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Former Analysand offers a selective commentary!

What is the Magic of Freud that sends his apologists, explicators, defenders and even his cadre of worshipers, to such dross? Here is George Prochnik in the TLS:

The first time Sigmund Freud wrote of destroying his papers he was twenty-one years old. He was writing to Eduard Silberstein, an intimate friend of his youth and the sole other member of the Academia Castellana, a make-believe Spanish literary society anchored in Cervantes trivia, which served them as a secret forum for airing playful fantasies and precocious world-weariness. Freud invited Silberstein to help expunge the record of their relations by conjuring up a pleasant winter evening in which they could come together to burn their archives “in a solemn auto-da-fé”. The next occasion was eight years later, in a letter to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, during what he described as a “bad, barren month”, waiting for money from a chemist to finance further research into cocaine, doing almost nothing except browsing through Russian history and toying with two rabbits who continually nibbled turnips and messed up his floor. His only real accomplishment, he told Martha then, was to have nearly completed his intention of doing something that would dismay various unborn, unfortunate people – namely his future biographers. He’d destroyed all his notes from the past fourteen years, along with correspondence and the original manuscripts of his scientific papers. In 1907, he once again burned a huge trove of private documents. Finally, in 1938, just before escaping Nazified Vienna, he delegated to his daughter Anna the task of overseeing another bonfire of his letters, which she undertook together with his disciple Marie Bonaparte.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/science-technology/medicine/mortal-secrets-frank-tallis-book-review-george-prochnik/

The Reader is put directly within the early Freudian milieu, as recreated in Prochnik’s vivid evocation, across a lifetime? It’s like a bad movie, or a thriller, though not like Graham Greens ‘entertainments’, or even like Eric Ambler’s beautifully realized novels!

But Prochnik can’t quite emancipated himself from his status of acolyte/apologist, in a minor key, tending to the imperative of the care and the maintenance, of his would be Historical Sketch, as a kind of apologetic? Think of each paragraph as a entry in a loose-leaf notebook.

Freud has often been approached by biographers not only as a subject whose life merits fresh exposition owing to evolving perspectives on psychoanalysis, but also as someone who masked and elided key parts of his story. His distaste for the very premiss of the biographical project is on record. When his friend the novelist Arnold Zweig told Freud that he wanted to write his life story, Freud retorted that he felt far too affectionately toward Zweig to permit such a misstep. “Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it.” Topping off the critique he announced, “Truth is unobtainable, mankind does not deserve it, and in any case is not our Prince Hamlet right when he asks who would escape whipping were he used after his desert”. In light of all Freud’s suppressive tactics and declarations, it seems fair to wonder what he was trying to keep under wraps.

In the last sentence Prochnik wonders of Freud’s motives. He offers this :

Freud’s standard biographers have typically fallen into two categories: those who believe his obfuscations are meant to cover up the fraudulence of his entire undertaking, and those who view Freud’s cloaked actions and emotions as either irrelevant or misunderstood features of his transcendent genius. Into this vexed arena comes Mortal Secrets, an accessible, fluent introduction to Freud’s life and work by the clinical psychologist and prolific author Frank Tallis. Tallis’s book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna’s golden age, retellings of Freud’s significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud’s principal theories. Interspersed throughout are brief discursions into Freud’s relevance to contemporary psychologists and neurologists, along with efforts to show how Freud’s ideas continue to reverberate through popular culture

But just rhetorical moments away lurks… I’ll place in italics the various attacks on the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ because Freud was its ‘inventor/practitioner’ over time. Yet a regular reader of its current partitioners, notices that they have completely eliminated that arcane Freudian vocabulary. ‘Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews’ Crews laid waste to the cult of Freud in the pages of the New York Review Of Books.

And in his Freud biography

George Prochnik next paragraph features more … I’ll put in italics this collection with the comparison of Freud with Isaac Newton. In sum for Prochnik there is an enlightened position on Freud, balanced by a collection of acolytes, hero’s and scoundrels!

In contrast to both the “Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews, and the dwindling tribe of dazzled, truculent hagiographers, Tallis aims for an even-handed portrait of his subject, and in large measure succeeds. The heat of the attacks on Freud’s legacy has cooled with the fading of his iconic status and the sheer passage of time. Tallis is thus able to acknowledge the justice of many specific critiques of Freud’s record – especially with respect to his problematic treatment of particular patients – without needing to suggest that these failures require us to jettison the entire Freudian project. “Dismissing Freud because of his shortcomings is like dismissing Sir Isaac Newton because he was a disagreeable misanthrope whose personal papers reveal a gullible fascination with alchemy and esotericism”, Tallis writes. Newton may not be the optimal analogue, since the scientific legitimacy of his core project is almost universally accepted, whereas the stature of psychoanalysis as an empirically verifiable scientific endeavour has been continually contested, but the general message is clear: when it comes to Freud’s contributions, our gains dramatically outweigh the deficiencies.

Reader there are 2377 more words: I offer this synopsis:

Editor: On ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ : 113 words.

Editor: On the utterly preposterous  the Oedipus complex: 504 words

Editor : On ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ : 34 words

Editor: On The Interpretation of Dreams’ : 363 words

Editor : Autobiographical Study: 178 words

The Reader confronts more of George Prochnik unimpressive attempt, at the marriage of Literary Pretention, and the moldering remains of Psychoanalyses!

Throughout his life, Freud famously suffered from acute anxiety about growing old and infirm, even going so far as to suggest that after the age of fifty psychoanalysis might no longer work since by then “the elasticity of the mental processes, on which treatment depends, is as a rule lacking”. Was that the secret he most longed to bury? Not some sensational personal escapade like the rumoured affair with his sister-in-law Minna, nor a shocking misrepresentation of a patient’s biography, but the skull hidden behind the defiant countenance in his photographs? This would mark the point at which what Freud describes as the psychologically determinative “instinct for knowledge” breaks down.

Whatever else, it appears that along with his Oedipal situation, Freud had a colossal Sphinx complex, and this remains unresolved.

Former Analysand

Political Observer offer a selection of quotations.

There can be no doubt that Perry Anderson is the formidable Public Intellectual writing today! No one can match his body of work, he has no equal! Forget cadre of political sycophants, who write for the respectable newspapers, and other publications, Corporate Media and Think Tank Chatterers, the issue of the utterly toxic Herman Kahn, and Walter Lippmann’s deeply anti-democratic worship of the ‘Expert’, the fore-rummer of the whole of the Technocratic Class: that now supplies that endless stream of respectable political commentary, steeped in the current political wisdom.

This long essay is formidable in every way, again Anderson is without peer! Let me focus this collection of long quotations, on the revelatory bad actors, who trade on the the currency of ‘International Law’, and its utter mailability in the hands of political opportunists:

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The principle of hierarchy

At the end of the War, the victor powers England, France, Italy and the United States called the Versailles Conference to dictate terms of peace to Germany, redraw the map of Eastern Europe, divide up the Ottoman empire and—not least—create a new international body devoted to ‘collective security’, to ensure establishment of durable peace and justice between states, in the shape of the League of Nations. At Versailles, the United States not only made sure that Rui Barbosa was excluded from the Brazilian delegation, but that the Monroe doctrine—Washington’s open presumption of dominion over Latin America—was actually incorporated into the Covenant of the League as an instrument of peace. A Permanent Court of International Justice was set up in the Hague, its Article 38 continuing to invoke ‘the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations’. Among those who drafted its Statutes was the author of a 600-page defence of the admirable record of Belgian administration in the Congo.

The us Senate eventually declined American entry into the League, but the design of the new organization faithfully reflected the requirements of the victor powers, since its Executive Council—the predecessor of today’s un Security Council—was controlled by the other four great powers on the winning side of the War, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, who were given exclusive permanent membership of it, on the model of the American scheme at the 1907 Hague Conference. In the face of this blatant imposition of a hierarchical order on the League, Argentina refused to take part in it from the start, and a few years later Brazil—when its demand that a Latin American country be given a permanent seat in the council was rejected—withdrew. By the end of the thirties, no less than eight other Latin American countries, large and small, had pulled out of it. Undeterred, the leading textbook of the period on international law, still widely used today, credited to Lassa Oppenheim and Hersch Lauterpacht, noted with satisfaction that ‘the Great Powers are the leaders of the Family of Nations and every advance of the Law of Nations during the past has been the result of their political hegemony’, which had now finally received, for the first time, in the Council of the League a formal ‘legal basis and expression’.footnote¹³

…

Words and swords

Such was the position in the inter-war period. Out of the Second World War came a new dispensation. With much of the continent in ruins, or in debt, the primacy of Europe was gone. When the United Nations was founded at San Francisco in 1945, the principle of hierarchy inherited from the League was preserved in the new Security Council, whose permanent members were given still greater powers than their predecessors in the Executive Council of old, since they now possessed rights of veto. But Western monopoly of this privilege was broken: the ussr and China were now permanent members, alongside the United States and a diminished Britain and France, and as decolonization accelerated over the next two decades, the General Assembly became a forum for resolutions and demands increasingly uncomfortable to the hegemon and its allies.

Surveying the scene in 1950, in his commanding retrospect The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Carl Schmitt observed that in the 19th century: ‘The concept of international law was a specifically European international law. This was self-evident on the European continent, especially in Germany. This was also true of such worldwide, universal concepts as humanity, civilization and progress, which determined the general concepts and theory and vocabulary of diplomats. The whole picture remained Eurocentric to the core, since by “humanity” was understood, above all, European humanity, civilization was self-evidently only European civilization, and progress was the linear development of this civilization’. But, Schmitt went on, after 1945 ‘Europe was no longer the sacred centre of the earth’ and belief in ‘civilization and progress had sunk to a mere ideological façade’. ‘Today’, he announced, ‘the former Eurocentric order of international law is perishing. With it the old nomos of the earth, born of the fairytale-like, unexpected discovery of a New World, an unrepeatable historical event, is vanishing.’footnote¹⁷ International law had never been truly international. What had claimed to be universal was merely particular. What spoke in the name of humanity was empire.

After 1945, as Schmitt saw, international law ceased to be a creature of Europe. But Europe, of course, did not disappear. It simply became subsumed in another of its own overseas extensions, the United States, leaving open the question: how far has international law since 1945 remained a creature, no longer of Europe, but of the West, with at its head the American superpower? Any answer to this question refers back to another. Setting aside its historical origins, what is the juridical nature of international law as such? For its first theorists in 16th and 17th century Europe, the answer was clear. The law of nations was grounded in natural law, that is a set of decrees ordained by God, not to be questioned by any mortal. In other words, the Christian deity was the guarantee of the objectivity of their legal propositions.

…

By the 19th century, the increasing secularization of European culture gradually undermined the credibility of this religious basis for international law. In its place emerged the claim that natural law still held good, but no longer as divine commandments, rather as the expressions of a universal human nature, which all rational human beings could and should acknowledge. This idea, however, was soon made vulnerable in its turn by the development of anthropology and comparative sociology as disciplines, which demonstrated the enormous variety of human customs and beliefs across history and the world, contradicting any such easy universality. But if neither the deity nor human nature could offer any secure basis for international law, how should it then be conceived?

An answer to this question could only be sought in a prior one: what was the nature of law itself? There, the greatest political thinker of the 17th—or perhaps any—century, Thomas Hobbes, had given a clear-cut answer in the Latin version of his masterpiece Leviathan, which appeared in 1668: sed auctoritas non veritas facit legem—not truth, but authority makes the law, or as he put it elsewhere: ‘Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words’.footnote¹⁸ This would over time become known as the ‘command theory of law’. That theory was the work, two centuries later, of John Austin, a clear-minded friend and follower of Bentham, who admired Hobbes above all other thinkers, and in concurring that ‘every law is a command’ saw what this meant for international law. His conclusion was: ‘The so-called law of nations consists of opinions or sentiments current among nations generally. It therefore is not law properly so called . . . [for] a law set by general opinion imports the following consequences—that the party who will enforce it against any future transgressor is never determinate and assignable.’footnote¹⁹

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Practice

Crucial words: never determinate and assignable. Why was that so? Austin went on: ‘It follows that the law obtaining between nations is not positive law; for every positive law is set by a given sovereign to a person or persons in a state of subjection to the author’—but since in a world of sovereign states ‘no supreme government is in a state of subjection to another’, it followed that the law of nations ‘is not armed with a sanction, and does not impose a duty, in the proper acceptation of these expressions. For a sanction properly so called is an evil annexed to a command’.footnote²⁰ In other words, in the absence of any determinable authority capable of either adjudicating or enforcing it, international law ceases to be law and becomes no more than opinion.

This was, and is, a conclusion deeply shocking to the liberal outlook of the overwhelming majority of today’s international jurists and lawyers. What is often forgotten is that it was shared by the greatest liberal philosopher of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill himself, who reviewed and approved Austin’s lectures on jurisprudence twice. Answering attacks on the foreign policy of the short-lived French Republic in 1849, which had offered assistance to an insurgent Poland, he wrote: ‘What is the law of nations? Something, which to call a law at all, is a misapplication of the term. The law of nations is simply the custom of nations’. Were these, Mill asked, ‘the only kind of customs which, in an age of progress, are to be subject to no improvement? Are they alone to continue fixed, while all around them is changeable?’ On the contrary, he concluded robustly, in a spirit of which Marx would have approved: ‘A legislature can repeal laws, but there is no Congress of nations to set aside international customs, and no common force by which to make the decisions of such a Congress binding. The improvement of international morality can only take place by a series of violations of existing rules . . . [where] there is only a custom, the sole way of altering that is to act in opposition to it.’footnote²¹

A few examples will suffice. At the very foundation of the highest official embodiment of international law, namely the United Nations, whose Charter enshrines the sovereignty and integrity of its members, the United States was engaged in their systematic violation. In an Army base in the old Spanish fort a few miles from the inaugural conference that created the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, a special team of us military intelligence was intercepting all cable traffic by delegates to their home countries; the decoded messages landed on the breakfast table of American Secretary of State Stettinius the next morning. The officer in charge of this round-the-clock operation of surveillance reported that ‘the feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution’.footnote²⁶ What did success mean here? The American historian who describes this systematic espionage exults that ‘Stettinius was presiding over an enterprise his nation was already dominating and moulding’—for the un was ‘from the beginning a project of the United States, devised by the State Department, expertly guided by two hands-on Presidents, and propelled by us power . . . For a nation rightly proud of its innumerable accomplishments’—the most recent, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan—‘this unique achievement should always be at the top of its illustrious roster’.footnote²⁷

Matters were no different sixty years later. The 1946 un Convention states that ‘The premises of the un shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action.’ In 2010 it was revealed that Clinton’s wife, then Secretary of State, had directed the cia, fbi and Secret Service to break the communication systems, appropriating passwords and encryption keys, of the Secretary-General of the un, together with the ambassadors of all four other permanent members of the Security Council, and to secure the biometric data, credit-card numbers, email addresses and even frequent-flyer numbers of ‘key un officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialized agencies and chief advisers, top secretary-general aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions’.footnote²⁸ Naturally, neither Mrs Clinton nor the American state paid any price for their brazen violation of an international law supposedly protecting the un itself, the official seat of such law.

…

What of the international justice that international law purports to uphold? The Tokyo Tribunal of 1946–48, organized by the United States to try military leaders of Japan for war crimes, excluded the Showa Emperor from the trial in order to lubricate American occupation of the country, and treated evidence with such disregard for due process that the Indian judge on the Tribunal, in a blistering 1,000-page condemnation of it, observed that the Tokyo trials amounted to little more than ‘an opportunity for the victors to retaliate’, declaring ‘only a lost war is a crime’.footnote²⁹ The Dutch judge on the Tribunal admitted candidly: ‘Of course, in Japan we were all aware of the bombings and the burnings of Tokyo and Yokohama and other big cities. It was horrible that we went there for the purpose of vindicating the laws of war, and yet saw every day how the Allies had violated them dreadfully’footnote³⁰—Schmitt’s discriminatory conception of law to the letter. The successive American wars that followed in East Asia, first in Korea and then in Vietnam, were then littered, as American historians have shown, with atrocities of every kind. Naturally, no tribunal has ever held them to account.

Has anything much changed since then? In 1993 the un Security Council set up an International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, to prosecute those guilty of war crimes in the break-up of the country. Working closely with nato, the Canadian Chief Prosecutor made sure successful indictments for ethnic cleansing fell on Serbs, the target for us and eu hostility, but not on Croats, armed and trained by the us for their own operations of ethnic cleansing; and when nato launched its war on Serbia in 1999, excluded any of its actions—the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the rest—from her investigation of war crimes. This was perfectly logical, since as the press officer for nato explained at the time: ‘It was the nato countries who established the Tribunal, who fund and support it on a daily basis.’footnote³¹ In short, once again, the us and its allies used trials to criminalize their defeated opponents, while their own conduct remained above judicial scrutiny.

…

Discriminations

As for the un Security Council, the nominal guardian of international law, its record speaks for itself. Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990 brought immediate sanctions, and a million-strong counter-invasion of Iraq. Israeli occupation of the West Bank has lasted half a century without the Security Council lifting a finger. When the us and its allies could not secure a resolution authorizing them to attack Yugoslavia in 1998–99, they used nato instead, in patent violation of the un Charter forbidding wars of aggression, whereupon the un Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appointed by Washington, calmly told the world that though nato’s action might not be legal, it was legitimate—as if Schmitt had scripted his words to illustrate what he meant by the constitutive indeterminacy of international law. When, four years later, the United States and Britain launched their attack on Iraq, having had to bypass the un Security Council under threat of a veto from France, the same Secretary-General once again blessed the operation ex post facto, making sure that by a unanimous vote the Security Council gave back-dated cover to Bush and Blair by voting un assistance to their occupation of Iraq with Resolution 1483. International law may be dispensed with in launching a war; but it can always come in handy to ratify such a war after the event.

Weapons of mass destruction? The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the starkest of all illustrations of the discriminatory character of the world order that has taken shape since the Cold War, reserving for just five powers the right to possess and deploy hydrogen bombs, and forbidding their possession to all others, who might need them more for their defence. Formally, the Treaty is not a binding rule of international law, but a voluntary agreement from which any signatory is free to withdraw. Factually, not only is a perfectly legal withdrawal from the Treaty treated as if it were a breach of international law, to be punished with the utmost severity, as in the case of North Korea, but even observance of the Treaty is open to restrictive interpretation, and if insufficiently monitored, subject to retribution, as in the case of draconian sanctions against Iran—indeterminacy and discrimination elegantly combined. That Israel has ignored the Treaty and has long possessed abundant nuclear weapons cannot be so much as mentioned. The powers punishing North Korea and Iran pretend the massive Israeli nuclear arsenal does not exist—perhaps the best commentary of all on the alchemies of international law.

…

The force of opinion

…

Modern international law is thus, as Koskenniemi observes, intrinsically threaded with contestation, and as its contemporary instrumentation for the will of today’s hegemon and its satellites has grown ever more brazen, so the number of critical legal minds not only questioning but seeking to reverse its imperial use has grown too. The most lucid do so without attributing more strength to its claims than they can bear. In the mot of a distinguished French jurist, international law is ‘performative’. That is, such pronouncements in its name seek to bring into being what they invoke, rather than refer to any existent reality, however laudable.footnote⁴³

The same dialectic, of course, has more famously been true of municipal law, invoked in Europe at least since the 17th century in defence of the weak against the strong, who created it. But there Austin’s axiom makes the difference. Within the nation-states, as they became, of Europe, there was always a determinable sovereign authorized to enforce the law, and as this authority passed from crowns to peoples, not coincidentally came also the legitimate power to change it. In relations between states, unlike relations among citizens, neither condition holds. So while hegemony functions in both national and international arenas, and by definition always combines coercion and consent, on the international plane coercion is for the most part legibus solutus and what consent is secured inevitably weaker and more precarious. International law operates to hide that gap. Koskenniemi began his career with a brilliant demonstration of the two poles between which the structure of international legal argument had historically moved, entitled From Apology to Utopia: either international law supplied servile pretexts for whatever actions states wished to take, or it purveyed a lofty moral vision of itself as, in Hooker’s words, ‘her voice the harmony of the world’, with no relation to any empirical reality. What Koskenniemi failed to see was the interlocking of the two: not utopia or apology, but utopia as apology: responsibility to protect as charter for the destruction of Libya, preservation of peace for the strangulation of Iran, and the rest.

Still, defenders of international law can argue that its existence, however often it is abused by states in practice, is at least better than would be its absence, invoking in their aid La Rochefoucauld’s well-known maxim: L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu. Yet critics can equally reply that here it should be reversed. Ought it not rather to read: hypocrisy is the counterfeit of virtue by vice, the better to conceal vicious ends: the arbitrary exercise of power by the strong over the weak, the ruthless prosecution or provocation of war in the philanthropic name of peace?

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii143/articles/perry-anderson-the-standard-of-civilization

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I have offered a collections of quotations from Perry Anderson’s invaluable essay, that places History in the forefront, that identifies the toxic actors, by name and by their actions in Historical Time. We live in the Age of the ‘Public Relations’, the book Propaganda, written by Edward Bernays in 1928 is an invaluable tool. As is Anderson’s invaluable, revelatory History!

Political Observer

Political Observer: its ‘as if’ the politically impotent Macron hadn’t called the snap election?

JUN 18, 2024

@FT never surprises it’s readership

Editor: a selection of words, phrases, sentences & possibly paragraphs in this diatribe. Note that it takes ‘three reporters’ to cover this news story, with the ‘help’ of the Senior Staff! Nothing stokes the fires of usable political hysteria like ‘The Left’ in any of is iterations, permutations raises the hackles of its Readership!

…

populist far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

…

Mélenchon — who has long been the left’s standard-bearer but divides leftist colleagues.

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“This is the new generation of the left,” Raphaël Glucksmann, a centre-left EU lawmaker…

…

But hours later on Friday, the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, or LFI) party, the largest member of the new alliance, reminded everybody that he remains a force to be reckoned with — and a tyrannical one at that.

…

Mélenchon carried out a late-night purge,…

…

“Candidacies for life do not exist,” Mélenchon said later,…

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Friday’s purge was an extraordinarily provocative step, coming on the very day the leftwing parties formally launched the New Popular Front, invoking the unity spirit of the original one under Léon Blum in 1936, when the left came together to thwart a far-right takeover of France. Several of those excluded by Mélenchon had been strong proponents of such an alliance.

…

The leadership of France Insoumise, far from rising to the occasion, is stooping to the worst schemes,” François Ruffin, a dissident LFI MP wrote on social media site X. “Let’s not kid ourselves: you cannot, for country, aspire to peace and democracy, and for party, a reign of fear and brutality.”

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It could make it much harder for candidates for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance to qualify for second round run-offs.

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A former Trotskyist who served as a junior education minister in a socialist government from 2000-2 before turning to the Eurosceptic hard left, Mélenchon has long had a reputation as a political bruiser with a volcanic temper.

In one infamous moment in 2018, he angrily confronted an investigator who came to search his offices during a campaign funding probe, screaming into the man’s face: “La République, c’est moi!”, the equivalent of “I am the law!”

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A gifted orator and debater, Mélenchon is the most successful recent vote-winner for the left. He won 22 per cent in the first round of the 2022 presidential election, coming third, just behind Le Pen.

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“He is a key figure, someone who has proved himself in the most challenging election in the French system, the presidential election,” said Bruno Cautrès, researcher at Sciences Po university. “He gave the left a future with the creation of Nupes, but in the end he was not able to manage the different people and temperaments within it.”

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There were also fights over Mélenchon’s lukewarm support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The final breakdown came last year over Mélenchon’s refusal to condemn the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and downplaying of antisemitic incidents, stances that reflected both his revolutionary zeal and strategy of rallying Muslim voters.

Meanwhile, sloppily dressed LFI MPs hurling abuse at opponents have disrupted the National Assembly. Their conduct has lent weight to critics’ claims that Mélenchon, who guides his troops from outside the chamber, is a demagogue not committed to parliamentary democracy.

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The public sees Mélenchon as a more polarising, less professional and less presidential than his far-right rival, according to an Ifop poll last year.

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Under the terms of their new alliance, the centre-left will contest 100 more seats than at elections two years ago, although LFI is still running the most candidates of the NPF members.

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Even Mélenchon’s allies say a more consensual approach is needed to maintain unity.

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Mélenchon himself signalled a partial retreat on Sunday, when his protégé Quatennens withdrew his candidacy. “I don’t want to be a problem. All our efforts must be for the victory of the NPF,” the party leader told France 3 television.

Editor: here is ‘Philippe Marlière, professor of French politics at University College London’

Philippe Marlière, professor of French politics at University College London, said it was “very clear that his party now understands that if the New Popular Front is to be successful and remain united during this campaign, Mélenchon should keep quiet and that’s a complete difference with 2022.”

Editor: The Reader might think that I have engaged in political opportunism, dishonesty and other political maleficence ! Yet I have treated this political intervention by The Financial Times, its Journalists, and its Editors, for what it is political propaganda! Aimed at a Readership that views ‘The Left’, as a clear and present danger to an utterly failed ‘Centrists Politics’ still unable to self-emancipate from the a toxin of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism!

Political Observer

Political Reporter surveys the political territory.

Headline: Will a Labour victory solve the UK’s growth crisis?  

Sub-headline; Replacing chaos with ‘dullness’ is intended to boost an economy growing at just 1.1% a year. But Keir Starmer might not be able to follow through on his plan Will a Labour victory solve the UK’s growth crisis?

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/will-a-labour-victory-solve-the-uks-growth-crisis-5xjzxdj0k

Isn’t Capitalism given to constant, indeed persistent crises? Or have I asked the wrong question of Mr. Smith?

The Reader might turn to Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism’ of September/October 2011:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii71/articles/wolfgang-streeck-the-crises-of-democratic-capitalism

The collapse of the American financial system that occurred in 2008 has since turned into an economic and political crisis of global dimensions.footnote¹ How should this world-shaking event be conceptualized? Mainstream economics has tended to conceive society as governed by a general tendency toward equilibrium, where crises and change are no more than temporary deviations from the steady state of a normally well-integrated system. A sociologist, however, is under no such compunction. Rather than construe our present affliction as a one-off disturbance to a fundamental condition of stability, I will consider the ‘Great Recession’footnote² and the subsequent near-collapse of public finances as a manifestation of a basic underlying tension in the political-economic configuration of advanced-capitalist societies; a tension which makes disequilibrium and instability the rule rather than the exception, and which has found expression in a historical succession of disturbances within the socio-economic order. More specifically, I will argue that the present crisis can only be fully understood in terms of the ongoing, inherently conflictual transformation of the social formation we call ‘democratic capitalism’.

Democratic capitalism was fully established only after the Second World War and then only in the ‘Western’ parts of the world, North America and Western Europe. There it functioned extraordinarily well for the next two decades—so well, in fact, that this period of uninterrupted economic growth still dominates our ideas and expectations of what modern capitalism is, or could and should be. This is in spite of the fact that, in the light of the turbulence that followed, the quarter century immediately after the war should be recognizable as truly exceptional. Indeed I suggest that it is not the trente glorieuses but the series of crises which followed that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism—a condition ruled by an endemic conflict between capitalist markets and democratic politics, which forcefully reasserted itself when high economic growth came to an end in the 1970s. In what follows I will first discuss the nature of that conflict and then turn to the sequence of political-economic disturbances that it produced, which both preceded and shaped the present global crisis.

…

Editor: A collection the sub-headings is instructive:

I. MARKETS VERSUS VOTERS?

2. POST-WAR SETTLEMENTS

3. LOW INFLATION, HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT

4. DEREGULATION AND PRIVATE DEBT:

Editor: Under the rubric of 4. Deregulation and private debt:

This is not to say, however, that the Clinton administration had somehow found a way of pacifying a democratic-capitalist political economy without recourse to additional, yet-to-be-produced economic resources. The Clinton strategy of social-conflict management drew heavily on the deregulation of the financial sector that had already started under Reagan and was now driven further than ever before.11 Rapidly rising income inequality, caused by continuing de-unionization and sharp cuts in social spending, as well as the reduction in aggregate demand caused by fiscal consolidation, were counterbalanced by unprecedented new opportunities for citizens and firms to indebt themselves. The felicitous term, ‘privatized Keynesianism’, was coined to describe what was, in effect, the replacement of public with private debt.12 Instead of the government borrowing money to fund equal access to decent housing, or the formation of marketable work skills, it was now individual citizens who, under a debt regime of extreme generosity, were allowed, and sometimes compelled, to take out loans at their own risk with which to pay for their education or their advancement to a less destitute urban neighbourhood.

The Clinton policy of fiscal consolidation and economic revitalization through financial deregulation had many beneficiaries. The rich were spared higher taxes, while those among them wise enough to move their interests into the financial sector made huge profits on the ever-more complicated ‘financial services’ which they now had an almost unlimited license to sell. But the poor also prospered, at least some of them and for a while. Subprime mortgages became a substitute, however illusory in the end, for the social policy that was simultaneously being scrapped, as well as for the wage increases that were no longer forthcoming at the lower end of a ‘flexibilized’ labour market. For African-Americans in particular, owning a home was not just the ‘American dream’ come true but also a much-needed substitute for the old-age pensions that many were unable to earn in the labour markets of the day and which they had no reason to expect from a government pledged to permanent austerity.

…

5. SOVEREIGN INDEBTEDNESS

Editor: under the rubric of Sovereign Indebtedness

…

Financial liberalization thus compensated for an era of fiscal consolidation and public austerity. Individual debt replaced public debt, and individual demand, constructed for high fees by a rapidly growing money-making industry, took the place of state-governed collective demand in supporting employment and profits in construction and other sectors (Figure 4). These dynamics accelerated after 2001, when the Federal Reserve switched to very low interest rates to prevent an economic slump and the return of high unemployment this implied. In addition to unprecedented profits in the financial sector, privatized Keynesianism sustained a booming economy that became the envy not least of European labour movements. In fact, Alan Greenspan’s policy of easy money supporting the rapidly growing indebtedness of American society was held up as a model by European trade-union leaders, who noted with great excitement that, unlike the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve was bound by law not just to provide monetary stability but also high levels of employment. All of this, of course, ended in 2008 when the international credit pyramid on which the prosperity of the late 1990s and early 2000s had rested suddenly collapsed.

…

In the three years since 2008, distributional conflict under democratic capitalism has turned into a complicated tug-of-war between global financial investors and sovereign nation-states. Where in the past workers struggled with employers, citizens with finance ministers, and private debtors with private banks, it is now financial institutions wrestling with the very states that they had only recently blackmailed into saving them. But the underlying configuration of power and interests is far more complex and still awaits systematic exploration. For example, since the crisis financial markets have returned to charging different states widely varying interest rates, thereby differentiating the pressure they apply on governments to make their citizens acquiesce in unprecedented spending cuts—in line, again, with a basically unmodified market logic of distribution. Given the amount of debt carried by most states today, even minor increases in the rate of interest on government bonds can cause fiscal disaster.15 At the same time, markets must avoid pushing states into declaring sovereign bankruptcy, always an option for governments if market pressures become too strong. This is why other states have to be found that are willing to bail out those most at risk, in order to protect themselves from a general increase in interest rates on government bonds that the first default would cause. A similar type of ‘solidarity’ between states in the interest of investors is fostered where sovereign default would hit banks located outside the defaulting country, which might force the banks’ home countries once again to nationalize huge amounts of bad debt in order to stabilize their economies.

There are still more ways in which the tension in democratic capitalism between demands for social rights and the workings of free markets expresses itself today. Some governments, including the Obama administration, have attempted to generate renewed economic growth through even more debt—in the hope that future consolidation policies will be assisted by a growth dividend. Others may be secretly hoping for a return to inflation, melting down accumulated debt by softly expropriating creditors—which would, like economic growth, mitigate the political tensions to be expected from austerity. At the same time, financial markets may be looking forward to a promising fight against political interference, once and for all reinstating market discipline and putting an end to all political attempts to subvert it.

Further complications arise from the fact that financial markets need government debt for safe investment; pressing too hard for balanced budgets may deprive them of highly desirable investment opportunities. The middle classes of the advanced-capitalist countries have put a good part of their savings into government bonds, while many workers are now heavily invested in supplementary pensions. Balanced budgets would likely involve states having to take from their middle classes, in the form of higher taxes, what these classes now save and invest, among other things in public debt. Not only would citizens no longer collect interest, but they would also cease to be able to pass their savings on to their children. However, while this should make them interested in states being, if not debt-free, then reliably able to fulfil their obligations to their creditors, it may also mean that they have to pay for their government’s liquidity in the form of deep cuts in public benefits and services on which they also in part depend.

However complicated the cross-cutting cleavages in the emerging international politics of public debt, the price for financial stabilization is likely to be paid by those other than the owners of money, or at least of real money. For example, public-pension reform will be accelerated by fiscal pressures; and to the extent that governments default anywhere in the world, private pensions will be hit as well. The average citizen will pay—for the consolidation of public finances, the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of interest on the public debt and, if necessary, for another rescue of national and international banks—with his or her private savings, cuts in public entitlements, reduced public services and higher taxation.

6. SEQUENTIAL DISPLACEMENTS

7. POLITICAL DISORDER

Editor: The final paragraphs of the Streeck essay… does this essay answers some of Mr. David Smiths questions, about the vexing question of ‘low growth’ ?

As we now read almost every day in the papers, ‘the markets’ have begun to dictate in unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do for their citizens and what they must refuse them. The same Manhattan-based ratings agencies that were instrumental in bringing about the disaster of the global money industry are now threatening to downgrade the bonds of states that accepted a previously unimaginable level of new debt to rescue that industry and the capitalist economy as a whole. Politics still contains and distorts markets, but only, it seems, at a level far remote from the daily experience and organizational capacities of normal people: the us, armed to the teeth not just with aircraft carriers but also with an unlimited supply of credit cards, still gets China to buy its mounting debt. All others have to listen to what ‘the markets’ tell them. As a result citizens increasingly perceive their governments, not as their agents, but as those of other states or of international organizations, such as the imf or the European Union, immeasurably more insulated from electoral pressure than was the traditional nation-state. In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens.footnote¹⁹

Democracy is not just being pre-empted in those countries that are currently under attack by ‘the markets’. Germany, which is still doing relatively well economically, has committed itself to decades of public-expenditure cuts. In addition, the German government will again have to get its citizens to provide liquidity to countries at risk of defaulting, not just to save German banks but also to stabilize the common European currency and prevent a general increase in the rate of interest on public debt, as is likely to occur in the case of the first country collapsing. The high political cost of this can be measured in the progressive decay of the Merkel government’s electoral capital, resulting in a series of defeats in major regional elections over the past year. Populist rhetoric to the effect that perhaps creditors should also pay a share of the costs, as vented by the Chancellor in early 2010, was quickly abandoned when ‘the markets’ expressed shock by slightly raising the rate of interest on new public debt. Now the talk is about the need to shift, in the words of the German Finance Minister, from old-fashioned ‘government’, which is no longer up to the new challenges of globalization, to ‘governance’, meaning in particular a lasting curtailment of the budgetary authority of the Bundestag.footnote²⁰

The political expectations that democratic states are now facing from their new principals may be impossible to meet. International markets and institutions require that not just governments but also citizens credibly commit themselves to fiscal consolidation. Political parties that oppose austerity must be resoundingly defeated in national elections, and both government and opposition must be publicly pledged to ‘sound finance’, or else the cost of debt service will rise. Elections in which voters have no effective choice, however, may be perceived by them as inauthentic, which may cause all sorts of political disorder, from declining turnout to a rise of populist parties to riots in the streets.

One factor here is that the arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilization and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or the strategic reach of the ‘man in the street’. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own.footnote²¹ While this may generate apathy at the mass level and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behaviour. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd—at which point the only rational and responsible conduct would be to throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of haute finance. Where democracy as we know it is effectively suspended, as it already is in countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, street riots and popular insurrection may be the last remaining mode of political expression for those devoid of market power. Should we hope in the name of democracy that we will soon have the opportunity to observe a few more examples?

Social science can do little, if anything, to help resolve the structural tensions and contradictions underlying the economic and social disorders of the day. What it can do, however, is bring them to light and identify the historical continuities in which present crises can be fully understood. It also can—and must—point out the drama of democratic states being turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors, compared to which C. Wright Mills’s ‘power elite’ appears a shining example of liberal pluralism.footnote²² More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners. In fact, looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.

Click to access wolfgang-streeck-the-crises-of-democratic-capitalism.pdf

Editor: Mr. David Smith continues.

…

Stronger growth is by no means guaranteed, but we should not give up hope. In a presentation to clients, the economic consultancy Fathom asks the question, “The UK’s economic malaise — would a new government help?” It finds some evidence that governments with large majorities, which is what election polls suggest, deliver stronger growth. That was the case after the 1997 Labour landslide, when, admittedly in a friendlier global environment, the UK economy averaged 3.1 per cent growth for ten years. Fathom does not see the UK getting to that level, but in one scenario it has growth topping 2.5 per cent by the second half of 2026.

As the consultancy puts it: “Our initial premise is that there is scope for more and better investment. Greater government support for [research and development] spending could help … and according to recent research, every additional pound of publicly funded R&D may call forth as much as £8 of additional privately funded R&D.

“Our optimism is further boosted by the presence of long-term catalysts, such as the climate transition, as well as economic and national security concerns. These are compelling policymakers to expand their policy horizons and adopt a more strategic approach. Ultimately, creating a dynamic economy is about embracing risks and turning them into opportunities through strategic planning and investment, rather than suppressing risks with short-term, temporary measures.”

We need a bit of optimism. Let us hope it is not misplaced.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/will-a-labour-victory-solve-the-uks-growth-crisis-5xjzxdj0k

My attempt to find an explanatory frame, is to say the least, not exactly on target. Yet the Streeck essay offers what just might be a vital contemporary history of a Capitalism, whose servants like David Smith and The Times, offer a certain kind of faith, in a system that pays their salaries!

Political Reporter

Political Observer reads and comments.

Edward Fawcett was ‘formerly chief correspondent of The Economist’ that might lead The Reader to doubt his ability, to be an objective observer of the political scene, in both Britain and America? Because this is The Financial Times, and as such Fawcett’s political beliefs, his inherent prejudices, indeed his Conservatism, make an ideal choice to write a highly attuned propaganda, to a readership that shares in his political enthusiasm? The first two paragraphs takes it’s imperatives from a self-serving outline of the political territory.

These are bad times for conservatism’s self-image as the political tradition of good sense and stability. Britain’s exhausted Conservative party limps to defeat in the coming election under its fifth prime minister in just nine years. Its moderates have mostly fled or been driven out. Hard-right parties vie for primacy in Europe’s conservative mainstream. A convicted felon is on track to head the Republican ticket for president of the United States. 

Conservatism’s image always had a strong element of myth. Since the late 19th century, when most conservatives made peace with modern life, they have held out a golden but conflicted promise: flourishing capitalism and social stability. Capitalism harnesses technological progress to generate and — if democratic — to spread wealth. In doing so, it forever turns society upside down. Conservatives, accordingly, must be skilful circus-riders, cantering the ring with one foot on a pony called “Capital” and the other on a pony called “Tradition”

Edward Fawcett then uses part of Edward Luttwak’s 3222 word essay of 7, April 1994 to hold aloft his next 311 words!

That two-pony conflict was understood by the shrewd, far-sighted American conservative Edward Luttwak when, 30 long years ago, he foresaw the rise of today’s hard right. His article in the London Review of Books was provocatively titled “Why fascism is the wave of the future”.  

You can quarrel with the title as overblown or unhistorical, but Luttwak’s point was a good one. The typical conservative after-dinner speech, Luttwak wrote, was “a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one.” The question for today’s conservatives is if that double promise — be it delivered over a pay-for-a-chair dinner or to your phone — is still convincing.   

Hard as it looks, it’s worth recalling how well in electoral terms conservatives have turned the trick. Take a small but salient core of big parties. Since the Federal Republic’s founding in 1949, Germany’s Christian Democrats have shared or held office for 52 of those 75 years. France’s presidents have been on the centre-right for 39 of the past 65 years — 46 if you include the ex-Socialist Emmanuel Macron. The right-left balance is more even in the US but in Britain, Conservative dominance is striking: in the past 110 years, the Tory party has held or shared office for 76 of them.  

Doing that took skill and balance. Skills wear out, however. Runs come to an end. Some think that British conservatism as a centre-right tradition is already done for. Sir Oliver Letwin, a former Conservative minister and manifesto drafter, is convinced, as he has told me, “The party, as we’ve known it, is dead.” Not all Conservatives will agree with that, but something is happening to conservatism everywhere of which Britain’s Tories are an exemplary case. 

Edward Fawcett then resorts to subtitles, as the in-order-too of managing his ‘History Made To Measure’.

A tradition of conflict

Editor: This is what I find of interest:

…

In the US and Britain, the first-past-the-post voting system favours two big parties that enjoy wide reach and long life at the price of endemic inner conflict. American Republicans have — or long had — left and right wings. Globalist Dwight D Eisenhower kept Robert Taft Sr’s Americanist Republicans in check. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller fell to anti-liberal Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon held together Northern business and aggrieved white Southerners-turned-Republican. Since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the party has expunged its liberals and moved solidly and illiberally to the right. 

For Britain’s Tories, infighting is a second name. The party’s Cain-and-Abel history is biblical: Robert Peel vs Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain vs Lord Salisbury, Edward Heath’s “Wets” vs Margaret Thatcher’s “Dries”, Europeans vs anti-Europeans. Its taste for self-slaughter makes its record in office the more remarkable. That continuity alone — and the oddly rare use of the label “conservative” itself — has always encouraged the thought that British conservatism was notably pure and exceptional. It wasn’t and isn’t. The party’s collapse towards the hard right reflects a general weakening of the centre across western democracies

The hard right.

Editor: This is what I find of interest

To nail the type, the hard right is an unstable and uneven alliance of three tribes: free-market globalists, national welfarists and ethico-cultural traditionalists. Globalists want a small, nightwatchman state, with undemocratic freedom for foreign capital to come and go as it pleases. Welfarists want an effective state that cares for the national people and protects them from immigration. Globalists and welfarists disagree with each other on taxes, regulation and trade. They each combine smoothly enough with the traditionalists, whose sermons about moral decay and national decline they mimic or sit through out of tactical courtesy.   Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.

Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.

The Day After:

Editor: this is what I find of interest:

By comparison, the Conservatives’ 13 years in the wilderness after defeat in 1997 was fallow time. The party chose to copy Tony Blair and New Labour, above all in its devotion to presentation and style. No compelling picture of conservatism emerged. Borrowing Stanley Baldwin’s all-purpose and under-informative label “one-nation conservatism”, Cameronism was thin on content. Add their 14 years in office, and for more than a quarter of a century Conservatives have left obscure what it is they stand for. 

In search of ideas, Conservatives had, it is true, three handicaps. The first was a loss of geopolitical bearings after the end of the cold war, which the right shared with the left. That disadvantage is party-blind. Everyone is baffled. The second two, however, were distinctly Conservative. Thatcherism, love it or not, calcified into dogma, and the collective self-wounding of Brexit sucked time, thought and energy out of everything else in politics.

New Thinking :

Editor: look at this Cast of Characters!

Tory brains, Rupert Harrison, a former banker, George Osborne’s chief of staff, Adrian Wooldridge has called “Notting Hill conservatism”, the Conservative’s future lies in appealing to voters there, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s ideas person, the radical-turned-Conservative Unionist Joseph Chamberlain), Remaking One Nation (2020), The trouble is the demons. Liberals, for Timothy, are “tone deaf to voters, ignore community and short-change ‘love of Britishness’”. Patrick Deneen is a professor at the distinguished Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana and star of the American hard-right. In Regime Change (2023), At others, he came close to calling for an American theocracy, Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Hazony is the brains behind National Conservatism, In May 2023, Hazony’s foundation ran a three-day conference in London, which drew stars of the British hard-right, including Suella Braverman and Miriam Cates, as well as much bien pensant mockery from right as well as left.

Space left for liberal conservatives

Editor: These final paragraphs sum up this long meandering essay come to it’s end, yet he offers an almost pleasing, even a near poetic style!

No convincing narrative with rhetorical appeal is on offer either from an equally confused and silent liberal left. Well-identified problems and intelligent offers for their solution abound in a troubled liberal world but defences of that world itself and its values are barely heard. They are spoken for in well-hewn essays, yes, but not crowed and shouted as they ought to be.

Into that silence has burst the seductive, angry music of a hard right. The future health of conservatism in any historically recognisable form will depend a lot on whether or not there remains a strong voice in politics for liberal conservatives — the kind who do not need enemies.

https://www.ft.com/content/21cebba5-8dfd-4cf8-ad3d-ae1f4a81d9cc?xnpe_tifc=hkH7bDx7huYJxu4N4.olOMpJVdUZMds_O.4_x.1JOk4utIh_xfoA4kHp4ZJNOF_jtfe.4FxdbI1Z4fP.xMXX4fULh.suOFE_xF4sxuPL

Political Observer

Political Observer wonders where that ‘left wing’ might be? Not at The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The New Statesman.*

The regular reader has to wince at Janan Ganesh’s latest political commentary, that now places him in the company of the other columnists, who have mastered the unimaginative, indeed boring ‘Anti-Leftism’ of British Corporate Media. The head-line and sub-headline tell the story:

Headline: No, Starmer should not be bolder

Sub-headline: ‘Bold’ is media-speak for ‘left wing’, and Britain doesn’t need a left turn

https://www.ft.com/content/d17e5a66-b792-45a3-a1ff-8966219c75d1

The Patient Reader is ‘rewarded’ in the first three paragraphs:

Just a month now from power, Sir Keir Starmer, that uncomplaining recipient of advice from pundits who never thought he’d get here, is urged to be bolder in his plans for Britain.

Excellent. We all agree, then. Labour should draw up the loosest regulations on artificial intelligence in the G7, to attract AI investment. It should make extra spending on public services conditional on serious reform of them. (The test of seriousness is that trade unions protest on the streets.) It should question the point of a “binding” net zero law in a nation that contributes 1 per cent of global emissions. This party of workers should cut the out-of-work benefits bill to fund lower income tax. After the disgrace of the High Speed 2 rail project — the lost cash, the lost time — Whitehall should be accorded a smaller, not larger, role in economic management.

Editor: That’s settled, then. So nice to have a consensus… in what world!

That’s settled, then. So nice to have a consensus. What? Not that kind of boldness? You know, somehow I didn’t think so.

It reads as rather dubious sarcasm. Its like that once audacious stylist reverts to Ante-Leftism! From David Cameron, Mrs. May, Boris Johnson, to Liz Truss & Kwasi Kwarteng and then Sunak, demonstrates utter governmental incompetence? 14 years of certifiable incompetence doesn’t register with Ganesh. The Left is his target of choice.

“Bold” is a journalistic euphemism for “left wing”. Demanding boldness, like demanding “radicalism” and “vision”, has become a way of saying “tax and spend more”, without having to defend that position square-on.

Editor: Next in line is Potted History:

And no wonder. That defence is hard to mount. The tax burden in the UK is the highest since the 1950s. It is still lower than in much of continental Europe, true, but Britain isn’t continental Europe. It doesn’t have the single market to offer. Even when it did, the nation’s competitive advantage tended to be ease of doing business. (As opposed to French infrastructure or German technical skills.) Now, Labour already proposes to increase the non-wage labour costs on business through regulations. So, if I follow the argument of the “bold” camp, Starmer’s vision for Britain should be European taxes and European labour laws without the compensation of the European market. Might it not be simpler to put a “Closed For Business” sign at Heathrow arrivals?

Editor: When broken down into specificities, the case for boldness becomes unsettling, hence its reliance on euphemism and code. The Reader must wonder at the fact, that like his mentor/guru Tony Blair, Starmer is a Thatcherite/Neo-Liberal. He has purged The Left from the Labour Party, so the Ganesh’s essay is in search of a reason to be! While dragooning that ‘Left’ into the dubiousness of his fictional political reverie! Reader only 434 words to go!

Editor: A selection from that 434 words:

…

Given these constraints, Starmer’s plans are, in fact, on the ambitious side.

…

If boldness means statism, which it almost always does, Starmer doesn’t lack it.

…

Boldness is questionable policy, then. But it is worse politics.

…

First, the tired, rote-learned questions. “What is Starmerism?” “Will the real Keir Starmer please stand up?” (It doesn’t help that his name scans so well with the Eminem song.)

Editor: the reference to the Eminem’s song, pure pandering to his ‘hipster’ followers!

…

Then the nonsensical comparisons with predecessors. “Say what you will about Tony Blair, but you knew where you stood with him.” No, you didn’t. Blair in 1997 was accused of being foggy and evasive to the point of mendaciousness.

Editor: Starmer is Tony Blair’s political creature! Call it Thatcherism, with a botched face-lift ?

---

Editor: the last two paragraphs Ganesh makes the claim ‘Governing is like writing a column: you only find out what you believe by doing it for years, responding to real events’: this writer is tempted to opine that Ganesh does not just just write a column of opinion, but writes Anti-Left Propaganda, for a newspaper that shares in the most reactionary kind politics, whose only real competitor is The Economist! The last paragraphs of the Ganesh essay demonstrate his self-regard, that has blossomed into the narcissism of the Pundit Class!

There is a misunderstanding here about politics. Governing is like writing a column: you only find out what you believe by doing it for years, responding to real events. Your -ism, if you have one, becomes clear in retrospect. Even Thatcherism ended up meaning something different, less monetarist, than it did at its inflation-obsessed start. Who would have guessed that the coy Blair of 1997 would flood the public sector with cash and retire a war leader?

It wasn’t that he withheld his true intent from voters. He just couldn’t know the circumstances in which he would govern, or even his own instincts under duress. And that was a stabler world than ours. So how on earth could Starmer? He has given about as clear a sense of what he will do as most leaders of the opposition. It is bold to a fault.

Political Observer

* All these publication defamed Corbyn!

Political Observer opens a door?

Mr. Ganesh’s ‘politicking’ reaches into the the most unlikely places, and chooses unlikely persons to make his arguments! Wedded to self-congratulation about his imagined victory about ‘low birth rates’ and the underserving retirees: ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ! In its way it echoes Mitt Romney 47 % of
2012, that cost him the election. The perpetual Boulevardier now steps into the quicksand of a variety of exhausted Neo-Liberal cliches, without the rhetorical curlicues, that once set apart his pronouncements.

Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.

And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.

This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?

Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.

Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.

And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.

This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?

Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/2d3f1019-0981-4f39-8e4f-653aea1344e0

Establishing with The Reader that he is ‘one of the fellas’ buy way of this enthusiasm for the game, and choosing ‘Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather’ as paradigmatic of those ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ?

Editor: But Ganesh can’t seem to self-emancipate from evocative references:

…
And now look. I don’t know if another Champions League title with this loose and expressive Madrid team will bring, in some kind of Hegelian antithesis, a turn in the tide against over-coaching.

…

The value of Ancelotti’s age isn’t prudence, then. It is almost the opposite: a defiance of convention, born of being long past caring about one’s reputation. Some of that insouciance was innate, no doubt. But it would have grown, not waned, with time.

…

With his tariffs and subsidies, Joe Biden, 81, building on the work of Donald Trump, 77, has changed the world. (For the worse, I think.)

…

Editor: Ganesh political reach at high velocity:

America’s pro-trade consensus was paper-thin to begin with. The 2008 financial crash then enhanced the prestige of the state. The speed with which protectionism has become the new common sense in Washington suggests the two men were pushing at an open door.

…

Editor: the pejorative ‘old people’ : in sum its reduced to a trans-generational conflict ?

Sometimes, in old people, it manifests as rudeness. But it has a constructive upside in this appetite for heresy.

…

It is hard to know the active ingredient that makes people carefree with age. It might be that near-term unpopularity seems trivial next to death.

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Either way, the equation of youth with risk-taking, and age with conformism, needs adjustment.

Editor: In the final paragraphs Ganesh reverts to Cultural Critique, steeped in  disingenuousness garnished with the fatuous!

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There is an exhibition at the British Museum now on Michelangelo’s last decades. The drawings show the artist in furious argument with himself. Here he changes the head of a figure beside the crucified Jesus. There he has several goes at an airborne angel on the one page. It is like looking at the scribbled marginalia of Shakespeare.

Well, we are going to need late-life restlessness from more and more citizens. Reducing their potential contribution to that of temperance and caution isn’t just a cliché. It ignores a world that is being turned upside down by those who aren’t long for it.

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

I was not familiar with the Pamela Paul, here is how the New Yorker’s Molly Fischer titles her essay on Paul:

The Rules According to Pamela Paul At the Times,

Paul often writes on the hazards of shifting norms. But she’s also revealed the fraught position of the opinion columnist.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rules-according-to-pamela-paul

Pamela Paul closing paragraphs is awash in the ‘scolding’ of dissenting students. Hardly a surprise. History might offer something of value, on the vexing question of ‘student protests’ ? Some of her readership might recall vividly Mario Savio of of 1964:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ES6tjnJ9_XU?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

To put it bluntly Pamela Paul is a Careerist who has found a safe position at The New York Times: examining ‘on the hazards of shifting norms’ where her political conformity is of value: to a newspaper attached to the most toxic expressions of what the New York Times most values, political conformity. The Reader need only look at it’s triad of commentators : Friedman, Brooks, Stephens as evidence of that fact!

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For decades, employers used elite colleges as a kind of human resources proxy to vet potential candidates and make their jobs easier by doing a first cut. Given that those elite schools were hotbeds of activism this year, that calculus may no longer prove as reliable. Forbes reported that employers are beginning to sour on the Ivy League. “The perception of what those graduates bring has changed. And I think it’s more related to what they’re actually teaching and what they walk away with,” an architectural firm told Forbes.

The American university has long been seen as a refuge from the real world, a sealed community unto its own. The outsize protests this past year showed that in a social media-infused, cable-news-covered world, the barrier has become more porous. What flies on campus doesn’t necessarily pass in the real world.

The toughest lesson for young people of this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision.

…

As a newspaper reader since 1960, Pamela Paul represents what used to be called ‘hard-hitting’, when men were ascendent in newspaper business. Though Paul engages in the ‘shaming’ of students with a certain gusto, once reserved for that cadre of entitled males. In sum, its the same old grift!

Political Observer

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P. S. Pamela Paul on Journalistic Ethics

Coming from a decade in the newsroom and two decades as a freelance writer, I apply those same standards and rigor to my work as an Opinion columnist. I always write what I believe to be accurate and true, even if it means presenting facts and opinions that challenge readers rather than reaffirm their preconceptions or preferences. I strive to write about complicated issues with clarity, nuance and sensitivity. I never blurb books. I avoid or disclose potential conflicts. I prefer to express my opinions on platforms other than social media. You can read this to learn more about our ethical guidelines.

Editor: Self-congratulation is no stranger to Pamela Paul!

Political Observer comments.

The Reader confronts the latest of Mr. Ganesh’s essays, with his ability to view the 14 years of Tory rule, that has been shortsighted, across a range of issues. To express it in the blandest terms: which just might be the raison d’etre of this Ganesh intervention? The trivialization serves as the backdrop, for an apologetic that simply muddies the waters, of what an actual critical evaluation of those 14 years might be argued!

Boris Johnson, 2017: “We hear that we’re first in line to do a great trade deal with the US.” Liz Truss, 2019: “My main priority now will be agreeing a free trade deal with the US.” Dominic Raab, a cabinet eminence at around the same time: “President Trump has made clear again that he wants an ambitious trade agreement with the UK.”

Then Rishi Sunak on the same subject last summer. “For a while now, that has not been a priority for either the US or UK.” Oh.

This government’s single greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US.

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Mr. Ganesh’s political myopia eventuates, realizes itself , into an expression of a self-serving political refraction, that might capture the The Reader’s attention, in the moment. But on reflection is judged as disingenuous? And or leads The Reader to treat this as propaganda?

Editor: Brexit in the next paragraph becomes the ‘Paradise Lost’ in this narrative. A a huge bet on the economic openness of America is then argued as Derrida might have argued it, as an aporia ?

Brexit was, from the start, a huge bet on the economic openness of America. A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with America, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries.

Editor: I’ll select some quotes from the remainder of the essay.

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In essence, the nation staked its future on trade at the exact historical moment that it fell out of favour as an idea. It is the geostrategic equivalent of investing one’s life savings in a DVD manufacturer circa 2009.

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Anyone with a passing knowledge of Washington could have warned them not to confuse the place for a free-market bastion.

In 1992, the trade sceptic Ross Perot won 19 per cent of the national vote as an independent presidential candidate.

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Editor: Potted American History:

Look at the dates here. This was the high summer of “neoliberalism”. Imagine how much stronger the protectionist impulse was in normal times. Or rather than imagine, check the record. It shows the tariff walls of the 1800s. It shows the statism of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t an interwar aberration.

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But protectionist sentiment is a force in American life to an extent that it can’t be in a mid-sized, resource-poor archipelago. It is then transformed into policy via sectoral lobby groups of a scale and sophistication that must be seen up close to be believed.

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If I lived in a continental-scale market with superabundant resources, I’d need a lot of persuading from David Ricardo and The Economist that I am still better off trading. But that is the point. The Tories think the crucial fact about America is that it is made up of Britain’s “cousins”. (It isn’t, unless we are consulting the census of 1810.)

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After that, the next most important fact is its status. America is defending a position as the world’s number one power.

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Editor: Mr. Ganesh must realize that the Hegemon does as it pleases. The very history of Britain is defined by that practice, that claim!

One needn’t admire this about the US. One can suspect it of hysteria, in fact. But the job of a British government is to fathom these things before betting the nation’s entire future on a hunch that America will forever uphold world trade.

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Editor: the final paragraphs of this churlish meandering philippic come to an end!

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This mistake came from “Atlanticist” Tories, remember — the ones who read Andrew Roberts and track the exact co-ordinates of the Churchill bust in the White House. (Barack Obama was hated for moving it.) Well, after giving it all that, these people failed on their own terms. They failed to understand US politics. Britain will foot the bill of their error for decades.

“Trade”: even the moral connotation of the word is distinct in each nation. It has had a high-minded ring to it in Britain ever since the abolition of the Corn Laws helped to feed the working poor. In America, where the cotton-exporting Confederates were free-traders, history isn’t quite so clear-cut. It is almost as if these are different countries.

https://www.ft.com/content/8f229e15-9842-46ce-a828-19647a48f6d6

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Political Observer

Old Socialist comments

It’s quite surprising that the Newspapers like The Financial Time and The New Statesman sends me daily updates of their latest commentaries on politics. The Financial Times accepts my money, but blocks me from commenting on any of the news reports, or the commentaries of their writers.

Today, May 29, 2024 Stephen Bush Columnist & Associate Editor sent me this:

Title: Lead the way

Are the polls exaggerating Labour’s lead? Matt Singh, the pollster who called the 2015 poll miss, ponders this question in his newsletter. He concludes that there are no “red flags” similar to that in 1992 or 2015, and that at most the Labour lead is only in the lower end of what pollsters are predicting. Still, this points to a landslide defeat, and as James Kanagasooriam explains over on FocalData’s blog, Labour doesn’t need that large a lead to win comfortably, as its coalition is now pretty electorally efficient.

I agree with James and Matt, and have little to add on this topic, other than that if we look at what Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are doing, it is pretty clear that they don’t think the polls are wrong.

Starmer is campaigning like a man who has a large opinion poll lead and whose focus is on reassuring voters and not doing anything to mess it up.

Sunak, meanwhile, is campaigning like someone who doesn’t really believe that he can win the election but just needs to get enough Reform voters back into the Tory fold to avoid a disaster. See, for instance, his latest set of proposals. First, a commitment to keep raising the threshold on which pensioners start paying tax so they will never pay tax on the state pension, a so-called quadruple lock. This will keep the tax base narrower than it needs to be, but the commitment is made safe in the knowledge Sunak won’t actually have to keep it. His policy of bringing back national service is similarly riddled with holes. And today the Tories have pledged that funding towards the degrees that are “not performing well” would be diverted towards apprenticeships (under the promise, about one in eight undergraduate degrees would be shut down, the Tories estimate).

What these all have in common is that they are squarely focused on people who voted Tory in 2019, but are currently saying they will vote Reform, or not at all.

Our polling toy will gradually update to include more assumptions about tactical voting — which we can assume will increase the Liberal Democrat seat total. But for now, it is a good way of gauging the Conservative-Labour battle and a reminder that as it stands, both parties are assuming that the polls suggesting Labour are on course to win are about right.

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Under the rubric of Top stories today:

• Whip restored to Diane Abbott | Veteran MP Diane Abbott was readmitted to the Parliamentary Labour party yesterday following her suspension for remarks about Jewish people. Abbott confirmed today that she has been banned from standing for Labour in July’s election.

• Battle pavilions | For Keir Starmer to win a House of Commons Labour majority of just one, he must gain about 125 seats on July 4. Given the party’s record postwar defeat in 2019, that would be a big achievement. In Scotland, Labour is locked in a fight with the Scottish National party, in what will be a pivotal election north of the border. Here are the places where the election will be fought and won.
• Neutral tones | Some of the UK’s biggest companies are refusing to back either of the main parties ahead of the country’s general election, as businesses attempt to avoid being drawn into partisan politics.
• Right as Rayne | Angela Rayner will face no further action from Greater Manchester Police or Stockport council following claims that she broke electoral law by failing to properly disclose her main residence in official documents.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

This followed with an evocative, full color graph! Yet there are certain lacuna, empty spaces, within the whole of of Mr. Bush’s political commentary e.g. : George Galloway’s win in Rochdale, Jeremy Corbin’s running as an independent, with Diane Abbott to do the same? Mr. Galloway and his The Workers Party of Britain are running other alternative candidates to the Tory/New Labour Political Monochrome! Perhaps that Political Monochrome, and its well paid Propogandists/Technocrats, will confront another kind of Politics , not rooted in Corporatist Imperatives?

Old Socialist