After Mr. Colvile’s defence of ‘Free Schools’ in the Times of last week and his advocacy as Director of :
Robert Colvile, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, said:
“It is now clear that free schools have been a success, improving the lives of their pupils – disproportionately in disadvantaged areas – and spurring innovation and competition within the wider education system.
“However, following the departure of Michael Gove as Education Secretary, the programme has steadily been stripped of its originality and distinctiveness. We urge the new Government to build on success by turbocharging the free schools agenda and improving the lives and prospects of children across the country.”
When they were plotting Labour’s election victory, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had a clear diagnosis. Labour had lost the last few elections, an aide told The Times, “because we’ve gone into them being seen as against opportunity and aspiration”.
Opportunity and aspiration are powerful words. Historically, they’ve been at the heart of some of the Conservatives’ most successful policies, such as the opportunity to buy your own council house, or the aspiration to ensure the best education for your child, if necessary by setting up a new and better school to deliver it.
So how are those signature aspirational policies — the right-to-buy and free schools — doing under Labour?
Since 2010, more than 650 free schools have opened in England. Another 44 had been approved. But now they’ve been un-approved. In a ministerial statement, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced that funding would be snatched away pending review. The statement argued that where free schools create damaging competition with existing schools, or surplus capacity, they should not be allowed to open. The priority, in terms of value for money, has to be rebuilding Britain’s crumbling classrooms.
This was strange, for two reasons. First, there is little evidence — despite the best efforts of their critics to find some — that free schools lower standards in nearby schools. If anything, competition pushes others to up their game. Second, Phillipson boasted last week that Reeves had provided extra cash both for rebuilding schools and for the wider education budget. So why the spiteful decision to pause (and very probably cancel) funding for schools that were already on the slipway?
Michael Gove’s free schools programme increased social segregation, according to an analysis of the flagship scheme that also suggests it reduced student intakes at neighbouring schools.
The creation of free schools has been touted as a major success of the 14 years of Conservative-led government. They were intended to offer high-quality institutions and improve parental choice. Part of their stated aim was to pressure nearby schools to improve and create a “galvanising effect on the whole school system”.
However, new research shared with the Observer suggests that free-school enrolment was associated with increased segregation of primary pupils, particularly in terms of their ethnicity. The study, by academics at University College London, also found that the presence of a free school was not associated with any significant change in student attainment in nearby primary schools.
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While nearby secondary schools did show a modest increase in student attainment in English and maths after a free school opened, there was also evidence to suggest this was linked to attracting more advantaged students. Secondaries admitting a substantially more disadvantaged intake did not tend to improve after a free school opened nearby.
The UCL study of free schools found that despite claims of setting high standards, this was not the case. Primary free schools performed worse than a matched sample of similar schools, while secondary free schools performed no better or worse.
Leaders in nearby schools reported feeling they were in competition, but this appeared to drive them to work harder on their advertising and external appeal, rather than enhancing the quality of their teaching. The highest levels of perceived competition were where free schools appealed to aspirational or middle-class families who had a “quasi-private school ethos”.
“Our findings show the introduction of free schools has often created new competition,” said Rob Higham, associate professor at UCL’s Institute of Education and the lead author of the study. “When subjected to these new market pressures, neighbouring schools rarely prioritised change or innovation in classroom practices.
“Not all free schools create such choice and competition, but where they do, this has the potential to increase social divisions in the school system, including the social segregation of students.”
Mr. Colvile is a Thatcerite ideologue, with an Institutional Veneer: yet with a 14 year record of Tory mendacity, wedded to a cadre of apoligists like Colevile: what was that Biblical Injunction against False Phrophets of Matthew 7:15 ?
What has happened to the once ascendent Oxbridgers at The Economist? The first paragraph of these book recomendations/reviews read as if it were in The Telegraph!
Editor: The opening parqagraphs of this essay:
They may not have the cachet of the Pulitzer or the Booker, but the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History deserve respect. The what-if genre of fiction is growing fast, with work of startling quality and originality. Take the last Sidewise long-form winner, “Cahokia Jazz” by Francis Spufford. A noir thriller that takes place in the 1920s, it imagines an America in which the native population had not been nearly wiped out by smallpox. Other winners of the 29-year-old prize include Laurent Binet’s “Civilizations”, which imagines that the Incas invaded Europe in 1531, 39 years after Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas. Tweaking history is surely as much fun as a novelist can have: losers become winners, and not quite everything changes. What if General Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Napoleon had seen off Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo? The Nazis are overrepresented on alternate-history bookshelves as they are in other sections of most libraries.
Perhaps the inspiration for this review/essay and the Sidewise Awards had their beginnings with Niall Ferguson’s book, of 1997?
Editor: The carefully re- written ‘Plot’ by televisions writers David Simon and Ed Burns, captures the Oxbridger attention for ‘a moment’!
The Plot Against America”byPhilip Roth, for example, places Charles Lindbergh, a suspected Nazi sympathiser, in the White House. Not far behind is John F. Kennedy, who skipped that visit to Dallas, or perhaps fell victim to the mafia/Cubans/Russians/Lyndon Johnson. As this selection of the best alternate-history novels demonstrates, the world of imagined pasts is rich and potentially endless.
Editor: Roth’s ‘Plot’ is awash in political hysteria, wedded to Roth’s idealised younger self: narcissism rules! : That evetually became a 2020 Television Melodrama, by David Simon and Ed Burns. They collaboreated with Roth and engaged in a re-write for television!
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Robert Harris’s “Fatherland”, set in 1964 in Nazi Berlin, would have been another entry.
Editor: I read ‘Fatherland’ and found it compelling reading from start to finish. Harris’s literary debut was auspicious. This novel transcendes the territory of Ferguson’s book, it is the work of a novelist that posses a vital, powerful Historical Imagination!
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Rodham
Curtis Sittenfeld imagines what might have happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton (pictured), and to American politics, if Hillary and Bill Clinton had broken up in 1975. Hillary becomes a politician and Bill leaves politics and becomes a rich tech entrepreneur. Their paths cross again in startling fashion in 2016, when Donald Trump also makes an appearance. Ms Sittenfeld finds a way to include the Clintons’ famous “60 Minutes” interview in 1992, in which Hillary declared herself to be no Tammy Wynette “standing by my man”. The glamour, the rough and tumble and the sheer grind of American politics are well captured. Above all, Ms Sittenfeld convincingly transports us into Hillary’s inner world. The book’s surprising denouement seems entirely plausible.
Reader here is a link: BOOKS
Curtis Sittenfeld interview: what would Hillary have achieved without Bill Clinton?
The author of American Wife returns with an explosive imagined autobiography of the former first lady, says Bryan Appleyard
How opportune! As Senile Old Joe marinates in his cognitive decline , sequestered from public view. His campaign, such as it is, carefully managed ‘interviews’ with friendly media, and short videos. Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Counter Factual Biography’ of Hillary Clinton, to be published under the title ‘Rodham’ adds what to the American political conversation? Here is her picture provided by The Sunday Times:
Here is a quote from Bryan Appleyard about the ‘why’ of the book:
Sittenfeld writes women better than anybody else, and women read her in huge numbers with the joy of recognition. If anybody can turn Hillary into a fictional heroine, she can.
And she really is the heroine. This book is a counterfactual — a “what if?” way of studying the past. The big “what if” here is what if Hillary hadn’t married Bill? Her answer, thanks to the deft way she combines fact and fiction, is wholly convincing. This is clearly how she wanted Hillary to be. And, crucially, about how much she wanted her to become president.
The book, and the timing of its publication are suspicious, to say the least, so it is important that Sittenfeld establish her distance from Hillary Clinton:
She has not met Hillary, although was once “in the same space with her” at Stanford University. But she springs to utterly convincing life in these pages.
“I do feel it’s important for me to emphasise that I’ve never spoken to her. It’s not as if I have any inside scoop. Any research I did was publicly available. I never interviewed someone behind the scenes. But there is a lot of information that’s out there.”
Appleyard probes a bit :
If she did meet her, what would she want to ask? She emails her question: “If you hadn’t become a lawyer and politician, what do you think you’d have done instead?” My question would have been: do you think marrying Bill Clinton held you back? That’s the one that looms behind the book. However, I can tell Sittenfeld doesn’t like that. She’s a detail person, and if that is the looming question, it’s up to the reader to ask it, not her.
Should the reader of this interview come to the conclusion that Sittenfeld has written counter factual fan fiction?
Did she like Hillary more than when she started this book more than three years ago? “Yes, more, more! You know, for a lot of the last three years I’ve put on a pant suit and blond wig, metaphorically. I would never write a book from the point of view of a character I was unable to sympathise with. I feel very emotional about her. There’s this reflexively negative way of talking about her. Yet she’s such a hero and role model to so many people, especially many women, which doesn’t get acknowledged as much as it should.”
She says she ended up loving her. But she had also fallen for Bill during her research. She had read his big, swaggering autobiography, My Life.
“I mean, this is the thing; while reading it, I felt like I fell in love with him. And it was very surprising to me. But I think a writer needs to be able to feel the emotions her characters feel.”
This is voice of the true believer, or to be pointed, an apologist/propagandist that has produced an ‘imagined’ Hillary Clinton, rendered more palatable by Sittenfeld’s adolescent ‘crush’.
Even Appleyard provides a bit of gush about ‘Bill’ , and Sittenfeld confirms :
I tell Sittenfeld about meeting the real Bill at a party. He charmed me in about three seconds, and there was some weird visual effect that made everybody else blur into insignificance.
“Exactly, I’ve heard he has this very particular kind of magnetism that most mortals do not have.”
Not interested in the remainder of the interview focused on Sittenfeld life and literary career. One final comment, neither Appleyard nor Sittenfeld have any relation to the tradition of Graham Greene or even Eric Ambler !
American Writer
Editor: The final comment from The Economist: steeped in prescience and self-congratulation! Being an Oxbridger is a moral/political responsibility, that weighs on the whole cadre!
In 2017 we warned that the what-if-the-Nazis-had-won genre may distract from more credible threats to democracy. Our series “The World If” has speculated about the future and invented history
NYT latest Zionist Propganda, with a cameo by Thomas Friedman & Russia expert Leon Aron, from the American Enterprise Institute: The Marriage of Zionist Propaganda & perennial Neo-Conservartive bellicosity, hardly a surprise!
Editor: Leon Aron from the American Enterprise Institute, quoted and paraphased at lenkth:
Putin, Aron added, cannot afford to come back to the Russian people after some 600,000 of their compatriots have been killed and wounded in Ukraine, and say, “Oops, sorry, we are not going to control Ukraine after all.” Putin cannot let this war end in defeat. But Trump cannot accept a peace that looks like a defeat for the West. Then he would look like a loser.
If there is any chance of a mutually acceptable deal on Ukraine — a long-term cease-fire roughly on existing battle lines in return for some lifting of sanctions on Russia and accelerated membership for Ukraine in the European Union along with security guarantees but not formal NATO membership — it will most likely happen only after Putin suffers more defeats there and Trump makes clear that he would arm Ukraine even more heavily if Putin would not relent.
The fact that Putin had to effectively hire 10,000 North Korean forces to help fight his reckless war in Ukraine shows two things: how afraid he is to stop without a visible victory “and how afraid he is of a societal backlash if he is forced to send into the trenches raw 18-year-old ethnic-Russian conscripts, especially from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the Russian elite lives,” said Aron, author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”
“Putin is not in a position to have a forever war,” concluded Aron. “He is running out of people.” All of which is to say that if Trump is capable of sustaining Ukraine in its current battlefield position for 12 more months, he might get the deal to end the Ukraine war in a year that he promised in the campaign to deliver in a day.
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Editor: here is Friedman’s final paragraph:
That’s the thing about the world — it is always so much more complicated than it sounds on the campaign trail, and today more than ever. Or as the boxer Mike Tyson is said to have observed: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A U.S. jury on Tuesday awarded $42 million to three former detainees of Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, holding a Virginia-based military contractor responsible for contributing to their torture and mistreatment two decades ago.
The decision from the eight-person jury came after a different jury earlier this year couldn’t agree on whether Reston, Virginia-based CACI should be held liable for the work of its civilian interrogators who worked alongside the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004.
The jury awarded plaintiffs Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae $3 million each in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.
The three testified that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison.
They did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment.
CACI’s lawyer, John O’Connor, did not comment after Tuesday’s verdict on whether the company would appeal.
Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuit on the plaintiffs’ behalf, called the verdict “an important measure of Justice and accountability” and praised the three plaintiffs for their resilience, “especially in the face of all the obstacles CACI threw their way.”
The $42 million fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs, Azmy said.
“Today is a big day for me and for justice,” said Al-Ejaili, a journalist, in a written statement. “I’ve waited a long time for this day. This victory isn’t only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation. This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse.”
Al-Ejaili traveled to the U.S. for both trials to testify in person. The other two plaintiffs testified by video from Iraq.
The trial and subsequent retrial were the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors in the 20 years since photos of detainee mistreatment — accompanied by smiling U.S. soldiers inflicting the abuse — shocked the world during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
None of the three plaintiffs were in any of the notorious photos shown in news reports around the world, but they described treatment very similar to what was depicted.
Al Shimari described sexual assaults and beatings during his two months at the prison. He also said he was electrically shocked and dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. Al-Ejaili said he was subjected to stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. He was also deprived of sleep, forced to wear women’s underwear and threatened with dogs.
CACI had argued it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse. It said its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case, and CACI questioned parts of the plaintiffs’ stories, saying that military records contradict some of their claims and suggesting they shaded their stories to support a case against the contractor. Fundamentally, though, CACI argued that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government.
As in the first trial, the jury struggled to decide whether CACI or the Army should be held responsible for any misconduct by CACI interrogators. The jury asked questions in its deliberations about whether the contractor or the Army bore liability.
CACI, as one of its defenses, argued it shouldn’t be liable for any misdeeds by its employees if they were under the control and direction of the Army. under a legal principle known as the “borrowed servants” doctrine.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that CACI was responsible for its own employees’ misdeeds. They said provisions in CACI’s contract with the Army, as well as the Army Field Manual, make clear that CACI is responsible for overseeing its own workers.
The lawsuit was first filed in 2008 but was delayed by 15 years of legal wrangling and multiple attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed.
Lawyers for the three plaintiffs argued that CACI was liable for their mistreatment even if they couldn’t prove that CACI’s interrogators were the ones who directly inflicted the abuse.
The evidence included reports from two retired Army generals, who documented the abuse and concluded that multiple CACI interrogators were complicit in the abuse.
Those reports concluded that one of the interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, lied to investigators about his conduct and that he likely instructed soldiers to mistreat detainees and used dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.
Stefanowicz testified for CACI at trial through a recorded video deposition and denied mistreating detainees.
Editor : The Reader must recall the auspicios debut of Francis Fukuyama?
What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?
By James Atlas
Oct. 22, 1989
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In Fukuyama’s interpretation, borrowed (and heavily adapted) from the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, history is a protracted struggle to realize the idea of freedom latent in human consciousness. In the 20th century, the forces of totalitarianism have been decisively conquered by the United States and its allies, which represent the final embodiment of this idea – “that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words, we win.
Within weeks, “The End of History?” had become the hottest topic around, this year’s answer to Paul Kennedy’s phenomenal best seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” George F. Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama’s photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to “The End of History?” The BBC sent a television crew. Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was “outselling everything, even the pornography.”
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Editor: Or the evolution of Fukuyamism!
The Decay of American Political Institutions
Published on: December 8, 2013
Francis Fukuyama
We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.
Editor: It takes 1369 words before Fukuyama mentions the name of fellow Neo-Conservative, Samuel Huntington of ‘The Clash Of Cilizations’, and the xenophobic ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity!
WHY INSTITUTIONS DECAY
In his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies, the political scientist Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II. Huntington argued that socioeconomic modernization caused problems for traditional political orders, leading to the mobilization of new social groups whose participation could not be accommodated by existing political institutions. Political decay was caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Decay was thus in many ways a condition of political development: the old had to break down in order to make way for the new. But the transitions could be extremely chaotic and violent, and there was no guarantee that the old political institutions would continuously and peacefully adapt to new conditions.
This model is a good starting point for a broader understanding of political decay more generally. Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.
In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.
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Editor: Even the stogey Financial Times opened its journalist space to Fukuyama:
Headline: Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America
Sub-headline : The Republican president-elect is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole
Editor: I will supply some selective quotation from the Fukuyama’s essay:
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But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.
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When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.
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Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives.
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Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights.
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The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity.
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The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.
Editor : How might the reader interperate ‘woke liberalism’ as a new catch phrase? Though Fukuyama is not Eric Partridge!
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The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals.
Editor: The New Demosrats: the Clintons, Pelosi, Obama and Biden abandoned FDR’s New Deal, reader look to that, as a major factors for the New Democrat’s well deserved defeat! Fukuyama rambels on and on, his facinaion with ‘decay’ is compulsive, not revelatory!
Mr. Shellenberger rabble rousing attack on ‘progressives’ is hardly surprising as these three paragraphs demonstrate, even his book title reeks of contempt for these amorphous politics, and the title of his book reifies such ‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities’ Neo-Conservatives engage in the useful hyperbole of toxic Political Enemies: It’s etiolated, bastardized Leo Strauss!
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Over the last quarter century, progressives argued that we should decriminalize drugs, stop enforcing laws against nonviolent crimes, and radically reduce the number of people in prison. This softer approach to crime, addiction, and homelessness was demonstrably more effective and compassionate than tougher models, they said. Hundreds of articles, books, documentaries, TV segments, and fact sheets all buttressed this worldview.
We all needed more empathy for those committing crimes, more empathy for drug dealers, the activists said, and soon the politicians did, too. In that frenzy of compassion, it wasn’t the criminals who were demonized, but the victims.
Blue states across the country—especially California, Oregon, and Washington—spent the past decade as real-world laboratories of these radical theories. The result has been one of the worst humanitarian disasters in American history. And nowhere was it worse than my state: California, where soft policies were implemented first and most forcefully.
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Just look at the results:
Proposition 36, a statewide measure to undo Prop 47, passed by 70 percent. The new law turns some misdemeanors into felonies (for example, shoplifting if it is a third offense), lengthens some felony sentences (i.e. smash-and-grab thefts involving three or more people), and requires some felonies to be served in prison (like fentanyl dealing). Notably, Governor Gavin Newsom opposed Prop 36. And Kamala Harris—who, recall, was California’s attorney general before becoming vice president—simply refused to comment on a bill that every single county in the state passed. (Even the former Sacramento district attorney who led the campaign to crack down on drugs and theft was shocked by the margin of victory. “I was expecting great numbers,” said Anne Marie Schubert, “but the 70 percent was amazing! It sends a powerful message to the rest of the country.”)
In Los Angeles, voters took the unheard-of step of electing an actual Republican as district attorney, ousting from office a George Soros-funded DA, George Gascón.
In Oakland, voters not only recalled the DA for all of Alameda County, they also recalled the mayor, Sheng Thao, who similarly hailed from the radical left and is being investigated by the FBI for possible corruption relating to city garbage contracts.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was defeated by Dan Lurie, who ran, in part, on a platform to increase police presence, increase shelter beds, and fight corruption.
Michael Shellenberger poses as a History-Less political naïf ? with no Memory of America’s political past, in sum a propagandist who attempts to erase actual History!
Miami Beach, Florida (retrieved November 11, 2024 http://www.c-span.)
The utter failure of the Neo-Liberal ascendency, that collapsed in 2006- 2008, has created a permanent under-class of its victims. Of not just a debacle, but of both economic catastrophes, wedded to a cultural/political despair that Michael Shellenberger self-willed political ignorance cannot, will not confront!
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology on JSTOR ( retrieved November 11, 2024 )
I’ve just returned from watching a momentous week unfold in American—and world—affairs. Even in New York City, that redoubt of liberal cosmopolitans, the share of support for Donald Trump surged. Those who focus on the voting habits of various demographic groups can point to almost any category of voter—by education, ethnicity, geography, income or whatever—and see that the Republicans gained. This weekend the Republicans seemed poised to retain control of the House, giving them full legislative control for at least two years. I can see only one tiny disappointment for Mr. Trump: it appears that turnout dipped slightly lower than the 67% who voted in 2020.
Editor: this ‘dip’ hardly seems relevant to the repudiation of the New Democratic candidate Kalamala Harris: who managed to be a total disappointment as an alternative to the Trump windbag. Though Trump did appear on Joe Rogan, and Harris did not. Which is indicative of a kind of tone-deafness of the whole Harris Campaign! This the Hallmark of the Clinton Cotree!
Some ask if American voters are sexist. After all, the Democrats have now twice seen a woman candidate defeated by Mr Trump. I don’t buy it. Our new article on the topic sets out why other explanations for Kamala Harris’s loss are more compelling. My hunch is that no incumbent candidate, of either sex, could have won this election: voters the world over are in a surly mood and mostly want to throw out the ruling bums. The surest way for the Democrats to have won in 2024? They should have lost the contest four years ago and thus run this time as the real candidate of change. (My guess is that in that counterfactual world, we would today have been writing about the success of president-elect Gretchen Whitmer.)
Editor: Some did not ask ‘if America voters were sexist’ it was a politically desperate Barak Obama, who scolded black male voters for not being enthesitis in their support for Harris. She disappointed consistently, that takes real work as Trump’s Political Chatter riffs on free imaginative variation in its various keys!
Why are voters everywhere so furious? We are living in an era of grouchiness. When the German election is held, probably next spring, you will see the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz badly thumped. In France, Emmanuel Macron gets to preside for a couple more years yet, but he will leave office in 2027 with voters’ insults ringing loudly in his ears. Already, in Britain, voters are cooling on the new government of Sir Keir Starmer, just months after Labour won a landslide victory.
Editor: Adam Roberts ask one questions: ‘Why are voters everywhere so furious?’ that he does not answer, he places it as an aside. And then answers it with the utterly jejune ‘We are living in an era of grouchiness’ which sidesteps the issue that the toxin of Neo-Liberalism, that still holds sway in Western Democracies, is somehow irrelevant to the rise of Trump and the Tea Party as his political precursor in America.
The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies. I look at the lingering effects of covid lockdowns and of previously high government spending that must now be rolled back. Voters see they are paying high taxes but their public services, too often, are falling to bits. They suffer prices that have surged for years and remain high (whatever official inflation rates might say), especially when you factor in the cost of renting or buying property, or paying for education. Wages may have risen too, but every individual believes he or she earned their pay rise. That will never make up for prices being high.
Editor: Mr. Roberts resorts to a sweeping historical frame: ‘The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies.’ It’s a political history made to measure, of the effects of ‘covid lockdowns’ and its various political distensions!
Add to that the uneasy feeling among many voters (maybe small-town ones especially, and perhaps men and older voters more) that the world is moving too fast. Cultural change, such as having to face new ideas of sexual identity, or how to talk about race, or about climate change, is deeply unsettling for some. All of the above can then be summed up in a simple idea, such as that immigrants, especially illegal ones, are to blame for everything. And who is to blame for letting in those foreigners? Why, the government of course.
Editor: Mr. Roberts political distensions become a psychological portrait, that really needs a Freudian pastiche to make it breathe as a functioning entity? Though its capaciousness renders it null…
So, welcome to the era of grouchiness. It, too, may pass. Let’s hope so.
Editor: An Inauspicious ending for this portion of Mr. Roberts essay.
Editor: Mr. Roberts opines that the ‘pollsters flopped’ never ever a surprise. And the utterly boring ‘Last week I stuck my neck out’ dreck!
Once again, pollsters flopped. For the third presidential election in a row they underestimated support for Mr Trump. Polling companies know they have a problem: they can’t get enough of the people who support him to respond to their questions. Their answer had been to try clever ways of weighting poll results in his favour, but that’s harder to do than it sounds. As for those—such as The Economist—who build predictive models on the back of polls, there are evidently challenges, too. But predictions are incredibly hard to do well, and it’s all too obvious when they go wrong.
Last week I stuck my neck out and guessed that Mr Trump would win, but only narrowly, taking 281 electoral college votes. It appears he is set to collect 312, versus 226 for Ms Harris. Congratulations to Roberto Burgess and Douglas Aird, who both foresaw precisely that outcome. As for the collective hive mind of this newsletter’s readers, the median guess was for just 259 votes (and thus a loss) for Mr Trump. The modal average—as you can see in our chart—was for 268. That was close to our election forecast model. Its final forecast was that Mr Trump would get just 262 seats. You can’t win them all.
Headline: In Harris’s defeat, French radical left sees proof supporting its strategy
Sub-headline: Members of France’s radical left see Donald Trump’s victory as a failure due to the Democratic candidate’s moderate stance. And they’re trying to draw lessons for the French political scene.
Published on November 8, 2024, at 10:18 am (Paris)
Donald Trump’s victory and Kamala Harris’s defeat in the US presidential election have resurfaced divisions within France’s political left over international but also domestic issues. Clearly keen to keep control of the narrative, France’s radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) was the first to react, on Wednesday, November 6. LFI lawmaker Antoine Léaument saw in the failure of the Democratic candidate’s moderate positioning a validation of LFI’s “radical” stance against a “soft” left.
In a statement, LFI argued that the Republican candidate’s return to the White House is implacable proof that “only a radical and popular left” could prevail against the far right. “You can’t mobilize people on a neoliberal platform and without social and geopolitical breaks” with the status quo, Manuel Bompard, LFI’s top official, wrote on X. in reference to Harris, the center-left candidate who was called a “communist” and a “total Marxist” by Trump, two disqualifying terms on the other side of the Atlantic.
Editor : Philippe Marlière offers this. Yet as American’s know, the Clinton Political Machinery doomed the Bernie Sanders campaign, via Party Regulars. Wedded to Sanders own will to political conformity!
“An American election can’t be won further to the left: In fact, that was Bernie Sanders’ limit,” explained political scientist Philippe Marlière, referring to this figure of the American far left, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
Editor: The Reader now enters the real political territory of Le Monde’s Anti-Leftist exercise in self-serving diatribery:
Driven by visceral anti-Atlanticism, LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wielded “confusionism,” believes Marlière, by equating the Democrat and the Republican. “The USA couldn’t choose the left: there wasn’t one,” reacted Mélenchon, a three-time presidential candidate, after Trump’s victory on Wednesday morning. Two days earlier, he said that the two contenders for the White House were “similar but not identical,” referring to their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and support of “capitalism.” “The lesser evil is always evil,” he concluded, while conceding that he would have voted for Harris if he had lived in a swing state.
Editor: Jean-Luc Mélenchon manages in his own political meander, to identify the very convoluted nature of the Trump/Harris campaigns. What dominates both candidate’s politics, is a very real flimsiness! Add to this that Polling Data provided by the Technocrats, was utterly and completely wrong! The argued ‘Dead Heat’ or ‘Political Parity’ between Trump and Harris, were a fiction that ensured that these ‘Technocrats’ could continue to profit, against the Myth of a Political Knowlege that has never been realized!
Editor: some selective quotation from the remainder of the essay:
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On these two issues, the party risks swimming against the tide. “It could be very complicated for Mélenchon,” said political scientist Rémi Lefebvre. Eurosceptic, LFI has always wavered on the war with Russia, advocating “peace” and calling for a “conference on borders,” a way of calling into question those of Ukraine.
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On the question of strengthening Europe, which LFI does not mention in its press release, the party would prefer France to “develop a non-aligned international policy,” in contrast to the Socialists and the Greens, both pro-European.
Editor:‘a non-aligned international policy’ reads like the intellectual orphan of the Cold War?
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Editor: The Myth of ‘Europe’ will never die! Jean Monnet is the pioneer of the European Myth of a Common Political Destiny
Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | SpringerLink
Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | Springer Link;
On 9 May 1950 French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman — reading formally from a text inspired and drafted by Jean Monnet — proposed to pool the heavy industries of his nation with those of her neighbors in order to form what would later be called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).1 In April 1951 negotiations for the proposed organization concluded. Its executive organ, the High Authority (HA), began operations in August of the following year. Monnet served as President of the HA until June 1955 when his resignation, initially submitted in November 1954, officially took effect. The ECSC was Monnet’s greatest accomplishment: it set in motion the process that transformed Europe from a continent historically divided by nationalism into an emergent civilization formed by common economic institutions and animated by a common political spirit.2
Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | SpringerLink (Retrieved November 10, 2024)
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Glucksmann posted on X that “Trump’s election is one of those tipping points that shape history. We are now, in Europe, alone to face our destiny.” This provoked an impassioned reaction from Antoine Léaument. “How can you be so out of touch that you can’t see that it’s the political position you hold in Europe and France that has led to defeat at the hands of Trump?” he challenged.
Editor: Glucksmann vs. Antoine Léaument!
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Appalling! Pathetic!” reacted Green Senator Yannick Jadot, anticipating a return of tensions amongst the left.
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