennifer Rubin singing the praises of Andrew Breitbart. Is it surprising that a fellow citizen of the ‘Conservative Counter World’, that has a problem with the establishment of historical actualities, should praise a fellow citizen of that ‘World’ as politically indispensable? Praise from one propagandist to another? In the American Political Melodrama the question of the hour: who will succeed the,now, eulogized Mr. Breitbart? The crimes of his manufactured antagonists are well documented, Shirley Sherrod,ACORN,NPR,Anthony Weiner. Mr. Breitbart played upon the most precious commodity of American Politics,perceived political respectability as demonstable of legitimately held power, and the subversive power of lies, truth and half-truths endlessly repeated with malevolent intent.

Political Cynic

In the ultra-respectable Economist of February 25, 2012 appears this essay entitled “Financial Infrastructure: Of plumbing and promises, the back office moves center stage.” Quite a mouthful! But have no fear, as I said, this is the staid house organ of an educated bourgeois readership, that places great store in their immediately perceived legitimacy, even though they are Capitalists to the core: without apology. The assumed virtues of Capital is the very moral/intellectual stuff of the readers of this periodical as of it’s writers and editors.This essay weaves a tale of the complexity of capital, it’s markets and the actors at various levels in the structure that make it function, or not function. Now as a witness to the collapse of the Market in 2008, and the subsequent unfolding as a story about Robber Capital, and it’s allies in government: Clinton, Rubin, Summers and their conservative allies, Phil and Wendy Gramm, who managed to pass Financial Reform, that rendered Glass-Steagall null and void, are here not mentioned, as vital background, to this cosmetically confected apologetics, rendered in the most sedate terms, using the self-serving rhetoric of rational political discourse, carefully removed from the context of the New Democrat’s political propinquity with Conservatism,in it’s post Reagan iteration. This is a striking example of glib, informed public relations, or more accurately, of rather transpaprent propaganda that meets specific editorial needs, but fails at the most basic level, to report the root cause of the World Market collapse of 2008.The arguement here is that the uninformed and unsophisticated underlings, the least cognizant of financial operators, in this civic melodrama, were, if fact, culpable because of the precipitating cause of that ignorance. The credulity of the reader is the operative assumption, that the writers of this essay are wagering on, as if we are ignorant of the size,shape and depth of the mendacity of American Capital, and their allies in the Democratic and Republican Parties. 

Almost Marx

Here is some well timed, politically useful, hypocrisy from the pen of Ross Douthat. What better way to distract voters in this time of the battle between misogynist, theocrats and jingos, that is the Republican Party of 2012, than with the Cult of Ike. The Republican Party has made it’s top priority, since 1964, to purge the Eisenhower Republicans out of the Party, and they have succeeded. But the celebration of Ike is handy for producing a usable nostalgia in service to a Party transformed by that highly successful purge. A question occurs to me: Did the Eisenhower Republicans come back as the Blue Dog Democrats? Here is a key passage from the essay:

“In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.”

How easy to overlook the facts that Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon as his Vice President and John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State, or is that a demonstration of his being ‘a ruthless master politician’. As a Modern Conservative,after Rove, Mr. Douthat can celebrate even admire the cardinal virtue of ruthlessness,perhaps the singular philosophical contribution of the Social Darwinism masquerading as Conservatism. I would venture to say, that a monument should be built to the Eisenhower Republicans, who were purged from the GOP.

Almost Marx