After this collection of David Cameron’s successors: Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Adrian Wooldridge, in the role of ‘Bagehot’ announces:
‘Bagehot’s’ ire at Johnson seems a bit overdrawn, given Boris past shenanigans! Cameron, Teresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are really about a completely disconnected Tory Party, from the realties of British life. And the whole of the British Media’s lies, confected about Jeremy Corbyn as public/political menace:
None the less, Bagehot takes off at a gallop!
The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title mps accept, according to Britain’s absurd constitution, in order to resign. He went because an inquiry into whether Mr Johnson deliberately misled Parliament found that he had. Not only that, he’d also impugned the investigating committee and joined a campaign of abuse and intimidation against it. Mr Johnson faced suspension as an mp for a remarkable 90 days. Given forewarning of the report, the former prime minister quit.
A funeral for Mr Johnson’s career had taken place some days before in a stuffy conference centre in Doncaster. The annual meeting of the Northern Research Group (nrg), a cartel of northern Conservative mps who owe their careers to Mr Johnson, was supposed to be a celebration. Instead it was a premature wake.
The miserable gathering was the best place to survey his political legacy. The nrg, rather than Britain’s departure from the European Union, represented the apogee of Mr Johnson’s political career. It emerged after the 2019 general election, when the party won an 87-seat majority under Mr Johnson as voters across northern England backed the Conservatives for the first time in living memory. In 2005, the Conservatives had 19 northern mps. Then in 2019, they managed 68, with voters enticed by Mr Johnson’s promise of nothing less than a realignment of British politics.
Bagehot wants to bury Boris deep, to expunge him from Political Memory: Bagehot in this regard is a Stalinist. And the ‘Brexit Vote’ was a political self- expulsion from the utterly un-governable E. U. Paradise?
The Reader approaches the remaining 745 words, of the Wooldridge/Bagehot meditation on British Politics, is about the toxic remainder of Boris, he’s its vital political actor in absentia? To engage in the high-toned rhetoric of a highly self-conscious Oxbridger: Caesars assassins cannot withdraw to work of their knives?
Out of self-defense, let this Reader engage in some careful pruning of this essay, while retaining its argumentative integrity, or at the least an attempt at such.
…
Now, however, the realignment has reversed. Conservatives are losing everywhere. But support is falling fastest in the northern constituencies the party was so proud of winning.
…
Four years on, northern voters who backed the Tories have little to show for it. Conservative mps were happy to give excuses.
…
Problems were more fundamental than mere faulty execution. Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson had made impossible promises.
…
Brexit has weighed on growth. This meant a government committed to cutting immigration instead had to boost it, to give the economy a hand.
…
Instead, mps offered bromides that would be best left in an airport self-help book. “It’s about being a victor, not a victim,” said Nick Fletcher, the mp for Don Valley, a post-industrial constituency on the outskirts of Doncaster.
…
“Hands in the air if you think the north is awesome,” pleaded one chairwoman at a fringe event, channelling a children’s television presenter.
…
Any cause for optimism came, in the self-help vernacular, from a negative place. Voting Conservative for the first time was a big deal.
…
Labour will have to lose because the Conservatives are not trying to win. The party is on defensive manoeuvres. That means placating voters in the south-east. In the latest budget, the government promised more money for child care, which is most unaffordable in the south-east.
…
The Conservatives need to win voters in the north of England to hold power. The party needs to maintain voters in the south to exist.
…
I know it’s over and it never really began
Rishi Sunak, Mr Johnson’s successor, talks a good game when it comes to the north. He wears the fact he represents a northern seat rather heavily, labelling himself a “prime minister for the north”.
…
Instead, Mr Sunak’s speech to the delegates in Doncaster became an accidental eulogy for the form of Conservativism that Mr Johnson personified in 2019 but which is dead today.
Who can forget that team of Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait that birthed such best sellers: ‘The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea’, of 2005, ‘God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World’ of 2009, ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ of 2004,‘The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus’ of 1998, ‘A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization of 2000.
Reading ‘Right Nation’ , long after its apologetics for Bush The Younger’s Neo-Cons, and its catastrophic crime of the Iraq War – I confronted an uneasy sense of déjà vu, as a long time reader of The Economist, that I’d read it all before, in another key…
I’ve written about Wooldridge before:
Who can forget that team of Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait that birthed such best sellers: ‘The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea’, of 2005, ‘God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World’ of 2009, ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ of 2004,‘The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus’ of 1998, ‘A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization of 2000.
Reading ‘Right Nation’ , long after its apologetics for Bush The Younger’s Neo-Cons, and its catastrophic crime of the Iraq War – I confronted an uneasy sense of déjà vu, as a long time reader of The Economist, that I’d read it all before, in another key…
These paragraphs, after the bad news provided by Boris Johnson’s exercise of rank political stupidity, and his victimhood melodrama…
Luck is an overlooked part of politics. It is in the interests of both politicians and those who write about them to pretend it plays little role. Yet, as much as strategy or skill, luck determines success. “Fortune is the mistress of one half of our actions, and yet leaves the control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves,” wrote Machiavelli in “The Prince” in the 16th century. Some polls give Labour a 20-point lead. Partly this is because, under Sir Keir Starmer, they have jettisoned the baggage of the Jeremy Corbyn-era and painted a picture of unthreatening economic diligence. Mainly it is because they are damned lucky.
Interjection: ‘Bagehot’ never lets that Oxbridger Education go to waste, as persuasive to his Readers. And because this is The Economist ‘Bagehot’ talks money:
If Sir Keir does have a magic lamp, it has been buffed to a blinding sheen. After all, it is not just the behaviour of Mr Johnson that helps Labour. Britain is suffering from a bout of economic pain in a way that particularly hurts middle-class mortgage holders, who are crucial marginal voters. Even the timing helps. Rather than a single hit, the pain will be spread out until 2024, when the general election comes due. Each quarter next year, about 350,000 households will re-mortgage and become, on average, almost £3,000 ($3,830) per year worse off, according to the Resolution Foundation. Labour strategists could barely dream of a more helpful backdrop.
The burning question of the purging of not just Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott from the Party, but the denial of the the facts presented by the inconvenient:
The British Press is the servant of the collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its invention of an ‘Anti-Semitic Crisis’ within the Labour Party, in the control of the Left Corbynite Menace.
The Reader is then treated to the other political fortunes and misfortunes:
Nicola Sturgeon, the most talented Scottish politician of her generation, found herself arrested and quizzed over an illicit £100,000 camper van and other matters to do with party funds. The snp’s poll rating has collapsed and another 25 seats are set to fall into the Labour leader’s lap thanks to pc McPlod and (at best) erratic book-keeping by the snp.
…
It is not the first time police have come to Sir Keir’s aid. He promised to quit in 2022 if police fined him for having a curry and beer with campaigners during lockdown-affected local elections in 2021.
…
Luck will always play a large role in a first-past-the-post system that generates big changes in electoral outcomes from small shifts in voting. Margins are often tiny. Mr Corbyn came, according to one very optimistic analysis, within 2,227 votes of scraping a majority in the 2017 general election, if they had fallen in the right places.
…
Sir Tony Blair reshaped Labour and won three general elections. But he only had the job because John Smith, his predecessor, dropped dead at 55. (“He’s fat, he’s 53, he’s had a heart attack and he’s taking on a stress-loaded job” the Sun had previously written, with unkind foresight.)
Bagehot being a Thatcherite …
Without the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher would have asked for re-election soon afterwards based on a few years of a faltering experiment with monetarism. Formidable political talent is nothing without a dash of luck.
…
Too much good luck can be a bad thing. David Cameron gambled three times on referendums (on the country’s voting system, on Scottish independence and on Brexit).
….
More Machiavelli quotation
“A Prince who rests wholly on fortune is ruined when she changes,” wrote Machiavelli. It was right in 1516; it was right in 2016.
In the final paragraph of ‘Bagehot’s essay
Fortune has left Labour in a commanding position. Arguments against a Labour majority rely on hope (perhaps inflation will come down sharply) not expectation. Good luck may power Labour to victory in 2024, but it will not help them govern. The last time Labour replaced the Conservatives, in 1997, the economy was flying. Now, debt is over 100% of gdp. Growth prospects are lacking, while public services are failing. It will be a horrible time to run the country. Bad luck.
When all else fails what ‘Bagehot’ can provide to his readership, is an ad hoc pastiche of Machiavellian Cynicism,in place of actual political thought. In sum The Reader must choose their Machiavelli : ‘The Prince’ or ‘Discourses on Livy’?
The most famous example from high politics is, of course, Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for offenses related to Watergate, although that episode dates from a different era when politics was a more serious business for more serious people. Ford didn’t go around bragging that he’d pardon Nixon to garner attention and curry favor with Nixon supporters, while Nixon, for all his desperate flaws, was a man of considerable substance and achievement.
Ford, of course, justified his act of clemency on grounds of moving on from, as he put it in his national address, “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
We are still far away from getting to anything like this place. First, Trump would have to lose the Republican nomination, and he’s currently the strong favorite. Then, some other Republican would have to win the presidency, or President Joe Biden would have to see the wisdom of potentially keeping the vanquished Trump out of jail, either after beating him again or defeating another Republican.
That this sentence fragment deserves loud guffaws… ‘The most famous example from high politics…’
American Politics/Life continues to sink in the mire of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle, heartily embraced by both New Democrats and Republicans: and that Trump, DeSantis, and even Vivek Ramaswamy, are the toxic political issue, of that historical fact . Inaugurated by New Democrat Bill Clinton, is a reality that is anathema to Lowry, as the flaccid successor to Wm. F. Buckley Jr..
Reader, thank you for your forbearance… Just one more quotation:
The conventional wisdom is that our politics is over-heated. The worry over this is often exaggerated (things have been as or more feverish before), but having a former president stand trial in a federal criminal case, and potentially spend the rest of his life in jail, is only going to make things more intense and the country more divided. A pardon itself would be a flash point, as the Ford pardon of Nixon was, but it would at least take the unprecedented possibility of a former president behind bars off the table.
LOVE IN A TIME OF HATE: Art and passion in the shadow of war, 1929–39 Translated by Simon Pare
As a reader of ‘The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871-1950 by Nigel Hamilton of 1975.
And Thomas Mann’s ‘Diaries, 1918-1939’ of 1982:
I had some knowledge of the milieu, the persons/characters and their shared fates, that is the subject of the the two books under review. This final paragraph of Chamberlin’s review is evocative of the that whole milieu:
They were all enemies of Nazism, certainly. But what kind of politics, what kind of society, would have best suited this licentious, aesthetic-minded generation, with its gigantic artistic talents and potential for deep moral waywardness? Presumably, our ultra-liberal own. Perhaps that’s why Illies remains so reserved in his moral judgements, finding the antisemitic vamp Alma Mahler pretty nasty, but only the Hitler-loving film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (“there was a strong streak of elitism to her nymphomania”) “diabolical”. He’s rather lenient, to this reviewer’s mind, and rather hard on Thomas Mann’s “noun-heavy moralizing”. I would have liked to hear him call Brecht not only a great artist, but also a pernicious moral fraud. Illies engages with some relish in his tale, where Wittstock, two generations older, is outraged and sad. In making these observations, though, I may be the product of a staider generation. So let me conclude by saying that, for all the compelling studies on the Weimar Republic, no one will want to miss either of these well-translated books on Weimar writers and Weimar in love.
Let me recommend Chamberlain’s ‘Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia’.
The First two paragraphs of Marcus Wheeler’s essay seem to contradict what Mark Lilla offers in The New York Times review , below this entry:
Headline: Motherland: a Philosophical History of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain
Sub-headline: Marcus Wheeler is provoked by Lesley Chamberlain’s history of Russian philosophy.
This book is a tour de force if only in that it encompasses an enormous subject – the ‘long tradition’ of Russian philosophical thought from 1815 to 1991 – in fewer than 350 pages. The author is not a professional or academic philosopher but a writer and journalist: she has however studied Russian and German language and literature and philosophy, and the present work is informed by a deep understanding of these three intellectual disciplines. When she writes on the last page that Russian philosophy “is a branch of German philosophy, perhaps even of German poetry”, she restates, albeit in a deliberately provocative way, what British philosophy students used to be told fifty years ago – that philosophy in Russia was wholly derivative from Hegel and German Idealism (and, by implication, not worth bothering with). Like many of us, Lesley Chamberlain was first drawn to 19th century Russian thought by the writings of Isaiah Berlin – his celebrated articles in Encounter on “A Marvellous Decade” and these and the other essays assembled in Russian Thinkers and elsewhere. Chamberlain surprisingly presents Berlin himself as a philosopher in the Russian tradition: in fact, his claim to fame rests far less on his original, recognisably Western-style contributions to philosophy than on his work as a historian of social and political ideas.
Chamberlain owes much not only to Berlin but to more systematic historians of Russian thought, such as Andrzej Walicki, Frederick Copleston and James Scanlan (though she does not mention Derek Offord, who has published extensively in this field in recent years). She sets herself however the ambitious and original aim of distinguishing in the Russians between social and political ‘thought’ and ‘philosophy’ proper and of relating their teachings to the general tradition of Western philosophy from Descartes to present-day post-modernism. To this end she has divided the book into four parts. Part I – entitled “The Making of the Intelligentsia” – is a lucid and straightforward sequential summary of the principal figures and movements from 1815 to 1917 – Chaadaev, Westernisers and Slavophiles, Populists, Marxists and fin-de-siècle ex-Marxists and religious thinkers. The title of Part II – ‘The Making of Russian Philosophy’ – leads the reader to expect a parallel treatment of the evolution of philosophical views, but its three component chapters are more or less discrete self-contained essays. In the first of these, as at intervals throughout the book, Hegel appears prominently. The author is thoroughly versed in his teachings (to her credit, since in British universities Hegel and Idealism have been virtually mothballed since World War II) and explains cogently why his view of society as constantly subject to change through conflict appealed to young Russians suffocated by their static autocracy; as also why his identification of reality and rationality came to offend Belinsky and others by seeming to ignore human suffering and injustice. She presents nearly all the Russian dissident liberals (whom, confusingly, she later calls “anarchists”) as “Counter-Rationalists” preaching a “Counter-Enlightenment”. This, since she describes herself as a “Cartesian rationalist”, may account for her harsh judgment that Russian philosophical history amounted to “two short centuries of intellectual and moral defeat for Russia.”
Now, understanding the soul is also well and good. But what happens when soulfulness stands in the way of rational philosophy and science? Isn’t there a price to be paid? That is the question Lesley Chamberlain poses in “Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia.” The question is not new, nor are most of her answers. There are very fine studies of 19th-century Russian thought available in English — by Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia — and the interested reader will want to turn to those first. But by focusing specifically on how Western philosophical ideas from Descartes through Marx were absorbed into Russian thinking, Chamberlain does complicate the received picture somewhat. As she sees it, the decisive struggle was not simply between Westernizers and anti-Westernizers, but between Russians who stood by the philosophical legacy of France and England, and those who drew sustenance from the far murkier thinkers of modern Germany.
…
What did the Russians learn from the Germans? This is hard to make out from the badly confused accounts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling given by Chamberlain, an English journalist and novelist. The main story, though, she gets about right. What the 19th-century Russian intellectuals found in, and partly projected onto, Germany was a romantic alternative to the supposedly cold, heartless logic of Descartes and his progeny. They were especially drawn to F. W. J. Schelling, whose philosophy of nature, a hash of intuition and metaphysical speculation, was closer to theosophy than to modern science. (Lots about “life,” nothing about the pancreas.) Schelling’s doctrines proved to be infinitely adaptable and unfalsifiable, and thus served as useful defenses against French and English rationalism. Like Napoleon’s troops, the modern ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Hume were turned back at the gates of Moscow and beat a slow retreat through the snow.
…
Marcus Wheeler seems to contradict Mr. Lilla’s assertions that somehow Chamberlain is less of an Historian than ‘ Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia’? Does the question regarding Chamberlain reading of that History, about Lilla’s preference for himself and his brother Historians were more reliable? In the long quotation by Marcus Wheeler, above, I’ve placed in a bold font, his comment on Chamberlain reliance on Berlin’s scholarship. As a subscriber of The New York Review Of Books, of the time, I too read Berlin’s ‘Russian Thinkers’ and others.
Here is Chamberlain’s review of ‘Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia’ by Victoria Frede in 2012.
Headline: Between Belief and Despair
Sub-headline: A group of thinkers tried to explain Russia to a West that could understand it only in terms of “communism” or “freedom.”
We are used to thinking of a great parting of the ways dividing the Russian 19th century unevenly in half, from around 1860, with a rather uncouth and propagandizing atheism of “New Men” taking over from the subtle rhetoric of their more spiritual predecessors. Something of the kind did happen under the influence of materialist philosophies spreading from the West. But partly too—as Ms. Frede shows in a highly original study of minor figures attending the revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle in 1849—it happened because nonbelief was a daring political move in a cruel, inert country. No great theory of personal conduct or philosophical insight was required. Nonbelief itself could be a simple act of defiance. Dostoevsky, another young participant in the Circle who was nearly executed for his apparent political intentions, would later evoke doubt as an essential feature of Russian spiritual life.
Ms. Frede ends her study with a portrait of the radical critic Dmitri Pisarev, a man of the 1860s who is remembered, if at all, for once declaring that a pair of boots was more valuable than the works of Shakespeare. Pisarev deserves his rediscovery by Ms. Frede as the psychologically complex figure he is. Desperate to extract himself from a controlling family, Pisarev latched onto doubt, and the materialism of the body, as the only way he could secure his personal freedom. He spent time in prison and had a mental breakdown and might be best re-imagined as a figure in some unwritten novel, representing one of the many possibilities of Russian dissent.
“Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia” is an encouraging example of what the end of the Cold War has meant for Russian scholarship. In both Russia and the West, vested interests have been removed from the business of “atheism.” We can see much more clearly now how Lenin, who needed the commitment of the old spiritual intelligentsia but not their inwardness, used atheism as a tool. We can also see how Western historians upholding Enlightenment values underplayed Russian doubt, confusing it with irrationality and missing an enduring clue to what was culturally at stake.
I purchased and read “Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia” onChamberlain’s recommendation. Victoria Frede’s book was revelatory, to say the least! Chamberlain is part of a long and indispensable tradition, of Writers, Book Reviewers, Critical Intellectuals, who before the Internet nourished my mind in the Age Of Print, and into the Political Present!
Below is a link to Jochen Hellbeck’s ‘Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin’ an example of a revelatory History of the Soviet Union, with its focus on individual lives of its citizens.
Old Socialist’s long quotation from ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin provides long overdue historical context!
If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy. Whether in Canada, the Cape, New Zealand or Australia, he admitted that colonists could be difficult, demanding, costly, and confrontational with natives. But he opposed the idea of cutting them loose. ‘We are pre-eminently a colonizing people. We are, beyond all comparison, the most enterprising, the most successful, and in most respects the best, colonists on the face of the earth.’140 He countenanced force wherever that valiant spirit was obstructed by recalcitrant subjects, or non-Westerners, though in such cases he preferred it to be moderate, and directed from London.
Closest to home, he backed Gladstone’s efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ after 1868: disestablishing the Church of Ireland – Protestant, in a country four-fifths Catholic – and passing very limited tenure reform to give evicted farmers compensation for their improvements to the land. Any step outside the 1801 Act of Union, however, was anathema. The Economist attacked both the Fenian Brotherhood, made up of armed republicans in America and Ireland, as well as the Home Rule League, which sought greater autonomy through conventional parliamentary forms. Gladstone was right to ‘tread out the Fenian folly’ following an uprising in 1867, which proved that the organization preferred sowing strife to practical politics. But since Home Rule was a ‘gigantic and impossible constitutional revolution’, it was hardly less of a folly. A parliament for Ireland would tear down the entire edifice of the British state, creating a federal instead of imperial parliament in London, unable to override the Irish one ‘without provoking something like a rebellion on every separate occasion’. Home Rulers would ‘be imprudent, but they would be far more logical, if they were to raise a cry at once for an independent Irish Republic’.141 The one consolation for the defeat of the Liberals in 1874 that so shocked Bagehot was, ‘at least it delivers us from the rule of the faction which is anti-English in essence, and which wishes to destroy the Empire’.142 His idea for political reform in Ireland was to suppress the office of viceroy: concentrating the symbolic majesty of the British state in such a person lent credence to the claim of Irish nationalists to live in a subjugated colony – as if Dublin were no different than Delhi.143
Perhaps the most far-reaching colonial crisis during the period was not in Ireland, but in the West Indian colony of Jamaica. Here, in 1865, Governor Edward John Eyre responded to an uprising of former slaves in Morant Bay with brutal force, declaring martial law and deploying troops, who burned and looted over a thousand homes, and killed several hundred black Jamaicans, including a mixed-race member of the Jamaica Assembly. This looked like an organized lynching designed to shore up the power of white sugar planters, whose fortunes had declined since the advent of free labour, free trade and lower-cost sugar a generation earlier – and these events caused massive
controversy when news of them reached Britain. Though Bagehot rebuked black rebels as ‘negro Fenians’, he was much more critical of Governor Eyre. For a time he made common cause with John Stuart Mill, who in 1866 set up the Jamaica Committee to press for Eyre to be put on trial; a host of liberals joined Mill, including John Bright, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and many others. Opposite them stood Thomas Carlyle and the members of the Governor Eyre Defence and Aid Committee. Bagehot attacked Carlyle in the Economist for defending Eyre’s ‘carnival’ of violence as ‘the worship of brute force’, and a threat to law, justice and liberty – not just in Jamaica, but in England. ‘On Mr. Carlyle’s principles of judging human actions, as exemplified in this Eyre case, Philip II and Alva have a right to the honour and thanks of posterity.’144 But as might be expected, his objection was not primarily moral. Bagehot agreed that blacks were inferior to whites, and acknowledged the importance of maintaining order in the Empire. To assure this in keeping with the needs of capital, however, required some cooperation from subject peoples. The Economist pointed to the tantalizing investments to be made in China’s railways, canals, tea planting, silk growing, and steam navigation, ‘beyond any experience we have yet acquired’, and similar opportunities in ‘Japan, Indochina, Persia, Asiatic Turkey’ and Africa, ‘from Abyssinia to the Cape’. To unlock these treasures, one point had be kept in mind – ‘that very large bodies of dark laborers will work willingly under a very few European supervisors’.145
As it turned out, gaining access to these markets involved more than investment prospectuses. It required armed compulsion, especially in East Asia. Bagehot saw British and French interventions in China to prop up the tottering Qing dynasty against Taiping rebels – a radical millenarian rebellion that spread from rural Guangxi to convulse the country, in part due to prior Western wars to force it open – as a
regrettable necessity; but with Englishmen ‘leading the fleets and armies, and administering the finances of the Celestial Empire’, soon to be ‘Governors and Viceroys over vast provinces’, its violent repression had a silver lining. Farther east in Japan, trade – and the sort of extra-territorial legal treatment that British merchants should expect – was also at stake, in a nation that had shown still stronger distrust of Westerners than China. The Economist was unsure if the Royal Navy had legitimate grounds to bombard Kagoshima in 1863, to punish the ‘Daimio Satsuma’ for the death of a British merchant. But once begun, the paper pushed for widening the war. ‘Possibly we may have to bombard the Spiritual Emperor as well as the Feudal Baron, if his palace lie within a mile or two of the shore. Anyhow we are in for it: we must now hold our ground and make good our position; and we must do this by force and at the cost of blood.’146 As the smoke settled afterwards, it worried that in continuously shelling a town of 150,000 (‘as large as Sheffield’) for over forty-eight hours ‘we do seem to have outstepped all the now recognized boundaries of civilized and credible warfare’. Satsuma’s representatives later put the death toll at 1,500.147
Not all imperial undertakings were military during these years. Bagehot grumbled in 1875 when Disraeli, as prime minister, opted to buy 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal from the Khedive of Egypt, bringing the total Britain owned to just under half. As an investment yielding 5 per cent it was and would allow the Khedive to ‘reform his finances’. But Bagehot was unsure if it would solve the problem it was meant to address – making sure the passage to India stayed open, and in British hands. ‘We do not know what will be the course of history or the necessities of future times.’ ‘If we are prepared to take hold of Egypt, will this share in the Suez Canal help us in so doing? Will it not be better to take the country when necessary, without making public beforehand our intention to do so?’148 India itself was non-negotiable, whatever route was taken there, as Bagehot affirmed in 1863 at the death of Elgin – the man sent east to break Chinese resistance in the Second Opium War and open Japan, subsequently appointed viceroy of India. His successor, Sir John Lawrence, had the ‘single quality’ needed to ‘keep a vast population which wants to recede, perpetually advancing’. What was that? ‘Force’.149
Perhaps the most revealing example of the open-ended imperialism of the Economist under Bagehot was its enthusiasm for the least successful of all such ventures: the invasion of Mexico at the end of 1861 by France, with support from Spain and Britain. It applauded Napoleon III for rebuilding a failed state unable to pay its creditors in Europe, and for balancing the US, with its back turned fighting the Civil War. The installation of an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, on Mexico’s throne three years later, was a particular stroke of brilliance – a better administrator than ‘any obtainable half-caste or Indian president’, whose rule would ensure the export of everything from silver to apples, and timely interest payments on Mexico’s sovereign debt.150 Three years later Maximilian was executed by firing squad in Querétaro, after French forces hastily withdrew.
In Physics and Politics, Bagehot explained his approach to empire in more theoretical terms, as a complement to these snapshots in the Economist. Applying his take on positivism and the natural sciences to human societies around the world, he divided them into three evolutionary epochs: a ‘preliminary age’, primitive, tribal and customary; a ‘fighting age’, in which some nations prevailed over others thanks to their martial qualities; and a third, progressive, industrial and peaceful ‘age of discussion’, where the ‘higher gifts and graces have rapid progress’. This, of course, was Victorian Britain: the class rule of the ten thousand educated members of society that Bagehot had outlined in the English Constitution found an evolutionary basis in ‘adaptation’ and ‘natural selection’. Bagehot added that some law of imitation must operate inside nations to account for their success in the world – a copying process, working its way from ‘predominant manners’ down and then inherited, in a Lamarckian sense. Bagehot was himself copying social evolutionists – not least Herbert Spencer and John Lubbock – by making such claims, and then extending them outwards. British wars were justified in China, for example, since its ancient civilization had been arrested at an earlier stage of development. There, to ‘crack the cake of custom’ might indeed require cannonballs.151
Colby Smith and Sam Learner rely on evoctaive Graphs at three points in their essay. Not to speak of :
…
The latest survey, conducted in partnership with the Kent A Clark Center for Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, predicts the Fed will lift its benchmark rate to at least 5.5 per cent this year. Fed funds futures markets suggest traders favour just one more quarter-point rate rise in July.
Top Fed officials have signalled a preference for forgoing a rate rise at their next two-day meeting on Tuesday, while keeping the door ajar to further tightening. After 10 consecutive increases since March 2022, the federal funds rate now hovers between 5 per cent and 5.25 per cent, the highest level since mid-2007.
…
A selection of sentences is more than in order :
Of the 42 economists surveyed between June 5 and June 7, 67 per cent forecast the federal funds rate to peak between 5.5 per cent and 6 per cent this year.
More than half of the respondents said the peak rate will be achieved in or before the third quarter, while just over a third expect it to be reached in the final three months of the year.
“They haven’t done enough for long enough yet to get inflation down,” said Dean Croushore, who served as an economist at the Fed’s Philadelphia Reserve Bank for 14 years.
Despite mounting expectations that the Fed is not yet done with its tightening campaign, most of the economists thought the Fed would skip a June move.
“The economy turned out to be much more resilient than we originally thought and the question is: is that resilience temporary and the hikes in the pipeline are sufficient or does the Fed need even further hiking?
An added complication is the pullback by regional lenders following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic and a handful of other institutions.
Among respondents, however, concerns about inflation appeared to outweigh banking sector worries.
By the end of 2024, roughly a third of the respondents said it was “somewhat” or “very” likely that core PCE would exceed 3 per cent. More than 40 per cent said it was “about as likely as not”.
“There has barely been any progress on core inflation, the real economy is performing vastly better than anyone could possibly have expected and policymakers have yet to fully adjust to that reality,” said Jason Furman,
The biggest factors driving down the rate of inflation will be rising joblessness and falling wage gains, 48 per cent of the economists said, followed by global headwinds stemming from a weakening Chinese economy and strong US dollar.
The Final Two Paragraphs:
Recession calls have been pushed back as well. Most economists do not see the National Bureau of Economic Research declaring one until 2024, compared to surveys conducted last year in which roughly 80 per cent expected a recession in 2023.
About 70 per cent said the peak unemployment rate in a forthcoming recession would not be reached until the third quarter of 2024 or later. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of Harvard University said he is bracing for a mild recession in which unemployment rises to about 6 per cent.
Philosophical Apprentice collects some of the evocative dross of his ‘Class Day Ceremony’.
JUN 8, 2023
Stephens always plays the victim:
This is a speech about speaking your mind when other people don’t want you to.
To those of you who are protesting or planning awalkout, I thank you for not seriously disrupting my speech. And though I’m sorry you won’t hear me out, I completely respect your right to protest any speaker you dislike, including me, so long as you honor the Chicago Principles. It is one of the core liberties that all of us have a responsibility to uphold, protect and honor.
A Neo-Conservative ‘strikes a pose’, like that faded Pop Star?
Next Bob Zimmer, rhetorically brought aboard for needed ballast:
To those of you who choose to stay, I thank you for honoring another Chicago principle, one that was dear to my dear friend, Bob Zimmer: Namely, that a serious education is impossible except in an environment of unfettered intellectual challenge — an environment that, in turn, isn’t possible without the opportunity to encounter people and entertain views with whom and with which you might profoundly disagree.
A quick walk-on of Mr. Stephens, in his youth… like Wm. F. Buckley Jr., he was a self-entitled, would be polymath, in waiting. This self ascription, the purest comedy : when I was a nervous 17-year-old freshman…
To John Boyer, who welcomed me to Chicago in 1991 when I was a nervous 17-year-old freshman, I want to salute you for everything you’ve done to make the college so much better, while preserving what always made it great: the conviction that to think clearly, we must be able to speak freely; that to disagree intelligently, we must first understand the views of our opponents profoundly; that to change people’s minds, we must be open to the possibility that our minds might be changed. All of this asks us to listen charitably, argue candidly, consider deeply, examine and re-examine everything, above all our own deeply held convictions — and, unlike at so many other universities, to respond to ideas we reject with more and better speech, not heckling or censorship.
The above testimony to the ‘values’ of ‘Free Intellectual Inquiry’ from an unapologetic Neo-Conservative, in sum an apologist for The Zionist Faschist State, and the American Proxy War in Ukraine. Mr. Stephens is a bellicose Straussian in its American iteration. Stephens never served, but his appetite for War takes inspiration from an etiolated pastiche of Ernst Jünger…
Harold Rosenberg’s essay, that Stephens links to, is from the September 1948 Commentary, not the Commentary Magazine edited by Neo-Con John Podhoretz. I spent many years reading the works of Harold Rosenberg e. g. The Tradition of The New, Discovering The Present, and his monograph on Saul Steinberg:
Decades ago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the phrase “the herd of independent minds.” It’s a line I think about often.
The herd of independent minds are the people who say they make up their own minds when it comes to politics, and yet somehow, and generally without exception, arrive at precisely the same long list of political conclusions as millions of others. The herd of independent minds were the Republicans who were ardent NeverTrumpers in 2015, fervent Trumpers from 2017-21, NeverTrumpers again after Jan. 6, and are now tilting back toward Trump: In other words, Lindsey Graham. The herd of independent minds are those who think “La La Land” is a great movie but “Miss Congeniality” isn’t.
The final paragraph lapses in Anti-Trump screeching, a favorite gambit of the New Centrist Alliance: The New Democrats/ Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Cons.
Mr. Stephens, in this paragraphs riffs on the passé territory of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
The point is: There are very few people who don’t see themselves as independent thinkers. There are even fewer people who are.
This is true wherever you go, in most walks of life. But it seems to be especially true in places and institutions heavily populated by people with elite educations: The kinds of places and institutions that many of you will soon be a part of. Groupthink is the affliction of those who ought to be — and often think of themselves as — the least vulnerable to it.
The ‘Elite Education’ a reference to the Haidt/Lukianoff postulation of a 10% of spoiled malcontents, that harbor a natural ill will to an Enlightened Cadre of Technocrats like Haidt/Lukianoff . Note that Haidt is a New Democrat.
Headline: Jonathan Haidt: ‘We got fooled into thinking liberal democracy is easy’
Sub-headline: The social psychologist on the ‘darts’ of social media, our dangerous present moment — and a decade of stupidity in America
His willingness to engage thoughtfully in debates often characterised by tribalism and virtue-signalling has helped him win considerable influence — Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos have both recommended his most recent essay. But Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, is not without his detractors. To his critics, he falsely equates the excesses of the progressivist activism of the left with the disregard for truth, science or the democratic process of some on the right; they accuse him of “bothsidesism”.
…
While some feel Haidt focuses too much of his fire on the left, he has only ever voted Democrat. “I cannot imagine voting Republican because the Republican party has completely lost all sense of constitutional responsibility and has lost all touch with conservatism. I have a lot of respect for liberalism, but there’s a lot of illiberalism on the left, and I have a lot of respect for conservatism, but there’s not much conservatism left on the right,” he says.
This Reader feels sympathy for the students and faculty who had to listen to the remaining 2,106 words of his address, let me present some of his cast of characters in this first paragraph:
Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Metaverse, New Coke, Federal Reserve, C.I.A, Afghanistan, Taliban, Ukraine, Russian Army (its the Soviet Army), Wall Street, Saddam Hussein,-Not to forget this bit of dangling hysteria: ‘Why were so many people convinced that overpopulation was going to lead to catastrophic food shortages, and that the only sensible answers were a one-child policy and forced sterilizations?’
Call this section of Mr. Stephens ‘stream of consciousness’ from his appointment with his strict Freudian Psychoanalyst? Think again of the audience, having to listen to this diatribe as it metastasizes, in the voice of a bankrupt newspaper scribbler.
Keir Starmer is swimming against the European current. Across the continent, traditional parties of the Left have been wiped out. The Dutch Labour Party won 5.7 per cent at the last election, the French Socialist Party 1.8 per cent in the presidential election. Only in Scandinavia and Iberia have parties of the mainstream Left clung on. And even that is about to change, with Spain set to give its socialists a brutal clubbing.
The notion that Starmer is a ‘Socialist’ in a product of Hannan’s imagination, in search of a reason, the New Labour dullard Starmer is headed for a defeat ?… un-mentioned is that the Labour Party, New and Old is still experiencing a continuing purge of the once ascendant Corbyn Wing of the Party. And that Corbyn was the target of defamation from The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. While this from Al Jazeera Investigations is subject to an historical erasure -its a Stalinist gambit. And Starmer’s banning Corbyn from running as a Labour candidate.
Mr. Hannan resorts to the role of Political Oracle, in times past, ‘thinkers’ like Alvin Toffler were deemed ‘Futurists’ who described what the possible New World would be like. Hannan riffs on those themes of yesterday, in the final sentence of my quotation. He trades upon a past that lives in the present: in France Macon’s unconstitutional Pension Reforms have re-ignited those ‘syndicalist embers’ ?
Before we get to Spain, though, it is worth delving into why the old Left has seen its support collapse. It has to do mainly with changing work patterns. I don’t expect my children to have “a job” as we understood that word in the 20th century. Rather, they will go through life constantly reskilling, freelancing and adapting as technology accelerates.
Artificial intelligence won’t make us redundant; that claim has been made of every advance in mechanisation since the industrial revolution, yet the number of people in work keeps rising. What it will do is diversify the employment market even more. When machines take on our old tasks, they free us up to find niches that no one had previously imagined.
In such a world, parties linked to mass industrialised workforces look not so much old-fashioned as cultish. The structures, slogans and symbols of syndicalist struggle seem to belong, quite literally, to another century.
Its not that Mr. Hannan doesn’t offer some interesting analysis of the Spanish Election, but that he garnishes it with …
…
Tellingly, Tony Blair could never bring himself to pronounce its name. Knowing how electorally toxic the word “socialist” was, he referred to it incorrectly as “the European Labour group”. Perhaps that is why, of the eight leaders Labour has gone through over the past 45 years, Blair is the only one to have won a general election.
…
He then presided over a coalition of separatists and Left-wing extremists; precisely the kind of wacky alliance, in fact, that Starmer might end up leading here. Almost immediately, he started losing elections – in Galicia, Madrid, Old Castile, Andalusia and, now, the whole country.
…
The above quote, reminds me of Ferdinand Mounts book ‘The New Few’ the chapter titled ‘Closing the local’ pages 154 and 155 ‘the looney left’ an epithet usedtwiceby one of Mrs. Thatcher’s cadre of the ultra respectable.
…
No, our Labour Party will find scant comfort in what is happening across the Pyrenees. But our Conservative Party might learn a thing or two.
…
So, in shops, in cafés and in queues (which Spaniards are much better at than they used to be)…
…
First, young people are not monolithically Left-wing. Indeed, many of them support Vox, the party that overseas commentators almost always describe as far-Right.
…
It is here, I think, that our Tories have the most to learn. The head of Madrid’s regional government is the unapologetically Thatcherite Isabel Díaz Ayuso. If the PP had had the sense to make her its national leader last year, it would now be sweeping the board.
Spain had a bad pandemic, combining a strict lockdown with a high death rate. But Ayuso kept Madrid open, campaigning under the one-word slogan Libertad. She went on to cut taxes and give people more choice over which schools and hospitals to use. Her most recent campaign was launched in the bullring. Madrileños repaid her with an absolute majority.
…
All that the Left can do in response – beyond unleashing the personal abuse that female conservatives always seem to attract – is to accuse her of being too close to Vox and, by implication, an extremist.
…
Isabel Díaz Ayuso is an ‘ unapologetically Thatcherite’ : she is an Extremists, by definition, Thatcherism was a political catastrophe! Daniel Hannan attempts to re-write History.
The final three paragraphs this essay:
If calling your enemies fachas doesn’t work any more, what does? The old infrastructure of organised labour has gone. Wokery in its various forms – racial, gender-based or sexuality-based – is unpopular. Greenery has a certain appeal but, as the sheer expense of net zero becomes clear, voters want it toned down.
The strongest argument for the Left is the unpopularity of the other side. Since 2004, when José María Aznar stood down, the PP has been seen by many of its supporters as a milk-and-water alternative to the socialists, who made all the running. That is why Vox came into existence in the first place.
If there is a lesson from Spain’s local elections, it is that voters don’t much care about accusations of extremism. But they do care about rising taxes and rising prices. When Rightist parties are trusted on those issues, the Left has nothing left.
‘Woke’ is a term of political abuse, its meaning lost in the fog of accusation. In the British context Mr. Hannan has missed the the rising star of Mick Lynch, the most articulate leader of ‘syndicalist nostalgia’ that is experiencing unparalleled political vigor, in the face of Tory maleficence.
There’s a memorable scene in Experience during which Amis kicks Hitchens’s shins under the table to get him to stop grilling Saul and Janis Bellow about Israeli atrocities. Amis’s capacity for ancestor-worship was boundless: (at least) 8 articles on Bellow, 9 on Nabokov. But I wonder if he might have benefitted more from reading less of them. From Bellow he took the street-wise tough guys (already often unpersuasive in the original) and made them even more street-wise until many of them simply became vessels of Translatlantic Amis-speak, while from Nabokov Amis cribbed a kind of cliff-notes postmodernism, furnishing pointless doppelgängers for his plots, and making his narrators pick up a toilet brush and see a ‘moustachioed sceptre’ (a parody of Nabokov, even in the mouth of a character). With the exception of Inside Story, an unexpectedly moving coda to his career, the first half of his output outshines the second by some distance. High-flown English
Thomas Meaney offer a link to this essay by James Wolcott of 2012:
Marti Amis has reached that not entirely enviable plateau in an eminent literary career where he (and we) might be better off if he gave up writing novels and just granted interviews from now on. He could air his observations on issues throbbingly relevant in the republic of letters, then retire to his den for a nip or a nap. Giving up fiction would lighten his workload considerably, and take the pressure off having to re-prove himself to the growing sector of the literary punditry that treats him with such jaded familiarity.
Since London Fields or so, I find myself anticipating the profiles, chat sessions, and drink visits promoting the novels more than I do the results themselves—reminiscent of the patch in Mel Brooks’s career when his guest spots on “The Tonight Show” plugging his latest self-wallow were funnier, jazzier, and more turned-on to the audience than the actual releases, as any bleary survivor of Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men in Tights can attest. The Q&A format seems to smoke out more reverie from Amis, unclenching his clam-tight control. Not that he puts on a command performance for the journalists who gingerly approach, fretful of running afoul of a verbal scowl, however graciously he offers them a suitable beverage. Nearly every Amis interview expresses the wary, battle-weary tone of a veteran interviewee hiking Boot Hill again. But within this monochromatic range he is far more engaging, perceptive, interesting, and adept at cultural landscaping than he is in the novels themselves, the forced labors of Night Train, Yellow Dog, House of Meetings.
And perhaps it really is so, with some novelists. But Martin’s talent wasn’t like that. Those reviewers had made the most basic category error. His style was his vision; or rather, that vision expanded, deepened and darkened, took on life sentence by sentence, coterminously with the growing richness and inventiveness of his verbal gifts, his linguistic imagination – his voice. So, he was content to let plot take care of itself, while his novels proceeded according to a recurring set of patterns or obsessions (his “doublings” and pairings, his characters unsure of their parentage, his rivalries among siblings and friends, his patch of west London), and his creative energies went into the sentences, thus into unforgettable human grotesques and exorbitantly funny exchanges, crescendos, laments … His was a Dickensian talent, and one – at its best – of Dickensian amplitude. It remade the world, not as we knew it but in the image of whatever the English language – his English language – could accommodate.
Martin achieved what he did, not through talent alone but also dedication – and crucial to that was appreciation, of writers he himself loved and admired: beyond all others, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow in prose, Shakespeare and Milton in verse. Love and admiration came naturally to him, just as naturally as sharp reproof of anything that struck him as inauthentic or incompetent. His was a wonderfully witty, warm and responsive presence (his launch parties were, appropriately, bacchanals): that much I knew from experience. From Experience I learnt that he was, too, a loving father and son, unabashedly affectionate with family and close friends. Those who were much closer to him than I was will have more to say about all these qualities in the coming days. But I mourn his loss, which is a loss to us all, British or American, who care about art, about sentences and the novels and essays built from them, about talent, and about Martin’s great abiding instinct, the belief on which he built his life: “Writing is freedom”.
On the questions of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov see the long quote from Thomas Meaney, above.
Literary Apprentice
P.S. For some further insights into Martin Amis, this from The New York Times of March 9, 2008
Headline: Amis and Islam
By Rachel Donadio
…
In England’s left-leaning intellectual culture, traditionally somewhat hostile toward Israel and the United States, Amis has emerged as sympathetic to the two countries’ situation. Although he opposed the Iraq war and is skeptical of American power, “The Second Plane” draws admiringly on books often dismissed by some on the left: Paul Berman’s “Terror and Liberalism,” Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong?” and Mark Steyn’s “America Alone.” (He also draws on the neo-atheist Sam Harris.)
On the phone last month, Amis talked about the transAtlantic divide. “The anti-Americanism is really toxic in this country, and the anti-Zionism,” he said, attributing the sentiments to empire envy. “I think we ceased to be a world power just as America was unignorably taking on that role.” The dominant ideology “told us that we don’t like empires, we’re ashamed of ever having one.” In England, he continued, “we’ve infantilized ourselves, stupefied ourselves, through a kind of sentimental multiculturalism,” Amis said. He called for open discussion “without self-righteous cries of racism. It’s not about race, it’s about ideology.”
I’m bored; you’re bored; we’re all bored. By our books and movies and television shows, the endless blandness of the Netflix queue, by our music and theater and art. Culture now is strenuously cautious, nervously polite, earnestly worthy, ploddingly obvious, and above all, dismally predictable. It never dares to stray beyond the four corners of the already known. Robert Hughes spoke of the shock of the new, his phrase for modernism in the arts. Now there’s nothing that is shocking, and nothing that is new: irresponsible, dangerous; singular, original; the child of one weird, interesting brain. Decent we have, sometimes even good: well-made, professional, passing the time. But wild, indelible, commanding us without appeal to change our lives? I don’t think we even remember what that feels like.
End:revelation
A great audience, Fran Lebowitz once remarked, is more important for the creation of great art than even great artists are. She was thinking, in fact, of the postwar audience, specifically in New York, the one that nurtured Balanchine, Rauschenberg, Miles Davis, and so many others. Great audiences create great artists, she explained, by giving people the freedom to take chances: to be irresponsible, dangerous, difficult, strange. When people compete to be sophisticated, artists win. Then we all win.
Recall that old European Dependable, the feuilleton? William Deresiewicz almost resuscitates it, in this ‘essay’.
Yours,
Myra Breckenridge
P.S.
Dear Reader: note the careful , evocative namedropping, and the utter absence of American theologian Johnathan Edwards, as the homegrown bearer of Calvinism’s self-hatred, inherited from Augustine, among others.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 