David Brooks ‘strategy’ in this essay is an attempt to change the subject from the Gaza Genocide, and enforced Famine of the Zionist Faschist State: to the clear and present danger of Trump, that Mr. Brooks’ as a once Neo-Liberal/Neo-Con nurtured until it became politically inconvenient, to his careerism. He now uses Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” as the means to present Biden as the politician who will ‘save the soul of America’ – the toxin of America’s Puritan Tradition is the ready-to-hand for a wide spectrum of The American Political Grifter Class!
The first paragraphs of Brooks are awash in the cliches of That Old Time Religion, or better yet its political pastiche:
In 2020 Joe Biden ran on the theme of saving the soul of America. Once he was president, he used the power of his office to help direct hundreds of billions of dollars through the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act to the people and places that had been left behind. At the time, I hoped that these programs would not only create jobs and give people a sense of financial security but also be seen as a sign of respect, a sign to the unseen and the alienated that America had their back.
These policies were successful in economic terms, sparking a torrent of additional investment and lifting real wages, but economic progress has not produced social or spiritual progress — less alienation, higher social trust. American society, at every economic level, is still plagued by enmity, distrust, isolation, willful misunderstanding, ungraciousness and just plain meanness. The pain in America resides in places deeper than economic policies can reach. So how can we create a society in which it is easier to be decent to one another?
The next paragraphs mention an obscure book by Howard Thurman “Jesus and the Disinherited”. The books obscurity plays well in the hands of Neo-Conservative, speaking to a readership that treats Mr. Brooks as an political expert of wide reading and high integrity!
To answer that question, I returned to Howard Thurman’s magnificent 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman, a Black theologian, was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Sr., at Morehouse and had a strong influence on the activism of his son Martin Luther King Jr.
In the book Thurman asks a series of profound questions: How is it possible for the disinherited and the oppressed to live pushed against the wall without losing their humanity? More broadly, how is it possible to strengthen the spiritual and social foundation of society so that people will recognize one another’s full dignity amid the normal tussles of life? These are germane questions today, when so many — on the left and right — feel that society has pushed them against the wall.
To answer that question, I returned to Howard Thurman’s magnificent 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman, a Black theologian, was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Sr., at Morehouse and had a strong influence on the activism of his son Martin Luther King Jr.
In the book Thurman asks a series of profound questions: How is it possible for the disinherited and the oppressed to live pushed against the wall without losing their humanity? More broadly, how is it possible to strengthen the spiritual and social foundation of society so that people will recognize one another’s full dignity amid the normal tussles of life? These are germane questions today, when so many — on the left and right — feel that society has pushed them against the wall.
Thurman emphasizes that Jesus was a poor Jew living under the tyranny of Roman power. But even in these vicious circumstances, Jesus focused his attention on the “inward center” of each person. He showed that you can’t look only at a person’s economic or political circumstances. The crucial level for any person is the spiritual level, the place where souls are either sanctified or degraded.
Thurman reminds us that when the networks of relationships in a society are broken and unjust, national transformation must flow from a tide of personal transformations. Thurman emphasizes that Jesus was a poor Jew living under the tyranny of Roman power. But even in these vicious circumstances, Jesus focused his attention on the “inward center” of each person. He showed that you can’t look only at a person’s economic or political circumstances. The crucial level for any person is the spiritual level, the place where souls are either sanctified or degraded.
Thurman reminds us that when the networks of relationships in a society are broken and unjust, national transformation must flow from a tide of personal transformations.
What might The Reader make of this long quotations and paraphrases of Mr. Therman’s book? To what political/moral purpose does Brooks yoke these paragraphs to, but Joe Biden and ‘the theme of saving the soul of America’. Some empirical evidence about Biden might be useful to The Reader:
Joe Biden in 1993 speech warned of ‘predators on our streets’
Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them.
Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the comments on the Senate floor a day before a vote was scheduled on the Senate’s version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
His central role in shaping and shepherding the tough-on-crime bill will likely face scrutiny in a Democratic primary should he run for president in 2020. His 1993 comments, which were in line with the broad political consensus to tackling crime at the time, are at odds with a new bipartisan coalition of activists and lawmakers who are trying to undo what they say is a legacy of mass incarceration fostered by that era.
Biden’s word choice could also pose a problem with a new generation of Democrats who view the rhetoric at the time as perpetuating harmful myths about the black community.
CNN’s KFile came across the 1993 speech during a review of the former vice president’s record.
President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the crime bill into law with broad bipartisan support as violent crime rates peaked in the US in the early 1990s. Included in the law was the federal “three strikes” provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.
“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as “the Biden bill.”
“They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden continued. “And it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.”
In the speech, Biden described a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” He said, “we should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”
Biden added that he didn’t care “why someone is a malefactor in society” and that criminals needed to be “away from my mother, your husband, our families.”
Bill Russo, a spokesman for Biden, said high violent crime rates at the time was key context to understanding the bill and that, “Senator-Biden’s strong rhetoric” was in response to Republican critiques that past efforts had been too soft on crime.
“Then-Senator Biden was referring specifically to violent crimes in the selected quotes. He was not talking about a kid stealing a candy bar, but someone who committed sexual assault, manslaughter, or murder,” Russo told CNN in an email. “In contrast, he says in the same speech that we need a different approach for nonviolent crimes. Specifically, he says we ‘need to keep people who are first time offenders, non-violent offenders, or potential first-time offenders who in fact are people getting themselves into the crime stream from the first time – that they should be diverted from the system.’”
Biden’s spokesman added the 1994 crime bill included funding “to keep individuals who committed first-time offenses and non-violent crimes out of prison and instead in treatment and supervision,” and that Biden advocated for prevention funding. Russo also pointed to two provisions of the bill that led to Biden’s strong support of its passage: bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons and the Violence Against Women Act.
Biden’s 1993 “predator” remarks are similar to comments made by then-first lady Hillary Clinton in 1996, where she warned of “superpredators” who had “no conscience, no empathy” and who need to be brought “to heel.” During the 2016 Democratic primary, Clinton was confronted by Black Lives Matter activists over her use of the term. Clinton later told the Washington Post: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.
Biden defended the 1994 crime law as a whole in a 2016 interview with CNBC, saying, “By and large, what it really did, it restored American cities.”
But more recently, at an event talking about criminal justice in January, Biden said, “I haven’t always been right. I know we haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always tried.”
He highlighted his later work with President Barack Obama to address the sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, saying, “It was a big mistake when it was made,” he said at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast in Washington. “We thought, we were told by the experts, that crack you never go back, it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”
In the decades since it passed, portions of the act have been singled out by critics as contributing to the expansion of mass incarceration, particularly of African Americans. Speaking about mass incarceration in 2015, Bill Clinton said he “signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”
In 1993, Biden spoke to the broad political consensus that had formed around tackling violent crime.
“The consensus is A), we must take back the streets,” Biden said, “It doesn’t matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.”
Biden added in his speech that rehabilitation could not be a condition for release or sentencing, because the United States criminal justice system didn’t know how to rehabilitate offenders.
“I’m the guy that said rehabilitation, when it occurs, we don’t understand it and notice it and even when we notice it and we know it occurs, we don’t know why,” he said. “So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release.”
The consensus, Biden again said, was the need to make streets safer. With an impassioned plea, Biden said he did not care what led someone to commit crimes.
“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath,” Biden said. “We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society, try to help them, try to change the behavior. That’s what we do in this bill. We have drug treatment and we have other treatments to try to deal with it, but they are in jail.”
Mr. Brooks encomiums to The Biden of the Present, is about the self-willed forgetting that the Trump phenomenon has produced, in the cadre of New York Times and the other proliferating Newspaper Pundits!
Ed Kilgore offers this from 2019 on Biden’s ‘Crime Bill’
Headline: On Crime Policy, Biden Worked Closely With His Segregationist Friends
There are two story lines about Joe Biden’s long Senate record that are potentially dangerous for him, in that they could threaten his currently strong support among African-Americans. One involves his friendships with segregationists in the Senate — notably James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, and Herman Talmadge — which he can’t seem to stop talking about. And the other is his responsibility for policies that have led to mass incarceration, including the landmark 1994 crime bill.
What could be happening now is that the two stories are converging, as reflected in a New York Times report on how Biden worked closely with his racist colleagues to push crime policy toward mandatory minimum sentences and other “get tough” positions, long before the 1994 bill.
The Diligent Reader has still to face 923 words. She can , if she chooses, continue to read Brooks essay, yet the very center of this muted polemic is in its last paragraphs:
…
There are obviously times when this nonviolent strategy is inappropriate — in a state of anarchy or war, when the very existence of your people is under threat. But these techniques did work in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago and beyond. Most important, they altered people’s souls, fortifying the state of consciousness of the disinherited, undermining the state of consciousness of the dominators and elevating the consciousness of those who looked on in awe and admiration.
These thoughtful techniques are a long way from the tit-for-tat crudities that now often pass for public discourse, the tantrums of the merchants of rage, the 57 percent of Republicans and the 41 percent of Democrats who regard people in the other party as their enemies.
As many have noted, we’re not going to solve our problems at the same level of consciousness on which we created them. If the national consciousness, the state of our national soul, is to repair, it will be because people begin to think as deeply as Thurman did and begin to be intolerant of the immoralities of their own side.
I was impressed this week by Georgia’s former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan. A conservative Republican, he announced his decision to support Biden, and he rebuked those other conservatives who are appalled by Trump but still vow to vote for him. Duncan’s reasoning was straightforward: Character is more important than policy. Or to put it more grandly, the soul of our democracy is more important than whatever the future top tax rate might be.
Old Socialist asks ‘A New York Times Question’: Is Bret Stephens ‘Woke’ ?
Mr. Stephens disingenuous thank you note to campus protestors, who can’t quite match Stephens education : Middlesex School , *University of Chicago & the London School of Economics, demonstrates his status as part of a highly credentialed elite, that entitles him to rebuke these campus protestors. Although these protestors are part on another elite, of another generation. In its way, this rebuke is Stephens way of exhibiting his educational, political and religious superiority, to a category of strangers under the guise of campus protestors.
Mr. Stephens begins his essay :
Dear anti-Israel campus protesters:
Though it may take a few years before you realize it, supporters of Israel like me have reasons to give thanks to militant anti-Zionists like you.
Recently, a friend asked what I would have made of your protests if they had been less fervently one-sided. If, for instance, pro-Palestinian student groups at Harvard and Columbia hadn’t castigated Israel immediately following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Or if Jewish students and professors hadn’t faced violence, harassment and antisemitic imagery from you or your allies from Harvard to Columbia to Berkeley to Stanford. Or if you had made a point of acknowledging the reality of the Oct. 7 rapes or the suffering of Israel’s hostages and their families while demanding their safe return. Or if you consistently condemned and distanced yourselves from Hamas. Or if all of you had simply followed rules that gave you every right to free expression without trampling on the rights of others to a safe and open campus.
In short, what if your protests had focused on Israel’s policies, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, rather than demanding the complete elimination of Israel as a Jewish state? What if you had avoided demonizing anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist — which includes a vast majority of Jews — as modern-day Nazis?
…
Here are Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and Jon Elmer of The Electronic Intifada were joined by Donya Abu Sitta, contributor and journalist in the Gaza Strip, on the day 208 livestream.
Debunking “Screams Before Silence,” Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 October “mass rapes” film, with Ali Abunimah
Mr. Stephens, ignores the inconvenient fact of the Gaza Genocide and forced Famine of the Palestinians, but Mr. Stephen continues his scolding of those campus protestors. The challenge to Stephens, that the propagandist does not meet, is the amorphous character of his chosen class of persons.
In that case, I told my friend, I would have disagreed with your views but I wouldn’t have despised them. Nor would a broad plurality of Americans, including many to my left. The result could have been a movement that would have had stronger arguments and greater impact. You would have been able to win over undecideds to your cause. And I would have had to fight harder to make my case that Israel must get rid of Hamas.
The Reader might ask herself who/what is the ‘left’ that Stephens refers too: the great looming presence of disloyalty, a hold over from Nixon/McCarthy Era, and its various political iterations, over time. That reliable political ghost surely cannot refer to his fellow Zionists Tom Friedman or David Brooks! Stephen’s was editor of the Jerusalem Post a propaganda arm of the Israeli government, yet in this instance that experience has failed him.
In Stephens collection of would-be gambits Marx makes an appearance, along with the free-floating ‘your Maoist-style sloganeering’ assisted by your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
I realize this isn’t how some of you see it. The most hard-line among you want to “sharpen the contradictions,” as the Marxists say. Your real goal was not to shape U.S. government policy, at least in the near term. What you really want to do is normalize anti-Zionism, particularly on elite college campuses, while hoping that the bigger payoff will come in 20 or 30 years, when those you’ve converted to your cause become senators and governors and university presidents.
But the problem with sharpening the contradictions is that the contradictions being sharpened are your own. For every student who became ardently pro-Palestinian during the protests, another one, perhaps a Jewish student with previously indifferent feelings about Israel, finally saw the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For every professor who’s shown up to your encampment to lend support, you’ve lost a fair-minded liberal with your Maoist-style sloganeering and your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
What follows is more avuncular scolding : note The Players in this section. I’ll put them in italics. The Reader might also note, that the third paragraph lapses into political hysterics, that recapitulates the Jewish Victimhood Narrative, from the point of view of bourgeois political intellectual, of a very specific kind: A bellicose Straussian! And like most, if not all Straussians, no military nor battle experience!
In short, if sharpening the contradictions is the game you’re playing, it’s paying bigger dividends for my side than it is for yours. It’s also nothing new. Those 1968 protests you’re trying to emulate? What they mainly helped achieve was the election of Richard Nixon followed by nearly 40 straight years of right-of-center governance in the United States.
Nor is this the only help you’re giving my side.
I am a Zionist not only because I support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state — an abstract point about another country. I am also a Zionist for the most personal of reasons: because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries. For anyone with a historical memory of France until Dreyfus, Germany until Hitler or Iran until Khomeini, that kind of insurance is one Jews can’t afford to lose.
In the final paragraphs again Stephens again will-fully ‘forgets’ the Gaza Genocide and the enforced Famine. As I write this Rafah awaits! In sum, Stephens never left his employment as editor of The Jerusalem Post- The New York Times has assumed that role in American Life!
But Stephens can’t let go if his closely held belief in his own victim-hood!
What happened on Oct. 7 shook my faith in the quality of that insurance: What else does the Israeli state exist for, after all, if not to protect its people from the kind of butchery they endured that day? But what happened on Oct. 8 — the moment your protests began — renewed that faith, because it gave me a glimpse into what America might yet become for Jews, at least if people like you were to gain real power.
I get that many if not most of you see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians, champion equality and oppose all forms of bigotry. There are ways you could do that without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. Supporting a two-state solution would be one such way. Insisting that Palestinians deserve better leaders than Hamas is another. Building bridges with Israelis is a third.
Instead, without knowing it, you are my daily reminder of what my Zionism is for, about and against. For that, if nothing else, thank you.
Old Socialist asks a New York Times ? Has Stephens become ‘Woke’ ?
While the Genocide and enforced Famine continues in Gaza, and the attack on Rafah awaits, Bret Stephens and Sheryl Sandberg sound the alarm on ‘Anti-Semitism’.
There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that the former Facebook chief operating officer There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that the former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar,…
…
Why? “People are so polarized that they want every fact to fit into a narrative, and if their narrative is resistance, then sexual violence doesn’t fit into that narrative,” Sandberg told me when I met her in New York last Thursday, hours before the documentary’s premiere at The Times Center. “You can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel has no choice; you can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel wants to kill babies. You can hold either one of those thoughts. And you should also be able to hold the thought that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what.”
…
“I’ve spent my life, obviously, building businesses,” Sandberg told me toward the end of our interview. “And separately I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting for women. And I never thought I was going to work on antisemitism. I didn’t think it was a problem, and I was absolutely wrong. And I never thought that politics could make any group or feminist leader turn a blind eye to just such clear documentation of sexual violence.”
Political Observer recalls Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan, as ‘The Transformational President’, while FDR remained in the shadow of that Hollywood has-been!
The reader needs, must consider what planet Janan Ganesh resides! This ‘essay’ on Joe is History Made To Measure ‘we can write it in exponent form as x2’
The first paragraphs are indicative of the ‘Ganesh Historical Methodology’
There are three things that Joe Biden cannot shake off: his Secret Service guards, his own shadow and the phrase “ . . . since Lyndon Johnson”. He is described as the most consequential Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson. He is said to have brought about the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson. The historical comparison is meant well. In fact, it undersells him.
In turning ideas into statute, LBJ had lavish advantages. Democrats outnumbered Republicans around two-to-one in both houses of Congress for much of the 1960s. Having replaced the slain John F Kennedy, he began with the nation’s goodwill, and could present his reforms as his predecessor’s unfinished work. Biden had neither the numbers nor the moral head-start. Still, last week, the Ukraine aid package joined the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and a vast infrastructure splurge in Biden’s canon of important (or at least expensive) laws.
What are we to learn from this prolific doer of things? What, as we near its end, is the lesson of this startlingly fertile presidential term?
For those of us who who were adults at the time, Mr. Ganesh’s political portrait of LBJ, represents not just a failed attempt to make Joe Biden and LBJ, as somehow sharing the same political imperatives! Mr. Ganesh is not familiar with Billie Sol Estes nor Abe Fortas!
Joe Biden is a Neo-Liberal: not the etiolated remains of the New Deal: Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act (1965) were the belated, unfinished business of that hallowed New Frontier of Kennedy. While not forgetting LBJ’s ‘Guns And Butter’! nor the careers of the war mongers McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, or Robert S. McNamara. Kai Bird’s book is the kind of political education that Janan Ganesh has no interest in exploring:
Ganesh is a apologist/ propagandist for senile Old Joe, as the political savior against the Political Monster Donald Trump. Though he makes no appearance in this defence of Biden. Yet Biden in Ganesh’s telling is not an exemplar of what might be considered political virtues:
One thing above all: eloquence is overrated. So is charisma, vision-setting and all the other “performance” aspects of politics. Biden was an average-to-poor communicator even before his age-related deterioration. He has no signature speech or even epigram to show for half a century in frontline politics. What he does have is more inside experience of Washington — its details, its unwritten codes — than any president ever. The result is a one-term legacy that exceeds what such silver-tongues as Bill Clinton managed in two.
Here is Joe’s signature speech, that has eluded the grasp of Ganesh:
Joe Biden in 1993 Speech talks of “Predators” on our streets
The above paragraph doesn’t quite qualify as faint praise. The Reader might wonder what it is! Perhaps the strangled voice of a would-be novelist? Or a writer traying to meet his deadline!
The fact is that Ganesh trades upon ‘leadership’ invested in the very thing that he inveigh against!
Samples:
…
Biden understood, as his more outwardly gifted predecessors didn’t always, the importance of face. Something else, too: he can count.
A leader can’t be so presentationally inept as to be unelectable. But once that low standard is met, there are diminishing returns to star power.
…
Their nation-changing qualities — stamina, focus, certitude — were in the private side of politics, which is most of politics.
Liberals need to hear this more than most. American ones in particular can be crashing snobs about education and speech. In The West Wing, they got to create their ideal president. The result? A hyper-articulate Yankee Brahmin.
…
But the ultimate beneficiary of this liberal obsession with rhetoric was Barack Obama. It wasn’t even profound rhetoric. “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
…
Biden is to Obama what Johnson was to Kennedy.
…
But the perception of what constitutes a leader never caught up. Because people overvalue what they themselves are good at, the educated politico-media class overvalues eloquence.
I say all this as no particular admirer of Biden’s domestic bills. If he loses re-election, the culprit will be inflation, to which his spending has probably contributed. His protectionism almost guarantees immense waste and fragments the world trade order that allowed the postwar US to bind countries to it.
…
Still, there are other moments to discuss how Biden uses his political skill. Just recognise that skill, and how little it relies on words. If a “great” leader is one who changes things, for better or not, this is an administration of mumbling, tongue-tied greatness.
Political Observer on Friedman’s 2,019 word intervention.
‘writing from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’ is attached to this ‘essay’ as the in order to of impressing the Times readership? Mr. Friedman, and his newspaper, self-present as not just the ‘last word’ on International Affaires but the sine qua non of such reportage! This rambling essay begins with these four paragraphs:
U.S. diplomacy to end the Gaza war and forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia has been converging in recent weeks into a single giant choice for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What do you want more — Rafah or Riyadh?
Do you want to mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah to try to finish off Hamas — if that is even possible — without offering any Israeli exit strategy from Gaza or any political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians? If you go this route, it will only compound Israel’s global isolation and force a real breach with the Biden administration.
Or do you want normalization with Saudi Arabia, an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza and a U.S.-led security alliance against Iran? This would come with a different price: a commitment from your government to work toward a Palestinian state with a reformed Palestinian Authority — but with the benefit of embedding Israel in the widest U.S.-Arab-Israeli defense coalition the Jewish state has ever enjoyed and the biggest bridge to the rest of the Muslim world Israel has ever been offered, while creating at least some hope that the conflict with the Palestinians will not be a “forever war.’’
This is one of the most fateful choices Israel has ever had to make. And what I find both disturbing and depressing is that there is no major Israeli leader today in the ruling coalition, the opposition or the military who is consistently helping Israelis understand that choice — a global pariah or a Middle East partner — or explaining why it should choose the second.
Its a kind of low grade political melodrama, that sends his bourgeois readership into fits of near adoration? His location, Riyadh, and his proximity to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who appears later in the essay, lends credibility ?
The next paragraph offers a Friedmann an ‘understanding mood’:
I appreciate how traumatized Israelis are by the vicious Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings of Oct. 7. It is not surprising to me that many people there just want revenge, and their hearts have hardened to a degree that they can’t see or care about all of the civilians, including thousands of children, who have been killed in Gaza as Israel has plowed through to try to eliminate Hamas. All of this has been further hardened by Hamas’s refusal so far to release the remaining hostages.
Followed by this paragraph steeped in admonition:
But revenge is not a strategy. It is pure insanity that Israel is now more than six months into this war and the Israeli military leadership — and virtually the entire political class — has allowed Netanyahu to continue to pursue a “total victory” there, including probably soon plunging deep into Rafah, without any exit plan or Arab partner lined up to step in once the war ends. If Israel ends up with an indefinite occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, it would be a toxic military, economic and moral overstretch that would delight Israel’s most dangerous foe, Iran, and repel all its allies in the West and the Arab world.
The Reader searches in vain for any mention of the Zionist Genocide and Famine in Gaza! Friedman is playacting the part of the ‘Peace Maker’ , the unofficial American Ambassador, with strong ties to Biden, and perhaps acting as his proxy? Enough of the Friedman self-congratulatory chatter, the last paragraphs of Freidman’s essay:
…
The Biden team wants to complete the U.S.-Saudi part of the deal so that it can act like the opposition party that Israel does not have right now and be able to say to Netanyahu: You can be remembered as the leader who presided over Israel’s worst military catastrophe on Oct. 7 or the leader who led Israel out of Gaza and opened the road to normalization between Israel and the most important Muslim state. Your choice. And it wants to offer this choice publicly so that every Israeli can see it.
So let me end where I began: Israel’s long-term interests are in Riyadh, not Rafah. Of course, neither is a sure thing and both come with risks. And I know that it’s not so easy for Israelis to weigh them when so many global protesters these days are hammering Israel for its bad behavior in Gaza and giving Hamas a free pass. But that’s what leaders are for: to make the case that the road to Riyadh has a much bigger payoff at the end than the road to Rafah, which will be a dead end in every sense of the term.
I totally respect that Israelis are the ones who will have to live with the choice. I just want to make sure they know they have one.
Mr. Friedman is a maladroit paternalist, as the sentence I’ve placed in bold font, demonstrates!
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
I’ll offer this video of Netanyahu’s latest pronouncement on American political/civic life:
At the weekend, Congress finally unblocked the $61bn Ukraine aid bill, and sighs of relief were heard across European capitals, where anxious policymakers had for months been reading up on arcane details of congressional procedure. But they should not relax just yet. And not just because those dollars still have to be transformed into weapons and a path to victory for Ukraine on the battlefield.
This remarkable vote was accomplished via an intelligence-assisted Pauline conversion in House Speaker Mike Johnson, a determined push by less than half the Republican caucus and support across the aisle from almost the entire Democratic side of the House. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential candidate, was distracted by his legal entanglements.
….
Inside House Speaker Mike Johnson’s conversion on aid for Ukraine
Breakthrough move to hold vote followed campaign by evangelical Christians and intelligence chiefs
In the last week of February, a large billboard appeared across the street from Mike Johnson’s home church in Benton, Louisiana.
“For such a time as this,” it read, quoting a Bible verse alongside an image of a damaged Baptist church in Berdyansk, Ukraine. It addressed Johnson by name.
The advertisement was paid for by Razom, a Ukrainian human rights group, and appealed to Johnson’s deep Christian faith — and his power as Speaker of the House of Representatives to secure billions of dollars in US funding for Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The campaign paid off last week, when Johnson shocked Washington and US allies around the world by allowing the House to vote for that aid, unblocking $95bn in funds for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The Senate also passed the package on Tuesday night, allowing President Joe Biden to sign it into law on Wednesday. The Pentagon immediately announced $1bn in weaponry from US military stockpiles would be sent immediately — crucial support just as Russian forces threaten to overwhelm Ukrainian defences.
It marks a huge U-turn for Johnson, who had previously voted repeatedly against Ukraine aid, and for months used his power as Speaker to block a vote on new support. And it culminates a months-long, behind-the-scenes campaign by intelligence chiefs, White House officials, European diplomats and evangelical Christians from Ukraine to persuade him.
People close to Johnson insist that he has long been sympathetic to the Ukrainian people’s plight and spent recent months trying to find a way forward to satisfy feuding factions within the Republican party, including isolationists who have threatened to oust him over his support for Ukraine.
“He has never had a lack of clarity about who is right and wrong in this conflict,” said one person close to Johnson.
…
Notice how both these ‘news stories’, commentaries are framed by vulgarized Theology. Also note that the Lauren Fedor & James Politi essay relies on gossip: ‘said one person close to Johnson.’
Political Observer
P.S. I have deliberately fore-shortened these political interventions ! The Reader is most capable, of reading for herself this ‘political reporting’ and come the her own conclusions!
‘’Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.’
I am not a subscriber to ‘Real Clear Politics’ , but somehow I am on their mailing list. Today I explored the web site, and one of the essays caught my interest:
‘Philip Howard Aims To Enhance Freedom by Restoring Authority’ by Peter Berkowitz.
The first sentence of Berkowitz’s essay offers both ‘The New Right’ & ‘the progressive left’ : Reader first note, the upper case of ‘The New Right’ and the lower case reserved for ‘the progressive left’, as a way to minimize, to place in shadow, as opposed to the revelation of ‘The New Right’ ! ‘Largely unbeknownst to themselves’ places both ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ in the category of unconscious political actors, is more Berkowitz rhetorical chicanery?
Largely unbeknownst to themselves, influential segments of the New Right and the progressive left share a deep-seated – and delusive – belief. Both suppose that freedom – in the form of the equal individual rights promised by America’s founding principles – on the one hand, and traditional virtues and tight-knit local communities, on the other, are implacably opposed. The more you have of one, prominent figures on the right and on the left surmise, the less you have of the other.
They draw, however, opposite conclusions from their common conviction. Prizing virtue and community, national conservatives and postliberals on the right blame individual freedom for hollowing out the public good and diverting attention from citizens’ character, and they would wield government to uphold their religious convictions and the moral judgments that flow from them. Valuing autonomy, ideologues and activists of the progressive left seek to emancipate individuals from the constraints of venerable duties and inherited ways of life.
One can take too far the observation about the partisans’ strange convergence. After all, the New Right affirms the right of national self-determination and that public policy should reflect that human beings are equally created in God’s image. Meanwhile, the progressive left employs government authority to curtail free speech in the name of inclusiveness. But on the whole, both believe that one must choose: freedom and individual rights or virtue and community.
I’ve placed in italics of some of the Berkowitz’s arcane, or just dubious political vocabulary e.g. national conservatives & postliberals , as co much techo-chatter, for want of a better descriptor ! Peter Berkowitz is a ‘senior fellow at the Hoover Institution’ who understands the value of propaganda, in the guise of book review, that acts the part of literary criticism, wedded to verifiable good of the restoration of ‘Authority’! In his next paragraph Mr. Berkowitz mentions both John Locke and Aristotle as part of ‘our political/moral inheritance’, I will offer the caveat that both of these Philosophers need careful laundering.
From the perspective of America’s founding principles, that is a false choice. The founders generally shared John Locke’s view – which reflects The author of several books dealing with institutions, laws, and practices that have distorted society, eroded freedom, and misshaped morals, Howard is also a lawyer and chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan organization that endeavors to replace bureaucracy with human responsibility .and Aristotle’s understanding – that freedom, the virtues, and community are mutually dependent: freedom makes possible the exercise of virtue and the preservation of communities while individuals acquire in communities the virtues that enable them to maintain and improve free institutions.
Locke:
Abstract:
Locke owned stock in slave trading companies and was secretary of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, where slavery was constitutionally permitted. He had two notions of slavery: legitimate slavery was captivity with forced labor imposed by the just winning side in a war; illegitimate slavery was an authoritarian deprivation of natural rights. Locke did not try to justify either black slavery or the oppression of Amerindians. In The Two Treatises of Government, Locke argued against the advocates of absolute monarchy. The arguments for absolute monarchy and colonial slavery turn out to be the same. So in arguing against the one, Locke could not help but argue against the other. Examining the natural rights tradition to which Locke’s work belongs confirms this. Locke could have defended colonial slavery by building on popular ideas of his colleagues and predecessors, but there is no textual evidence that he did that or that he advocated seizing Indian agricultural land.
April 24, 2024: ‘Locke could have defended colonial slavery…?
Aristotle
Abstract
Aristotle’s claim that natural slaves do not possess autonomous rationality (Pol. 1.5, 1254b20-23) cannot plausibly be interpreted in an unrestricted sense, since this would conflict with what Aristotle knew about non-Greek societies. Aristotle’s argument requires only a lack of autonomous practical rationality. An impairment of the capacity for integrated practical deliberation, resulting from an environmentally induced excess or deficiency in thumos (Pol. 7.7, 1327b18-31), would be sufficient to make natural slaves incapable of eudaimonia without being obtrusively implausible relative to what Aristotle is likely to have believed about non-Greeks. Since Aristotle seems to have believed that the existence of people who can be enslaved without injustice is a hypothetical necessity, if those capable of eudaimonia are to achieve it, the existence of natural slaves has implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s natural teleology.
Mr. Berkowitz’s 1478 word essay, has been reduced to 836 words remaining. Mr. Berkowitz is a Neo-Conservative, or its cognate, whose political/moral imperative is to the muddy the rhetorical waters, just enough to make his arguments seem plausible! The Ideas, Philosophies of these paradigmatic Thinkers/Writers are tainted, as my sources make clear: if The Reader attaches herself to something like Truth or even mere plausibility. I’ll pick through the arguments remaining, and without apology, it will be self-serving, but I think revelatory of Mr. Berkowitz’s defence of a needed re-invigoration of ‘Authority’.
…
…fruitful expression in cooperation is central to Philip K. Howard’s succinct new book. In “Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society,” Howard maintains that throughout contemporary public life, “Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible.” Restoring that authority, he argues, will enhance individual freedom.
…
The author of several books dealing with institutions, laws, and practices that have distorted society, eroded freedom, and misshaped morals, Howard is also a lawyer and chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan organization that endeavors to replace bureaucracy with human responsibility.
…
Howard focuses on the corrosion of the culture of freedom in post-1960s America. This may sound odd since that decade is famously associated with rebellion against traditional norms and practices.
…
The post-1960s assault on freedom flowed from good intentions, he asserts.
…
But, Howard maintains, the technocratic mindset overreached.
…
Howard identifies “three new legal mechanisms” that government and business have implemented since the 1960s to protect the American people from abusive authority.
…
The purpose of comprehensively regulating conduct through elaborate rules, extensive procedures, and a vast array of rights – you could call it the juridification of public life – reflected the high-minded aspiration “to enhance freedom by reducing any wiggle room for bias, unfairness, or error.”
…
The long-term consequences of the juridification of public life, argues Howard, have been pernicious. The expansion of law and regulation – notwithstanding the aspiration to fairness – suppresses spontaneity, constricts intuition and common sense, fosters conformity, promotes indiscriminate distrust of authority, discourages people from taking ownership of their actions, and erodes appreciation of the common good.
…
“The cure is not mainly new policies, but new legal operating structures that re-empower Americans in their everyday choices,” Howard contends.
…
Howard proposes an alternative framework. To preserve and enlarge “everyday freedom,” this new legal architecture would establish “boundaries safeguarding against unreasonable acts.”
…
Since judgment on the spot is crucial to most human activities – in the family, within communities, on the job – law that empowers individuals to use their common sense would not only expand freedom but also improve outcomes.
…
“Everyday freedom requires not only a zone of protected autonomy, but also trust that other people will abide by the reasonable values of society.”
…
Although it cuts against the grain of contemporary legal sensibilities, argues Howard, “people with responsibility must be empowered to assert norms of what’s right and reasonable, and they must be free to make judgments about the people they work with.”
…
This freedom to exercise authority allowed supervisors and workers to use their discretion, find creative solutions, and work unimpeded by bureaucratic meddling and endless demands for permits and licenses.
The last paragraphs of Mr. Berkowitz’s essay are platitudinous at best, yet he still can’t let go of the bad actors, in this dubious Political Melodrama : ‘The New Right’ , in upper case & ‘the progressive left’ in lower case, that exemplifies his political/rhetorical bad faith!
To deserve, in the name of the protection of everyday freedom, the greater authority and discretion that Howard would entrust to them, public officials and ordinary citizens must acquire a range of virtues: the imagination to put themselves in other people’s shoes; the diligence to do their homework and devise feasible undertakings, measures, and reforms; the courage to stand by correct but unpopular decisions; and the grace to admit when they are wrong and correct course.
The American political tradition teaches that the cultivation of these virtues, which are essential to the responsible exercise of everyday freedom, depends on strong families, vibrant communities, and schools dedicated to education rather than indoctrination.
Contrary, then, to influential elements within both the New Right and the progressive left, reconciling freedom, on the one hand, and virtue and community, on the other, does not call for squaring a circle but rather embracing a package deal.
Melanie Phillips opens her diatribe with these markers, this hysterical collection of ‘charges’ against a people subject to 75 years of subjugation, oppression, dispossession, incarceration, kidnap, murder. And in the present to Geocide and Famine, charges that Phillips vehemently denies, based on denial, alone!
The Enemy of Civilization
The malign malignant attack
Genocide of the Jews
The War against The West
War against Israel
The War against Civilization
Phillips is, along with other Jews, are given the role of Victim, as in the six charges above! Phillips also attacks an amorphous, ill defined ‘Left’, the Tories and some of the attendees at the Conference she is addressing. A 25 minute speech consisting of repetitions, reframed as need be, to fit the evolving rhetorical imperatives of propaganda!
Political Observer wonders at this short lived ‘evolution’!
The first paragraphs demonstrate a remarkable ‘evolution’, that reminds this American Reader of Rod McKuen’s ‘Listen to the Warm’ of 1967! He was reported to be Elizbeth Taylor’s favorite Poet! Mr. Colvile poetic reach, not to speak of his blend of ‘The Eclipse’ , the political with popular entertainment of the moment, lends a certain elan !
For medieval peasants a solar eclipse was a certain sign of the apocalypse. A 14th-century text, “The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday”, explained that the sun “will give no light and will be cast down to Earth — while you now see it as pleasing and bright, it will become as black as coal”.
For Tory MPs there is no need to watch the heavens to predict the end: they just have to look at the polls. The Conservative rating of 19 per cent in Ipsos’s Political Monitor is the lowest since the survey started in 1978. Rishi Sunak’s personal favourability has hit a historic low, too — yet the same polls suggest that changing leader would do little to help.
Indeed, a better parallel than the Middle Ages may be Fallout, the big new show on Amazon Prime, in which a mismatched group of characters have to navigate a derelict, post-nuclear hellscape.
Admittedly, those Conservative MPs that do make it back into parliament may not have to grapple with flesh-eating ghouls, mutated fish monsters and murderous robots. But on present polling it’s looking like about as much fun.
Yet in politics, as in Fallout’s wasteland, life always goes on. Which is why thoughts are already turning to what comes next.
Unfortunately, Mr. Colvile then touches the ground of reality, in the political present, I’ll attempt a foreshortened collection of the ‘highlights’ :
…
With the signal exception of Suella Braverman, the main contenders for the Tory leadership after the election are still supportive of Sunak,…
….
…Conservative Home’s survey of Tory members, vindicated by the Cass review on transgender care for under-18s, giving a punchy speech on regulation and growth and using the free vote on the smoking ban to express principled opposition to creating two categories of legal adults.
…
Yet the more I think about the Conservative Party’s plight, the more questions of personality feel almost irrelevant.
…
We don’t need to rehearse all the reasons for the Tories’ spectacular — and historically unprecedented — slide in the polls.
…
The Conservatives have lost voters to both left and right,…
…
The Tory party, as one of its senior members told me the other day, is made up of three tribes.
Editor: The Three Tribes:
the soft centre
“the wets”
There are those (like me) who prioritize free markets and economic opportunity.
…Conservatism is cultural, inspired by faith, family and flag.
Editor : Perhaps I don’t understand British Counting, it looks like 4 to me!
Of course, these tendencies mix and mingle, often within the same individuals.
Editor: Liz Truss is entitled to her own section!
…Liz Truss complains that during the Brexit referendum, in which she campaigned for Remain, “Vote Leave’s main campaign message … was simply a pledge to increase public spending on the NHS. This seemed an odd rallying cry for free-market conservatives.”
The brutal truth — much as Truss and I would both wish it otherwise — is that messaging tailored to free-market conservatives barely wins you a majority among Tory MPs these days, let alone the wider electorate.
…
Assuming that the polls do narrow (as I still suspect they will), there will be enough of a core for the Tories to rebuild after their likely loss.
…
I mentioned Fallout earlier. It’s a hit show. But the audience for even the biggest hits today is a fraction of what it was in the four-channel days. We’re a multiculture, not a monoculture. So why should political parties be an exception?
…
But that majority also relied on the electoral steroids provided by Corbyn and Brexit. Even without the stream of shocks and scandals that followed, it would have been hellishly difficult to keep that coalition together.
…
There is, of course, one consolation: the same probably applies to Labour. That may seem a strange claim, given Keir Starmer’s position in the polls. But that lead is built on dislike of the Tories, not enthusiasm for the other lot.
…
Owen Jones, the leftie’s leftie, has already departed in high dudgeon, because a Labour Party that moves far enough right to win a majority has gone beyond the ideological pale for the Corbyn lot.
…
I’ve always been a strong supporter of first past the post. I still am.
…
Fixing them will take serious reforms, as it did under Thatcher — a topic I’ve been reading about in depth, given that I run the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank she and her allies founded to do that job 50 years ago.
…
How, for example, do you persuade an electorate that is increasingly dependent on the state that there are limits to not just what it can do, but what it should do?
If rebuilding a majority Conservatism is a hard task, building one that also addresses Britain’s core challenges feels even harder. Yet it’s a job that absolutely needs to be done.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 