StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Observer comments.

I won’t waste The Readers time, here are the final two paragraphs of this Financial Times ‘interview/apologetic’ for Blair. Not to forget that Mrs. Thatcher called Blair her greatest accomplishment. A question arises as too whether Blair, was the political nexus of the Corbyn Defamation? from within The New Labour cadre, that was an unrelenting series of lies, repeated in respectable ‘bourgeois journalism’: that monument to mendacity has been exposed, as what its was and is, Lies from beginning to end. Mr. Blair can’t resist donning the mantle of Victimhood!

…

Now aged 70, does Blair feel aggrieved that his reputation was trashed for so many years by people in his own party? “It didn’t hurt me personally,” he said. “But it irritated the hell out of me because it meant the Tories could just govern the country.”

Referring to Corbyn, he added: “We didn’t have a credible Labour leader. That’s what gave us Brexit.” Asked if he will help Starmer in the forthcoming election campaign, Blair smiles: “I’ll help in any way I can, but he will want to be his own person.”

https://www.ft.com/content/c39a9576-a8fb-416c-ad94-ba90b1e16a0e

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

The first three paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh’s political analysis offers?

There is no such thing as a popular US president. Each one enters office with the suspicion or ill will of almost half the electorate now. Once the routine wear and tear of governing sets in, a low approval rating is so natural as to almost be proof that one is doing the job.

The plight of Joe Biden has to be seen in this context. His dire ratings have to be weighed against the near impossibility of being widely liked in so riven a country. Not since George HW Bush in 1988 has someone won more than 400 out of the available 538 electoral college votes (a once banal feat).

Biden’s situation isn’t unique, then, much less unsalvageable. But if he is to recover, Democrats must understand his central problem. It isn’t, or isn’t just, old age. It isn’t — that eternal conceit of doomed governments the world over — a failure to “communicate” his achievements.

…

Considering that the first three paragraphs fails to take account of Eisenhower, Reagan, or even Obama: self-serving political reductivism is the Ganesh preferred strategy. What follows is a collection of unsubtle clichés, predicated upon his first three paragraphs:

Editor: a sampling of Ganesh clichés:

Biden’s situation isn’t unique, then, much less unsalvageable.

Biden over-interpreted his mandate. 

His brief was to end the dark carnival of Donald Trump and lead the US out of the pandemic. 

There is nothing like inflation to expose the generation gap between those who lead the US and most of those who live in it.

Since his cavalier early months, the president has grown more sensitive to concerns about inflation.

Editor: Ganesh’s political brew is thickened, that might add a kind of credence to his political speculations?

Policies that are popular on their own terms can be unpopular in combination. It is the impression of zeal, of pounding away at an ideological programme, that unnerves voters, unless they have sanctioned it in advance.

Editor: The Reader just has to laugh at this dull-witted assertion. Biden and The New Democrats are Neo-Liberals.

 What followed — profuse spending, subsidies on a scale that might scandalise a Gaullist — was not just startling.

There is nothing like inflation to expose the generation gap between those who lead the US and most of those who live in it. 

He might not fathom what a psychic trauma it is for the middle-aged and the young to see basic goods jump in price, and savings deplete in value. This is their first rodeo.

But members of his government still talk with messianic bombast about a “new economic order” for the world, as though price rises are so much collateral damage in a grand experiment on behalf of the People.

It is the impression of zeal, of pounding away at an ideological programme, that unnerves voters, unless they have sanctioned it in advance.

Editor: the sentence below is on its face  ludicrous, Biden is a Neo-Liberal .

In cast of mind, the Democrats are less Marxist than most parties of the left.

Editor: Mr. Ganesh is so desperate he is not above dragooning Hegel, and spells Neo Liberal correctly! The pressing question is what is ‘Hegelian flowchart’? Chatter, instead of actual argument, the fall back position of Ganesh?

Even mild US progressives now say, as though reading from some Hegelian flowchart, that we have come to the end of a stage called Neoliberalism, and are now proceeding neatly to the dialectical counterblast.

Editor: Let me abbreviate the final paragraph

Democrats seem convinced the recent past was a Steinbeckian hellscape of downtrodden workers and cackling bosses. .

Editor: Political Critique of a kind, featuring again ‘neoliberal’ in its faint praise iteration :

The neoliberal age included low inflation. The neoliberal age included low inflation. It needed reform, not rupture.

Editor: two kinds of ‘ presidencies’:

There are water-treading presidencies and wave-making presidencies.

Reader confront the last sentence for yourself ! 

Political Observer

Old Leftist comments.

The Economist

@TheEconomist

The most painful legacy for a leader who has done much to modernise France would be for his two-term presidency to be followed by the election of the hard-right Marine Le Pen https://econ.st/3qXNqIc

The most painful legacy for a leader who has done much to modernise France would be for his two-term presidency to be followed by the election of the hard-right Marine Le Pen https://t.co/KcslurbCjg

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 6, 2023

Replying @TheEconomist

Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’ capstone was the Anti-Democratic passage of the raising of the Retirement Age, codified by :

French court approves the Macron retirement-age hike despite protests

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/14/france-retirement-age-pension-reform-constitutional/

A top French court on Friday approved controversial legislation to raise the retirement age, clearing the way for the change to become law and securing a victory for French President Emmanuel Macron, even as opponents vowed to continue protests that have rocked the country for months.

In its much-anticipated decision, the Constitutional Council, France’s highest constitutional authority, validated a measure to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 — a shift that has sparked the most significant unrest France has seen in years.

Government officials were eager to signal that the ruling should mark not just the resolution of the legal debate, but the public one, too.

“The text has arrived at the end of its democratic process,” Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne wrote on Twitter in response to the decision. “This evening, there is no winner or loser.”

…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/14/france-retirement-age-pension-reform-constitutional/

The Economist frets about Macron’s legacy! Reader do you have the patience to read the remaining text? Even though I will make some self-serving edits to this capacious Macron apologetic ? The Neo-Liberal Swindle is the guiding ‘principal’ of …

Editor: Pay close attention to the opening paragraph and its ‘political actors’ Sarkozy, Chirac, Macron:

In a memorable phrase that captured his precocious ambition four years before he ran for the French presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy confessed in 2003 that his mind was focused on the top job and “not only when he shaved” every morning. The comment marked the start of his long and fractious struggle to succeed his boss, Jacques Chirac, which he did in 2007. Today, four years before the French elect a successor to their current president, an undeclared race to take over from Emmanuel Macron is also breaking out among his present and former lieutenants.

…

Editor: The Economist resorts to Palace Gossip, Economist Reporter’s cultivated friendships with French pols, and the always self-serving imaginative speculation?

Today, four years before the French elect a successor to their current president, an undeclared race to take over from Emmanuel Macron is also breaking out among his present and former lieutenants.

The French constitution allows a president to serve only two consecutive terms (though after stepping down in 2027, when he will be only 49, Mr Macron could stage another bid five years later). But he still has plenty of time to try to reshape France, and he gives no sign of tiring of the job, nor of shrinking ambition. He vowed recently to keep governing “until the last quarter of an hour” of his term.

Editor : This lie is so prevalent as to be a commonplace: ‘Yet would-be successors from within Mr Macron’s broad centrist camp…’ ‘Macron’s broad centrist camp’ in not ‘centrist’ but rabidly Neo-Liberal!

Yet would-be successors from within Mr Macron’s broad centrist camp are keenly aware not only that there is no single natural successor among them, but that they cannot leave it too late if they are to stand out. On everyone’s mind is the need to find a credible candidate to take on the hard-right Marine Le Pen. Three front-runners seem to think they have what it takes.

Editor’ The Players in this Political Melodrama are heavily garnished, I’ll just highlight some of the praise, apologetics and the ordinary bull-shit!

The showiest is Gérald Darmanin, the tough-talking interior minister, appointed by Mr Macron to secure his right-leaning flank. On August 27th he staged a big political event, over saucisse and chips, in the industrial northern city of Tourcoing, where he was formerly mayor. Ostensibly to discuss political strategy, the happening carried more than a scent of personal ambition. Elisabeth Borne, the prime minister, was hastily dispatched to the event to keep him in order. The son of a bar-owner and a housekeeper, Mr Darmanin (pictured, with Mr Macron) is styling himself as a politician who—unlike the dry technicians who sit beside him in cabinet—understands everyday worries. If mainstream politicians cannot find a way to speak to the working-class and middle-class vote, he declared, outlining a job description tailored to himself, Ms Le Pen’s victory in 2027 will be “quite probable”.

A more discreet but no less resolute aspirant is Edouard Philippe, formerly Mr Macron’s prime minister. Like Mr Darmanin he hails originally from the conservative Republicans party, and tops polls as the most popular French politician with 55% approval, 13 points ahead of Ms Le Pen in ninth place, and 18 points ahead of Mr Darmanin in 18th, according to Ifop, a polling group. Mr Macron trails in 23rd place, on 32%. As French politicians do, Mr Philippe will mark la rentrée, or the return to work, by publishing a new book, outlining his vision and ties to France, on September 13th. After leaving government in 2020 he founded his own political movement, Horizons, which sits in parliament as part of Mr Macron’s minority coalition. Mr Philippe is also mayor of Le Havre, a port city in Normandy. This gives him a convenient perch from which to appear semi-removed from daily politics in Paris. Those who have seen Mr Philippe recently say that he is indeed firmly focused on preparing for 2027.

A third potential runner is Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, yet another ex-Republican and currently the second-most popular politician, with a 46% rating. More discreet in public about his personal aspirations, and more usually spotted in airless summit meeting rooms, he was to be seen this summer in shirt sleeves enthusiastically greeting holidaymakers atop an Alpine mountain pass. Earlier this year the besuited technocrat raised eyebrows when he published a racy novel. Mr Le Maire has now been finance minister for the longest unbroken period of any under the Fifth Republic, created in 1958. But he may at some point feel that he needs to move on if he is to broaden his appeal and work on his own chances.

Others too are said to be mulling over theirs, including Jean Castex, another ex-prime minister, Yaël Braun-Pivet, head of the National Assembly, or even Gabriel Attal, the 34-year-old education minister. Each will have to tread a delicate line between the desire to remain loyal to Mr Macron, to whom they owe their jobs, and the political need to distance themselves from the unpopular president, who has faced strikes and rioting this year. Even if it were in his gift to anoint an heir, this might not do the anointee any favours.

Four years is a long time, and Mr Macron himself was a little-known back-room adviser that long before his first presidential bid. Nor is there any organised process within his party, Renaissance (formerly En Marche), to pick a candidate. The party anyway lacks roots, and may not in its current form even outlive the president.

Editor’: the final paragraph is brimming with Actors bad and good, I’ve put them in bold font.

Yet the threat of a Le Pen presidency lends the matter great urgency. The hard-right leader has been quietly biding her time, sitting politely on the opposition parliamentary benches and trying to look like a president-in-waiting. Mr Macron may not like to think about succession planning. But the most painful legacy for a leader who has done much to modernise France would be for his two-term presidency to be followed by her election, just as Barack Obama’s was by Donald Trump’s.

Will the four years before the next election, give ample time for Macron to wage war on Niger? As France’s dependence on uranium, the price of which has reached record highs? Will French solders die under Macron ? The Economist essay writers are not clairvoyant, so the whole of this essay is awash in speculative political metaphysics, to guild this propaganda.

Old Leftist

Old Socialist attempts to to untie the knot?

Headline: The UK is becoming a pragmatic country again.

Sub-heading: Britain has turned against radical politics faster than other rich nations because it has lost more from it.

https://www.ft.com/content/f8293796-aea7-4157-878e-fc535a6f4a22

Note Mr. Ganesh’s highfalutin, almost beguiling framing, of his latest apologetic for ‘a pragmatism reborn’? Confront his first 155 words with the caution of a sceptic. Architecture and its practitioners, are the natural allies of a portion British Politics of as valid measure of the Zeitgeist? Not just about the power of The Rich to build monuments to their egoism. As an antidote to this chatter, read the Architectural Criticism of Ada Louise Huxtable.

You can tell a Zaha Hadid building from the absence of right angles. You can tell a Frank Gehry one because it seems to have been frozen midway through an explosion. Herzog & de Meuron, the great architectural pragmatists, leave no such calling card.  

No big idea links the Bordeaux stadium (the airiest and most human venue in which I have watched elite sport) to 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami (the only multistorey car park in which I have passed an afternoon) to the Dominus winery in California. Sure enough, when the firm rose to world acclaim, it was in the era of undogmatic politics either side of the millennium. Its winning proposal for Tate Modern in London was architectural Blairism, tweaking an existing structure instead of attempting a revolution. 

The Herzog & de Meuron show at the Royal Academy is one of those exhibitions that, without trying to, captures the spirit of the times

…

This exercise in hyperbole is -what else to name it? ‘His Saint Paul’

Britain is a nation re-embracing pragmatism. Boris Johnson is out of parliament. So is Nadine Dorries, his Saint Paul. The Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer is elevating politicians of the centre-ground in his cabinet-in-waiting.

For the moment political speculation is the focus of Mr. Ganesh. Let me engage in a bit of rhetorical pruning: The Reader might accuse me of being self-servingly selective in my choices, yet Mr. Ganesh writes completely obvious propaganda, for a British Politics, and its allies in the defamation of Corbyn, as not just toxic, but representative of Political Catastrophe. Yet the Object lesson of Johnson, May and now Sunak, has not dimmed Mr. Ganesh’s enthusiasm for the Age of Sunak/Starmer pragmatism, in sum Neo-Liberalism with a pallid impasto, to hide the immiseration of millions!

In 2019, Britain had to choose between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. Next time, voters will have their pick of adenoidal but meticulous technocrats in Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir. When the principal complaint about its leaders is a lack of charisma and grand vision, a country is normalizing.

With this sentence, in bold font, Ganesh demonstrates political cynicism, it lacks the beguiling luster, that used to be a Ganesh trade-mark, at least to those who used to read him, not too many years ago.

What can the world learn from the UK’s political cleansing? First, parliamentary systems fail fast.

Second, don’t be choosy about your saviors.

Editor: Mr. Ganesh then dons the robes of a Stogey Pedagogue: He is not Ronald Coleman in The Halls of Ivy !

The most important lesson, however, is almost too distressing to state baldly. In order to turn against radical politics, a nation has to suffer quite tangibly from it. Britain is unique in that it didn’t just vote for an unconventional individual but for an unconventional project. In the form of Brexit, it has put post-liberal politics into direct effect to a degree that is rare among mature democracies.

Editor : Some instructive sentences and sentence fragments:

The far-right forever stalks the French Fifth Republic…

Trump, too, though he became president, was stymied by a Democratic House of Representatives…

Even the populists who govern Italy have to reckon with that polity’s fragmented nature.

Editor: Brexit

Brexit is different: a specific, discrete venture, enacted in full. One in three voters now think it was a good idea. I don’t suggest the disillusioned majority will reverse the decision any time soon. (That wouldn’t be pragmatic.) But they are inoculated against anything — leftist, rightist or hard-to-place — that smells of grand visions, easy answers, personality-led demagoguery. Even on the airwaves, the faux men-of-the-people and undergraduate communists who grifted so well in the Johnson-Corbyn years are less and less heard from. No, a nation is adamant: we’re not doing this anymore.

Editor: The end of Ganesh’s essay quotes Herzog & de Meuron, in a weak attempt to provide a convincing frame to this essay that meanders into …?

“You cannot always start from scratch,” said Herzog & de Meuron at the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. For a pragmatic nation at maybe its most pragmatic ever point, that was a statement of the obvious. A generation on, it stands out as a warning, and one being absorbed too late.

Old Socialists

Political Observer offers a review of J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, Volume 1 and 2.

The Historians, as the pretenders to the status of Oracles, never disappoint in their quotations from each other. John Rapley ends his New York Times essay, framed by American National Security State hireling/historian Graham T. Allison’s much quoted “Thucydides’ Trap”. It’s like reading, that sychophatic praise for the American charlatan Fukuyama’s Hegelian pastiche, that signaled the arrival and permanence of The American Political Hick, that has bridged an ocean!

For America, it’s a cautionary tale. In responding to the inevitability of China’s rise, the United States needs to ask itself which threats are existential and which are merely uncomfortable. There are pressing dangers facing both the West and China, such as disease and climate change, that will devastate all humanity unless nations tackle them together. As for China’s growing militarization and belligerence, the United States must consider whether it’s really facing “Thucydides’ Trap” of a rising power or simply a country defending its widening interests.

If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.

To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity

Where might The Reader begin her search for an alternative to John Rapley?

J. G. A. POCOCK. Barbarism and Religion. Volume 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 339. $49.95. J. G. A. POCOCK. Barbarism and Religion. Volume 2, Narratives of Civil Government. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 422. $49.95.

Woolf, D. R.

The American Historical Review , Volume 107 (2) – Apr 1, 2002

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) is probably the most famous and perhaps the most misunderstood history written in the past three centuries. It is often cited, and is even well known in popular culture (Bugs Bunny glances at a parody of it on a vampire’s shelf in an old Warner Bros. cartoon), yet more than two-thirds of it, concerning the Greek Eastern Empire, has been largely ignored. Its memorable title has also become falsely associated with popular accounts of the moral decay of the early, Julio-Claudian empire described by Tacitus and Suetonius-a period that Gibbon, who began with the “Five Good Emperors” of the secondcentury Antonine dynasty, did not even address. These misconceptions aside, the multivolume work has the stature of a monument to Enlightenment culture (though not to philosophe agendas). Study of it has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, including David Womersley’s recent critical edition of the entire text and Patricia B. Craddock’s authoritative two-volume biography of Gibbon. How much there is left to say on Gibbon himself, or his masterpiece, is a question one might be excused for asking. The answer, however, would be “a great deal,” and if one has any doubts about that, they are dispelled after reading the first two massive volumes of J. G. A. Pocock’s ongoing study. These get us only to the eve of Gibbon’s writing the first volume, which appeared in 1776 (a year otherwise notable in intellectual history for the death of David Hume and the publication of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith-two North Britons who feature prominently in the second of these volumes). Pocock’s study is not, as one might expect, another biography-though biographical details both enter into his account and prove significant-but an attempt, largely persuasive, to situate Gibbon in as many different intellectual and political contexts as can be imagined or reasonably described from the evidence, and through that exercise (which is far from complete at the end of volume two) to arrive at a much richer understanding of the Decline and Fall.

There is an impressively symphonic quality to Pocock’s major works, at least in their design. In The Machiavellian Moment (1975), his study of the transmission and transformation of ancient ideas of republican virtue through medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth-century English, and North Atlantic filters, he began with a dazzling analysis of a millennium of intellectual history up to Niccolo Machiavelli, slowed the pace notably for a middle section on Machiavelli’s contemporaries, and picked it up again for a concluding sprint through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is something of the same here, and what we have is the first two movements-each with several melodic lines simultaneously developed. Volume one of Barbarism and Religion does not cover a vast chronological sweep, but it does follow Gibbon’s life (and, importantly, the lives of his father and grandfather) and travels against the backdrop of a very complex and distinctively English political and religious climate. The goal of this is more obvious than the road toward it: to demonstrate how and under what circumstances the former apostate, turned militiaman, turned gentleman of letters arrived at his understanding of late antiquity, and of the proper method and suitable style for recounting that understanding to the reading public. There was clearly a much longer and more complex ferment than one can glean from a surface reading of his Memoirs alone; the inspirational moment in 1764 when he mused “amidst the ruins” of the Capitol may explain the occasion of his writing the Decline and Fall, but not the process that permitted that occasion to occur, much less its results. Along the way, we get a wonderful account of the often conflicting streams of English history from the Elizabethan settlement through the Civil War, the Restoration, the revolutionary settlement, Jacobitism, and the advent of a culture of party, commerce, and civility.

Volume two provides the more relaxed andante to this opening allegro: here, Gibbon himself almost slips from view till the very last, as Pocock presents sequential free-standing studies of the major civil histories that provided the narrative exemplars from which Gibbon could depart (he could not really imitate them since they principally dwelt on more modern times). These include two major continental historians (Pietro Giannone and Voltaire), and his major older British contemporaries (principally the Scots Hume, William Robertson, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Smith); there is not much hen: about English neoclassical history writing, which was in a state of decline, although there is a brief but interesting account of the reception of Hume’s major rival, Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay. As with volume one, these studies are valuable in their own right, but they also provide a further context to the writing of the first volume of the Decline and Fall. (So relentless is Pocock’s attention to strict chronology that Robertson’s History ofAmerica [1777] does not feature in his account of that historian, because it appeared too late to have any effect on Gibbon’s first volume, and because it belongs to a different intellectual context: that of the American Revolution.) They are, however, only half the story. One of the unresolved questions here is exactly how Gibbon solved the problem of models for his later volumes, on the Byzantine east, after his history had taken him in directions, or painted him into corners, that he had probably not anticipated when he first conceived it. One answer would seem to be that Gibbon needed to rely to a much greater extent than has been acknowledged on ecclesiastical historians, and we can expect that there will be a parallel to volume two, later in this series, examining that genre.

Each of these volumes also stands on its own as an exploration of two other intellectual questions not directly related to (or at least not circumscribed by) the study of Gibbon. In The Enlightenments ofEdward Gibbon, which is dedicated to the memory of Franco Venturi, the question is to what degree England experienced an Enlightenment at all, and how its “rhythm” differed from the continental and Scottish versions. The plural in the title is not an affectation. The case here is very much for multiple enlightenments, that of the philosophes not being the same as that of the erudits, and the European being no more singular (or normative) than the English. A secondary theme in this volume is provided by the argument of Arnaldo Momigliano that there were distinctive historiographic streams from Renaissance to Enlightenment-narrative, philosophe, and antiquarian or “erudite”-and that Gibbon was the man who managed to integrate them in the Decline and Fall. Narratives of Civil Government, dedicated to the memory of Momigliano, takes up this latter theme more directly, though the emphasis is squarely on the narrative (Hume) and the philosophical (Voltaire) streams, with rather less stress on erudition in the mode of Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Sebastien Tillemont. For any historiographer for whom Momigliano’s famous essays have become central-which is to say most of us working on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-this is a welcome addition to the corpus: the least satisfactory part of Momigliano’s overall argument was his explanation of exactly how Gibbon achieved this synthesis, and by what stages.

These are not easy volumes to read, their pages filled with gallicisms, lengthy extracts, and highly complex sentences weighted with qualifying clauses. The nuances will be lost on anyone unfamiliar with some of the ongoing debates in the history of ideas (and particularly the history of historiography), or with the architecture of the Decline and Fall itself. The turns in the argument are conducted with such precision, and at such a pace, that a napping reader may soon be left behind. But in combination, they represent a very significant advance in our understanding of Gibbon, and of the intellectual and political worlds in which he lived. We are not there yet: there is no climactic third movement imminent, and at the current rate one might expect several more volumes before we hear it.

One of Pocock’s first principles of intellectual history has been that authors end up saying both more and less than they intend, and that what they intended and what we take them to mean depends not only on their own, but also on our, context. “Barbarism and religion,” Gibbon’s most quotable phrase, had one meaning in his time and another in ours. Indeed, it resonates differently between the appearance of these 1999 volumes and the post-September 11, 2001 world in which we must now read them.

D. R. WOOLF McMaster University

I have probably broken some cardinal rule by posting the whole of D. R. Woolf’s review. The reference to September 11, 2001 is out of place, to say the least! Having read both volumes reviewed , and The Machiavellian Moment, which places J. G. A. Pocock in a class by himself. Pocock writes History within a political/historical/moral/intellectual frame that is unrivaled, most assuredly not by John Rapley.

Political Observer

Old Socialist comments.

Headline: She Attacked Israel and The N.Y.P. D. It Made Her Law School a Target

Sub-headline: A student gave a commencement address at the famously progressive CUNY law school. Two weeks later, she was attacked by the tabloids and the mayor, and the school disavowed her speech.

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine

An excerpt of Fatima Mousa Mohammed speech, as ‘reported’ in The New Your Times:

She looked out into the audience now and saw “movement lawyers, business attorneys, professors, librarians,” she said. “I see future lawyers who will defend tenants and not those who dispossess our communities from their homes.” In these instances, her tone was optimistic and celebratory rather than indignant, though there was plenty of indignation.

“Let us remember that Gaza, just this week, has been bombed with the world watching,” she said at one point. “That daily, brown and Black men are being murdered by the state at Rikers.” She praised CUNY as “one of the very few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.”

As it happened, much of her commentary fell under the umbrella of conventional leftist rhetoric — the call to fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism — delivered with a zealotry not unfamiliar among the young and warrior-minded. But it was the fierceness she brought to her denunciation of “Israeli settler colonialism” and CUNY’s collaboration with “the fascist N.Y.P.D.” that especially inflamed the political class, even if her own audience, including the law school dean, seemed receptive.

…

Recall that this is The New York Times

Where does Brooke Goldstein fit into this? See her C.V. here:

Brooke Goldstein is a New York City-based human rights attorney, author, and award-winning filmmaker. She serves as Executive Director of The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about and facilitating a response to the abuse of Western legal systems and human rights law. Brooke is also the founder and director of the Children’s Rights Institute (CRI), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to track, spotlight, and legally combat violations of children’s basic human rights around the world. CRI has a special focus on the state-sponsored indoctrination and recruitment of children to become suicide-homicide bombers, child soldiers, and human shields.

Brooke’s first book, co-authored with Aaron Eitan Meyer and titled Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech: A First Amendment Guide For Reporting in an Age of Islamist Lawfare, gives practical guidance to journalists who wish to speak truthfully about the national security threats faced by liberal democracies.

Brooke’s second book, End Jew Hatred: A Manual for Mobilization, will be released in September 2023. End Jew Hatred shows how the Jewish people can affect real and lasting change by championing the Jewish cause as a minority rights issue, and by harnessing the power of grassroots mobilization, direct action, and legal activism.

Brooke’s award-winning documentary film, The Making of a Martyr, uncovers the illegal, state-sponsored indoctrination and recruitment of Palestinian children for suicide-homicide attacks. Filming Martyr, Brooke secured firsthand interviews with active and armed members of the Al-Aqsa, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas terrorist groups as well as with families of suicide bombers, children imprisoned for attempting to blow themselves up, teachers at terrorist-run schools, and others involved in the phenomenon of child suicide bombing. Martyr is currently broadcast on television stations throughout the globe and is ranked as IMDb’s seventh most popular title on the West Bank.

Brooke is a regular commentator on FOX News and has been featured in several media, including CNN, The New York Sun, Swindle Magazine, Defense Technology International, and on WABC News Talk Radio, and has been published in a variety of sources, including the New York Daily News, Commentary Magazine, The American Spectator, The Counter Terrorist Magazine, Special Ops Magazine, and others. She also hosts the television series Outspoken on Jewish Broadcasting Service (JBS) and is a contributor at Newsmax.

Brooke is a seasoned public speaker and has lectured and taught seminars at numerous schools, including the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York University, Berkeley University, Stanford University, and others. Brooke has also been invited to brief government officials at the U.S. State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, the U.K. Parliament, and U.S. Central Command on issues of asymmetric warfare and human rights.

Brooke is the 2007 recipient of the E. Nathaniel Gates Award for Outstanding Public Advocacy and the 2009 Inspire! Award bestowed by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, was listed in 2009 as one of “36 Under 36 Young Innovators” by the Jewish Week, formerly served as an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and is currently a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a member of the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East’s (SPME) Council of Scholars, an advisory board member of Belev Echad Charity, and a board member of The Mideast Reporter. She is also a recipient of The Blue Card’s 2016 The Irene Hizme Tikkun Olam Award, the UJA’s 2017 Defender of Israel award, and Belev Echad Charity’s 2015 Pillar of Courage award. In 2019, she was inducted into the Manhattan Jewish Historical Initiative’s (MJHI) Manhattan Jewish Hall of Fame. In 2020, she was named among the JNS top 40 global advocates for Israel online. In 2022, Brooke was presented with the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation’s (CAEF) Advocate Award of Excellence in recognition of The Lawfare Project’s work. In 2023, she was honored to receive the WIZO Charlotte and Sami Rohr Defender of Israel Award, established to pay tribute to those who have acted as guardians and protectors of the State of Israel and its people.

From 2007-2009, Brooke served as director of the Legal Project at the Middle East Forum, an organization that arranges financial support for and pro-bono legal representation of persons wrongfully sued for exercising their right to free speech on issues of national security and public concern.

Additionally, Brooke is the co-founder of A2B Film Productions, Inc., a Canada-based independent documentary film production company focused on creating films that explore issues ignored by the mainstream media.

Canadian born, Brooke earned her B.A. from McGill University and received her J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. She also attended Columbia University and University of Toronto’s exchange programs.

In her role as Executive Director of The Lawfare Project, Goldstein incubated, provided the seed funding for, and founded the progressive Jewish organization Zioness. She coined the phrase, “Zionism is a progressive value.”

https://www.thelawfareproject.org/staff-bios

It is an 825 word ‘Press Release’ , not a C.V. Like her allies @Freedland and @AnthonyJulius6, she is a professional political hysteric, on the search for Anti-Semites, under the bland descriptor of Jew Haters, as the in order too of avoiding the Law Court, for defamation.

See her latest tweet for the next installments of the continuing Melodrama, rooted in her inability to recognize the fact that Free Speech, and that Palestinians must defend their right to merely exists, even in the reality… Thank you Fatima Mousa Mohammed!

Old Socialist

Political Cynic breathes deep, and chokes, on the incense burnt in the names of misbegotten expertise.

Mr. Bret Stephens is a political opportunist, always looking to guild his commentaries with some high sounding, and not the least pretentious opening paragraph.

Several years ago, the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison coined the term “Thucydides’ trap.” It was based on the ancient historian’s observation that the real cause of the Peloponnesian War “was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta.” Allison saw the pattern of tensions — and frequent wars — between rising and ruling powers repeating itself throughout history, most recently, he believes, with the challenge that a rising China poses to American hegemony.

This offers some insights into Graham Allison:

Graham Allison is a professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the founding dean. He is a former U.S. assistant defense secretary and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

https://foreignpolicy.com/author/graham-allison/

Graham Allison was a an integral part of The American National State, who wooed the cadre of American Political Hicks, with an evocative catch phrase.

On the actual ‘American Foreign Policy And It’s Thinkers’ Read Perry Anderson’s:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii83/articles/perry-anderson-consilium

This paragraph acts as framing:

It’s an intriguing thesis, but in China’s case it has a glaring flaw: The main challenge we will face from the People’s Republic in the coming decade stems not from its rise but from its decline — something that has been obvious for years and has become undeniable in the past year with the country’s real estate market crash.

Stephens becomes prescriptive:

Western policymakers need to reorient their thinking around this fact. How? With five don’ts and two dos.

The Reader might observe that Allison has had actual experience as ‘ a former U.S. assistant defense secretary’, that Stephens can’t even match, nor I! Yet Stephens continues to scribble away ‘as if’ …

First, don’t think of China’s misfortunes as our good fortune.

Second, don’t assume the crisis will be short-lived.

Third, don’t assume competent economic management.

Fourth, don’t take domestic tranquillity as a given.

Fifth, don’t suppose that a declining power is a less dangerous one.

Sixth, do stick to four red lines.

Seventh, do pursue a policy of détente.

The final paragraphs:

We should not seek a new cold war with China. We cannot afford a hot one. The best response to China’s economic woes is American economic magnanimity. That could start with the removal of the Trump administration tariffs that have done as much to hurt American companies and consumers as they have the Chinese.

Whether that will change the fundamental pattern of Beijing’s bad behavior is far from certain. But as China slides toward crisis, it behooves us to try.

The New Cold War with China is of long standing, to act as if this is not a political fact, is self-serving myopia- yet for a Neo-Conservative ghoul, to play the part of The Voice Of Political Reason, is not just unconvincing, but disingenuous. The reader might ask, what expertise dose Stephens offer his readership on China, besides his list? The other Times Neo-Conservative, @nytdavidbrooks, could have written a better exercise in a proffered, for want of better descriptors, Political Realism, Political Pragmatism ?

Political Cynic

Political Observer recalls the Republican Convention of 1964, and the importance of Newspapers.

I watched the 1964 Republican Convection, as a high-school drop-out, I watched too much television. The expulsion of William Scranton, or at the least the public shaming of a Liberal, that Goldwater exemplified in his ‘ Extremism in pursuit of Liberty is no vice’. was the beginning of the end for the Liberal Republican, as political actor. That eventually became the Goldwater/ Reagan toxin, that metastasized into the ‘Tea Party’ and evetually Trump/Trumpism.

But my fascination with politics started in 1960 and the Kennedy’s: I read that Hearst rag The Herald Examiner provided gossip of Kennedy’s sexual escapades, in its ‘reporting’ on the Democratic Convention of 1960. My brother and sisters were taken with that cult of political glamour, too much television? As a younger child I had delivered the ‘Los Angeles Mirror’, in the time of the The Johnny Stompanato murder… my mother made my brother, and I swear, that we would not read the newspapers we folded, before delivery. Newspapers played a big part in my childhood and after.

It comes as no surprise that political commentators, self-proclaimed foreign policy experts, wedded to jejune moralizing, like Friedman and Brooks- yet in all their political babble, about the political toxicity about Trump and Trumpism, not one word about the Liberal Republicans of another time?

Millicent Fenwick, Edward Brooke, Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy, William Scranton, Margaret Chase Smith

What better way, than through a History, of those ignored/forgotten exemplars of a pragmatic Republican Party?

Political Observer

Old Socialist eventually finds, the elusive, diminutive, ‘Culture Department’.

The Reader might just ask what is a ‘Culture Department’?

Here are the opening paragraphs of Colvile’s essay, that does not mention that ‘Culture Department’ :

Here’s a riddle for you. Energy costs are lower than they were yet some people are having to pay more. How come? The answer, as Rishi Sunak explained last week, is that during the energy crisis, the government lopped an average of £1,500 off every bill in the country.

This was treated by the left as a hideous blooper from an out-of-touch prime minister. In fact, it’s a statement of the bleeding obvious. Not to mention a perfect example of where we are when it comes to spending. The British state is forking out more than ever before. Yet politicians get precious little thanks for any of it — just endless calls to spend even more.

This point was driven home by two other stories. First, it was announced that government borrowing is lower than expected. Hooray, chorused Tory MPs — room for tax cuts! But then the Institute for Fiscal Studies put out a report on the long-term state of the public finances, which threw cold water on any such enthusiasm. It showed not only that the gap between tax and spend is still cavernous, but also that spending is set to climb over the next half-century at pretty much a 45-degree angle.

“The UK’s ageing population will effectively confront policymakers with a choice in coming decades,” wrote the authors. “Increase levels of tax substantially to fund higher spending or substantially reduce the scope of the public services that the British state provides.”

Any business would take drastic action to repair its balance sheet if faced with such a combination of heavy debt and rising costs (and indeed the rising cost of heavy debt — thanks to higher interest rates, the annual bill to repay our creditors is likely to top £100 billion, making it larger than any departmental budget bar the NHS). But adjusting outgoings to incomings doesn’t seem to be in Britain’s political vocabulary. Instead, we are adding to our commitments: the big social care and childcare reforms in this parliament essentially boiled down to spending more on each.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-we-need-a-culture-department-its-one-question-to-be-asking-when-money-is-tight-mjzj8wbbb

In these 339 words, The Reader has yet to confront that ‘Culture Department’. But Mr. Colvile is concerned with various problems of a ‘balance sheet’ : he imitates the patois of the bookkeeper. That should not surprise, as Colvile’s adoration of Thatcher, who came from a Nation Of Shopkeepers, and their ‘values’, is a kind vulgarized, penny-pinching Neo-Liberalism: one writ small, the other writ as World Historical Fraud.

Finally, here is where The Reader confronts momentarily, a diminutive ‘a department for culture’ …

Let’s throw out a few. Do we genuinely need a department for culture?

Not to forget Colvile’ faith in the Myth of ‘The Market’ :

What could instead be done at local level — or by the market?

A revelatory collection of Neo-Liberal/Thatcherite clichés follows :

Why does NHS England duplicate many of the functions of the Department of Health and Social Care?

(The language of priorities is the religion of socialism, and all that.)

At some point, for example, politicians will have to address the inexorable rise in NHS compensation costs (which have almost doubled in the past seven years), or the fact that the proportion of the working-age population claiming disability benefits has more than trebled since the early 1990s, despite all the medical advances over that period.

But we also need people to pay more of the costs of their old age.

Asking people to cover more of their care costs, for example via an insurance scheme funded post-mortem by a limited fraction of their property wealth.

All of these challenges are the work of decades rather than years. Many would be deeply controversial. But in the absence of a miraculous surge in growth and productivity, the choice ahead of us is clear. Either we do some hard thinking about what the public sector shouldn’t be doing, as well as what it should — or we resign ourselves to a future of far higher taxes, and a far larger state.

Colvile is a practiced Thatcherite /Neo-Liberal. This is The Times!

Old Socialist

Old Socialist offers a selection.

Leaders | Economic malaise

Is Germany once again the sick man of Europe?

Its ills are different from 1999. But another stiff dose of reform is still needed

Nearly twenty-five years ago this newspaper called Germany the sick man of the euro. The combination of reunification, a sclerotic job market and slowing export demand all plagued the economy, forcing unemployment into double digits. Then a series of reforms in the early 2000s ushered in a golden age. Germany became the envy of its peers. Not only did the trains run on time but, with its world-beating engineering, the country also stood out as an exporting powerhouse. However, while Germany has prospered, the world has kept on turning. As a result, Germany has once again started to fall behind.

Europe’s biggest economy has gone from a growth leader to a laggard. Between 2006 and 2017 it outperformed its large counterparts and kept pace with America. Yet today it has just experienced its third quarter of contraction or stagnation and may end up being the only big economy to shrink in 2023. The problems lie not only in the here and now. According to the imf, Germany will grow more slowly than America, Britain, France and Spain over the next five years, too.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/17/is-germany-once-again-the-sick-man-of-europe

Aug 17th 2023

Business | Angst

German bosses are depressed

And dissatisfied with the government

“We are at a dangerous point,” worries Arndt Kirchhoff, boss of the employers’ association in North Rhine-Westphalia and one of three brothers who run Kirchhoff, a maker of car components. Germany recently slipped into a technical recession. Many companies are investing abroad rather than at home. Chinese consumers are importing less after the lifting of pandemic restrictions than German manufacturers had been hoping. And Ukraine’s counter-offensive against Russian invaders is injecting uncertainty into Germany’s backyard.

…

https://www.economist.com/business/2023/06/08/german-bosses-are-depressed

Jun 8th 2023 | BERLIN

Finance and economics | How the wheels came off

The German economy: from European leader to laggard

Its problems are deep-rooted, knotty and show little sign of being fixed

The 2010s were Germany’s decade. A Jobwunder (employment miracle) that began in the 2000s reached full flower, largely unimpeded by the global financial crisis of 2007-09, as labour reforms introduced by Gerhard Schröder, chancellor from 1998 to 2005, combined with China’s demand for manufactured goods and a boom in emerging markets to add 7m jobs. From the mid-2000s to the end of the 2010s, Germany’s economy grew by 24%, compared with 22% in Britain and 18% in France. Angela Merkel, chancellor from 2005 to 2021, was lauded for her grown-up leadership. Populism of the Trump-Brexit variety was believed to be a problem for other countries. Germany’s social model, built upon close relationships between unions and employers, and its co-operative federalism, which spread growth across the country, wowed commentators, who published books with titles such as “Why the Germans Do It better”. Germany’s footballers even won the World Cup.

…

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/08/17/the-german-economy-from-european-leader-to-laggard

Aug 17th 2023 | BERLIN

Europe | Germany own goals

Germany is becoming expert at defeating itself

Bureaucracy and strategic blunders are starting to pile up

In “the twelve tasks of asterix”, an animated film from 1976, one of the feats the diminutive Gaul must perform is to secure a government permit. To do so he must visit a vast office called The Place That Sends You Mad. In a recent open letter Wolfram Axthelm, the head of the German Wind Energy Association, likened modern Germany’s infuriating bureaucracy to Asterix’s challenge. A particular gripe was the 150-odd permits demanded by Autobahn GmbH, a state-owned firm that runs Germany’s vaunted motorways, for transporting outsize components of wind turbines, such as blades. Between byzantine rules on load dimensions, faulty software, perennial roadworks and a lack of personnel to process complaints, a backlog of some 20,000 applications has built up. A company that recently trucked a turbine from the port of Bremen to a site in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein found that although the distance is barely 100km (62 miles), road restrictions made the journey five times that long.

…

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/08/17/germany-is-becoming-expert-at-defeating-itself

Aug 17th 2023 | BERLIN

Le Monde, even quotes The Economist !

Germany’s slowdown is good news for no one

EDITORIAL

The German economy is going through a worrying slump. In addition to cyclical and structural difficulties, a fragmented political landscape is hampering the efforts needed to get back on track.

Published today at 12:31 pm (Paris)

Have the Germans caught the French bug? Doubt and self-flagellation seem to have taken hold of our neighbors on the other side of the Rhine, demoralized by economic indicators that accompany growth at half-mast. According to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, Germany is likely to be the only G7 country to experience a recession this year.

Inflation, which is higher than in France, partly explains this underperformance. Other causes are inherent to the German model: the decline in industrial production is felt more keenly because Germany’s economy is more industrialized; competition, particularly from China, in the electric car market is hitting Germany harder because of the importance of the automotive industry. The fallout from the Covid-19 period and the impact of the war in Ukraine are particularly hard on a model that draws its strength from exports. It is symptomatic that the two countries whose economies have benefited most from globalization, China and Germany, are finding it harder than the others to recover. In fact, the German economy is the most China-dependent in Europe, an asset that has now become a handicap.

British weekly The Economist drove the point home with its fatal cover question this week, “Is Germany once again the sick man of Europe?”, bringing back the trauma of a previous resounding cover story which, in 1999, had decreed the same country “the sick man of the euro”.

…

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/08/23/germany-s-slowdown-is-good-news-for-no-one_6104927_23.html

Old Socialist