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Old Socialist.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 11, 2025

Old Socialist scoffs at Zanny Minton Beddoes’ collection of self-serving political cliches, in almost praise of a Joe Biden presidency.

Posted on November 20, 2020 by stephenkmacksd

Should any reader be surprised that Beddoes is an Oxbridger? It’s an Economist Tradition. Note this from the Economist:

Ms. Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.

Wikipedia supplies more detailed information on Beddoes IMF responsibilities:

After graduation, she was recruited as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, in 1992,^[3] as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard. She then spent two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanny_Minton_Beddoes

Beddoes is member, in very good standing, of the Economic Elite, that is only reinforced by her service with the IMF. She worked with the ‘Shock Therapy’ obsessed Prof. Sachs, who now denies his toxic prescriptions, for implementing those destructive policies across Eastern Europe. See ‘Europe Since 1989: A History’ by Philipp Ther for a telling history of Sach’s destructive ideological fixsation.

Chapter 4: Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon

Chapter 5: Second-Wave Neoliberalism

Beddoes being the first women to be the Editor of the Economist. She is a long time employee of the newspaper since 1994. Her ideological conformity is a proven political quantity. Reading the opening paragraph of her essay demonstrates that fact.

Some years loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.

Call this restrained political melodrama. She has been schooled, by that Economist team of Micklethwait & Wooldridge, that team of Economist Writers, who have proven to be the best re-write men in Journalism. Taking their shorter Economist articles and fleshing them out, into those best selling 400 page paperbacks.

Next:

Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified.

Then comes this astounding sentence, ever uttered by any editor of this reactionary newspaper:

At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality.

One of the most enlightening aspects of reading ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin is that a self-serving political/moral hypocrisy is the very sine qua non of this newspaper. So Beddoes mention of inequality brings to mind:

From May 5th 2014

By R.A.

Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as “the modern Marx” (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

…

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

And this:

May 3,2014

Headline: A modern Marx

Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy

WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included.

The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.

…

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/05/03/a-modern-marx

To be fair R.A. published a revelatory set of essays on Piketty’s book. The first essay in this valuable set of commentaries on ‘Capital’.

LAST year Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and a renowned expert on global inequality, published a book titled “Capital in the Twenty-first Century”—in French. It will be released in English on March 10th. We reviewed the book earlier this year, but it is detailed and important enough, in our opinion, to deserve additional discussion. We will therefore be publishing a series of posts over the next few weeks—live-blogging the book, as it were—to draw out its arguments at slightly greater length. Starting today, with the book’s introduction.

Capital, as I will refer to Mr Piketty’s book from here on out, is an incredibly ambitious book. The author has self-consciously put the book forward as a companion to, and perhaps the intellectual equal of, Karl Marx’s Capital. Like Marx, Mr Piketty aims to provide a political economy theory of everything. More specifically, he attempts to re-establish distribution as the central issue in economics, and in doing so to reorient our perceptions of the trajectory of growth in the modern economic era. Mr Piketty’s great advantage in attempting all this, relative to past peers, is a wealth of data and analysis, compiled by himself and others over the last 15 or so years.

…

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs

This newspaper has never had any interest in ‘inequality’. Look at this depiction of Jeremy Corbyn, the foremost political reformer in British politics. Who attacked the very ‘inequality’ of both New Labour and the Tories, that Beddoes finds so compelling. This is pure political pose!

A selection of quotations from the Beddoes essay is instructive, of the level of political posturing, wedded to an unslakable hypocrisy-the very life-blood of this newspaper! As Beddoes moves from imperative to imperative, as she describes it, I will try to be brief and make some choices that will incite criticism:

On Globalization:

…

Although globalisation will still be about goods and capital crossing borders, people will travel less. The Asian countries that controlled the virus most effectively were also those that shut their borders most strictly. Their experience will shape others’ policies. Border restrictions and quarantines will stay in place long after covid-19 caseloads fall. And even after tourism restarts, migration will remain much harder. That will dent the prospects of poor countries that rely on flows of remittances from their migrant workers abroad, reinforcing the damage done by the pandemic itself. Some 150m people are likely to fall into extreme poverty by the end of 2021.

Global commerce will be conducted against an inauspicious geopolitical backdrop. Mr Trump’s mercurial mercantilism will be gone, but America’s suspicion of China will not end with the departure of “Tariff Man”, as the president was proud to be known. Tariffs, now levied on two-thirds of imports from China, will remain, as will restrictions on its technology companies. The splintering of the digital world and its supply chain into two parts, one Chinese-dominated and the other American-led, will continue. Sino-American rivalry will not be the only fissiparous influence on globalisation. Chastened by their reliance on imported medical supplies and other critical goods (often from China), governments from Europe to India will redefine the scope of “strategic industries” that must be protected. State aid to support this new industrial policy has become and will remain ubiquitous.

…

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

On China:

…

With the West battered and China crowing, plenty of pundits (including in this publication) will declare the pandemic to be the death knell for a Western-led world order. That will prove premature. For all its “vaccine diplomacy”, China inspires fear and suspicion more than admiration. And for all his determination to bring China centre-stage, its president, Xi Jinping, shows little appetite for genuine global leadership. Although Mr Trump’s contempt for allies and forays into transactional diplomacy have shaken trust in the American-led global order, they have not destroyed it.

…

On Biden, as the political antidote to a ‘dangerous Leftism’ = Left-Wing Social Democrats. Medicare for all is not an integral part of ‘Bidenomics’ (Call this neologism what it is a dull-witted placeholder for actual argument)

…

But he could be just the right person. Mr Biden’s policy platform is ambitious enough. Behind the slogan of “build back better” is a bold, but not radical, attempt to marry short-term stimulus with hefty investment in green infrastructure, research and technology to dramatically accelerate America’s energy transformation. From expanding health-care access to improving social insurance, the social contract proposed by Bidenomics is a 21st-century version of the Progressive era: bold reform without dangerous leftism.

…

This selective quotation, from the final paragraph of Beddoes’ essay is less that enthusiastic about Biden, that descends into demotic moralizing.

… Mr Biden himself is too focused on repairing yesterday’s world rather than building tomorrow’s, and too keen to protect existing jobs and prop up ossified multilateral institutions to push for the kind of change that is needed. The biggest danger is not the leftist lurch that many Republicans fear—it is of inaction, timidity and stasis. For America and the world, that would be a terrible shame.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

Beddoes is like so many self-appointed political technocrats ,obsessed with ‘policy’, rather than what effect those policies have on human lives. Its ‘as if’ these technos are in a laboratory, rather than the unpredictable, and utterly ungovernable human world. This was called ‘Social Engineering’, in the days of the Soviets, but not a subject that the once ascendet Neo-Liberals, and their fellow travelers, would dare to broach about their own Utopianism, now in a state of ungovernable collapse.

Old Socialist

Old Socialist.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 11, 2025

Old Socialist scoffs at Zanny Minton Beddoes’ collection of self-serving political cliches, in almost praise of a Joe Biden presidency.

Posted on November 20, 2020 by stephenkmacksd

Should any reader be surprised that Beddoes is an Oxbridger? It’s an Economist Tradition. Note this from the Economist:

Ms. Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.

Wikipedia supplies more detailed information on Beddoes IMF responsibilities:

After graduation, she was recruited as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, in 1992,^[3] as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard. She then spent two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanny_Minton_Beddoes

Beddoes is member, in very good standing, of the Economic Elite, that is only reinforced by her service with the IMF. She worked with the ‘Shock Therapy’ obsessed Prof. Sachs, who now denies his toxic prescriptions, for implementing those destructive policies across Eastern Europe. See ‘Europe Since 1989: A History’ by Philipp Ther for a telling history of Sach’s destructive ideological fixsation.

Chapter 4: Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon

Chapter 5: Second-Wave Neoliberalism

Beddoes being the first women to be the Editor of the Economist. She is a long time employee of the newspaper since 1994. Her ideological conformity is a proven political quantity. Reading the opening paragraph of her essay demonstrates that fact.

Some years loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.

Call this restrained political melodrama. She has been schooled, by that Economist team of Micklethwait & Wooldridge, that team of Economist Writers, who have proven to be the best re-write men in Journalism. Taking their shorter Economist articles and fleshing them out, into those best selling 400 page paperbacks.

Next:

Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified.

Then comes this astounding sentence, ever uttered by any editor of this reactionary newspaper:

At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality.

One of the most enlightening aspects of reading ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin is that a self-serving political/moral hypocrisy is the very sine qua non of this newspaper. So Beddoes mention of inequality brings to mind:

From May 5th 2014

By R.A.

Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as “the modern Marx” (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

…

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

And this:

May 3,2014

Headline: A modern Marx

Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy

WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included.

The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.

…

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/05/03/a-modern-marx

To be fair R.A. published a revelatory set of essays on Piketty’s book. The first essay in this valuable set of commentaries on ‘Capital’.

LAST year Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and a renowned expert on global inequality, published a book titled “Capital in the Twenty-first Century”—in French. It will be released in English on March 10th. We reviewed the book earlier this year, but it is detailed and important enough, in our opinion, to deserve additional discussion. We will therefore be publishing a series of posts over the next few weeks—live-blogging the book, as it were—to draw out its arguments at slightly greater length. Starting today, with the book’s introduction.

Capital, as I will refer to Mr Piketty’s book from here on out, is an incredibly ambitious book. The author has self-consciously put the book forward as a companion to, and perhaps the intellectual equal of, Karl Marx’s Capital. Like Marx, Mr Piketty aims to provide a political economy theory of everything. More specifically, he attempts to re-establish distribution as the central issue in economics, and in doing so to reorient our perceptions of the trajectory of growth in the modern economic era. Mr Piketty’s great advantage in attempting all this, relative to past peers, is a wealth of data and analysis, compiled by himself and others over the last 15 or so years.

…

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs

This newspaper has never had any interest in ‘inequality’. Look at this depiction of Jeremy Corbyn, the foremost political reformer in British politics. Who attacked the very ‘inequality’ of both New Labour and the Tories, that Beddoes finds so compelling. This is pure political pose!

A selection of quotations from the Beddoes essay is instructive, of the level of political posturing, wedded to an unslakable hypocrisy-the very life-blood of this newspaper! As Beddoes moves from imperative to imperative, as she describes it, I will try to be brief and make some choices that will incite criticism:

On Globalization:

…

Although globalisation will still be about goods and capital crossing borders, people will travel less. The Asian countries that controlled the virus most effectively were also those that shut their borders most strictly. Their experience will shape others’ policies. Border restrictions and quarantines will stay in place long after covid-19 caseloads fall. And even after tourism restarts, migration will remain much harder. That will dent the prospects of poor countries that rely on flows of remittances from their migrant workers abroad, reinforcing the damage done by the pandemic itself. Some 150m people are likely to fall into extreme poverty by the end of 2021.

Global commerce will be conducted against an inauspicious geopolitical backdrop. Mr Trump’s mercurial mercantilism will be gone, but America’s suspicion of China will not end with the departure of “Tariff Man”, as the president was proud to be known. Tariffs, now levied on two-thirds of imports from China, will remain, as will restrictions on its technology companies. The splintering of the digital world and its supply chain into two parts, one Chinese-dominated and the other American-led, will continue. Sino-American rivalry will not be the only fissiparous influence on globalisation. Chastened by their reliance on imported medical supplies and other critical goods (often from China), governments from Europe to India will redefine the scope of “strategic industries” that must be protected. State aid to support this new industrial policy has become and will remain ubiquitous.

…

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

On China:

…

With the West battered and China crowing, plenty of pundits (including in this publication) will declare the pandemic to be the death knell for a Western-led world order. That will prove premature. For all its “vaccine diplomacy”, China inspires fear and suspicion more than admiration. And for all his determination to bring China centre-stage, its president, Xi Jinping, shows little appetite for genuine global leadership. Although Mr Trump’s contempt for allies and forays into transactional diplomacy have shaken trust in the American-led global order, they have not destroyed it.

…

On Biden, as the political antidote to a ‘dangerous Leftism’ = Left-Wing Social Democrats. Medicare for all is not an integral part of ‘Bidenomics’ (Call this neologism what it is a dull-witted placeholder for actual argument)

…

But he could be just the right person. Mr Biden’s policy platform is ambitious enough. Behind the slogan of “build back better” is a bold, but not radical, attempt to marry short-term stimulus with hefty investment in green infrastructure, research and technology to dramatically accelerate America’s energy transformation. From expanding health-care access to improving social insurance, the social contract proposed by Bidenomics is a 21st-century version of the Progressive era: bold reform without dangerous leftism.

…

This selective quotation, from the final paragraph of Beddoes’ essay is less that enthusiastic about Biden, that descends into demotic moralizing.

… Mr Biden himself is too focused on repairing yesterday’s world rather than building tomorrow’s, and too keen to protect existing jobs and prop up ossified multilateral institutions to push for the kind of change that is needed. The biggest danger is not the leftist lurch that many Republicans fear—it is of inaction, timidity and stasis. For America and the world, that would be a terrible shame.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

Beddoes is like so many self-appointed political technocrats ,obsessed with ‘policy’, rather than what effect those policies have on human lives. Its ‘as if’ these technos are in a laboratory, rather than the unpredictable, and utterly ungovernable human world. This was called ‘Social Engineering’, in the days of the Soviets, but not a subject that the once ascendet Neo-Liberals, and their fellow travelers, would dare to broach about their own Utopianism, now in a state of ungovernable collapse.

Old Socialist

Political Observer

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 08, 2025

Headline: The divide in tomorrow’s Britain: power women and powerless men

Sub-headline: Young women in the UK are now, for the first time, more likely to be in education, employment or training

If you’re losing the game, change the rules. It’s a strategy my six-year-old swears by. But it’s also Labour’s plan for the next election. Sir Keir Starmer recently confirmed that the party remains committed to lowering the voting age to 16 — a manifesto pledge that was expected to add hundreds of thousands of voters to the Labour tally (which is of course why it was in the manifesto in the first place).

At the last election, Labour won a stonking 42 per cent of the youth vote: next were the Lib Dems, all the way down on 18. But since then something weird has happened. The latest polling by More in Common has Labour on 30 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds — still in the lead, but only just ahead of the Greens on 27 per cent. Reform, meanwhile, are on 22 per cent. In other words, a full half of the youth vote is now going to the populist parties of left and right. Which probably isn’t what those manifesto writers had in mind.

In many ways, this isn’t much of a surprise. As I’ve pointed out before, age is now the key fault line in British politics: the Tories, in particular, are so reliant on the grey vote that their supporters’ average age, as the US pollster Frank Luntz puts it, is “deceased”.

…

At the last election, twice as many young women as men voted Green, and twice as many young men as women voted Reform. The John Smith Centre has found that young women are far more likely to cite the NHS as a key political issue; young men are focused on crime and immigration.
Again, this is a pattern replicated internationally. The journalist John Burn-Murdoch recently pointed out the astonishing gender divide in the South Korean election. Among young men, the left-right split was 24-74. Among young women, it was 58-36. And as he says, you can see a similar (though less dramatic) tendency in countries across the West — including the UK.

The traditional explanation for this is that young men have been captured by the “manosphere” — a generation sitting alone in their basements, in thrall to steroidal podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. But again, there’s also an economic explanation.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-divide-in-tomorrows-britain-power-women-and-powerless-men-358zd5lnd

---

Editor: Look at the approach of The Economist to the territory that Mr. Colevile attempts to diagnose? Consider that the political/sexual/career asperations of men and women are central to The Economist, and Mr. Colevile interventions. In sum ‘The Battle of The Sexes’ is reinvigerated as The West sinks deeper into its collapse, as Russia, China, Iran and BRICS define what the future might be …

In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.

Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.

Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.

Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.

In much of the developed world, the attitudes of young men and women are polarising. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. But our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75 (see chart 1 ). For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.

…

https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/13/why-the-growing-gulf-between-young-men-and-women

---

Men and women have different experiences, so you would expect them to have different worldviews. Nonetheless, the growing gulf between young men and women in developed countries is striking. Polling data from 20 such countries shows that, whereas two decades ago there was little difference between the share of men and women aged 18-29 who described themselves as liberal rather than conservative, the gap has grown to 25 percentage points. Young men also seem more anti-feminist than older men, bucking the trend for each generation to be more liberal than its predecessor. Polls from 27 European countries found that men under 30 were more likely than those over 65 to agree that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”. Similar results can be found in Britain, South Korea and China. Young women were likely to believe the opposite.

Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.

Another big change is that, to varying degrees across the developed world, immense progress has been made in reducing the barriers to women having successful careers. College-educated men are still thriving, too—often as one half of a double-high-income heterosexual couple. Many men welcome these advances and argue for more. However, those among their less-educated brothers who are struggling in the workplace and the dating market are more likely to be resentful, and to blame women for their loss of relative status. And young women, by and large, are glad of past progress but are keenly aware that real threats and unfairness remain, from male violence to the difficulty of juggling careers and children. In short, most young women and worryingly large numbers of young men complain that society is biased against their own sex.

Young women tend to vote for parties of the liberal left. Angry young men, sometimes dismissed as toxically masculine by those parties, are being shrewdly wooed by politicians from the right and the far right. In South Korea their support helped an overtly anti-feminist president win power. In America polls are muddy but some pollsters think young men are souring on the Democrats. In Europe, where many countries offer a kaleidoscope of political choices, young male votes have helped fuel the rise of reactionary outfits such as the AfD in Germany, Confederation in Poland and Chega, which surged at Portugal’s election on March 10th.

Editor: Alice Weidel is currently serving as the co-chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

---

Editor: The final paragraph of this Economist essay ‘Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world’

There is no easy solution to any of this. But clearly, more should be done to help boys lagging behind at school to do better. Some policies that might work without harming their female classmates include hiring more male teachers (who are exceptionally scarce at primary schools in rich countries), and allowing boys to start school a year later than girls, to reflect the fact that they mature later. Better vocational training could encourage young men to consider jobs they have traditionally shunned, from nursing to administration. Schooling boys better would not only help boys. Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/03/14/making-sense-of-the-gulf-between-young-men-and-women

PoliticaL Observer.

Political Observer takes a minimalist approach, to this political chatter!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 05, 2025

Why Woke Failed

The movement was based on flawed understandings of human nature.

Michael Shermer

Jun 5

---

Editor : Woke has become a derisive epithet, to state the obvious and Michael Shermer wallows in it.

…

Although some liberals embrace just such an unconstrained vision of human nature, most understand that human behavior is at least partially constrained—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the problem lies chiefly with woke illiberals, who are full-on blank slaters, unconstrained visionaries, and utopian dreamers with no purchase on the reality of human nature, or what, in my book The Believing Brain, I called a Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of our nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.

A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate belief that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a Great Society of its design, and instead believes that family, custom, law, and traditional institutions are the best sources for social harmony. A Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. A Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. A Realistic Vision of human nature is what James Madison was thinking of when he penned his oft-quoted dictum in Federalist Paper Number 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The resulting structure of the United States government and its nearly 250 years of successful governance is a tribute to Madison’s (and the other founders’) realistic vision of human nature. If you have a flawed theory of human nature, however, much follows that will also be flawed, including disastrous social policies and failed social movements that have taken hold in recent years and that mark the results of the woke movement.

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Editor: Not to forget Critical Race Theroy

New York University Press

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Or Mr. Richard K. Matthews who layes waste to the cult of Madison!

Book Details

Editor: Revelatory quotations!

Political Observer.

Political Reporter shares one of his comments on Scalia!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 04, 2025

At The Economist: a Scalia obituary, a comment by Political Reporter

Posted on February 18, 2016 by stephenkmacksd

There is no doubt that the author of this obituary is schooled in the Scalia patois, in fact she/he is adept at sounding the notes of witless bulling insult that is the hallmark of that Scalia style!
But was Scalia an ‘Originalist’ Or as Scalia described himself as a ‘faint-hearted originalist’? Here is a partial answer provided by Bruce Allen Murphy,the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

‘When I teach about the First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion at Lafayette College, which used to occupy a routine pair of classes, I now wheel into the classroom a large white board that will occupy us for weeks, filled with all of the exceptions that the Court has created here restoring, in piecemeal fashion, the pre-Scalia, 1990 decision, world. I explain what has become the “Swiss Cheesing” of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, allowing, among others, for claims to be considered for exceptions for federal prisoners and others being held in government institutions, for a religious group in Hialeah, Florida seeking to sacrifice animals in religious ceremonies, and for a small religious group seeking to drink ceremonial hallucinogenic tea from the Amazon. The string of exceptions to Scalia’s Smith rule has created so many holes that there is almost no cheese left. After the Hobby Lobby decision, I will have to make one more change to the top of my board, one which risks doubling the number of exceptions, adding next to the words “person’s Free Exercise of Religion rights,” the phrase “and closely-held corporations’ religious rights” Even though the majority in Hobby Lobby has further limited Scalia’s Smith case holding, since that result comports with his pro-religious accommodation, pro-corporation constitutional rights, viewpoint, he silently votes with them. While Scalia likes to say in his public speeches that his version of the Constitution is “Dead. Dead. Dead,” once more his reading of Founding era history to construct his originalist interpretation of the Constitution is very much an evolving work in progress.’- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/156300#sthash.BWyZ4mgK.dpuf

The idea of ‘Originalism’ and or its renaissance is connected to Brown v. Board I &II as made plain in John Dean’s book The Rehnquest Choice:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rehnquist-Choice-Appointment-Redefined/dp/0743233204

Confirmed by The Partisan by John A. Jenkins:

http://www.johnajenkins.com/BookpageThePartisan.html

Also read Joan Biskupic’s barley disguised hagiography American Original:

http://us.macmillan.com/americanoriginal/joanbiskupic

Here is a report from Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen on Justice Scalia’s final Supreme Court rant, which is nothing less that reprehensible:

‘Critics of affirmative action, (including the court’s only black justice, Clarence Thomas,) have long argued that the policy backfires on black students, claiming that placing unprepared students in elite academic settings is setting them up for failure. Still, Scalia drew “muted gasps in the courtroom” for his indelicate comments at the end of oral argument, according to The New York Times. From the transcript:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer.

Bloggier outlets like the Hill reported that Scalia “surprised” the court, while Mother Jones tersely remarked that they would “really be looking forward to his opinion in the case.”

One could defend Scalia by pointing out that justices often float devil’s advocate–type statements during an oral argument in order to test the lawyer’s arguments, and that the only opinion that matters is the one they eventually write down. But even Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog, an elite law reporter who knows a thing or two about not jumping the gun when analyzing the court, found Scalia’s statement “quite clumsy.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/scalia-affirmative-action-blacks-admission

Is this encomium to the Originalist Eminence a surprise? Which doesn’t quite eschew substance, but relies on the argot of Scalia, which had its origin, or at least paid homage to the Hollywood Gangster films of the 1930’s.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21693161-originalist-chief-devout-and-colourful-end-was-79-obituary-antonin-scalia

My reply to guest-lawelsj

June 4, 2025.

Political Observer explores these questions.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 03, 2025

Headline: Javier Milei’s chainsaw economics in Argentina could lead the way

Sub-headline: If the model can be successfully applied across even just some of the underperforming countries in South America, the economic bounty could be enormous.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/javier-mileis-chainsaw-economics-in-argentina-could-lead-the-way-kq3ss0sqg?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1748983552-5

Editor: Read the first gushing paragraphs of her opininon column;

You’ll no doubt have noticed the growing buzz around Europe, thanks to a brighter economic outlook, Germany’s decision to scrap its debt brake, and some tactical shifts away from the US. But there’s another region that’s been quietly catching investors’ attention: Latin America.

I believe the region could emerge as the unexpected economic winner of the next few years, and perhaps beyond.

Regular readers will be familiar with Argentina’s eccentric, chainsaw-wielding president, Javier Milei, who was my economic hero of 2024. Since becoming president in 2023, Milei has slashed burdensome red tape and bureaucracy, and rolled back unsustainable and unproductive spending, while implementing supply side reforms.

The result has been an astonishing turnaround in Argentina’s economic fortunes. “Hyper-inflation” reduced to a mere 2.2 per cent as of February, with projected GDP growth of 5.5 per cent in the next year. It’s no surprise, then, that Argentina-focused exchange traded funds saw record inflows in 2024, and emerging market debt funds have been hoovering up corporate and government bonds.

But Milei is far from done. With inflation now under control, last week he scrapped reporting and tax rules aimed at unlocking a potential $200 billion injection in the domestic economy, consisting of the unofficial US dollar savings of ordinary Argentines. Previously, attempts to part with this cash were fraught with risk and would have seen individuals and businesses fall foul of strict protectionist currency controls. Now, individuals will be free to spend their dollars at will.

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Editor: here is a Buenos Aires Herald report on Argetine Poverty from February 18, 2024:

Argentina’s poverty rate reached 57.4% in January according to a new report by the Argentine Catholic University’s respected Social Debt Observatory. It’s the highest poverty number since 2004, when the observatory began publishing reports, amid widespread economic deregulation and price hikes.

“Our perspective is that this will keep getting worse in February,” the observatory’s Director Agustín Salvia told the Herald. “The crisis is about to explode in systemic terms.”

According to the report, which analyzed the inflationary effects of the 54% Argentine peso devaluation in December, poverty rose from 44.7% in the third quarter of 2023 to 49.5% in December, then 57.4% in January.

Salvia said there is “a generalized impoverishment of Argentine society” as a result of “a decrease in real salaries” as well as “a high risk of losing jobs” and the devaluation of the peso. “Households can’t compensate the effects of inflation on the food basket with working more hours, like they did in 2023.”

“The working class and middle class who don’t receive any welfare suffered the biggest increase [in poverty levels],” the report said.

The observatory also found that 15% of Argentines are destitute — the highest level since 2005. Destitution numbers had been 9.6% in the third quarter of 2023 and 14.2% in December, and went up even more in January “due to the increase in the cost of the basic food basket.”

The National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC by its Spanish acronym) considers a family “destitute” when their monthly income is less than the basic food basket. A family is considered to be in poverty if they earn less than the basic food basket plus services, known as the total basic basket.

You may also be interested in: Argentina starts 2024 with a 20.6% monthly inflation rate

“The December 2023 devaluation led to a strong price increase at a general level, and therefore, [an increase of] the basic food basket and the total basic basket,” the document stated.

The report added that while the government increased pensions and social plans in an attempt to absorb the effects of the record-high inflation “the poverty and destitution levels significantly rose.”

Argentina’s monthly inflation rate reached 25.5% in December 2023, the highest since February 1991, according to the National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC, for its Spanish acronym). In January, it went down to 20.6%, marking a 254.4% year-on-year inflation.

Within the past two months, gasoline prices more than doubled, private healthcare medicine applied 80% increases, and bus and train fares rose by 251% and 169% respectively. More tariff and price jumps are expected in the upcoming months.

Meanwhile, discussions to increase Argentina’s minimum wage and unemployment benefits fell through on Thursday while social movements protested outside the Labor Ministry. The minimum wage, which defines who receives certain social benefits, currently sits at AR$156,000 a month while the total basic basket for a single adult reached AR$193,000 in January, according to INDEC’s latest report.

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Editor: Here is a report from May 19, 2025 in the Buenos Aires Herald, about Milei and Money!

Headline: Cash savings, tax evasion, bank robbery: Milei confirms no-questions-asked dollar plan

Sub-Headline: The president said he doesn’t care ‘in the slightest’ how Argentines got their dollars

https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/cash-savings-tax-evasion-bank-robbery-milei-confirms-no-questions-asked-dollar-plan

President Javier Milei said that he “does not care in the slightest” how Argentines got their dollars during a television interview on Monday, during which he appeared to encourage tax evasion and play down the risk of courting organized crime.

It comes as his administration prepares a measure to allow the population to spend dollars without justifying where the funds came from, which experts say would facilitate money laundering, tax evasion, and other crimes.

Asked about such risks, Milei responded that economic issues should be separated from legal and security issues.

The move was announced by Economy Minister Luis Caputo in early May, but has yet to be made official.

“Under the mattress, Argentines have… estimates range between US$200 billion and US$400 billion,” Milei said during an interview on América 24 TV channel. “That means between 33% and 66% of the GDP. That implies an injection of funds into the economy that could generate a huge acceleration of the growth rate.”

According to the INDEC statistical bureau, Argentines held US$256 billion in cash and deposits outside the nation’s financial system in the last quarter of 2024.

He said Argentines who save dollars outside the financial system have done so to “avoid the tax that is inflation,” which he described as “devastating.”

Tax evaders are ‘heroes’

Asked about dollars stemming from tax evasion, the president said that “taxes are robbery,” later adding: “people who tried to protect themselves from thieving politicians are heroes, not criminals.”

He went on to argue that organized crime such as drug trafficking should be combated by the Security Ministry and the Defense Ministry, without involving the economy. “You do not use the economy to fight crime,” he said.

For the measure to work, he said, “the key is that nobody asks where you got your dollars. What’s more, I don’t care where you got your dollars. I don’t care in the slightest. That’s to say, economic issues are fixed in the economy. Issues of other kinds are fixed in the legal and judicial sphere. You have to understand that: they shouldn’t be mixed.”

After the plans were announced, María Eugenia Marano, a lawyer focusing on economic crimes, told the Herald that allowing the population to use dollars with no questions asked facilitated bringing laundered money back into the financial system.

Bank robbery

When journalist Antonio Laje asked whether that would mean bank robbers attempting to pay in US$500,000 would be asked no questions, Milei compared the situation to giving a sick person the wrong medicine, before stating: “Again, with the robbery, you shouldn’t mix the problem of crime with the issue of the economy.”

Under current law, such transactions can be reported to the financial authorities as suspicious. That legislation, Milei said, “is horrific.”

“You have to be able to use dollars with ease. Nobody should be asking for explanations for anything.”

Milei said the measure, which he has described as a form of “endogenous dollarization,” would be similar to a tax amnesty, but without paying taxes.

Milei said that the government had not yet passed the measure because it was addressing legal issues. He refused to give a launch date, stating instead that it would be passed once it was “technically impeccable.”

https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/cash-savings-tax-evasion-bank-robbery-milei-confirms-no-questions-asked-dollar-plan

Political Observer.

Political Observer provides a sample of Anderson’s 47 page evaluation, and a link to the full text!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 03, 2025

Editor: The final paragraphs of Anderson’s revelatory text.

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When writing in this vein, Tooze has certainly earned his place on the left of liberalism. But the compound is labile. Elsewhere in Crashed, he can write without demur of Obama’s failure to deliver ‘a concerted drive to unify American society around a sustained programme of investment-driven growth and comprehensive modernization’.footnote⁸⁹ Unify American society—or, power against power—cleave it?

If there is no clear-cut resolution of these tensions in Crashed, it is in part because so much rhetorical emphasis falls on the technical complexity of the ‘giant “systems” and “machines” of financial engineering’, and the vital role of a pragmatic managerialism in keeping them running. Central banks, Tooze has insisted, far from being stoppers of democracy, have often been flywheels of progress. After all, without the good sense of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, could the Entente have won the First World War, or the Allies the Second? Without helpful counteractions by Carney and Draghi, could the fall-out of unfortunate developments like the victory of Brexit in one referendum, or the defeat of Renzi in another, have been contained? ‘It would be a grave theoretical error and missed practical opportunity if technocratic structures were held to be a diminution of politics’. They can enhance them. Think of the ‘astounding flair for the situation’—magic term!—of someone like Mario Draghi.footnote⁹⁰

When he writes in this mode, rather than looking to possible avenues of democratic control over them, Tooze explains that ‘there are good reasons to defend technocratic government against the unreasoning passions of mass democracy. It is all too obvious today how important it is to be able to identify matters of potential technical agreement beyond politics.’ Sanity and lunacy so distributed, how can irrational masses be brought to accept rational decisions taken by the Bernankes and the Draghis? There, essential is that ‘coalitions be assembled for unpopular but essential actions’—not just as a conjunctural, but as a permanent necessity: ‘building such ad hoc and lopsided political coalitions is what the governance of capitalism under democratic conditions entails’.footnote⁹¹

Unpopular but essential actions: Tooze’s indictment of the eu brutalization of Greece is searing enough. But does he have anything to say about Tsipras’s shredding of a referendum to comply with it? Nothing. A silent sigh of relief can be deduced. For wasn’t such surrender the responsible course of action, as Stresemann showed? It is enough to recall Durand’s verdict in Fictitious Capital on the overall tale Tooze’s book tells to see the difference between the two writers: ‘Finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the body of society to feed its own profits.’ That note is missing in Crashed. There, blackmail—not called as such—is regrettable, but acceptable.

Ad hoc and lopsided coalitions: to date, the most specific illustration Tooze has offered comes in a recent piece on Germany, his European land of reference, in the lrb. In it, he argues for the creation of a Red–Red–Green alliance of the spd, Die Linke and the Greens, in place of the current Black–Red coalition of the cdu–csu–spd that has ruled the country since 2013, as previously from 2005 to 2009. Within the alternative bloc of his hopes, his preference plainly goes to the spd, hailed as ‘no ordinary political party’, but one that for 150 years, from the time of Bismarck to that of Merkel, has ‘stood for a vision of a better, more democratic and socially just Germany’—as if these were adjectives that could encompass the vote for war credits in 1914, the use of the Freikorps to dispatch Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the McCarthyism of the Radikalenerlass in the seventies, and the practice of renditions in this century: not the whole record, but an indelible part of it. Today, obstructing the prospect of a Red–Red–Green alliance is ‘Die Linke’s ingrained hostility to nato’.footnote⁹² The good sense of the spd’s Kaisertreu fealty to it goes without saying.

Such questions aside, what should be the programme of a future Red–Red–Green government? Formally speaking, Tooze’s article is a review of four recent books on Germany, to which he adds three others as he proceeds, though as often in the lrb reference to them is cursory, none accorded the dignity of an actual review. Much of the substance of the piece is devoted to the social consequences of Hartz iv, Schröder’s ‘tough new system of welfare and labour-market regulation’, imposed in 2005. Though he prefers a more to a less lenient view of its neoliberal agenda, and complains that the spd gets no credit for ‘earnest efforts to rebalance’ its consequences—a minimum-wage law has since belatedly ended a situation in which Germany was one of the last countries in Europe without onefootnote⁹³—Tooze leaves no doubt that the condition of the country is far from ideal: inequality has soared, precarity has spread, and with it social and political unrest. To remedy such ills, what agenda of social repair does he outline for a Red–Red–Green coalition? Answer: Germany needs ‘a more pro-European government’, one capable of responding to the ‘bold vision of Europe’s future’ offered by a ‘charismatic’ Emmanuel Macronfootnote⁹⁴—a leader famously capable of constructing a transverse, if lopsided coalition and taking unpopular, but essential decisions. Nothing else. ‘Europe can ill afford further delay’. That empty signifier is all.

It would be wrong to make too much of this. Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place. That’s often the price of a growing reputation—la primadonna é mobile—and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the West from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron, and no one can accuse Crashed of lacking a social sensibility in keeping with this tradition. Yet in today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds—indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds? ‘Power must be met with power’. Truly?

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii119/articles/perry-anderson-situationism-a-l-envers

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Editor: if in search of an historical/political analogy to describe the ‘Liberalism’ of Tooze, look to Americans for Democratic Action, and two of its founders Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr:

On the Political Toady Arthur Schlesinger see his journals, as collected and edited by his sons. The Sons have been a bit too honest, as to their fathers political enthusiams! Schlesinger pere, in some sections, makes noises like Joe McCarthy and his Fellow Travelers! In some ‘scenes’ in this collection, Schlesinger echoes that Hollywood Potboiler Big Jim McLain,1952.

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On Reinhold Niebuhr

By Richard Wightman Fox

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/reinhold-niebuhr-a-biography_richard-wightman-fox/528175/item/8646814/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=high_vol_midlist_standard_shopping_retention_17244561358&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=666159745081&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17244561358&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45hISD6IVv6pjKXLtjD6F_G33&gclid=Cj0KCQjwuvrBBhDcARIsAKRrkjczJQ1yv12gcN0PVHGf24a9114femlxNMpg6bWEA_ZSGJJOXWtze-AaAmIiEALw_wcB#idiq=8646814&edition=2147979

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On The Theopolitics of Reinhold Niebuhr by Political Observer

Posted on May 24, 2012 by stephenkmacksd

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

Political Observer

The Financial Times and UK Higher Education!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 01, 2025

Amy Borrett in London

Publishedan hour ago

https://www.ft.com/content/32a16c10-25d6-484d-a1e9-9fbf8fc8cb1f

“Ambitious reform” of funding and regulation is needed to stave off financial crisis in UK higher education as competition for students is stopping cash-strapped universities joining forces to cut costs, a review has warned.

Sir Nigel Carrington, chair of the Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce, said the “marketisation” of higher education since tuition fees in England rose to £9,000 in 2012 had led institutions to “operate as islands”.

Last year ministers agreed to increase domestic tuition fees in England in line with inflation for three years, taking the annual payment to £9,535 in 2025-26 and likely above £10,000 this parliament.

But Carrington, former vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, said the funding situation was still “unsustainable” as the real value of fees had fallen by about 40 per cent since 2012.

Securing the sector’s future required a “fundamental rethink of how higher education operates at a national level” and a commitment to “ambitious reform” from universities and policymakers, he added.

The review by the task force set up by Universities UK, the main lobby group, called for ministers to stabilise university finances, create a “transformation fund” and remove regulatory barriers to collaboration.

But it added that universities also needed to “urgently” look at cutting costs by integrating services and procurement.

A long-term funding squeeze and softening enrolment of international students has exacerbated a financial crisis in higher education, with universities taking drastic cost-cutting measures to avert a wave of insolvencies.

…

Half of UK institutions have said they have closed courses, while one-quarter have made compulsory redundancies in the past three years.

Carrington said there had already been “an enormous amount” of retrenchment in the sector, warning that without more support from government the UK was in “real danger of falling down the global league tables” and compromising the quality of teaching and research objectives.

As well as stabilising the sector’s income, Carrington called for clarification on competition laws around university collaboration and a shift in “philosophy” from the Office for Students, the sector regulator, which had been “built on a foundational pillar of promoting competition”.

The report pointed to examples of collaboration such as the University of London, a federation of 17 institutions that share services, and the joint campus operated by Falmouth and Exeter universities in Cornwall.

Efficiencies could also be made by leveraging sector buying power with a “more strategic, cross-institutional approach to purchasing” in areas such as software, it found.

While mergers “may be appropriate in a few cases”, Carrington said they were not a “quick fix” and were unlikely to be desirable for most institutions.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think-tank, said the report confirmed the sector would emerge from the current crisis “looking very different”.

“Universities know they need to balance their past fierce competition with a bit more co-operation,” he said, adding that the task force was right to question whether full mergers would deliver effective change.

“The key test will be following through. There have been past comparable sector-wide initiatives which have gone nowhere.” Baroness Jacqui Smith, skills minister, said that while the government had taken “tough decisions to put universities on a firmer financial footing . . . universities must do more to deliver opportunity for students and growth for our economy”.

Editor: I post this on Sunday 6/1/2025 5:59 PM California Daylight Savings Time: Only 3 comments so far!

Yours,

Old Socialist .

Political Observer comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 01, 2025

The New York Times May 31, 2025:

…

But any trust-the-plan case for Trump’s approach underrates how much time can be wasted and policy opportunities lost unraveling problems of your own making. The idea that we’re going to end up with the optimal form of re-industrialization at the end of all the Trump trade drama is, let’s just say, extremely unproven; a scenario where the economy just survives the drama seems more like Trump’s best case, with worse ones still very much in the picture.

And then there is just the inherent danger in living, for three years and eight months more, with a president who we know from the experience of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t always backtrack when he enters dangerous terrain.

A contained, checked form of Trumpian aggression seems to be what a subset of Americans want from this presidency. But their support, now as last November, rests on a gamble — that there will be forces strong enough to check him even if he decides not to chicken out.

Editor: the above is an example of the ‘Lowbrow Douthat’ in the ending of his essay at the

New York Times.

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Ross Douthat

Condition of America

Interviewed by Nick Burns

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america

The some selected paragraphs of Mr. Doutaht on Gaza :

…

How would you weigh the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with reference to a decadent empire’s ability or inability to maintain a Pax Americana?

One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.

And Gaza?

There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.

To describe Washington’s role in the war in Gaza as that of ‘bystander’—given that the us has supplied Israel with tens of thousands of massive bombs and the aircraft dropping them to obliterate the Strip, together with the requisite diplomatic coverage operation at the un and elsewhere—isn’t that a euphemism of the kind you otherwise tend to avoid?

‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.

…

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america

Editor: In these paragraphs The Reader discovers that Douthat is just another New York Times Political/Moral conformist, like Friedman, Brooks, Stephens and the rest of the second-stringers at this newspaper. Douthat, in his New York Times iteration, plays the role of just another political mediocrity! Yet Nick Burns interview of Douthat is revelatory of what?

Political Observer.

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Added 6/1/2025

Editor : I do recall reading four of Douthat’s essay at the Spectator, which I’m having trouble finding, yet the writer of those essays seemed to be less of The New York Times persona, and more like an actual Conservative voice!

Editor: Another question: what can the reader make of the utterly talentless Douthat, that conflates the iphone as a threat to Men an Women , and the declining birthrate?

stephenkmacksd.com/

May 29, 2025

introduction

Interview with Ross Douthat

Claims that left and right, terms born during the French Revolution in the divisions of the National Assembly of 1789, are becoming, or are already, anachronisms have been a recurrent political trope since the last century. If there is no more reason to credit it now than there was in the past, evidence of confusion between the two has been visibly increasing, in an ideological flux dramatized in Brazil by Roberto Schwarz, historicized by Christopher Clark in Britain, and enacted daily in the cross-cutting populisms of Europe and America. Scenes like these speak to a slow erosion of the liberal order, with no clear-cut alternative to challenge its rule, whose upshot is the jumbled discourses cartwheeling through social media and broadcast politics, open feedstock for clinical scrutiny.

The world of ideas proper, where articulated systems of thought confront each other, is another matter. There, a serious left needs to respond, not with self-segregation or withdrawal to any Abgrenzung of its own, but with open-minded curiosity and principled critique, where these are in order. In that spirit, we lead this issue with an interview with Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist who is the most consistently original mind writing about American politics in the pages of the New York Times. In doing so, the journal continues a tradition of treating thinkers and writers of an outlook antithetical to its own with respect—and, if merited, admiration—that started with Michael Oakeshott in the sixties, and from the nineties onwards continued with Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Sartori, J. G. A. Pocock, Karl-Heinz Bohrer and others. Author of some seven books on a wide range of subjects, covering class and culture, demography and religion, technical progress and economic stagnation, the organizing subject of Douthat’s writing is the condition of his own country, America, placed within the setting of the world. In the Victorian era there were equivalents in the press of Britain, France, Italy and elsewhere, writers about their time enjoying significant public authority. But today’s Europe lacks any real counterpart, and in the United States itself there is no journalist of comparable imaginative scope. A firebrand of the student right in his youth—incendiary entries in the Harvard Salient, an inaugural salvo of ‘Cheney for President’ in the nyt of 2009—by the time Trump ran in the primaries of 2016, Douthat was one of his sharpest critics. At no point part of what became the Never Trump brigade, Republicans—Cheney’s daughter in the lead, along with Kristol Jr and the like—scandalized by his lack of regard for Cold War pieties, Douthat would develop into one of the astutest analysts of the trajectory of the current President, whose zigzagging threats of an all-round trade war he judges condemned to failure. Here our contributor Nick Burns questions him about his intellectual formation, political evolution, international horizon and the gains and limits of his role as a tribune on America’s leading newspaper. The result is a portrait, perhaps unlike any other so far available, of a far from typical conservative intelligence.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america

What would make you want to have more children? This week on “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat speaks with Dr. Alice Evans, a social scientist who is as concerned about the global decline in fertility as Ross is. The two discuss why this isn’t just a gender issue — it’s “a solitude issue” — and whether there’s a way to bring relationships back.

….

Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

Fifty years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war and disaster. But for most of my career, I’ve been trying to persuade people that actually, population decline is now the greater peril. And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We’re undeniably headed toward a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today’s children — mine, yours, if you have them, and by the way, you really should — in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies.

Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question, not just why birthrates have declined, but why they’ve declined so far and so fast in so many different places. Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times.

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Editor: The above Mr. Douthat at near full screech! Mr Douthay of 2012, you can’t accuse him of inconsistaney !

Ross Douthat: Low birth rates, Modernism and Decadence by Philosophical Apprentice

Posted on December 3, 2012 by stephenkmacksd

To characterize Ross Douthat, in his essay of December 1, 2012 titled More Babies, Please, as sounding like some turn of the century Germanic prophet of doom and inevitable decadence. This, as more and more people realize that their lives are important in themselves, set free from a ‘civilizational’, religious, nation state, even biological context: the realization of the possibilities of human freedom, is revelatory of his linkage of the sine qua non of growth, in Capitalism, and the Catholic Church’s belief in unfettered procreation.

Philosophical Apprentice

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What I missed in my 2012 comment on More Babies, Please Douthat resorts to the crime of decadence, and the rehabilitation of ‘individual choice’: it attempts to hint as some kind of ‘revelation’ that Douthat dare not speak its name @NYT!

…

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

Philosophical Apprentice.