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.
Mr. Wooldridge’s essay about Sunak is awash in political cynicism? its a convenient posture, that almost mimics critical thinking, under a heavy veneer of the ersatz.
Note that Wooldridge ‘shows’ Sunak in his various guises in the first three paragraphs of this essay:
Followers of Rishi Sunak on social media are treated to high politics and low culture. In one post, the prime minister accused Labour of being on the same side as “criminal gangs” who profit from smuggling people across the Channel into Britain. In another, a beaming Mr Sunak posed with his young family mulling whether to see “Barbie”, the pinktastic film about the doll, or “Oppenheimer”, a biopic about the godfather of the atom bomb. “Barbie first it is,” posted the unapologetically lowbrow politician.
Mr Sunak’s perky and nerdy demeanour covers an overlooked fact: he is comfortably the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. Taking a hard position on asylum-seekers is just the beginning. On everything from social issues, devolution and the environment to Brexit and the economy, Mr Sunak is to the right of the recent Tory occupants of 10 Downing Street. Yet neither voters nor his colleagues seem to have noticed.
Critics dismiss Mr Sunak’s hardline position on small boats crossing the Channel as focus group-led posturing. Mr Sunak has made stemming the flow of people across those waters one of the main goals of his government. The prime minister has curtailed the right of asylum for people who arrive in small boats. A barge for 500 asylum-seekers is docked in Dorset waiting for its human cargo. Mr Sunak wants to solve the crisis in the most aggressive and prominent way. If it is all for show, it is a needlessly expensive blockbuster. There is a simpler explanation for Mr Sunak’s approach: he believes in it.
Wooldridge, in the next five paragraphs, writes a made to measurer potted history of the Tories. These topic sentences are indicative of the Wooldridge attempt at a methodology.
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Where recent Conservative prime ministers dragged the party towards liberalism, Mr Sunak is resolutely traditionalist.
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Each recent Conservative prime minister has boasted of their environmentalism.
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Critics within the party moan that Mr Sunak is a closet leftie: a man who was too quick to spend money when he was chancellor during the pandemic and is too slow to cut taxes now that he is prime minister.
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When it comes to Brexit, now a religious question for the Conservatives rather than a policy one, Mr Sunak was always a believer.
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Mr Sunak’s credentials as a right-winger are close to immaculate.
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The final two paragraphs are -let me highlight a selection of Wooldridge’s wan attempt, at an informed analysis of Sunak’s status as right-winger. Yet the long time reader of Wooldridge, finds the terminus of his political analysis of Sunak, awash in political hypocrisy: in sum Wooldridge is an unapologetic Right-Winger. Given that, what might be the political purpose of this multi-layered polemic?
Right On
Ultimately, Mr Sunak’s strange reputation is due to the scrambling of British politics after 2016, which mangled the old left-right axis.Mr Sunak’s most decisive act was to bring down Mr Johnson. If Mr Johnson was Brexit incarnate, then his assassin must be a Remainer stooge. Right-wing Brexiters flocked to the Remain-supporting Ms Truss, who was loyal to Mr Johnson, in the leadership contest last summer; Mr Sunak relied on a rump of more liberal Tory mps. Nor was this delusion isolated to Conservatives. After the unprofessionalism of Mr Johnson and the chaos of Ms Truss, centrists welcomed the rise of the diligent Mr Sunak, mistaking competence for liberalism. They assumed he was one of their own based on his age, manner and background rather than his views. Many of them still do.
It is this ideological dissonance that creates the danger for Mr Sunak. He is left channelling another former prime minister who had to persuade his party his views were genuine. In 2001, after New Labour had secured re-election, one party wallah asked Sir Tony if he would ditch his rightward drift. Sir Tony replied: “It’s worse than you think. I really do believe in it.” Mr Sunak is right-wing out of conviction, rather than convenience—even if few others believe it.
Capitalism’s failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.
“(The bad) things have been forgotten,” said Rumen Petkov, 42, a former guard now clerk at the only prison still functioning on the Persin island.
“The nostalgia is palpable, particularly among the elderly,” he said, in front of the crumbling buildings of another old jail opened on the site after the camp was shut in 1959. The communists imprisoned dozens of ethnic Turks here in the 1980s when they refused to change their names to Bulgarian.
Some young people in the impoverished town of Belene, linked to the island with a pontoon bridge, also reminisce: “We lived better in the past,” said Anelia Beeva, 31.
“We went on holidays to the coast and the mountains, there were plenty of clothes, shoes, food. And now the biggest chunk of our incomes is spent on food. People with university degrees are unemployed and many go abroad.”
In Russia, several Soviet-themed restaurants have opened in Moscow in recent years: some hold nostalgia nights where young people dress up as pioneers — the Soviet answer to the boy scouts and girl guides — and dance to communist classics.
Soviet Champagne and Red October Chocolates remain favourites for birthday celebrations. “USSR” T-shirts and baseball caps can be seen across the country in summer.
While there is scant real desire for old regimes to be restored, analysts say apathy is a vital outcome.
“The big damage of the nostalgia…is that it dries out the energy for meaningful change,” wrote Bulgarian sociologist Vladimir Shopov in the online portal BG History.
The year 1989 brought the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. It was also the year that the economic theories of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Chicago School achieved global dominance. And it was these neoliberal ideas that largely determined the course of the political, economic, and social changes that transformed Europe—both east and west—over the next quarter century
Philipp Ther—a firsthand witness to many of the transformations, from Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution to postcommunist Poland and Ukraine—offers a sweeping narrative filled with vivid details and memorable stories. He describes how liberalization, deregulation, and privatization had catastrophic effects on former Soviet Bloc countries. He refutes the idea that this economic “shock therapy” was the basis of later growth, arguing that human capital and the “transformation from below” determined economic success or failure. Most important, he shows how the capitalist West’s effort to reshape Eastern Europe in its own likeness ended up reshaping Western Europe as well, in part by accelerating the pace and scope of neoliberal reforms in the West, particularly in reunified Germany. Finally, bringing the story up to the present, Ther compares events in Eastern and Southern Europe leading up to and following the 2008–9 global financial crisis.
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Goldberg ends her ‘essay’ with
One silver lining to Brexit is that it offers a cautionary tale for the rest of Europe. After Britain voted to leave the E.U. in 2016, there’s been fear, among some who care about the European project, that France or Italy could be next. But as The Guardian reported, as of January, support for leaving the E.U. has declined in every member state for which data is available. As governments across the continent move rightward, the E.U. itself is moving in a more conservative direction, but it’s not coming apart.
“I don’t think you’re going to see other countries in the E.U. leaving the E.U. if for no other reason than because they’ve seen the impact on us,” said Khan. But there’s a larger lesson, one most Western countries seemingly have to continually relearn. Right-wing nationalist projects begin with loud, flamboyant swagger. They tend to end unspeakably.
If The Reader consults François Duchêne’s hagiography of ‘Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence’ reviewed here..
No one can seriously doubt the existence of a crisis in the affairs of the European Union. As the implications of the treaties on which it is based, including the Maastricht timetable for economic and monetary union, become ever more widely appreciated, and as the ordinary citizen in most member countries begins to participate in the debate over the future of the Union and its institutions (a debate hitherto largely confined to the United Kingdom), the glow of the European ideal begins to fade and the demand for precise definitions as to what it is all for becomes louder. We are all Euroskeptics now.
The only country seemingly unaware of this change in public attitudes is the United States of America. Washington continues to act on the assumption that a “United States of Europe” is the continent’s inevitable destiny, and American ambassadors continue to proclaim in London, and no doubt elsewhere, that nothing must be allowed to frustrate this “manifest destiny,” even at the expense of the solidarity of the English-speaking and Atlantic worlds.
Ever since I began studying this process nearly forty years ago, I have been puzzled by the uncritical acceptance in the United States of the view that only with common institutions exercising sovereign power could Europe flourish economically, and play a proper role in its own defense. For while it is understandable that the United States should welcome the apparent decision of the countries of Western and Southern Europe to end their age old strife–did not Americans twice have to intervene to redress the balance?–the assumption that, without the institutions of Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, these countries would once again be preparing for armed conflict is on the face of it wholly implausible.
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Should The Reader look to the continuing Rebellion’s in France, or the Revolt of the Dutch Farmers against the EU, as indicative of the fracture of Monnet’s ‘vision’? Or might The Reader be blunt: Michelle Goldberg is out of her depth, yet fully congruent with current ‘political wisdom’. Yetthe fracturing of a Utopian Capitalist Collectivism, in sum The EU , tinctured in an etiolated Neo-Liberalism, is under attack by The Populist Menace?
