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This jejune observation by Mr. Ganesh: opens his latest essay:

Nowhere in Europe are universities as central to national life as in the US. Time-hogging is part of it: four rather than largely three year degrees, two as opposed to one for graduates. Then there is the enmeshment with professional sport. The campus is a portal to the big leagues in a way unknown to European football, where careers are made at a younger age. Throw in the vast cost, and it is natural that Americans stamp their alma mater on car rears and hoodies.

This is succeeded by rhetorical exhumation of the notorious Straussian Allen Bloom, as a some how player in Ganesh’s pop sociology, for want of a better descriptor.

It is also natural that they would curse academia’s politicisation. When Allan Bloom wrote about the left’s capture of education in The Closing of the American Mind, his thesis was novel. Thirty-four years on, even liberal faculty, hounded by students for whom liberalism is not enough, ask if he went far enough. The first stirrings of a fightback are in the air. It is hard to know whether to cheer it on or fear the perverse consequences.

Since ‘Closing’ was on my bookshelf, a $4.50 remainder copy, I read first Saul Bellow’s introduction, that was more about him: his narcissism not so toxic as Norman Mailer’s metaphysically framed pugilism, but ‘Closing’ gets lost within Bellow’s self-regarding chatter.

This followed by Bloom’s preface that begins:

This essay- a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education-written from the perspective of a teacher. A thought, was George F. Will’s 1988 book ‘Sate Craft as Soul Craft’ inspired by Bloom’s polemic?

Mr. Bloom begins Part One. Students, with these sub-headings:

The Clean Slate

Books

Music

Relationships:

• Self-Centeredness
• Equality
• Race
• Sex
• Separateness
• Divorce
• Love
• Eros

The implication of these topics, implies an intimate knowledge of the inner lives of students, and of their day to day conduct. Was he a confident to his ‘students’, or just an outside observer, of public conduct and classroom demeanor ? I find it hard to believe, from observing Bloom’s television personae, that any student would find him in any way sympatico!

Here is a PDF of Mr. Bloom’s polemic, for the reader who might like to explore Straussian Mendacity, in situ!

Click to access 14434540-The-Closing-of-the-American-Mind.pdf

Regrettably I can’t find a PDF of ‘Essays on The Closing of The American Mind’ edited by Robert L. Stone. A valuable resource, for the reader to explore what Mr. Bloom’s Straussianism was, and the evolution of Bloom’s cultural politicking.

Richard Rorty’s ‘Straussianism, Democracy, And Allen Bloom I: That Old Time Philosophy’ reflects on the destructive Straussian agenda of ‘Intellectuals’ vs ‘Philosophers’ .

David Rieff’s ‘The Colonel and the Professor’ compares the public careers of Bloom and Iran-Contra co-conspirator Oliver North.

Betty Friedan of ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and ‘Second Wave’ on Bloom’s Anti-Feminism titled ‘Fatal Abstraction’ .

Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Undemoctatic Vistas’, from November 5, 1987 issue of The New York Review Of Books

…

Allan Bloom, like Musonius, has written a book that defends the central role of philosophy in higher education, and defends it as essential for the health of human souls and human society. Like Musonius again, he initially presents the philosophical activity he praises as a search, through active critical argument, for the best human life; he praises as the founder of his ideal university Socrates, the paradigm of tireless rational searching to whom Stoics also appeal. But in Bloom’s book the Socratic conception is in conflict with another very different idea of philosophy: the idea of a study that is open only to a chosen few specially suited by nature (and to some extent also by wealth and social position) for its pursuit; the idea of a philosophy that is concerned more with revealing fixed eternal truths than with active critical argument; of a philosophy that not only does not aim at justice and practical wisdom, individual and/or communal, but actually despises the search for social justice and beckons chosen souls away from social pursuits to a contemplative theoretical life.

To understand these contradictions, and their relation to Bloom’s practical proposals for a reform of the university curriculum, we must begin with his diagnosis of contemporary American culture, for whose diseases philosophy is supposed to provide the cure. As Bloom sees it, the central problem in higher education today, and in American society more generally, is widespread relativism. Both teachers and students have been taught that all conceptions of the good human life are equally valid, and that it is not possible to find an objective view-point from which to make rational criticisms of any tradition or any study, however apparently trivial or even base. The most any such criticism can be, according to this prevalent view, as Bloom reports it, is an expression of unenlightened prejudice.

…

Undemocratic Vistas

Bloom’s ascension is about , in part, the Reagan Free Market sloganeering of ‘government is the problem’ : the Straussians came along for the ride, like the followers of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan her most fervid acolyte. The Straussian nihilism in answer to a Liberalism, and the remnants of The New Deal, that had lost its political luster, in the glare of ‘Morning In America’. And its Neo-Confederate/Originalism as the new dispensation, proclaimed by Reagan as ‘I believe in States Rights’. The Victory of Reagan was the triumph of the ‘Outliers’ : the Neo-Liberal Trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman, and its enthusiasts, The Neo-Confederate/Originalists, greedy Capitalists and the redoubtable jingo Jeane Kirkpatrick.

After the exhumation of Bloom, Mr. Ganesh continues his essay: a reimaging of the conflictual melodrama between the New Democrats and Republican, in all the attempts of both parties to establish political primacy. That Ganesh names ‘a strange kind of equilibrium’: the very definition of the political, as practiced?

America has arrived at a strange kind of equilibrium. The left enjoys an entrenched supremacy in culture that spans universities, publishing, Hollywood, corporate PR and, deplatformed Republicans would say, social media. There is no print equivalent of Britain’s tabloids to offset the hegemony. Whether or not the left ever planned this march through the institutions, the resulting monoculture has discontents beyond the registered Republicans who turn to Fox News. The huge podcast audience of Joe Rogan, who traffics in something closer to libertarianism, is proof of that.

A mere 528 words later, the reader arrives here:

In a sense, America benefits from a separation of powers that is deeper than the one codified by its founders. It is that between politics and culture; between formal and informal clout. One side has advantages in politics “proper”. The other gets to set the atmosphere in which it takes place. That this is an ill-gotten kind of peace does not mean there are better ones available.

https://www.ft.com/content/2085c407-e466-4d4b-9b94-8be1b7c0764e

The lesson, that Mr. Ganesh’s essay teaches the reader, is that no matter the rhetorical garnish, even of an antique Straussian, Political Metaphysics simply replicates itself.

Philosophical Apprentice

Here is the concluding paragraph of The Editorial Board of The Financial Times comparing Eric Adams to ‘Mike’ Bloomberg:

Adams appealed less to progressives, but strong execution and effective administration can help sway voters. That is what made Michael Bloomberg popular and has been lacking under outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio. Adams also needs to find ways to work with Wall Street and the tech companies that provide much of the city’s tax base and new jobs. The lesson from Adams is that focusing on concrete achievements, rather than noisy culture wars, allows the Democrats to dominate the middle ground of US politics. Others in the party should follow his lead.

https://www.ft.com/content/b258537b-cb91-402f-a87b-f3c9ddf0fc67

What might the reader of this ’editorial’ think of this Politico news item?

Headline: NYPD won’t release Adams’ disciplinary records

The NYPD has refused to release disciplinary records for Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams — despite a state law meant to lift the veil of secrecy around such documents.

Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was an NYPD cop for 22 years, retiring as a captain in 2006. The future mayoral candidate was one of the department’s most vocal internal critics and founded a reform group, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. He has spoken publicly about being the target of four Internal Affairs Bureau investigations.

The NYPD has not released any documents related to Adams’ time as an officer, though, denying requests by POLITICO under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

The state Legislature last year voted to make police disciplinary records public, repealing a law known as 50-a that kept them confidential. Law enforcement unions sued to stop the release, specifically objecting to publication of unsubstantiated allegations. They lost in court in February, and the publication of some records began.

But the NYPD is taking the position that it does not have to release records related to any investigation that does not result in a subsequent hearing or disciplinary action, or complaints that are not substantiated.

…

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2021/07/08/nypd-wont-release-adams-disciplinary-records-1388181

This from June 12, 2020 from NBC New York is demonstrative of what?

Headline: NY Police Disciplinary Records Made Public; Cuomo Orders Local Governments Reinvent Police Strategies

Sub-headline: Eliminating the law, known as Section 50-a, would make complaints against officers, as well as transcripts and final dispositions of disciplinary proceedings, public for the first time in decades

New York state lawmakers earlier this week repealed a decades-old law that has kept law enforcement officers’ disciplinary records secret and Gov. Andrew Cuomo made it official on Friday.

The repeal of the law known as Section 50-a was spurred by the local uproar over the death of George Floyd. Only Delaware has a similar law.

The measure to make officers’ records and misconduct complaints public was the first police change among several police accountability bills currently racing through the state legislature. Lawmakers passed other bills that would provide all state troopers with body cameras and ensure that police officers provide medical and mental health attention to people in custody.

Gov. Cuomo said Friday he will sign an executive order requiring local governments and agencies to “develop a plan that reinvents and modernizes police strategies.” Communities must create and implement a plan by April 1, the governor said, or they will not be eligible for state funding.

The plans must address force by police officers, crowd management, community policing, implicit bias awareness training, de-escalation training and practices, restorative justice practices, and community-based outreach.

“To say that every mayor must come up with a plan along these areas or [New York] would withhold state money is a model for where we ought to be dealing with 21st century civil rights in this country. Make on mistake, this is a new level that all other 49 governors ought to look at,” Rev. Al Sharpton said.

Cuomo signed police reform bills including the repeal of 50-a alongside Rev. Al Sharpton, Gwen Carr, Valerie Bell and other advocates, as well as New York State Senate Democratic Leader Andrew Stewart-Cousins and State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

The reform package signed by Cuomo repeals 50-a, bans chokeholds by law enforcement officers, prohibits false race-biased 911 reports and designates an independent prosecutor to investigate the civilian deaths in police custody.

Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch says state leaders have no reason to celebrate after “failing our communities for decades.”

“We will be permanently frozen, stripped of all resources and unable to do the job. We don’t want to see our communities suffer, but this is what Governor Cuomo and our elected leaders have chosen,” Lynch said.

…

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/cuomo-expected-to-sign-50-a-repeal-to-make-police-disciplinary-records-public/2458910/

The Editorial Board’s presentation of ‘Mike’ Bloomberg, as a mayor who set a standard, doesn’t just ignore his removal of Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, via mendacious political chicanery, it makes itself complicit in this crime against an independent judiciary!

Leftist Thinker

Here is Andy’s opening salvo:

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

…

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM4Mzc0MTEyLCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MjU5NTY4MDUsImV4cCI6MTYyNTk2MDQwNSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9._Yn8e617hO7OysXYmchI85Yo5A5M9GMgxWxGbcrCM_E

The narrative according to Andy is that he is the victim, the perpetual victim of malevolent actors. Act One, is that he was fired from New York Magazine, that hold-over from April 1968! And the reader hasn’t even arrived at the the point, in the essay, when all the Guest Stars make their appearances. Its like those 80’s Night-Time Soap Operas, except that it not a collection of washed up old actresses, dressed by Nolan Miller, in heavy makeup, assisted by strategic lighting and melodramatic scripts: specializing in dismissive exits, while one of these players is left wounded by a well aimed disparaging remarks: this had all the dramatic impact, the staying power, of a the 21 inch black and white screen of the 1950’s . The Guest Stars in Andy’s tale of his victimology make their appetences, just a partial list:

The CRT debate, liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign, the GOP, “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman, Derrick Bell, Republican propaganda and guile, American elites, a profound cultural dislocation, the specter of “white supremacy,”, the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history., one political party, one media monoculture, “social justice reckoning”, NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, (“intersectionality”), tendentious post-modern theorizing.’, * Ta-Nehisi Coates, “blue period.” …    

This is just the beginning of Andy’s hysterical screed, it goes on, and on, and on! Andy doesn’t miss the opportunity to plug his new book, about to be published. I’m certain to have missed much …

Like the professional Neo-Con, Andy exhausts the readers patience, and the ability to make sense, of what might be the point of his ‘essay’. It rambles on, as each of his political obsessions is given rhetorical liberty, to strut upon the stage that Andy has – he allows his stream of consciousness its full toxic freedom!

The last paragraph Andy present himself as the voice of reason, a Hero of ‘the right side of liberalism’ in the face of ‘tribal pile-ons’ and ‘the poison and nihilism on the right’:

But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me. 

The ‘liberalism’ that Andy extolls is the ‘liberalism’ of The Economist, in all its pretense of ‘values’ celebrated by Bagehot in his day, and still has a column written by Adrian Wooldridge, under the pen name ‘Bagehot’. ‘Liberalism at Large, The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin provides a vivid history of this newspaper and its politics.

Liberalism at Large

Queer Atheist

* On Ta-Nehisi Coates, here is Mr. Sullivan’s ‘free imaginative variation’ on Mr. Coates and ‘He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography.’ In sum Mr. Coates is a CRT fellow traveler.

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”

Mr. Sullivan is still an admirer of the writing of Charles Murray, the co-author of the utterly notorious ‘Bell Curve’.

Headline: Charles Murray On Human Diversity

Sub-headline: The indefatigable writer and political scientist talks IQ with me, and much more.

Charles has a new — and probably explosive — book coming out soon, Facing Reality. This conversation is not about that. Instead, I wanted to discuss his last book which received almost no attention, Human Diversity.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For three clips of my conversation with Charles — on the different career choices that high-IQ women often make; on the “unearned gift” of those with high IQs; and how IQ is irrelevant to the human worth, dignity, and essential equality of all people — head over to our YouTube page.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/charles-murray-on-human-diversity

What opens this almost two hour long ‘interview’ is Andy and Charles commiserating about their victimhood status, as ‘outsiders’, and their means of coping. It’s like watching Network Television, before the Internet, that featured those ubiquitous confessional interview programs. I listened for nine minutes, Andy turns everything into usable political kitsch, with himself as its focus: a function of his rampant narcissism. Andy tries unsuccessfully to mask the moral sensibility of the Inquisitor!

Headline: Afghanistan: the war that film forgot

Sub-headline: The screen’s neglect of the conflict illustrates the modern incapacity for despair

François Truffaut denied the very possibility of an antiwar film. Put telegenic actors in uniform and you are halfway to tacit glamorisation. Well-lit explosions do the rest. Jarhead, in which soldiers watch an almost erotic screening of Apocalypse Now, makes the point in meta style.

…

Truffaut’s ‘Films in My Life’ was the work of a film enthusiast, he shared his love of cinema, with the reader: it is engaging and wins the admiration of that reader. But the Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950sNeo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier and Andre Bazin’s ‘What Is Cinema?’didn’t match what Truffaut offered in his book, even though he contributed to that ‘Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950’s. The above just some observation on Truffaut’s milieu. Not forgetting Andrew Sarris and his 1962 comment on the Auteur Theory, with part of a reply by Peter Wollen.

Click to access Sarris-Notes-on-the-Auteur-Theory.pdf

Instead of confronting the utterly mendacity of the Neo-Con war mongering ethos, or its mendacious political actors, that brought Afghanistan and Iraq Wars into being, Mr. Ganesh chooses to denature it, by way of making the central focus of his argument about Hollywood’s disinterest in this war. The reader confronts Mr. Ganesh’s final paragraph, awash in an angst, that acts as not a very well thought out apologetic, for these acts of criminality!

This, in the end, is what the big screen’s relative neglect of the Afghan war comes down to. The modern incapacity for despair. Most wars connote glory (the second world war) or folly (Iraq), either of which is a guide to future action. This one was not a teachable moment so much as an extended riddle. It was right to go in and it was hopeless to go in. We have to leave and it is rash to leave. As didactic a medium as film was always going to be at a loss with such ambiguity. The rest of us are in for much more of it.

https://www.ft.com/content/ab8a9052-7bdd-4868-a471-fd01c4d84ace

Political Dissident

Note that the first paragraph of Mr. Ferguson’s essay, is the standard ‘History Made To Measure’ of the Technocrat, when writing propaganda:

It is usually clear when a war breaks out. Even if there is no formal declaration, the work of invasion or destruction begins. The outbreak of war can be given a date, even a time. This is not true of a cold war. We now recall as prophetic Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, in which he referred to an “iron curtain” descending across the European continent “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. In fact, Churchill was simply giving a vivid name to what was already happening. At the time, however, few Americans shared his pessimism about Soviet intentions. The New York Times’s commentary on the speech implied that the US had to choose between an alliance with the British Commonwealth or one with the Soviet Union, making it seem like a finely balanced choice. And just days before the address, the Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg – who would later play a vital role in the creation of NATO – was still willing to offer Stalin “a direct treaty of mutual defense, under the United Nations”, and to affirm his belief that the US and USSR could “live together in perfect harmony”. Only gradually did it become clear to most Americans that the “cold war” George Orwell had predicted as early as October 1945 – an indefinitely prolonged “peace that is no peace” – was a reality. 

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-risks-china-poses-to-global-security-review-niall-ferguson/

This paragraph features Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Cold War Speech’. Yet Ferguson’s need for an exemplar of Cold War virtue leads him to forget one of the closely held beliefs of a large portion of Post-War American Conservatism:

…

Since 1945, and especially during the Cold War, the agreements reached at Yalta have been the subject of subsequent criticism, especially in the United States. President Roosevelt, who died only two months after the conference, was accused by some of handing over Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to Stalin and for allowing the Soviet Union to gain a foothold in the Far East against a promise of Russian intervention in the war against Japan.

Future Secretary of State James Byrnes, who was present at Yalta, recorded in his memoirs that, ‘so far as I could see the President had made little preparation for the Conference’. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, thought that the President was ‘a very sick man’ with only a few months to live. Churchill was to complain to Moran that: ‘The President is behaving very badly. He won’t take any interest in what we are trying to do.’

But Churchill was also criticised for his seemingly passive acceptance of Soviet domination of Poland and Eastern Europe. In the House of Commons debate on Yalta, 21 Conservative MPs, including future Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, tabled an amendment which regretted ‘the transfer of the territory of an Ally to another power’. Junior minister George Strauss resigned in protest against the government’s policy on Poland.

…

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-churchill-roosevelt-and-stalin-planned-to-end-the-second-world-war

The reader is just on the first paragraph of Ferguson’s essay. Perhaps he is offering Churchill’s political virtues, in his maladroit way, as rhetorically comparable to his own commentary on the Cold War, in its latest iteration? Expressed in these catch phrases “cool war”, “hot peace”. Who should appear but Henry Kissinger, Ferguson being his Boswell, of a kind.

…

Yet even Henry Kissinger, who began the work of creating a relationship between Washington and Beijing fifty years ago this month, acknowledged in November 2019 that the two governments were now “in the foothills of a cold war”. Even if they prefer other terms (“cool war”, “hot peace”), a growing number of commentators implicitly accept this – which is to say, they accept that China under Xi Jinping is behaving in ways that recall Churchill’s characterization of the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytizing tendencies” under Stalin.

…

The patient reader will find that Ferguson’s framing is just a highfalutin introduction to a collection of ‘book reviews’ and or just some considerations on books that he is ‘aware of’, and the authors of those books being Policy Technocrats/Academics etc.

Listing these writer/thinkers/academics/technocrats, not to speak of government employees, with Ferguson’s brief and longer comments, is instructive as to ideology. And what our author’s opinion of their book length political commentaries , essays and their theses, for want of a better descriptor.

The One Hundred Year Marathon: China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower (2015) by Michael Pillsbury of the Hudson Institute. 

*

This, along with Jonathan T. Ward’s China’s Vision of Victory (2019), furnished the administration of Donald J. Trump with a more compelling rationale for its new and a more combative policy towards China than the President’s own quixotic protectionism

*

American Enterprise Institute’s Dan Blumenthal, who argues in The China Nightmare: The grand ambitions of a decaying state (American Enterprise Institute; paperback, £14.95) that “a Chinese world order would look … like the [Chinese Communist Party’s] China” – “malign”, “repressive” and “reliant on tools of social control, coercion and repression”. 

*

Rush Doshi’s new book The Long Game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order (Oxford University Press; £21.99), begins with the propositions that China “now poses a challenge unlike any the U.S. has ever faced” and that “Beijing’s ultimate objective is to displace the U.S. order globally … to emerge as the world’s dominant state by 2049”. Of all the books to appear on this subject in 2021, this will be the one most closely read, as Doshi is now the director for China on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council and a protégé of Biden’s “Asia tsar”, Kurt Campbell. 

*

Elizabeth Economy, recently argued in Foreign Affairs (May 28, 2021) that China is in fact much weaker than it looks, spending $30 billion more on domestic security than on the People’s Liberation Army, the price of keeping an increasingly unequal and fractious population under the Party’s control.

*

Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell’s Invisible China: How the urban-rural divide threatens China’s rise – University of Chicago Press; £22 – is not to be missed.)

*

And Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna noted in a column for Bloomberg (May 27, 2021) that, in terms of wealth and military (especially nuclear) capability, China is still far behind the US. In his view, “manifold internal weaknesses, which range from rapid demographic deterioration to social unrest, ethnic tensions and an inefficient state-capitalist system … will limit the growth of Chinese power”. 

*

It is a sign of the times that a veteran journalist of the British left, Ian Williams, in his new book Every Breath You Take: China’s new tyranny (Birlinn; paperback, £16.99), should describe the country under Xi as “an aggressive and expansionary power that not only represses its own people but is now the biggest threat to western democracies, their like-minded allies, and to democratic values in general”.

*

Luke Patey, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, argues in How China Loses: The pushback against Chinese global ambitions (Oxford University Press; £22.99) that it is precisely this kind of sentiment, not only in the UK but in Europe too, that will cause China to lose its bid for world power – “not because it lacks global power … but because the actions and visions of its leaders elicit … pushback across the world”.

*

Eyck Freymann’s definitive study of BRI, One Belt One Road: Chinese power meets the world (Harvard University Press; £48.95), reveals a motley array of projects wrapped in a great deal of propaganda, sometimes losing money, sometimes losing friends as quickly as it gains them, though Freymann still thinks it “represents a working model for a future geopolitical bloc led by China, structured along the lines of a modern tributary system”. 

*

In China Coup: The great leap to freedom (University of California Press; £18.99), the former British diplomat Roger Garside imagines a version of the Soviet internal crisis of 1991, with Li Keqiang joining forces with Wang Qishan to overthrow Xi in response to a crisis triggered by US financial sanctions.

*

On the other hand, Gordon Chang published The Coming Collapse of China in 2001. A compendium of all the articles predicting a Chinese collapse over the past twenty years would be a fat one. 

*

A year ago, in the National Interest (June 11, 2020), Graham Allison, the author of the hugely influential Destined for War (2017), drew a parallel between US economic sanctions against Japan prior to Pearl Harbor and the current measures directed against China – not so much Trump’s tariffs as the measures targeted against Chinese technology companies such as Huawei. 

*

In The Great Decoupling: China, America and the struggle for technological supremacy (Hurst; £25) Nigel Inkster – a veteran of UK intelligence now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies – notes that the biggest difference between the Cold War and the present is the extent of the economic interdependence between the US and China, something Trump’s tariffs predictably failed to diminish.

*

The corollary of decoupling is to restore the US manufacturing base that was so rapidly eroded in the era of what Moritz Schularick and I called “Chimerica”. Clyde Prestowitz’s The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the struggle for global leadership (Yale University Press; £25) proposes a lengthy list of new measures and institutions designed to restore the United States to economic independence and predominance:

*

It is in this context that Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis’s novel 2034(Penguin; $27) is well worth reading. Stavridis imagines a surprise Chinese naval encirclement of Taiwan as one of the opening ploys of World War III. The US sustains such heavy naval losses in the ensuing maritime struggle that it is driven to hit Zhanjiang (in Guangdong province) with a nuclear missile, which leads in turn to the obliteration of San Diego and Galveston.

*

“For China to seize Taiwan by force”, Westad has argued, “would be a bit like wanting to fly and jumping off a cliff to prove that it is possible: the war that would follow would be cataclysmic for China and the world”. But Norman Angell made similar arguments about the illusory nature of German aggression just five years before 1914.

* 

I have selected what seemed to me the most viable/readable books and essay titles. Note that ‘Straussian Arguments’ are about exhausting the readers patience, and ability to find a cohesive thread of argument, within the chock-a-block of examples. How can one person, one reader, come to terms with an essay awash in Straussian Bad Faith?

The reader reaches Ferguson’s penultimate paragraph:

In their different ways, many academics, journalists and diplomats aspire to be the Kennan of Cold War II. None of the books reviewed here, however, comes close to the clarity of Kennan’s article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, published in Foreign Affairs a year after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. It bears re-reading today. “Who can say with assurance that the strong light still cast by the Kremlin on the dissatisfied peoples of the western world”, Kennan asked, “is not the powerful afterglow of a constellation which is in actuality on the wane? … the possibility remains … that Soviet power … bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced”. Some might ask the same question of China today. Yet Kennan was forty-three when he wrote those words and eighty-seven when the Soviet Union was finally dissolved in December 1991. 

Anders Stephenson in his Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy of 1989, offers a more probing and cogent analysis of ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. Mr. Ferguson’s endorsement of something that Kennan eventually repudiated, is demonstrative of Ferguson’s retrograde politics.

Mr. Ferguson ends his teetering rhetorical monstrosity, in this last paragraph, that riffs on a political centrism, that he adopts as the-in-order-too of the care and maintenance of political respectability. Mr. Ferguson and his allies were/are the enthusiastic architects of that New Cold War. The first sentence is self-apologetic in the guise of conjecture.

Just as no one can quite be sure when a cold war begins, nor can there be any certainty about the duration of such a war. Just because Cold War I lasted around forty years is no guarantee that the same will be true of Cold War II. Those making US foreign policy today must hope for the best but prepare for the worst. It may indeed be a long game. 

Old Socialist

It used to be at least interesting to read Mr. Ganesh! His latest essay posits the ‘as if’ the Pandemic, and its effects on working people, at all levels of employment is a mystery, that Mr. Ganesh ‘solves’ with a sentence that starts here ‘A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output;’ ! Not to forget the Headline writers contribution to his politicalyarn:

Headline: America’s economic boom and civic bust

Sub-headline: The story is not that a rich country is so politically broken but that a politically broken country is so rich

Here follow pairs of facts about the contemporary US. The economy added 850,000 jobs in one month; a third of voters believe the last presidential election was stolen. A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output; states as large as Georgia are curbing the independence of election officials. At 7 per cent, anticipated economic growth this year is that of mid-2000s China; a twice-impeached president is near-favourite to clinch the next Republican nomination.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/67dcbe95-c953-48c9-822d-07e5df8ef684

On the vexing question of ‘civic bust’ : I recall 1968: the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed, the assassination of Robert Kennedy , The Democratic Convention, Mayor Dailey, and its Police Riot, the fact that George Wallace received 9 million votes in the Presidential election. All of this framed by the Vietnam War, the The Best and the Brightest’s murderous neo-colonialism.

Mr. Ganesh can’t address his own ignorance of American history, but marvel at his cast of rhetorical players:

A Tale of Two Cities, The End of History and the Last Man, Weimar Germany, pre-Caesar Rome, “Glorious Thirty”, Algerian war, the Fourth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, May ‘68, The Sorrow and The Pity.

The three final paragraphs of his essay are framed by this pronouncement:

The lesson here is consoling or chilling, according to taste. A nation can prosper despite its politics.

Out of the thicket of chatter, this stands in higher relief :

Viewed from this angle, California is not a world unto itself but the nation in miniature: a place where woeful politics and scarcely believable dynamism cohabit.

Here is a sobering report from Equal Times:

Headline: Homeless in Silicon Valley: how the heartland of global tech became the epicentre of a housing crisis

If California was a country it would have the sixth largest GDP in the world, directly behind the United Kingdom and slightly ahead of France. However, as the economy has grown, so has income inequality. According to the most recentAnnual Homeless Assessment Report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, California accounts for nearly half of all unsheltered people in the country.

For Amie Fishman, the executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California (NPH), it is the “Ground Zero” of America’s housing crisis. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the San Francisco Bay Area, which as well as being home to Silicon Valley and some of the world’s richest companies is also home to a population of service workers who can barely afford to live there.

“We are facing the gravest crisis in housing unaffordability and inequity in recent history,” says Fishman. “We are in a new period where housing has become a commodity and private consumer good bought and sold by institutional investors,” she says.

…

https://www.equaltimes.org/homeless-in-silicon-valley-how-the?lang=en#.YOR7RuhKjIV

American Writer

Headline: What Joe Biden can learn from Richard Nixon’s playbook

Sub-headline: As it did 50 years ago, the US economy finds itself at a turning point

https://www.ft.com/content/ca4a8ae1-7e0b-4abf-9b0b-78154b7e3391

While the ‘spell of Nixon Nostalgia’ lasts, the reader should consider this:

Headline:  Edward M. Kennedy: The Man Who Killed Health Care Reform

Sub-headline: Don’t cry for me, Martha’s Vineyard. 
…

Nixon strongly believed that a national health insurance plan was crucial. In that 1974 State of the Union Address, he declared that “the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American”. Actually, this statement is not surprising considering Nixon’s personal history of poverty and family illness. (He lost two brothers to tuberculosis, the illnesses dealing a heavy blow to the family finances, and in fact proposed a national health insurance bill when he arrived in Congress in 1947.) Nixon sounds very much like Obama, when he said in 1974 that he did not want to see “other families of modest means…driven …to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type”.

However, the “liberal” opposition, spearheaded by the lobbying of the then-powerful AFL-CIO and United Autowokers, proved too much for an administration spending significant energy on defending against the rising tide of the Watergate affair.

Kennedy did begin secret negotiations with the Nixon White House, but he fell prey to the pressures of the unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payor system which they felt would be rather easily achieved once a Democrat was elected to the presidency in the face of the Watergate scandal. Many felt that Kennedy would be that Democrat, and therefore he had no business throwing a lifeline to the sinking Nixon administration.
…
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/overcoming-pain/201002/edward-m-kennedy-the-man-who-killed-health-care-reform

This probably not what political technocrat Jeffrey Garten, nor his enthusiast Ms.  Foroohar, had in mind but it is an object lesson in American political hypocrisy ,manifested by both Parties!

Political Observer

It used to be at least interesting to read Mr. Ganesh! His latest essay posits the ‘as if’ the Pandemic, and its effects on working people, at all levels of employment is a mystery, that Mr. Ganesh ‘solves’ with a sentence that starts here ‘A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output;’ ! Not to forget the Headline writers contribution to his political yarn:

Headline: America’s economic boom and civic bust

Sub-headline: The story is not that a rich country is so politically broken but that a politically broken country is so rich

Here follow pairs of facts about the contemporary US. The economy added 850,000 jobs in one month; a third of voters believe the last presidential election was stolen. A lockdown with no peacetime precedent cost just 3.5 per cent of national output; states as large as Georgia are curbing the independence of election officials. At 7 per cent, anticipated economic growth this year is that of mid-2000s China; a twice-impeached president is near-favourite to clinch the next Republican nomination.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/67dcbe95-c953-48c9-822d-07e5df8ef684

On the vexing question of ‘civic bust’ : I recall 1968: the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed, the assassination of Robert Kennedy , The Democratic Convention, Mayor Dailey, and its Police Riot, the fact that George Wallace received 9 million votes in the Presidential election. All of this framed by the Vietnam War, the The Best and the Brightest’s murderous neo-colonialism.

Mr. Ganesh can’t address his own ignorance of American history, but marvel at his cast of rhetorical players:

A Tale of Two Cities, The End of History and the Last Man, Weimar Germany, pre-Caesar Rome, “Glorious Thirty”, Algerian war, the Fourth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, May ‘68, The Sorrow and The Pity.

The three final paragraphs of his essay are framed by this pronouncement:

The lesson here is consoling or chilling, according to taste. A nation can prosper despite its politics.

Out of the thicket of chatter, this stands in higher relief :

Viewed from this angle, California is not a world unto itself but the nation in miniature: a place where woeful politics and scarcely believable dynamism cohabit.

Here is a sobering report from Equal Times:

Headline: Homeless in Silicon Valley: how the heartland of global tech became the epicentre of a housing crisis

If California was a country it would have the sixth largest GDP in the world, directly behind the United Kingdom and slightly ahead of France. However, as the economy has grown, so has income inequality. According to the most recentAnnual Homeless Assessment Report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, California accounts for nearly half of all unsheltered people in the country.

For Amie Fishman, the executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California (NPH), it is the “Ground Zero” of America’s housing crisis. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the San Francisco Bay Area, which as well as being home to Silicon Valley and some of the world’s richest companies is also home to a population of service workers who can barely afford to live there.

“We are facing the gravest crisis in housing unaffordability and inequity in recent history,” says Fishman. “We are in a new period where housing has become a commodity and private consumer good bought and sold by institutional investors,” she says.

…

https://www.equaltimes.org/homeless-in-silicon-valley-how-the?lang=en#.YOR7RuhKjIV

American Writer

The ‘Conservative Hysteria’ about CRT has reached such a pitch Ross Douthat has, for the moment, stopped pitching his ‘The Decadent Society’ & minding the sexual/reproductive business of Women, to sounding the alarm about this ‘crisis’. The headline writers @NYT have titled his essay ‘The Excesses of Antiracist Education’. Douthat addresses his readers as if he were a disinterested pedagogue in his opening paragraphs:

In my last column I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education — the part that turns on whether it’s possible to tell a fuller historical story about slavery and segregation while also retaining a broadly patriotic understanding of America’s founding and development.

In this column I will try to describe the part of the controversy that concerns how we teach about racism today. It’s probably the more intense debate, driving both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.

Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.

In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.

The patient reader finally arrives after, what to call it ‘positional equivocation’ on the subject of the excesses of CRT.

…

What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.

First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.

Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.

…

Later in his essay Douthat links to an essay by David Frum:

The Left’s War on Gifted Kids

Local progressive activists have found a cause even more unpopular than “Defund the police,” and are pushing it with even greater vigor.

By David Frum

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/left-targets-testing-gifted-programs/619315/

Mr. Frum and Mr. Douthat are fellow travelers, Frum in this case writes a screeching polemic, that links ‘Defund The Police’ with ‘blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms.’ In sum there are no ‘Standards’ for admission, that becomes ‘The Left’s War on Gifted Kids’.

Douthat continues his essay, that descends from a pose of ersatz pedagogy, to poorly stage managed historical analogies:

Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.

That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.

I’m on page 55 of ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction’ by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Third Edition. What strikes me is that CRT, as argued, embraces the ‘Conservatism’ of the American Academy, and the zeal of a ‘Rhetorical/Historical Reconstruction’, to express it as succinctly as possible.

Neither Douthat nor Frum, uses the History of Conservative Thought, that is readily available, to frame their arguments. Both these critiques moored in a perennial Political Present. The reader might think that ‘Soulcraft’ and Douthat are perfect companions.

Here is Michael J. Sandel reviewing George F. Will’s ‘Statecraft As Soulcraft: What Government Does.’ From 1983:

If Ronald Reagan is the leading practitioner of American conservatism, George Will is its high priest. A political commentator with a reflective bent, Mr. Will stands out among columnists as the most elegant voice of contemporary conservative political philosophy. But Mr. Reagan does not practice what Mr. Will preaches. In ”Statecraft as Soulcraft,” his first book-length work, Mr. Will laments the lack of genuine conservatives in American politics and shows how the best conservative thought is lost even on the most conservative President in decades. ”I will do many things for my country,” writes Mr. Will, ”but I will not pretend that the careers of, say, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involve serious philosophical differences.”

Conservatives like Mr. Reagan attack ”big government,” but Mr. Will is more concerned with the reluctance of modern government to cultivate the moral character of its citizens. He faults conservatives for agreeing with liberals that the ”inner life” of citizens – our ”sentiments, manners and moral opinions” -is none of the government’s business. Mr. Will insists that ”statecraft is soulcraft.” Government cannot be neutral on major moral issues and shouldn’t try. ”Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.” 

…

This might have been a better choice, a more historically aware choice, by which to frame a critique of CRT, by Douthat, and the end of testing of students, in blue states, as pronounced by Frum. This expresses the poverty of the historical awareness, and imagination of both these propagandists!

Political Observer

When will the political romance with Joe Biden come to an end? The alliance between the Neo-Liberals, masquerading as New Democrats, and The Neo-Cons, is sure to suffer unbridgeable policy disputes. The Neo-Cons are by nature – their Founder Leo Strauss’s philosophical mendacity is founded upon internecine philosophical quarrels, with an actual History of Western Philosophy abandoned to a toxic, self-serving Mythology. Imagine the power of Strauss! It almost resembles the power of Heidegger, before the publication of the now notorious ‘Black Notebooks’. I’ve wandered a bit. the

Let me focus on this Ganesh paragraph:

 America’s knack for great-power politics is as consistent as its fumbles against insurgencies. The fledging republic saw off British menaces, kept Europe out of its civil war, beat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany before nursing both to pacifist democracy and waged a cold war of immense craft and patience against the Soviet Union. US failures, whether in south-east Asia, the Middle East or the Horn of Africa, have come mostly against non-sovereign enemies in irregular conflicts.,

This paragraph, takes the practice of History Made To Measure, that renders the attempt to be succinct, into nearly illegible shorthand. While demonstrating a kind of historical grasp, resembling a Walt Disney cartoon, expressed in the quick flashes of montage. The ‘stills’ run at high speed of montage, defines this essay. A revelatory selection:

the innate difficulty of counter-insurgency, America’s weird history as a superpower, Having had few colonies in the formal sense, the nation’s political, military and even journalistic elites tend to view conflict as that which takes place between states., A superpower tussle is a beguiling return to the familiar. ,It is the relief of a governing class finding its métier again. The change goes beyond the conceptual to the guts and grease of US power. , Heroic financial and intellectual resources went into refitting history’s mightiest armed forces for the nimbler work of the terror age, Great-power strategy will be a kind of liberation., What really sets the new era over the old one is its potential for some semblance of domestic unity., What stands out about the US ordeal in Afghanistan is not the death toll, which roughly equals the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

The reader just needs to steel herself for the final paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s collection of ‘stills’ run at high speed , that might be suggestive of a possible set of arguments, but does not constitute such.

No, the grim distinction of the past 20 years is the collapse of the national cohesion after 9/11. For all its heinous violence, terrorism was too diffuse a threat to give Americans that sense of besieged togetherness that past eras conferred. A conventional superpower, with four times their population, just might. A nation that has often defined its identity against an Other was never going to find it in Afghanistan.

https://www.ft.com/content/796c8af6-c4e3-418a-bf46-41d3fad5590e

America is still the Occupier of Iraq, an Embassy that is a fortress of American Power- the reader should treat the notion, that somehow America will leave Afghanistan, as the purest kind of fiction!

Philosophical Apprentice