Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE!  Anyone still here?  Okay, then.  Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush.  We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads.  They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...

 The administration of President Donald Trump has made many of us eager to cheer on virtually any check or balance as it appears, even as we were briefly cheering on the old neoconservatives of and around the Cheney family (yes, the old torture caucus), insofar as it limited Trump's reach. It served a human and humane purpose.  Anyway, the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (the third central bank in the history of our country) has come to the fore of late.  The political hack's instinct is often to advance the cause of inflation, in part because it assists net debtors in relieving them of some of the net value of their indebtedness, and that can have stimulative effects in the marketplace and at the ballot box.  Also, if the nation-state itself is a debtor, as the United States certainly is on a world history record-breaking scale, then reducing the value of the currency on which its bonds were issued is a way of getting the ben...

Lichtman set aside: the election last week would seem to establish that the "neoconservative" movement is, politically, a spent force.  "Neocons" were the dominant public policy intellectuals of the Bush era in the history of the Republican Party.   The Harris campaign spent a lot of time and effort to reach out to Neocons, and to politicians associated with Neocons ideas, notably the Cheney family. It created a strikingly broad alliance with Neocons and Bernie Sanders under the same political roof.  It did Harris no good.  Indeed, I suspect the rightward stretch of it was a misdirection that did her cause harm.  Because the Cheneys speak only for themselves.  Heck even if "W" himself had come out with a rousing endorsement of the Vice President, (which never happened) the result would likely have been spot on the same.  Such Neocons as are still active are just a coterie of mutual praise.  It is possible they never really were anything more:...

Now is a good time to wonder: do neoconservatives have any support in the broad voting population?  Or has the whole 'neocon" thing of the last 60 years or so been an elaborate game within the elites, intellectual policy-wonkish, and politically connected? This is a big question.  After all, the Cheney family is regularly classified as neocon. Dick and Lynne and Liz. Other prominent example of Trump-resisting Republicans fit the label pretty nicely: Bolton, Haley, the latest Podhoretz to be running COMMENTARY....  If we are headed for a rematch one would expect neocon sentiment to side with Biden over Trump after all the water under the bridge.  After Trump has made so clear his utter contempt for them. But ... does it matter? Do the neocons have the numbers to make themselves matter?  Here is a potentially relevant factoid. COMMENTARY says it has 1.2 million monthly page views on average. So there are at least that number of people willing to take neocon ideas ...

To continue on the reviewer-ish roll from yesterday. I understand the word "contemporary" in the headline to exclude any books that are primarily concerned with any events prior to the contested presidential election of 2000.  And I will keep the chief focus here on U.S. politics, though I hasten to add that the concern is not insularity. At least three of them are focused on the contentious relationship of the United States to the rest of the globe.  Without further ado: 1) Woodword, STATE OF DENIAL (2006). Woodward writes a fair amount of dross, but this is one of his better efforts IMHO, looking at how the Bush administration managed to persuade itself that the cause of peace required a U.S. occupation of Iraq.  2) Isikoff & Corn, HUBRIS (2006). Much the same focus as the first book. But where Woodward is concerned with showing Bush's self-delusion, this book focuses on the efforts of the group around Bush to delude the rest of us. 3) Woolen, DONALD TRUMP (2009). N...

  There is reason to hope that the "stop the steal" stuff is on the retreat at last, away from the center toward the margin of political discourse in the United States.  In January, of course, the Republicans lost two critical seats in the U.S. Senate because of an impossibly mixed message to their base, "Your vote doesn't really matter. It will be changed by nasty Dominion voting machines and by the machinations of child-abusing traitors. Yet you ought to get out and vote!" The first part of that overwhelmed the second, the Democrats did get out their vote, and they won both Senate seats from Georgia. The mixed message wasn't quite as absurd and self-defeating as it seems, though. We have had reason to worry over the intervening months that the message is "elections don't matter in general, they are always a charade, so a military coup wouldn't be such a bad thing -- it would be just a little more honest." And THAT message is a truly vicio...