Political Observer comments on Preston’s self-willed ignorance.
The Players: Andrew Preston, William Bullitt, Sigmund Freud, Woodrow Wilson, Patrick Weil, Zachary Jonathan Jacobson, Richard Nixon.
Andrew Preston’s review begins here:
Shortly after the US election of 2016 a group of psychiatrists denounced Donald Trump as a psychologically unbalanced sociopath – cruel, narcissistic, paranoid, prone to delusions of grandeur – and thus a danger to the world. But in doing so they had to wrestle with two contradictory principles of their profession: a psychiatrist shouldn’t offer diagnoses for people they have never met, let alone treated, a principle also known, thanks to an earlier American political episode, as the Goldwater rule; yet a psychiatrist also has a duty, not only moral but legal, to warn if someone’s mental illness poses a danger to others. This seemed compelling in Trump’s case, but in publicly offering a diagnosis, their decision to prioritize the second principle over the first generated fierce debate over whether a president’s state of mind was fair game.
Most observers agreed it was. During the Trump era sensational revelations of a psychologically unstable president made Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury one of the fastest-selling books in publishing history. As Nancy Pelosi put it, “You understand that this is not a person of sound mind”. In response, Trump’s self-diagnosis will long be remembered: he wasn’t just “smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”
Presidential sanity is not a new concern, and politicians have long been subject to psychological analysis. The Goldwater rule emerged after a large number of psychiatrists claimed that Senator Barry Goldwater, campaigning for the White House in 1964, was mentally unfit for the presidency. After his election loss to Lyndon B. Johnson – himself a curious psychological study – Goldwater successfully sued for defamation and the American Psychiatric Association issued its cautionary guideline. But that hasn’t stopped a cottage industry about it from arising.
Should The Reader look askance at the title of Patrick Weil’s book under review?
The Madman In The White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the lost psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
The ‘psychobiography’ was published in 1966, a ‘redacted version’: this from the publisher of Weil’s book, Harvard University Press. I’ve placed in bold font the last paragraph.
After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project.
For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.
This Andrew Preston paragraph, pronounces that ‘essentially every biographer is a psychohistorian’.
Historians and biographers, whose only methodological guardrail is the availability of primary sources, have no such qualms. Judging a personality, and its disorders, is inherent to the practice of biography. At the extreme end is the genre of psychohistory, which blends historical method with psychoanalytical theory, but essentially every biographer is a psychohistorian.
Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House, a detailed study of Woodrow Wilson and his statecraft, falls into this category. Wilson reluctantly brought the US into the First World War and, during the Paris Peace Conference, attempted to create a new world order, known as Wilsonianism, along liberal internationalist lines. By ensuring the attainment of its other principles – the promotion of democracy, self-determination, collective security – the League of Nations was Wilsonianism’s bedrock. This was always going to be a tough sell in America, but Wilson refused to compromise on the League’s basic design. His unstoppable force met the immovable objections of the Republican Party, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, and, though Wilson was a strong president, Republicans controlled the Senate. Lodge prevailed, and the standoff meant that the US never ratified the Treaty of Versailles or joined the League. Wilson predicted that the consequence would be another world war.
Psychohistory and the Psychohistorian had passed from the scene decades ago. Prof. Preston’s ignorance, of this second half of Robert Coles 1973 essay, seems inexcusable given his credentials!
No doubt somewhere there is a historian prepared to insist that any psychoanalyst who wants to write about history take a full graduate course and spend a few years doing “proper” historical research. But some scholars have to some degree combined the two disciplines—the historian Bruce Mazlish, for example, or the political scientist E. Victor Wolfenstein. Both men have psychoanalytic knowledge—of an order Dr. Eissler would doubtless find acceptable—as well as training in their professions.
Professor Mazlish has been an especially active proponent of what he and others (Robert Jay Lifton, Joel Kovel, John Demos) call “psychohistory.” Each of these men has his own particular way of working with historical materials from a psychological (more precisely, psychoanalytic) point of view. They share a common interest in drawing upon several disciplines in the hope of seeing human experience more broadly, and escaping the rigidities and biases inherent in any particular psychoanalytic formulation. Robert Wallerstein has perhaps made the best case for such activity:
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Yet as one goes through Mazlish’s In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry or Wolfenstein’s The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, it seems clear that both scholars have as many dangers to avoid as opportunities to grasp. In both books we are warned that psychoanalytic “reductionism” is offensive and perhaps a thing of the past. Nevertheless, Nixon is called “oral” and “anal” at various points, as are Lenin, Trotsky, and Gandhi. Ambivalences are discussed, problems with mothers and fathers described at length.
In the case of Mazlish’s book an interesting dialectic of sorts takes place. First the President is described or typed. (“Orality is an important element in Nixon’s character.”) Then the reader is informed that such a description merely makes Richard Nixon a human being. If he has used a “genital metaphor and an anal one,” then “others frequently use similar metaphors.” After we have read two-thirds of his book, in which words or phrases like “passivity,” “death anxiety,” and “survivor guilt” are pervasive, Mazlish makes this statement: “What we have been discussing up to now may be thought of as the psychological banalities of Nixon’s character.” One wonders, at this point, why the author has bothered to write this book at all, especially since the rest of the book offers nothing else about the President’s “character,” only an extensive justification of the value of “psychohistory” as “science.”
Zachary Jonathan Jacobson writes ‘On Nixon’s Madness: An emotional history’ … The Reader might ask herself, what is an ‘emotional history’, or might it be? Could it be a kind of modern day reductionism of Psychoanalysis/Psychohistory? Andrew Preston seems, at the least, duly impressed : ‘brilliant, insightful, beautifully written book’.
If historians ranked the maddest of the modern presidents, it’s certain Wilson wouldn’t top the list. That honour would more likely go to Zachary Jonathan Jacobson’s subject, Richard Nixon. But in this brilliant, insightful, beautifully written book, Jacobson takes a different approach from Weil’s. Rather than diagnosing Nixon’s pathologies, he uses the infamous “madman theory” as a point of entry into one of the most consequential presidencies in history.
Andrew Preston’s praise of Zachary Jonathan Jacobson ‘emotional history’ reads like maladroit Anti-Trump propaganda, with Nixon acting the part as the ‘bizarre personality, along with his clumsy attempts to manipulate reality so that it would conform to an image he not only wanted to project, but needed to believe’.
Nixon has been written about more extensively than most presidents, so the audacious originality of On Nixon’s Madness is a truly impressive feat. Jacobson’s account examines Nixon’s bizarre personality, along with his clumsy attempts to manipulate reality so that it would conform to an image he not only wanted to project, but needed to believe. As Jacobson observes: “It was as if Nixon had never quite mastered the role of Richard Nixon”. He was “ill-calibrated”. The results – including the prolonging of the war (the madman theory turned out to be a strategic dud) and the Watergate crisis – destroyed Nixon and destabilized an increasingly divided nation.
Most presidents have displayed strange or antisocial behaviour. Perhaps that’s because they’ve all to some extent been mentally ill: who other than a narcissist would even want the job? Others may have had the sense not to say it out loud, but Trump wasn’t the only president to believe “I alone can fix it”. Maybe Wilson and Nixon were indeed mad. But if so, they probably all were.
My comment is a sketch, at best, but it might just enable The Reader to navigate Prof. Preston essay, via some sources that transcended the imperatives of propaganda.
The opening paragraph of this exhumation is not surprising:
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.
That Golden Age ushered in by ‘a series of reforms in the early 2000s ushered in a golden age. Germany became the envy of its peers’ – The Reader will take note that proof of that ‘age’ is presented in the negative?
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.
To be sure, things are not as alarming as they were in 1999. Unemployment today is around 3%; the country is richer and more open. But Germans increasingly complain that their country is not working as well as it should. Four out of five tell pollsters that Germany is not a fair place to live. Trains now run so serially behind the clock that Switzerland has barred late ones from its network. After being stranded abroad for the second time this summer as her ageing official plane malfunctioned, Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, has aborted a trip to Australia.
A bit of argumentative reductionism might helps to try to grasp The Economist’s argumentative points, if they exist as such, instead of being chock-a-block assertions about a time period ‘Between 2006 and 2017’ attached to ‘not as alarming as they were in 1999’.
A collection of sentences and or paragraphs might help illuminate?
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For years Germany’s outperformance in old industries papered over its lack of investment in new ones. Complacency and an obsession with fiscal prudence led to too little public investment, and not just in Deutsche Bahn and the Bundeswehr.
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The geopolitics mean that manufacturing may no longer be the cash cow it used to be. Of all the large Western economies, Germany is the most exposed to China. Last year trade between the two amounted to $314bn.
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Another difficulty comes from the energy transition. Germany’s industrial sector uses nearly twice as much energy as the next-biggest in Europe, and its consumers have a much bigger carbon footprint than those in France or Italy.Cheap Russian gas is no longer an option and the country has, in a spectacular own goal, turned away from nuclear power (see Europe section).
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Editor: The utter dishonesty of The Economist, not to address the fact that America and or its hirelings/allies destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines!
THE COVER-UP
MAR 22, 2023
The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines
Increasingly, too, Germany lacks the talent it needs. A baby boom after the second world war means that 2m workers, on net, will retire over the next five years.
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For Germany to thrive in a more fragmented, greener and ageing world, its economic model will need to adapt.
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The temptation may therefore be to stick with the old ways of doing things.
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Instead of running scared, politicians must look ahead, by fostering new firms, infrastructure and talent. Embracing technology would be a gift to new firms and industries. A digitised bureaucracy would do wonders for smaller firms that lack the capacity to fill out reams of paperwork.
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Editor: After that collection of clichés, the The Economist offers an Agenda 2030:
Just as important will be attracting new talent. Germany has liberalised its immigration rules, but the visa process is still glacial and Germany is better at welcoming refugees than professionals. Attracting more skilled immigrants could even nurture home-grown talent, if it helped deal with the chronic shortage of teachers. In a country of coalition governments and cautious bureaucrats, none of this will be easy. Yet two decades ago, Germany pulled off a remarkable transformation to extraordinary effect. It is time for another visit to the health farm.
The insufferable arrogance of Oxbridgers, and the pretenders to that toxic status, yet not one reference, to two rhetorical actors in German Political History, Realpolitik or Ostpolitik? Surely those references could have transformed the jejune into The World Historical?
Brooks is the paradigmatic New York Times Public Intellectual, who couches this essay of moral/political chatter, with this attempt at confronting ‘the decline of the American psyche’, via Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe. The pseudo-profound, sometimes attached to Public Moralizing is now ‘the why’ that defines the Brook’s métier. I’ll leave it to The Reader to evaluate my commentary! The inclusion of Tom Wolfe is the singular comic note here.
Here are the first two paragraphs of Mr. Brooks essay in the The Atlantic of August 14, 2023
Headline: How America Got Mean
Sub-headline: In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
In the first paragraph Brooks presents empirical evidence, and in the second paragraph an admixture of the anecdotal and the empirical. But The Reader detects in these paragraphs Brooks’ adherence to bourgeoise political respectability, as his measure of what is ‘normal’. As I child I recall all those Saturday Evening Post covers illustrated by Norman Rockwell, on reflection to be the epitome of ‘niceness’ … that is before Rockwell discovered the Civil Rights Movement.
Given that I will not spend eighty dollars, on a marginal publication, that is the headquarters of Neo-Conservatives, in search of cultivating political respectability. So as my critical strategy, I will search the New York Times database and other sources for Mr. Brook’s political moralizing, in its more more diminutive expressions.
On Meanness, let me begin with this Brooks’ essay of July 15, 2021:
The American Identity Crisis
Here is an excerpt of Brooks’ political moralizing:
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I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
Not to forget this War Mongering essay: ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ofApril 28, 2003. I’ll just post the link to the ‘essay’, it is a moral/political obscenity. A man who had never served in a war, writes dull witted war propaganda! In ‘The American Identity Crisis’ he carefully air-brushed it as the abandonment of American Values.
Headline: ‘The Power of American Capitalism’of April 20, 2023
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My point is not that American capitalism is perfect. My point is that there is a tension between economic dynamism and economic security. For reasons deeply rooted in our culture, the American brand of capitalism has always been tilted toward dynamism, with freer markets and smaller welfare states.
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In 2013, Thomas Piketty published a much discussed book called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” arguing that widening inequality is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. The problem is that right around the publication of his book, inequality stopped widening, the economist Noah Smith notes, and it now appears to be slightly decreasing.
The American model of capitalism is under assault from the left, which rails against the supposed horrors of neoliberalism and globalization, and from Tucker Carlson-style populists, who often treat American capitalism as a great betrayal. But it has proved superior to all real world alternatives.
In fact, I’m kind of amazed. We’ve lived through a wretched political era. The social fabric is fraying in a thousand ways. But American capitalism rolls on
On the vexing question of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’, Brooks missed R.A’.s ten part review of ‘Capital’ in The Economist. I relied on this exercise of political honesty, as the antidote to this dismissive, in deed reductive Economist essay.
Brooks is a propagandist, though not a particularly adept practitioner, of the art of mendacity. Though he is still be employed by The New York Times, as that toxic American Political Type: The New York Times Public Intellectual.
The framing of this latest David Brooks essay, in which he ponders ‘the decline of the American psyche’ what ever that might be? What are the credentials that Brooks offers The Reader? His long apprenticeship to Wm. F. Buckley Jr. : Depth Psychology and Buckley were antithetical.
If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.
Philip Rieff published his book the Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, Harper & Row in 1966.
Old Master
FRED BAUMANN
June 1, 2006
Cultural critic Phillip Rieff has been a man of few but powerful words. Now, at age 84, he has published the first volume of a new trilogy.
Philip Rieff is what we might call an obscure famous man. Among intellectuals of a certain kind and generation he is the master who in 1965 published The Triumph of The Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud, a pioneering work that charted the rise of the therapeutic ethos in Western culture (and whose basic thesis was borrowed some years later by the late Christopher Lasch for The Culture of Narcissism). He is also famous to University of Pennsylvania denizens of a certain period, for he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology there for many years until his retirement in 1992. And for those who like to follow more personal matters, he is famous for having married Susan Sontag and fathered the journalist David Rieff.
Those of ‘us’ who came of age trying to master the Freudian patois, Rieff’s book was another hurdle.
Christopher Lasch published his book ’The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations’ in 1979. And Tom Wolfe of ‘The ‘Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”
The Book of Self-Love
By Lee Siegel
Feb. 5, 2010
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This would all sound familiar to Christopher Lasch. Just over 30 years ago, in “The Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch, a historian at the University of Rochester, took what was still mainly a narrowly clinical term and used it to diagnose a pathology that seemed to have spread to all corners of American life. In Lasch’s definition (drawn from Freud), the narcissist, driven by repressed rage and self-hatred, escapes into a grandiose self-conception, using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval. Lasch saw the echo of such qualities in “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death.” “The happy hooker,” Lasch wrote, “stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success.”
Not all reviewers cottoned to Lasch’s relentlessly grim tone, but Time magazine described him as a “biblical prophet,” and the broader public embraced his jeremiad. Appearing at a time of inflation and recession, oil shortages, soaring crime rates and faltering cities, Lasch’s book leapt onto the best-seller list, making him famous. Jimmy Carter was so taken with Lasch’s ideas that he invited the academic author to advise him on the famous “malaise” speech of July 1979.
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Lasch wasn’t the first to comment on our rising self-absorption. Three years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written an epoch-anointing cover story in New York magazine called “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” But where Wolfe celebrated narcissism as a millenarian outburst of vitality — “the greatest age of individualism in American history,” as he put it with winking enthusiasm — Lasch saw a decadent defiance of nature and kinship. In “The Culture of Narcissism,” he asked a simple question that cut deeper than Wolfe’s provocation: How had the radical changes in American economic and social arrangements since the 19th century affected the individual? Armed with Marx’s conviction that economic forces shape character and with Freud’s insight into the bourgeois mind, he answered with a sulfurous indictment of contemporary American life. “Long-term social changes,” Lasch wrote, have “created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute.”
Mr. Brooks demonstrates that his inclusion of Tom Wolfe, before he became an American Silver Fork Novelist. Mr. Brookes continues his exercise in self-serving hyperbole.
In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace. But in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?
From the start, many writers noticed that this ethos often turned people into fragile narcissists. It cut them off from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity. It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves. As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”
Lasch continued: “Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”
Mr. Brooks’ change of decade to the near present, or the past present?
Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.
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Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm.
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This was accompanied by what you might call the elephantiasis of trauma.
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A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era.
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Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm.
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For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.
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Apparently, every national phenomenon has to turn into a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.
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Editor: Magically Political Hysterics Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt appear:
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt described the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.
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The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life.
Editor: more Pop Psychology, or it it just self-serving political kitsch?
But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.
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Editor: Jordan Peterson and Josh Hawley appear as part of ‘an army of masculinist influencers’.
The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators — from Senator Josh Hawley to an army of masculinist influencers.
Editor: the cast of characters grows with nearly every paragraph. A self-protective reductionism is not just necessary but demanded.
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“Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma.
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Editor: The Reader has 541 more words, of this diatribe, to reach before it’s end… my patience has reached its end! Neo-Conservatives always alienate their readership, via their insufferable arrogance, Mr. Brooks follows that self-destructive imperative to the letter.
The first paragraphs of Stephens diatribe against Paul Ryan offers:
Shortly after last year’s midterms, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and eked out only a thin majority in the House, Paul Ryan gave an interview to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in which he described himself as a “Never-Again Trumper.” It’s worth recalling what Ryan and other Republicans said about Donald Trump the first time he ran to see what a sham this feeble self-designation is likely to become.
In 2015, Ryan, the House speaker then, denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “not conservatism,” “not what this party stands for” and “not what this country stands for.” Then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana privately complained that Trump was “unacceptable,” according to the G.O.P. strategist Dan Senor, before he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. Ted Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for insulting his wife, Heidi, before declaring that “Donald Trump will not be the nominee.”
They all folded — and they all will fold again. Their point of principle wasn’t that Trump had crossed so many moral and ethical lines that they would rather live with a Democrat they could honorably oppose than a Republican they would be forced to dishonorably defend. Their point was simply that Trump couldn’t win. When he did, they became powerless to oppose him.
Seven years later, they’ve learned nothing.
In his interview with ABC, Ryan said he was “proud of the accomplishments” of the Trump years, citing tax reform, deregulation, criminal-justice reform, and conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges. So why oppose Trump in 2024? “Because I want to win,” Ryan said, “and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”
Should The Reader be at all surprised that Politics, as practiced, is about the ability to adapt to an ever-changing landscape… call it hypocrisy if you must, yet the ability to adapt and change, with the shifting political tides, defines political careers across the political spectrum.
This set of imperatives fails to register with Mr. Stephens, who is for want of a more accurate descriptor is a Straussian, of a particular kind, unmasked by Nicolas Xenos.
Mr. Stephens in this ‘essay’ dons the robes of Tomás de Torquemada, to expose Ryan as one of many, who have come to terms with the ‘Trump Phenomenon’. Yet this ‘Phenomenon’ is about a completely failed Political Class: The Republicans and The New Democrats.
The Neo-Cons had their political moments with the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both murderous and ignominious losses, and the monument’s to America’s failed hegemonic ambition: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and its many ‘black sites’…
Stephen’s, in the robes of Torquemada, seeks to strike, from inconvenient political memory, these crimes, by pointing to Paul Ryan, as a dubious political hack. Note that Ryan, demonstrated a kind of political wisdom, in abandoning his powerful position, as the in order too… he cultivated a possible status as a ‘wise political elder’?
Contemplate the ‘failure’ of Putin’s 45 delegation’s.. the question of the decline of the of attendance to delegations, demonstrates that mollifying the American Hegemon is the wise course for African Nations?
Headline: Putin hosts African leaders in St Petersburg in bid to salvage reputation
Sub-headline: The second Russia-Africa summit, taking place on July 27-28, provides an opportunity for the Russian president to reassure his African counterparts, some of whom are anxious about the consequences of the war in Ukraine.
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All these achievements on the African continent must be preserved from Moscow’s perspective. The Saint Petersburg summit is, therefore, of the utmost importance. But the targeted model cultivated by Moscow, mainly based on security and informational influence for the benefit of ruling elites, is likely to show its limits in the long term. In Sochi, Putin had pledged to double trade between Russia and Africa, then valued at $20 billion. Four years later, trade is stalling at $18 billion, representing 5% of Europe-Africa trade and 6% of China-Africa trade. As for Russian investment, it represents less than 1% of foreign capital invested in Africa. These figures call into question the extent of Moscow’s political influence with respect to its effective economic presence.
The Economist opening paragraphs set the stage with a vegetable seller, Nassirou mahamadou the local color provided by a ‘stringer’? … Its hard to imagine a privileged Oxbridger consorting with ‘locals’ .
Nassirou mahamadou, a vegetable seller perched on a stool in Niamey, the capital of Niger, does not look like a fighter. Yet at the mention of threats by Niger’s neighbours to use force to reinstate Mohamed Bazoum, the president who was ousted in a coup on July 26th, he swells with anger. “If they come here, we [civilians] are going to war alongside the army.” He is outraged that the Economic Community of West African States (ecowas), the regional bloc, is considering sending troops to battle the junta, even as it has done little to fight the jihadists that he says are the bigger threat. “ecowas has weapons to attack Niger but not to kill the terrorists,” he says. “It’s a disgrace.”
The regional bloc had threatened to use force if Mr Bazoum were not reinstated by August 6th. Yet as the clock ticked down to that deadline, the coup leaders showed no sign of giving up power. Instead they filled a stadium with cheering supporters (pictured), who beheaded a rooster painted in the colours of France, the former colonial power. As the deadline day ended the junta closed Niger’s airspace altogether, claiming that two other African countries had been preparing troops for deployment to Niger. It said Niger’s armed forces were “ready to defend the integrity of our territory”. As this article was published ecowas appeared to be buying time by calling for an extraordinary summit on August 10th.
The Reader needs to prepare herself for this 1,542 word essay. This is a History Made To Measure. This Colonial Rag shared in the ‘values’ of The British Empire e. g.
How Britain stole $45 trillion from India
And lied about it.
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
Headline: French intelligence hits back at Macron over its ‘failure’ to predict Niger coup
Sub-headline: Spy agency says the Elysée was advised to send troops to protect president Mohamed Bazoum but declined for fear of seeming ‘colonialist’
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As for anticipating the putsch, he said: “It was Gen Tchiani who had foiled other previous coup attempts. People trusted him. Who would have thought he would do it? In my opinion, this was a last-minute decision because he was going to be fired.”
“Perhaps we didn’t look closely enough at the very strong anti-French sentiment that existed within the presidential guard – much more than in other parts of the Niger army that were trained by the French, such as the special forces,” he added.
A senior French source told The Telegraph: “Looking at Ukraine, Mali, Burkina Faso and now Niger, nobody saw it coming. Macron is right to be angry. Is this him seizing the moment to change intelligence chief?”
In an apparent bid to bolster its reputation, the DGSE last week claimed that it was aware of Wagner’s plans to launch a rebellion against president Vladimir Putin in June before the CIA. French secret agents claim they received plaudits from their US counterparts for predicting the failed insurgency.
However, Mr Macron has another bone of contention against Mr Emié. Unlike MI6 and the CIA, the DGSE failed to anticipate Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, claiming the Americans and British were scaremongering.
What ‘The West’ needs, demands is another losing Theater of War ? For Macron the uranium of Niger is of vital interest. An alliance between Senile Old Joe and Macron, offers Nuland and Sullivan more latitude in their quest for an already fracturing Hegemony.
The Reader needn’t resort to the doom saying political hysterics of Niall Ferguson, to find that ‘we’ are in trouble, of the most dire kind! That Reader just needs to consult this ‘essay’ for a package of bad news.
Some quotations from this evaluation are instructive:
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Yet even controlling for human, economic, and democratic development, people living in countries with greater scientific and technological development as measured by per capita scientific publications, patents, and citations tended to be more optimistic about science and technology. Whether such optimism creates a culture that drives scientific ambition and productivity or whether such outputs boost optimism is not a question we can answer with our data. The most likely explanation, however, is a reinforcing, virtuous circle of optimism driving output and output reinvigorating optimism, irrespective of the stage of economic and democratic development a country may be in. In all, controlling for individual-level factors within countries, our model predicts 53 percent of the between-country differences in terms of scientific optimism.
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There is, however, one important caveat to these relationships. When we examined the relationship between individual-level beliefs about state authority and country-level context, we observed that the influence of state authority skepticism on scientific optimism is significantly more pronounced among those living in highly developed countries (see Figure 1). In wealthy countries, for individuals who distrust the police, military, or courts, they may be more prone to view the close association between scientific research, technological innovation, militarization, and surveillance as operating in the service of social control, rather than economic growth, as their counterparts in developing countries might primarily view science. Overall, our final model including country-level and individual-level factors accounted for 15 percent of within-country, individual variation in scientific optimism.
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Apart from the religious, those who are more distrustful of various forms of societal authority and conventional norms also expressed greater reservations about science. Somewhat paradoxically, moral relativism across countries is significantly related to reservations about the impact of science and technology on faith, morality, and the perceived importance to life. Notably, the relationship between defiance of traditional authority and scientific reservations varies strongly by the level of democratic development in a country. In countries with fewer civil liberties and press freedoms, science may still be closely associated with forms of government and societal control; thus, those who are distrusting of traditional authority expressed higher levels of scientific reservations. In contrast, their counterparts living in strongly democratic countries expressed far fewer reservations about science and technology (see Figure 5).
The Reader might inquire what ‘universal values’ means? But short of that, look to these paragraphs, as steeped in Oxbridger self-serving Political Mendacity- wedded to an apologetic for the murderous political adventurism, of the Neo-Conservative clique, still in charge of American Foreign policy: Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. That morphs into: ‘This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy’ , as if political misadventure applies?
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
A selection of topic sentences is instructive, as to the propaganda strategy of this intervention: the imperative of enlarging the canvas, denies to a possible critic, a way to capture the possible political essence of this essay, composed of stitched together tangents. The vexing question of the Sociological Method that ‘reduces’ via mathematical formulas, amount to a reductionist standpoint. The question becomes can Sociology, in its various iterations, come to terms with the actuality of Cultures, not with a mere mathematical homogenization?
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Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s.
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Something similar has happened in Russia.
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Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear.
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Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support.
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Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down.
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China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights.
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A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law.
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However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change.
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Where does The Reader eventually find herself? This defence of ‘Universal Values’ is a defence of Classical liberalism.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
In The Real World ‘we’ live in the political crater of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism: The Economist was one of the political champions of the Neo-Liberal Trinity: Hayek/Mises/ Friedman. Advocating/Apologizing/Rationalizing for The American Proxy War in Ukraine, and fomenting a War with China is the business of The Economist, under the rubric of ‘Universal values’.
Mr. Stephens can reach a state of high dungeon, in just moments, and maintain it’s screeching intensity, over the course of 868 words, in his latest moralizing diatribe. With telling changes of scene for Oregon to Portugal: quoting from Jeff Bezos Neo-Con- Rag ‘The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins’ and The Economist, who still employs the embalmed remains of Walter Bagehot, ghosted by Adrian Wooldridge. The history of this monument to looking backward is here:
Neo-Conservatives are steeped in the intellectual/philosophical mendacity employed by Leo Strauss, who tried to re-write the History of Western Philosophy. Mr. Stephens is an inhabitant of Strauss’ tiny island nation, barely peeking out of that vast sea of Counter-Evidence.
Like his political ally Niall Ferguson’s hyperbole, Mr. Stephens paints a vivid, disturbing portrait of the these two locations, undergirded by the failed attempts of a class of incompetent civic/medical actors, to solve such a vexing societal problem. Yet the compelling case of the human misery of addiction, does not prick the conscience Mr. Stephens. He is full of indignation at failed policies that attempt to ameliorate such misery.
The Reader need only look at the political trajectory of The Neo-Liberals, and their wholesale dismantling of The Welfare State, as path to a more perfect expression of the Free Market? And The War Mongering of the Neo-Cons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, Black Sights etc. – and the soldiers, nurses, and other personnel returning to civilian life, as possible explanations for the loss of Hope in the ‘West’ : Oregon, Portugal ?
Mr. Stephens’ posture of Public Moralist fractures, as The Reader continues her rhetorical journey.
The Reader, as always, confronts the Stalinist Erasure of 2016: after the resignation of David Cameron precipitated by the Brexit vote, the rise of Mrs. May, the defamation of Jeremy Corbyn by the whole of respectable British Political Class, from The Times to the ‘Left’ Guardian, to reduce it drastically… Not forgetting the rise of the political buffoon Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss and the redoubtable Kwasi Kwarteng, ending with kleptocratic Rishi Sunak. That Political History is carefully avoided by Mr. Colvile: that trades upon that convenient political mythology, that what the reader and writer hold dear, in sum, that British Politics are ‘normal’ rather than completely collapsed in that conveniently manufactured Stalinist Erasure.
Headline: The Ulez lesson: voters like eco policies, as long as they cost net zero
The New Labour Party, that is under discussion, is the product of the bad faith of a whole political class, led by Thatcherite Colvile. He begins his political melodrama here:
It’s hard to feel sorry for Sadiq Khan. In a crowded field he is perhaps the most excruciatingly annoying politician in modern Britain. But I did feel just a twinge of sympathy over the speed and brutality with which Sir Keir Starmer chucked the mayor of London under a bright red double-decker bus after the Uxbridge by-election.
Labour lost because of Ulez, the ultra-low emisssion zone. Ulez was Khan’s policy. So Khan should think again. After all, said Starmer, “we are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet”.
It’s certainly true that — as some of us predicted — Ulez has become hugely toxic, to the point that even Labour’s own candidate in Uxbridge distanced himself from it. But there’s something more complicated going on here than just Khan being monstrously tin-eared.
Britain’s air is too dirty, especially in its cities. That’s true not just generally but legally: there is a large volume of British and European regulation setting limits and targets for pollutants, and the courts have made clear they are to be taken seriously.
Note that Colvile presents this as a battle between Khan and Tony Blair’s political catamite Starmer. What might a Thatcherite profit from a presented battle two New Labour stalwarts?
So why the backlash? The weird thing is that Ulez ought to be popular. The think tank I run, the Centre for Policy Studies, recently produced a report on the future of driving, including a detailed study of clean air zones. Polling for the project by BMG Research found that 79 per cent of voters were concerned about air quality, including 83 per cent of Tory voters. Some 52 per cent of the public had specific concerns about air quality in their local area, and 64 per cent said politicians had done too little about it. We also found good evidence that the original, smaller Ulez had done its job, with the number of non-compliant vehicles on the roads falling sharply.
Yet we also found — and warned — that the expansion of Ulez to cover the whole of Greater London was turning into a case study of how not to do it, so much so that it risked discrediting the whole idea.
Thatcherite Mr. Colvile speaks for the ‘Low-income families’?
Ulez expansion, by contrast, felt like a cash grab. Low-income families were being told they would have to pay £12.50 a day to drive to work or pop to the shops. The money for replacement cars was both inadequate (£2,000) and late. The whole thing was rushed in without allowing time for families to adapt — in the middle of a cost of living crisis that was already hammering those same families’ incomes. And the mayor appeared mostly deaf to their complaints, apart from whining about central government and demanding more funding (perhaps if he cut his PR budget …).
Mr. Colvile then speaks of :
Since the Uxbridge result there have been loud voices arguing — especially from the right — that both Labour and the Tories need to rethink not just Ulez but the whole net-zero agenda, just as the Chesham and Amersham by-election loss in 2021 led Boris Johnson to junk his planning reforms.
The above paragraph operates under another political fiction that Colvile is capable of the politically self-serving, in the guise of presenting both sides, on the question?
Has The Reader lost patience with Colevile, yet? I’ll present some telling remainders of his argument:
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We also have a particular problem in the UK of policymaking that is essentially declaratory, based on setting high-level targets and then puzzling through the actual ramifications later.
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Take net zero itself, which was waved through into law essentially as a goodbye gift from the Tory party to Theresa May, with no real detail or scrutiny of what it would take to actually get there.
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(Editor: note the resort to Political Moralizing via ‘if we go with the grain of human nature’ !)
Whenever I write about the net-zero emissions policy, I make the point thatit will work only if we go with the grain of human nature. That means focusing on incentives and innovation. People will accept swapping petrol cars for electric vehicles, or a gas boiler for a heat pump, when and only when it is cheaper or more convenient for them personally.
Governments can tilt the balance via grants and incentives — or indeed by actually getting that charging infrastructure built — but if they try to force the issue, they will come a cropper.
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Uxbridge and Ulez don’t mark the death of net zero, or even of air quality campaigns — not least because those legal standards and obligations are firmly in place.
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( Editor: Thatcherites are constitutionally incapable of something resembling: ‘on those voters who could least afford it, in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis for a generation.’ )
Khan’s stroke of genius was to place the full burden of meeting his targets on those voters who could least afford it, in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis for a generation. No wonder they turned the air blue.
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