It takes The Reader five paragraphs before she reaches the beginning of Caldwell’s long soliloquy to Todd.
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
Since then, what Mr. Todd writes about current events has tended to be received in Europe as prophecy. His book “After the Empire,” predicting the “breakdown of the American order,” came out in 2002, in the flush of post-9/11 national cohesion and before the debacle of the Iraq war, to which Mr. Todd was fiercely opposed. Anglophone (his doctorate is from Cambridge) and Anglophile (at least at the start of his career), he has grown steadily disillusioned with the United States, even anti-American.
Mr. Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine, but his argument is not the now-familiar historical one made by the dissident political scientist John Mearsheimer. Like Mr. Mearsheimer, Mr. Todd questions the zealous expansion of NATO under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the neoconservative ideology of democracy promotion and the official demonization of Russia. But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.
In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.
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Let me sample some sentences, paragraphs, featuring Mr. Todd:
Mr. Todd contends that Americans’ heedless plunge into the global economy was a mistake.
In an advanced, highly educated society like ours, Mr. Todd argues, too many people aspire to the work of running things and bossing people around.
Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers.
As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world.
A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer.
Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.”
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones.
The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam.
The final three paragraphs, featuring political moralizing!
One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
Until some new consensus emerges, President Biden is misrepresenting his country in presenting it as stable and unified enough to commit to anything. Ukrainians are learning this at a steep cost.
Newspaper Reader & Political Cynic
To The Reader,
Malise Ruthven devastating review of Caldwell’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West’ . It is indicative of the Neo-Conservative World View, of it’s time and political place . ‘The Other’ is the focus of the successors of Western Colonizers that became ‘The War On Terror’ of the Bush/Cheney cabal:
AT WAR
At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.
The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.
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Mr. Caldwell now finds Emmanuel Todd’s riffing on the themes of Oswald Spengler, as a comfortable home, for the end point of his career as a Neo-Conservative? Or is Todd acting as a point of departure, for the coming War with Russia, China and others bid actors, like the Houthi?
Mr. Brooksseems to think/believe that his readership is gullible and or clueless?
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In a magnificent 1949 essay on Churchill, Isaiah Berlin noticed that Churchill idealized his fellow Brits with such intensity that he lifted “a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatizing their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armor.”
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Mr. Brooks ‘forgets’ that Berlin defamed Isaac Deutscher, and cost Deutscher an academic position.
The Hedgehog and the Hedgehog: Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher
By David Mikics August 10, 2013
Here is a descriptive paragraph of Caute’s argument about the Berlin, Deutscher controversy, that was once a secret of Academic Mendacity: as a way of viewing Berlin as ‘as elitist snob’ and seeing Deutscher as victim of Berlin’s abuse of the power of position, in Academic Life.
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Caute paints Berlin as something of an elitist snob, in his words a “coddled bourgeois.” Surely Berlin reveled in the good life, but to imagine with Caute that this fact invalidates his arguments is rather silly. And on Berlin’s aesthetic preferences Caute falls down completely. Caute faults Berlin for spending too much time in his most famous work, The Hedgehog and the Fox, discussing Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, with their upper-class milieux, rather than (this is Caute’s suggestion) Walter Greenwood’s “memorable Love on the Dole (1933),” which Berlin’s Soviet hosts were shocked he had not read when they asked him about it on a 1945 visit. Caute laments the fact that Berlin never referred to Gorky and sees class prejudice in this omission. But Berlin would surely argue that his favorites Tolstoy and Turgenev tell us far more about the reality of human life than Gorky or the justly forgotten Greenwood. Caute seems to yearn for the good old days of socialist realism, when the worth of a piece of fiction could easily be deduced from whether it sympathetically portrayed working-class life and showed the wealthy to be corrupt fiends. These are the standards of propaganda, not art, and they had a devastating effect on writers in the Soviet bloc. Berlin, whose 1945 meeting in Leningrad with Anna Akhmatova was, according to his biographer Michael Ignatieff, the most important event of his life, cared deeply about the writers persecuted by Stalin. Deutscher, by contrast, seemed indifferent to the fate of art under Communism.
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On the question of Michael Ignatieff , his fawning interview with Berlin is hard to understand, or even follow. Yet Ignatieff’s fawning ‘interview’ with The Great Man, evokes embarrassment in the befuddled viewer.
The Reader confronts JD Vance ‘often vitriolic Trumpist’ whose ‘criticism is essentially correct.’ Trump is the Political Monster created by The New Democrats, The Republican and the Neo-Conservatives: Constanze Stelzenmüller is part of that Neo-Conservative cadre!
Two weeks ago, Republican US senator JD Vance told an audience at the Munich Security Conference that “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet”. In a follow-up article for this newspaper, he singled out Germany as “the most important economy in Europe, but it relies on imported energy and borrowed military strength”.
The senator is a combative, often vitriolic Trumpist, and one of the fiercest opponents of a US aid package that includes $60bn for Ukraine, which is currently held up in Congress. Not a few Republicans find him an easy man to dislike. But recent events in Europe suggest that his criticism is essentially correct.
The next paragraph expresses ? and scolds via ‘disarray and fecklessness’
Yes, the Europeans managed to approve a €50bn aid package for Ukraine last month, and as Germany’s leaders never tire of pointing out, they are Kyiv’s second biggest supporters after the US. Major European states have signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine. But at a time of multiplying security challenges, the overwhelming message from Europe has been one of disarray and fecklessness. That is particularly true of Berlin.
Here is a source that might cause Stelzenmüller more distress ?
April 20 2021
Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the United States Pulls Back
The Abstract give The Reader valuable information:
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Europe’s security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade amid Russia’s resurgence, mounting doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. security commitment, and Europe’s growing aspiration for strategic autonomy. This changed security landscape raises an important counterfactual question: Could Europeans develop an autonomous defense capacity if the United States withdrew completely from Europe? The answer to this question has major implications for a range of policy issues and for the ongoing U.S. grand strategy debate in light of the prominent argument by U.S. “restraint” scholars that Europe can easily defend itself. Addressing this question requires an examination of the historical evolution as well as the current and likely future state of European interests and defense capacity. It shows that any European effort to achieve strategic autonomy would be fundamentally hampered by two mutually reinforcing constraints: “strategic cacophony,” namely profound, continent-wide divergences across all domains of national defense policies—most notably, threat perceptions; and severe military capacity shortfalls that would be very costly and time-consuming to close. As a result, Europeans are highly unlikely to develop an autonomous defense capacity anytime soon, even if the United States were to fully withdraw from the continent.
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Stelzenmüller experiences gloom:
Imagine if they all had signed a detailed pledge to defend Ukraine and Europe, and then stood on the stage together to say: “Russia: your aggression will not stand. We will do whatever it takes to stop you. America: We still need your help (and thank you!), but we hear you, and are racing to become much more self-sufficient.”
But that didn’t happen. Germany’s key partners, French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, didn’t even come. And things have been going swiftly downhill since then.
The essay builds upon the mendacity of the actors in her melodrama, to this end point:
This is the brutal truth: the two key actors in continental Europe are bungling the strategic response to Europe’s greatest security threat in a generation, while Ukraine’s future is hanging by a thread.
France, its president’s acrobatics notwithstanding, at least has a powerful deterrent in its nuclear weapons. Germany’s government — despite its immense financial commitments and frenetic efforts to produce more weapons — appears to think that clinging to the US is a grand plan. Where it ought to have a Europe strategy, or a Russia strategy, there is a conceptual void. And the only thing it is deterring is itself.
To put is bluntly Constanze Stelzenmüller is a de-facto member of The American National Security State, as she directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution.
Newspaper Reader offer a excerpts from Anthony Julius ‘T. S. Eliot , Anti-Semitism and literary form’ as an alternative to Noah Feldman’s ‘Second Front’?
March 6, 2024
@NoahRFeldman has opened the ‘Second Front’ in the Gaza Genocide! In defence of The Zionist Fascist State, by manufacturing an ‘Anti-Semitism crisis’ within American life and its politics. From his position ‘Professor at @Harvard_Law and as a columnist for Bloomberg @opinion and his ‘essay’ in Time magazine .
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The means Israel has used are subject to legitimate criticism for killing too many civilians as collateral damage. But Israel’s military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war. There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.
To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack. The child is equally innocent, and the parents’ sorrow equally profound. As a matter of international law, however, the difference is decisive. During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.
The mythical ‘West’ is sinking in the mire of Zionist Apologetics for Genocide, while the political awakening of the Global South, China, and BRICS ,which offers an alternative that other fading mythology of the ‘Post-War Liberal Order’ , and its cognates. Reader note that ‘the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has created a Council of Councils (CoC).’ as an expression of meta, as the beyond point of what has come before!
Headline: The BRICS Summit 2023: Seeking an Alternate World Order?
Mission Statement
The defining foreign policy challenges of the twenty-first century are global in nature. To help direct high-level international attention and effective policy responses to these threats and opportunities, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has created a Council of Councils (CoC). The CoC is composed of twenty-seven major policy institutes from some of the world’s most influential countries. It is designed to facilitate candid, not-for-attribution dialogue and consensus-building among influential opinion leaders from both established and emerging nations, with the ultimate purpose of injecting the conclusions of its deliberations into high-level foreign policy circles within members countries.
Eliot’s Anti-Semitic poetry is both of a very high order and profoundly noxious. It is art speech and hate speech.
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Page 331:
I propose instead an adversarial stance. One that maintains one’s relation to the work. , but argues with it. This notion of adversarial reading is, if anything, self-defensive. It is not prosecutorial. It is a reading that acknowledges the offense to the reader. It does not suppress that offense, or wish it away. But nor does it reject the work. Indifference to the offense given these poems is a false interpretation. They insult Jews ,I argue. To ignore these insults e poems is to misread the poems. And if one is addressed as a Jew, isn’t it reasonable to responds as one?
US Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can remain on Colorado ballot
Decision is victory for former president and removes one obstacle in his run for White House US Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can remain on Colorado ballot
The Reader might start her inquiry of this Financial Times ‘report’ by this essay about Schenck v. United States: which is relevant to the Trump decision, no matter the resistance of the Oxbridger cadre of the Financial Times!
Analogies get misused all the time. Take, for example, the other famous metaphor Holmes introduced into American free speech law: namely, the metaphor of the “free trade,” or marketplace of ideas. This metaphor is frequently invoked on the other side of free speech debates, to suggest that speech regulation is somehow illegitimate because it interferes with the operation of an ideal speech market. Like the analogy to false cries of fire in a theater, the evocative power of this metaphor makes it a powerful weapon in free speech debates, and one that gets used to justify a deregulatory conception of free speech that ignores plenty of evidence of market failures in many arenas.
That analogies can be misused does not mean, however, that we should—or could—embrace an analogy-free legal debate. Analogies are also useful because they translate difficult conceptual ideas into more accessible language. They concretize complicated concepts and therefore broaden the base of people who can engage in the relevant debates. They can even, as is the case with the fire meme, be enlightening by highlighting the false factual premises that the analogizer is relying on.
This is why, even though we had some hesitation about adding fuel to the (ahem) fire of the debate about Holmes’ analogy, we thought it worthwhile to explore what not-so-flickering light the fire meme sheds on First Amendment law. To dismiss the invocation of the meme as a sign of ignorance or stupidity is to try to transform an important legal, public, and cultural debate about the proper regulation of speech in modern society into a technocratic debate about “holdings” and “dicta” (which, to reiterate, is a poor description of the meme’s doctrinal status today!) and to distract from the substantive issue.
The focus should remain on what is really troubling about most uses of the meme: not the invocation of a hypothetical that states a valid principle of First Amendment law, but the mistaken supposition about how people are affected by information they consume that motivates many of those who invoke the analogy in contemporary debates. False and inflammatory speech online is equated with speech acts that have coercive force. Participants in public discourse are too often characterized as mere automatons who can be made to join a stampede (or storming of the Capitol) at any moment. It is better to confront this incorrect view head-on even if that is harder to do than attempting to extinguish cries of false cries of fire in theaters.
In this case ‘no matter how odious’ Trump may be to the bourgeoise politics of the Financial Times. Reader recall :
Eugene Debs: When a prisoner ran for president
By Thomas Doherty April 21, 2023
Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
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On April 4, 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indictment of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump on 34 felony charges related to alleged crimes involving bookkeeping on a 7-year-old hush money payment to an adult film actress.
Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024, in any case. Yet if he does, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from the Big House.
In the election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail.
Debs was behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition. It was a not a bum rap. Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust, the Sedition Act of 1918.
The act was an anti-free speech measure passed at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson. The law made it illegal for a U.S. citizen to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government” or to discourage compliance with the draft or voluntary enlistment into the military.
By the time he was imprisoned for sedition, Eugene Victor Debs had enjoyed a lifetime of running afoul of government authority. Born in 1855 into bourgeois comfort in Terre Haute, Indiana, he worked as a clerk and a grocer before joining the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and finding his vocation as an advocate for labor.
“The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive Parties are but branches of the same capitalistic tree,” he told a cheering mass of people in Madison Square Garden during the 1912 campaign. “They all stand for wage slavery.”
In April 1917, when America joined World War I’s bloodbath in Europe, Debs became a fierce opponent of American involvement in what he saw as a death cult orchestrated by rapacious munitions manufacturers. On May 21, 1918, wary of a small but energized and eloquent anti-war movement, Wilson signed the Sedition Act into law.
Debs would not be muzzled. One June 18, 1918, in an address in Canton, Ohio, he declared that American boys were “fit for something better than for cannon fodder.”
In short order, he was arrested and convicted of violating the Sedition Act. At his sentencing, he told the judge he would not retract a word of his speech even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. “I ask for no mercy, plead for no immunity,” he declared. After a brief stint in the West Virginia Federal Penitentiary, he was sent to serve out his sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
Imprisonment only enhanced Debs’ status with his followers. On May 13, 1920, at its national convention in New York, the Socialist Party unanimously nominated “Convict 2253” as its standard bearer for the presidency. Debs was later given new digits, so the campaign buttons read “For President, Convict No. 9653.”
As Debs’ name was entered into nomination, a wave of emotion swept over the delegates, who cheered for 30 minutes before bursting into a rousing chorus of the “Internationale,” the communist anthem.
Yet Debs did not let incarceration keep his message from the voters. In a wry response to Harding’s “front porch” campaign style, in which the Republican candidate received visits from the front porch of his home in Marion, Ohio, the Socialist Party announced that its candidate would conduct a “front cell” campaign from Atlanta.
In 1920, broadcast radio was not a factor in electioneering, but another electronic medium was just beginning to be exploited for political messaging. On May 29, 1920, in a carefully choreographed event, newsreel cameras filmed a delegation from the Socialist Party arriving at the Atlanta penitentiary to inform Debs officially of his nomination. The intertitles of the silent screen described “the most unusual scene in the political history of America – Debs, serving a ten-year term for ‘seditious activities,’ accepts Socialist nomination for Presidency.”
After accepting “a floral tribute from Socialist women voters,” the “Moving Picture Weekly” reported, the denim-clad Debs was shown giving “a final affectionate farewell” before heading “back to the prison cell for nine years longer.”
At motion picture theaters across the nation, audiences watched the staged ritual and, depending on their party registration, reacted with cheers or hisses.
The New York Times was aghast that a felon might canvass for votes from the motion picture screen.
“Under the influence of this unreasoning mob psychology, the acknowledged criminal is nightly applauded as loudly as many of the candidates for the Presidency who have won their honorable eminence by great and unflagging service to the American people,” read an editorial from June 12, 1920.
Public opinion turns
On Nov. 2, 1920, when the election results came in, Harding had trounced his Democratic opponent by a record electoral majority, 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127, with 60.4% of the popular vote to Cox’s 34.1%. Debs was a distant third, but he had won 3.4% of the electorate – 913,693 votes. Debs’ personal best showing was in the presidential election of 1912, with 6% of the vote. To be fair, that was when he was more mobile.
Even with the Great War over and the Sedition Act repealed by a repentant U.S. Congress on Dec. 13, 1920, President Wilson, during his final months in office, steadfastly refused to grant Debs a pardon. But public opinion had turned emphatically in favor of the convict-candidate. President Harding, who took office in March 1921, finally commuted his sentence, effective on Christmas Day, 1921, along with that of 23 other Great War prisoners of conscience convicted under the Sedition Act.
As Debs exited the prison gates, his fellow inmates cheered. He raised his hat in one hand, his cane in the other, and waved back at them. Outside, the newsreel cameras were waiting to greet him.
As senile Old Joe tries to appear, as something other than a Zionists lap-dog, by his Air-Drop of food to the Palestinians: that reeked havoc and death on a desperate population: an enforced famine continues! Trump is a political inevitability. The New-Democrats, The Republicans, The Neo-Cons birthed Trump and recoil at the Monster they made. Not to speak of the fact that this Political Triad offers nothing!
Not at all surprising that former Neo-Con, now ‘Liberal’ Fukuyama is plowing the same field that he furrowed in December 8, 2013, with a new cast of characters:
The Ties That Used To Bind
The Decay of American Political Institutions
Francis Fukuyama
We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.
The Democrats have a lot of work to do to wake people up to the magnitude of the challenge the country faces. If that happens, there is a possibility that, rather than eking out another narrow victory, they will win decisively. If that happens, they can begin to think about reforms that will reverse the process of decay. Believers in a classically liberal America need to reduce the ability of political minorities to stymie majorities, and streamline our impossibly complex processes and procedures to make government more effective. But first, they need to win.
What Stephen Bush offers is jejune at best, even garnished with a three color chart, an actual thought process would have helped! This wan paragraph is all The Reader gets.
What does the Rochdale by-election indicate? Not a lot, given that the Labour party abandoned its candidate too late to replace him on the ballot paper and it was too late for the Liberal Democrats — who do have a history in this constituency — to mount a serious crack at it. George Galloway’s campaign was essentially the only serious, organised political machine in town and he duly triumphed handsomely and emphatically despite a very impressive performance by David Tully, a local businessman running as an independent. Galloway won nearly 40 per cent of the vote at 12,335 votes, and Tully came in second at 6,638 votes.
Until it is shanghaied buy this political chatter:
It does suggest a couple of things about the national picture, though. First and foremost, if I were a Scottish National party MP in Glasgow, I would be feeling very happy this morning. I would feel that this result suggests that I can leverage the difference between the SNP and Labour positions on the Israel-Hamas war to my electoral advantage.
Apply Occam’s razor to the question, Mr. Bush must be an Oxbridger !
Occam’s razor, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”
The first 570 word chatter is taken up with the paradigmatic figure of Howard Buffet, father of Warren Buffett. Reader proceed with caution when reading Buckley’s protege! A potted history of the Republican Party, with its focus on Howard Buffet, as the major actor, that is then displaced by Brook’s ‘History Made to Measure’ a creature of the opportunism. Enter ‘Historian/Apologist’ Matthew Continetti:
In his superb history of conservatism, “The Right,” Matthew Continetti describes dueling essays in 1989 between the conservative commentators Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan that ran in the pages of The National Interest. Krauthammer argued that America should steer the world away from an unstable multipolar order and toward a more stable “unipolar world whose center is a confederated West.” Buchanan, one of the few remaining spokesmen for the older, isolationist G.O.P., titled his essay “America First — and Second and Third.”
At that time, the party embraced Krauthammer’s vision and rejected Buchanan’s. Within a decade Pat Buchanan had left the Republican Party, thoroughly marginalized. In 1999 the editors of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, where I worked, celebrated Buchanan’s departure from the party. In that same issue I wrote a humor piece trying to imagine the most hilariously unlikely version of the G.O.P. future. That piece was headlined “Donald Trump Inaugurated.”
Mr. Brooks then ventures in into the realm of Psychohistory, or its pastiche.
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It turns out that some political tendencies never really die; they just lie dormant for a few decades, waiting for the emotional mood to change. It’s conventional to say that Trump destroyed the postwar Republican establishment. That’s not quite right. The Tea Party’s extreme disgust with the course of American life was already flowing by 2009. The Pew Research Center detected a surge in American isolationism back in 2013. In 2004 only 8 percent of Republicans thought the United States’ power in world affairs was declining. By 2013, after Iraq and Afghanistan, 74 percent of Republicans thought American was in decline. By 2021, nearly a third of Republicans thought violence might be necessary to save America. …
Speaking of ‘some political tendencies never really die’ : the Reader needs to acquaint herself with Brooks’ celebration of War & Patriotism, of a particular kind:
People often say that history is a battle of ideas, but sometimes it is just a succession of moods. It was a culture of pessimism — Trump’s belief that we’re living in an era of “American carnage” — that restored the old G.O.P., not any set of arguments. America has a dazzling economy and dominant military strength. Military spending as a percentage of G.D.P. is dangerously close to its postwar low. But the Republicans apparently lack the self-confidence to believe they can improve the world, or the willpower to substantially try.
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And this wan final paragraph, Howard Buffett makes his return!
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Some of my friends believe that after Trump the showman is off the stage, the future of the G.O.P. will be up for grabs. I disagree. Today’s Republicanism has deep roots in American history. I suspect the post-Trump Republicans will be just as inward-looking, but drab and defeatist, without the Trumpian razzle dazzle. Howard Buffett would feel at home.
Mr. Brooks is a New York Times Public Intellectual! The virtues of this form of life is a self-serving political/moral conformity, and a long career at The Paper of Record. The New York Times is the propaganda organ for The American National Security State!
Tom Friedman’s latest essay focuses on the question of Israel’s loosing ‘acceptance’. Mr. Friedman’s attempt to impresses his readership with his world travels. And the almost hand-wringing white washing, of the Genocide practiced Netanyahu, aided by American arms and material, and crucial votes in the UN.
I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s.
I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.
That such anger is boiling over in the Arab world is obvious, but I heard it over and over again in conversations in India during the past week — from friends, business leaders, an official and journalists both young and old. That is even more telling because the Hindu-dominated government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only major power in the global south that has supported Israel and consistently blamed Hamas for inviting the massive Israeli retaliation and the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, the majority of them civilians.
That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. But when so many civilians die in a retaliatory invasion that was launched by an Israeli government without any political horizon for the morning after — and then, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally offers a morning-after plan that essentially says to the world that Israel now intends to occupy both the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely —it is no surprise that Israel’s friends will edge away and the Biden team will start to look hapless.
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There is no ‘War in Gaza’: ‘That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context’ is the equivocating apologetics of a partisan: as if he were not neck deep in crude Zionist apologetics. But a Genocide and the forced famine against Palestinians: Israel blocking convoys of trucks with food, water, medical supplies, has eluded Friedman. ‘The Storied West’ is sinking in the muck and mire of a Zionism, that has metastasized into a recrudescence of Nazism!
Historical background offered by Anthony Quinton in his review of Paul Lawrence Rose’s book ‘Revolutionary Antisemitism In Germany From Kant to Wagner.’
The suggestion of the title of Paul Rose’s imposing book that Kant, the patron saint of liberal humanitarianism, was in fact the initiator of an important, and perhaps the crucial, strand in German anti-Semitism may come as something of a shock. But for this and for a number of other, more comprehensive, propositions, Paul Lawrence Rose has assembled a powerful, if rather single-minded case. In twenty long chapters he presents the results of an enormous amount of reading in the primary and secondary literature of nineteenth-century German intellectual history, which is attested to by the luxuriant fringe of notes dangling at the bottom of nearly every one of the book’s 379 pages of text.
His main thesis is that the modern form of anti-Semitism in Germany started to acquire its peculiar virulence nearly a hundred years before Hitler was born; in 1793, to be precise. This was the year of publication of Kant’s Religion Within The Bounds of Reason, and of a defense of the French Revolution by Fichte, at a time when Fichte had not yet moved from Jacobinism to the emphatic nationalism of which he is best known as the prophet. Kant and Fichte were radicals who were convinced that the time had come for a moral transformation of mankind—or, at any rate; of Germany—through which all people should become truly free and rational moral agents, autonomous directors of their own lives, independent of the constraints of ossified custom and established authority. The Jews, to both of them, exemplified with the greatest intensity the kind of degraded moral existence to which they were opposed.
Rose’s second point is that this kind of fervently moral anti-Semitism is almost entirely the work of left-wing or, he thinks it is better to say, radical or revolutionary thinkers. (He reasonably holds that the terms “left” and “right” are not all that effectively discriminating when they are applied to revolutionaries.) Indeed he presents some evidence which supports his point with almost scientific purity. Those of his thinkers who drifted away from radicalism, either as they got older or through disappointment with the outcome of 1848, also muted or abandoned their anti-Semitism, unlike those who remained radical. Heine is one example. Then there are Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube, members of the “Young German” movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Gutzkow was briefly jailed for his attack on marriage and religious orthodoxy. Although they retracted their anti-Semitism in later life they had made their mark by attacking Jews in their youth. Laube’s view that the Jewish interest in art was essentially commercial was the inspiration of Wagner’s Judaism in Music. Gutzkow, on a more comic level, seems to have been the first to say, or print, the familiar incantation: “Many of my best and dearest friends are Jews.” Marx is the most famous of Rose’s specimens who are conventionally regarded as men of the left. But he includes also Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer.
For many years, left-wing opinion-makers have told us that there is no crisis of free speech in British universities, that the whole idea is a fiction put about by right-wing bigots upset that they can no longer sound off with impunity, or by politicians and journalists intent on stirring up a culture war. To quote Nesrine Malik, writing in the Guardian in 2019, “the purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is…to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas”.
Anyone who works in a university knows that this is balderdash. The crisis in academia is of course a godsend to the right, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also real and serious. Indeed, it is much more serious than most people realise. High-profile cancellations are what make the headlines, but they are merely the occasional effect of something deeper: the capture of entire sections of the academic bureaucracy by ideological lobbies, which insist on imposing their beliefs on all and sundry. We have seen this sort of thing before.
“Books, newspapers, official communications and forms issued by administrative departments – all swam in the same brown sauce,” wrote the German philologist Victor Klemperer, referring to the monotony of thought and language in Hitler’s Reich. The sauce is no longer brown, but apart from that, Klemperer could be describing a modern British university.
The Reader might look to this essay by Mr. Skidelsky at ‘The Critic’ from 2021:
Headline: The Specter of Totalitarianism
The worst offenders in the new climate of intolerance are our universities.
The new intolerance is often seen as a specifically left-wing phenomenon — an intensification of the “political correctness” which emerged on US campuses in the 1980s. But that is a one-sided view of the matter. It was US Zionists who pioneered the tactic of putting pressure on organisations to disinvite unfavoured speakers; far-right nationalists are among the keenest cyberbullies; and religious zealots of all stripes are prodigal of death threats.
Generalising, one might say that left-wing groups, being more publicly respectable in our part of the world, prefer to pursue their objectives through institutions and the law, whereas right-wing groups seek out the anonymity of the internet. But the goal on each side is the same: it is to intimidate, suppress, silence. In any case, the distinction between “left” and “right” is becoming increasingly muddled, as lines shift and alliances regroup. All one can safely say is that the various forms of contemporary extremism imitate and incite each other. What has given way is the civilised middle ground.
For this reason, I prefer to speak not of “fascism” or “political correctness” but of “totalitarianism”, a label designed to pick out what is common to fanaticisms of left and right. Totalitarianism is often thought of as a type of regime, which may make my use of the term seem hyperbolic; after all, we still live in a democracy. But it can also be understood in a broad sense, as a frame of mind and a style of political action. Totalitarianism in this broad sense existed in Russia and Germany before the establishment in either country of a totalitarian regime, and it remained a force in West European politics even after the war, if only on the radical fringe. It is totalitarianism in this sense whose recent rise to prominence alarms me. A public inured to totalitarian habits of thought and action is unlikely to offer much resistance to a totalitarian takeover of the state.
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Call Mr. Skidelsky a political opportunist, who writes a ‘History Made To Measure’: its like reading The Financial Times Opinion Section.
In the context of these two essays, The Reader might gain from reading Skidelsky’s essay of 1999 on Perry Anderson?
Headline: The New Statesman Profile – Perry Anderson
Sub-headline: He is one of Britain’s great Marxist intellectuals, yet now he seems a strangely conservative figure
On Anderson’s critique of Fukuyama, as presented by Skidelsky:
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A good example of this is his essay on Francis Fukayama’s The End of History. Fukayama’s grand narrative of historical progress – even though it culminates in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy – is of precisely the kind to win Anderson’s admiration. Anderson defends it against its detractors, claiming, on impeccably Marxist grounds, that their various refutations of Fukayama’s hypothesis amount to nothing more than local difficulties, and do not constitute a genuine contradiction. But then – as if suddenly realising what he has admitted – he amasses a whole set of difficulties of his own, ranging from environmental problems to feminism. But these are no more a fundamental contradiction than the difficulties he has previously dismissed. All are manageable within the confines of the present world-system. Fukayama has beaten Anderson at his own game.
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Editor: Nothing impressed the intellectual bumkins across continents as much as Fukuyama’s Hegelian inflected chatter. Charlatan !
Editor: added 2/28/2024:
Then there is this dubious commentary about how Anderson must comport himself as a Public Intellectual. Not to speak of Anderson’s romance with ‘Latin American terrorism’.
Anderson is notoriously elusive. No interviews, no broadcasts – and even the London School of Economics, where he is a visiting lecturer, did not have a photograph to contribute to the illustration of this profile. Yet for all his elusiveness, his influence on British intellectual life has been enormous. The conduit of this influence was the New Left Review, the socialist bi-monthly which he edited from 1962 to 1982. Anderson’s goal was the introduction into Britain of a new kind of socialist culture, alternative to both the official Marxism of the Communist Party and the stolid reformism of the Labour Party. His followers saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Inspired by Gramsci, they aimed to establish a socialist hegemony in the realm of ideas from which, they hoped, a revolutionary movement would follow. The leading lights of Continental Marxism – Lucacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and Althusser – were published and discussed, often for the first time in Britain. Non-Marxist structuralists such as Lacan and Levi-Strauss were also introduced. High theory was interspersed with the other amour of the era: Latin American terrorism.
Just having re-read The Origins of Post-Modernity, a work of impeccable scholarship, historical insight, not offered by any writer/thinker, other than Fredric Jameson! The reader will note that the claim made by Skidelsky, is the same claim made by the critics of that Post-Modernism, Derrida being the target of choice.
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Defeated on the political plane, Anderson has at last succumbed to the “siren voices of idealism”. His latest essay, The Origins of Postmodernity, is a work of cultural criticism in the classic tradition of Benjamin and Adorno. It is essentially a defence and an elaboration of Frederic Jameson’s thesis that postmodernism constitutes “the cultural logic of late capitalism”.
Postmodernism is a natural target of attack for a Marxist. What it signifies is the final disappearance of any critical perspective on the capitalist order. The Soviet Union, for all its imperfections, provided such a perspective, and its existence sustained the avant-garde throughout Europe and America. Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is immediately assimilated and commodified. Art, realising this, has abandoned its haughty intransigence and entered into alliance with the market. The tone of the essay is one of sorrowful resignation. Anderson can diagnose the malady, but he has no cure.
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The Young Derrida and French Philosophy. 1945-1968
Edward Baring, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 326pp., $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107009677.
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