StephenKMackSD's Blog

If you subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times and you are a regular reader of both David Brooks and Paul Krugman, you will notice that their essays mirror one another,and share contiguous print space, in that they take as their subject Mitt Romney, or perhaps, more pointedly his ‘success’ as the CEO of Bain Capital as demonstrative of his ability, his singular qualification to run for President, as opposed to the other candidates whose corporate resumes lack that impressive experiential garnish. Brooks takes what might be judged a stand of dubious concern but favors- but let me quote one of his thoughts, here expressed as a telling aphorism:

“In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God’s hand on their every move.”

To utter a breathtaking tautology“Great Presidents” neatly fits into the frame Mr. Brooks has constructed.( I know that I am drastically foreshortening the sense of Mr. Brooks commentary.) But the reader must carefully examine the deeply equivocal rhetoric that he constructs to make his arguments: it seems almost Hegelian in the utterance of statement and near counter statement, which leads the apprehensive reader into exploitable intellectual muddle rather than into an anticipated and desired clarification. This could be argued to be the position of the regular reader of Mr. Brooks’ essays.

Krugman remains utterly skeptical,doubtful, not to say suspicious of the experience of Mr. Romney at Bain Capital as demonstrative of his qualification and aspiration to the Presidency and directly and cogently make his arguments: America Isn’t a Corporation.

Now, reading both of these essays in such close proximity, might in the mind of the respectable bourgeois reader of the Times, produce a cognitive dissonance that might be satisfied only by writing a letter to the editor, or perhaps even a goad to the birth of some independent thinking on the part of that very reader: one can hope.

Political Observer

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http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11052

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10948

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12833 (Cover not available)

http://www.versobooks.com/books/949

News for All the People is a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation’s system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/949

News for All the People is a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation’s system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/961-wittgensteins-anti-philosophy

http://www.versobooks.com/books/961-wittgensteins-anti-philosophy

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

“Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein–as an exile–that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein’s exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era–Oswald Spengler’s culture of the early nineteenth century.”

Bain Capital is an expression of a capitalism without a root in any community and most especially with no investment in the central notion of citizenship, of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, as basic, foundational to their endeavor. That civic context is rendered null in the light of the practice of the maximization of profit, without regard for its human costs. The well being of fellow citizens, as an ethical concern, is then of no relevance, it is mooted by a capitalism adrift from any notion of civic responsibility. That is the central ethical void, that Bain Capital and others like it, express as Free Market Capitalism.

Almost Marx

If the reader of David Brooks latest essay at The New York Times is looking for intelligent,cogently argued rejoinders to his conservative opinionating, that reader need only look at the comments section posted below his column on the Times website. The comments are devastatingly direct, demonstrably critical of not just his arguments as presented in his opinion piece, but of the whole of the Conservative political/ethical project. Here are some of my thoughts:

Mr. Brooks takes as his subject of the evolution of modern Liberalism, in the sense of it’s failure to win adherents, post Reagan, to engage in argumentative foreshortening. But Mr. Brooks fails at the outset to even define what that ‘Liberalism’ might be descriptive of, except the growth of incompetent, mendacious government.( Let us, for the moment, table the issue of the concerted propaganda campaign waged by conservative think tanks and commentators, over the past forty years identifying ‘big government’ as inherently ‘evil’-the argument is always formulated in moralistic terms.) The ultimate conservative specter, a rhetorical fabric unfurled on which the reader can project her/his/their own definition, the definitional ambiguity adds a certain luster to his reputation as an intelligent political observer.

His long introduction, aided by using Mr. George Will’s borrowed argumentative frame, makes sense only in the political context of identifying President Obama as his ‘Liberal’ protagonist, this is, after all, a political opinion commentary. Obama is most assuredly a New Democrat not a Liberal. The New Democrats willfully rejected the New Deal legacy, perhaps the most potent expression of Liberalism, as excess political baggage, in a bid for power, in the wake of the political success of Reagan’s wedding of a capacious political nostalgia, Free Market romanticism and a more refined expression of the Southern Strategy. So, how to define Liberalism is a question totally absent from Mr. Brooks’ essay. The New Democrats made their peace with Capital in order to meet the demands of an electorate no longer responsive to the message of restraint of thievery masquerading as free markets, and the exorbitant monetary demands of political campaigns. These are some thoughts that may not constitute an argumentative whole, but their pertinence leads me to record them, none the less.

Here is a question that is pure speculation, but might be worth asking: If Obama loses the campaign of 2012, in tandem with a possible victory for Elizabeth Warren, will the Democratic Party reclaim the rejected legacy of the New Deal as their own? Or will they continue to be a branch of what Gore Vidal called The Property Party, and simply nominate another New Democrat in 2016? Although one might argue that Obama is two beings, one a rhetorical New Dealer, the other a political moderate conservative. All this in the watershed of the Market collapse of 2008, the Bank bailout, and the wholesale rejection of the rescue of homeowners makes the case against Obama quite strong. Except that the Republican candidates, to a man, appear dedicated to the failed Free Market Ideology or at least to some variant of that Economic Theology.

Political Observer