Monday, February 27, 2017

What Does Steve Bannon Want?

President Trump presents a problem to those who look at politics in terms of systematic ideologies. He is either disinclined or unable to lay out his agenda in that way. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who does have a gift for thinking systematically, would be so often invoked by Mr. Trump’s opponents. They need him not just as a hate object but as a heuristic, too. There may never be a “Trumpism,” and unless one emerges, the closest we may come to understanding this administration is as an expression of “Bannonism.”
Mr. Bannon, 63, has won a reputation for abrasive brilliance at almost every stop in his unorthodox career — as a naval officer, Goldman Sachs mergers specialist, entertainment-industry financier, documentary screenwriter and director, Breitbart News cyber-agitprop impresario and chief executive of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. One Harvard Business School classmate described him to The Boston Globe as “top three in intellectual horsepower in our class — perhaps the smartest.” Benjamin Harnwell of the Institute for Human Dignity, a Catholic organization in Rome, calls him a “walking bibliography.” Perhaps because Mr. Bannon came late to conservatism, turning his full-time energy to political matters only after the Sept. 11 attacks, he radiates an excitement about it that most of his conservative contemporaries long ago lost.
One month into the Trump administration, Mr. Bannon has already made his influence felt. He helped draft the president’s Inaugural Address, acquired a seat on the National Security Council and reportedly was the main force behind the president’s stalled ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Reports that the administration has considered designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization echo Mr. Bannon’s own longtime preoccupation with the group, as both a screenwriter and a talk-radio host.
Many accounts of Mr. Bannon paint him as a cartoon villain or internet troll come to life, as a bigot, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a crypto-fascist. The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, have even called him a “white nationalist.” While he is certainly a hard-line conservative of some kind, the evidence that he is an extremist of a more troubling sort has generally been either massaged, misread or hyped up.
There may be good reasons to worry about Mr. Bannon, but they are not the ones everyone is giving. It does not make Mr. Bannon a fascist that he happens to know who the 20th-century Italian extremist Julius Evola is. It does not make Mr. Bannon a racist that he described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right” — a broad and imprecise term that applies to a wide array of radicals, not just certain white supremacist groups.
Nor does it make Mr. Bannon a fringe character that during the meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013 and 2014, he hosted rival panel discussions called the Uninvited — although it did show a relish for the role of ideological bad boy. Mr. Bannon’s panels included such mainstream figures as the former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey, and discussed such familiar Republican preoccupations as military preparedness and the 2012 attacks on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya. It wasn’t much different from watching Fox News.
Where Mr. Bannon does veer sharply from recent mainstream Republicanism is in his all-embracing nationalism. He speaks of sovereignty, economic nationalism, opposition to globalization and finding common ground with Brexit supporters and other groups hostile to the transnational European Union. On Thursday, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he described the “center core” of Trump administration philosophy as the belief that the United States is more than an economic unit in a borderless word. It is “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being.”
So some of the roots of Mr. Bannon’s ideology, like the roots of Mr. Trump’s popularity, are to be found in the disappointed hopes of the global economy. But Mr. Bannon, unlike Mr. Trump, has a detailed idea, an explanation, of how American sovereignty was lost, and of what to do about it. It is the same idea that Tea Party activists have: A class of regulators in the government has robbed Americans of their democratic prerogatives. That class now constitutes an “administrative state” that operates to empower itself and enrich its crony-capitalist allies.
When Mr. Bannon spoke on Thursday of “deconstructing the administrative state,” it may have sounded like gobbledygook outside the hall, but it was an electrifying profession of faith for the attendees. It is through Mr. Bannon that Trumpism can be converted from a set of nostalgic laments and complaints into a program for overhauling the government.

Mr. Bannon adds something personal and idiosyncratic to this Tea Party mix. He has a theory of historical cycles that can be considered elegantly simple or dangerously simplistic. It is a model laid out by William Strauss and Neil Howe in two books from the 1990s. Their argument assumes an 80- to 100-year cycle divided into roughly 20-year “highs,” “awakenings,” “unravelings” and “crises.” The American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II — Mr. Bannon has said for years that we’re due for another crisis about now. His documentary about the 2008 financial collapse, “Generation Zero,” released in 2010, uses the Strauss-Howe model to explain what happened, and concludes with Mr. Howe himself saying, “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”
Mr. Bannon’s views reflect a transformation of conservatism over the past decade or so. You can trace this transformation in the films he has made. His 2004 documentary, “In the Face of Evil,” is an orthodox tribute to the Republican Party hero Ronald Reagan. But “Generation Zero,” half a decade later, is a strange hybrid. The financial crash has intervened. Mr. Bannon’s film features predictable interviews with think-tank supply siders and free marketers fretting about big government. But new, less orthodox voices creep in, too, from the protectionist newscaster Lou Dobbs to the investment manager Barry Ritholtz. They question whether the free market is altogether free. Mr. Ritholtz says that the outcome of the financial crisis has been “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else.”
By 2014, Mr. Bannon’s own ideology had become centered on this distrust. He was saying such things about capitalism himself. “Think about it,” he said in a talk hosted by the Institute for Human Dignity. “Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis.” He warned against “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” by which he meant “a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people.” Capitalism, he said, ought to rest on a “Judeo-Christian” foundation.
If so, this was bad news for the Republican Party. By the time Mr. Bannon spoke, Ayn Rand-style capitalism was all that remained of its Reagan-era agenda. Free-market thinking had swallowed the party whole, and its Judeo-Christian preoccupations — “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being” — along with it. A business orientation was what donors wanted.
But voters never more than tolerated it. It was Pat Buchanan who in his 1992 run for president first called on Republicans to value jobs and communities over profits. An argument consumed the party over whether this was a better-rounded vision of society or just the grousing of a reactionary. After a generation, Mr. Buchanan has won that argument. By 2016 his views on trade and migration, once dismissed as crackpot, were spreading so fast that everyone in the party had embraced them — except its elected officials and its establishment presidential candidates.
Mr. Bannon does not often go into detail about what Judeo-Christian culture is, but he knows one thing it is not: Islam. Like most Americans, he believes that Islamism — the extremist political movement — is a dangerous adversary. More controversially he holds that, since this political movement is generated within the sphere of Islam, the growth of Islam — the religion — is itself a problem with which American authorities should occupy themselves. This is a view that was emphatically repudiated by Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
Mr. Bannon has apparently drawn his own views on the subject from intensive, if not necessarily varied, reading. The thinkers he has engaged with in this area tend to be hot and polemical rather than cool and detached. They include the provocateur Pamela Geller, a campaigner against the “Ground Zero Mosque” who once suggested the State Department was “essentially being run by Islamic supremacists”; her sometime collaborator Robert Spencer, the director of the website Jihad Watch, with whom she heads an organization called Stop Islamization of America; and the former Department of Homeland Security official Philip Haney, who has argued that officials in the Obama administration had compromised “the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness.”
President Trump being unpopular among intellectuals, any thinker in his cabinet will be, at some level, a nonconformist, a rebel or an individualist. That may yet make things interesting for the country. It will certainly make Washington a hostile environment for Mr. Bannon. Many policy intellectuals in the capital have paid a steep price in swallowed misgivings and trimmed convictions to get to the place that Mr. Bannon has somehow blown into town and usurped. He never had to compromise or even modify his principles. His boss didn’t even get a majority of the popular vote. Establishment conservatives may be prone to mistake their jealousy for a principled conviction that Mr. Bannon is unsocialized and dangerous.
Is he? Last summer the historian Ronald Radosh contributed to this image with his (later contested) recollection that, years ago, Mr. Bannon, in the only conversation the two ever had, described himself as a “Leninist” who wanted to “bring everything crashing down.”
But Mr. Bannon’s ideology, whatever it may be, does not wholly capture what drives him, says the screenwriter Julia Jones. Starting in the early 1990s, Ms. Jones and Mr. Bannon began writing screenplays together, and did so for a decade and a half. She is one of the few longtime collaborators in his otherwise peripatetic career. As Ms. Jones sees it, a more reliable key to his worldview lies in his military service. “He has a respect for duty,” she said in early February. “The word he has used a lot is ‘dharma.’ ” Mr. Bannon found the concept of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, she recalls. It can describe one’s path in life or one’s place in the universe.
When Mr. Bannon came to Hollywood, Ms. Jones says, he was less political. For two years, according to Ms. Jones, the two of them worked on the outline of a 26-part television series about seekers after the secrets of the human self, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Nietzsche to Madame Blavatsky to Ramakrishna to the Baal Shem Tov to Geronimo. “It was his idea,” she said. “He assembled all the people.”
But the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Jones says, changed him, and their collaboration did not survive his growing engagement with politics. Speaking of his films, she says, “He developed a kind of propaganda-type tone of voice that I found offensive.” Ms. Jones is a literary person, left-liberal in politics. She regrets that Mr. Bannon “has found a home in nationalism.” But she does not believe he is any kind of anarchist, let alone a racist.
Those focused on Mr. Bannon’s ideology are probably barking up the wrong tree. There are plenty of reasons for concern about Mr. Bannon, but they have less to do with where he stands on the issues than with who he is as a person. He is a newcomer to political power and, in fact, relatively new to an interest in politics. He is willing to break with authority. While he does not embrace any of the discredited ideologies of the last century, he is attached to a theory of history’s cycles that is, to put it politely, untested. Most ominously, he is an intellectual in politics excited by grand theories — a combination that has produced unpredictable results before.
We’ll see how it works out. Barack Obama, in a similar way, used to allude to the direction and the “arc” of history. Some may find the two theories of history equally naïve and unrealistic. Others may see a mitigating element in the cyclical nature of Mr. Bannon’s view. A progressive who believes history is more or less linear is fighting for immortality when he enters the political arena. A conservative who believes history is cyclical is fighting only for a role in managing, say, the next 20 or 80 years. Then his work will be undone, as everyone’s is eventually.
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Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is at work on a book about the rise and fall of the post-1960s political order

Trump, Archenemy of Truth by Charles Blow

Donald Trump’s unrelenting assault on the media is in fact an assault on the implacability of truth, the notion of accountability and the power of free speech. It is also a bit of a bow to the conspiracy theorizing that Trump is wont to do.
Last week at CPAC, the politically crippled Reince Priebus delivered a soliloquy lamenting Trump’s negative media coverage, saying, “We’re hoping that the media would catch up eventually.”
Trump’s “boss,” Steve Bannon, immediately blasted the notion the way a shotgun blasts a quail rising from the brush:
“The reason Reince and I are good partners is that we can disagree. It’s not only not going to get better. It’s going to get worse every day.”
Bannon continued:
“And here’s why. By the way, the internal logic makes sense. They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed — adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.”
He later added:
“And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day — every day, it is going to be a fight.”
The conspiracy theory Bannon posits here is perfectly shaped for the xenophobe: America’s media has economic interests that extend well beyond this country’s borders, and therefore Trump’s “America first” message and policies pose a very real, bottom-line threat to the media’s global prosperity. The threat is so urgent that the American media is willfully damaging the only real asset it has — credibility — by inventing falsehoods designed to damage Trump and insulate its own profitability.
As far-fetched as this may sound to any reasonable person, one must always remember that Trump isn’t a reasonable person or even a particularly smart one, which makes him the perfect vessel for Bannon’s pseudo-intellectual vanities.
The day after Bannon spoke, Trump himself came to CPAC and reaffirmed his commitment to this anti-media crusade, parroting Bannon’s language.
First Trump said: “A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. And they are. They are the enemy of the people.”
He continued in a barely coherent diatribe of sentence fragments, incongruous ideas and broken logic. But if you listened closely, you could hear echoes of Bannon. At one point, Trump said: “We have to fight it, folks, we have to fight it. They’re very smart, they’re very cunning and they’re very dishonest.” At another he said of the media: “Many of these groups are part of the large media corporations that have their own agenda and it’s not your agenda and it’s not the country’s agenda, it’s their own agenda.”
Trump is Bannon’s puppet, whose one sustaining parlor trick is to deliver incoherence with confidence. Strangely enough, people find comfort in this kind of imperfect parlance.
Maundering is the rhetoric of the middlebrow.
Demagogic language is reductionist language. It draws its power from its lack of proximity to soaring oratory. It can be quaint and even clumsy, all of which can give idiocy, incomprehensibility and untruth a false air of authenticity.
So Trump and Bannon spin their folksy tale of media corruption to give Trump a needed enemy in his perpetual campaign and a needed diversion from the enormity of his disasters. This fits Trump perfectly because not only does he have a gnawing insecurity, he also views the confrontational nature of news as maleficently targeted.
Trump doesn’t seem to register that lying — all the time! — is not allowed. He doesn’t seem to understand that news, by its very nature, is the publishing of that which those in power would prefer to conceal. He doesn’t seem to realize that fawning promotion of politicians’ positions is not the exercise of journalism but the promotion of propaganda. Or maybe he does and is enraged at the absence of propaganda.
So Trump lashes out with mindless twaddle, insinuating that the media has fully abandoned the pillars and principles of journalism to join the opposition.
The fact is that Trump simply wants the truth not to be true, so he assaults its quality. He wants the purveyors of truth not to pursue it, so he questions their motives.
And yet, truth stands, rigid and sharp, unforgiving and unafraid. It is our only guard against tyranny and the brave men and women who labor away in its service are nothing short of patriots and heroes.
The press won’t pat Trump on his head and give him a gold star for the few things he gets right, and then turn a blind eye to the overwhelming majority of things he gets wrong.
That’s not how it works. That’s not how it has ever worked. Trump wants to brand the press as the enemy of the American people when the exact opposite is true: A free, fearless, adversarial, in-your-face press is the best friend a democracy can have.
The press is the light that makes the roaches scatter.
Remember this every time you hear Trump attack the press: Only people with something to hide need be afraid of those whose mission is to seek.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Charles Wright, a forgotten black writer

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO GET ALARMED ABOUT
The Complete Novels of Charles Wright
By Charles Wright
Out of print
Between 1963 and 1973, Charles Wright wrote three scalding autobiographical novels about a young black intellectual from Missouri, a Korean War veteran, trying to make it in New York City. To remark that Wright’s novels were also satirical and freewheeling does not begin to cover it. As one of his admirers, the novelist Ishmael Reed, put it, Wright was “Richard Pryor before there was a Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor on paper.”
Wright’s books — “The Messenger” (1963), “The Wig” (1966) and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” (1973) — were issued by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, arguably the most admired publishing house on our blue planet. They were, for the most part, ecstatically reviewed. “Malevolent, bitter, glittering,” the critic Conrad Knickerbocker declared about “The Wig” in The New York Times. Then Wright disappeared.
When he died  of heart failure at 76 in 2008, his books were out of print and all but forgotten. He hadn’t burned out; he’d faded away. His obituary in The Times reported that he had “vanished into alcoholism and despair.” He’d spent decades living in the spare room of his editor’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was as if his name had been erased: The Tennessee-born poet Charles Wright, a recent poet laureate of the United States, was and is better known.
It’s time to exhume Wright’s novels. I won’t give you the already-exhausted Trump-era culture argument, that we need this writer now more than ever. Instead, I’ll give you this one: Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure, and pleasure will be the guiding principle behind the undersung American books I’ll be speaking about twice a month in this new column.
It’s an apt moment to talk about Wright, as well, because of the deserved success of Paul Beatty’s breakthrough novel, “The Sellout” (2015). It’s possible to draw a crooked line between Wright’s insolent and melancholy novels and Beatty’s own. Indeed, Beatty is a fan of Wright’s work.
The comedy, in each of these writers’ novels, comes backloaded with pain. The laughter each writer provokes catches in your throat. Their African-American characters confront America’s shattered promises regarding race and progress and, as often as not, end up grinning and shaking their heads in disbelief. Life for them is, to borrow a phrase from the critic Albert Murray, “one hog ass thing after the other.”
Wright’s books — they were republished by HarperCollins in 1993 in an omnibus edition under the title “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” — will not be for everyone. They are essentially plotless. They bristle with pimps and drug dealers and all-American hustlers of every variety. They were composed before the era of political correctness, and their social targets are free-range and multiform.
They’re each about a lonely young man, a fan of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, adrift in the big melancholy city. He has dreams of becoming a writer, but for now he’s holed up in cheap apartments or cockroach-filled hotels, working as a bike messenger or a dishwasher or, though he doesn’t identify as gay, allowing older gay men to pay him for sex.
In “The Messenger,” he gives this account of one moment in his workday: “As I walked through the concourse of the RCA building, sneezing and reading Lawrence Durrell, dead drunk from the explosion of his words, I suddenly looked up and encountered the long face of Steven Rockefeller. He seemed startled. Doesn’t he think poor people read?”
The primal subject of Wright’s novels is loneliness. As a light-skinned black man, his narrator feels like a minority tucked inside a minority. But his solitary nature was baked in at birth. About certain Sunday mornings in Manhattan, the author reports: “The shameful, envious, eyes-lowered glances at passing couples. You recognize other solitary fellow travelers. Both of you go separate ways, moving with the knowledge of Sunday papers, endless cigarettes, tap water, the hoarded half-pint, and the feeling of having missed out on Saturday night’s jackpot prize.”
The jackpot prize among Wright’s novels is probably “The Wig.” It’s his most fully realized book, a frazzled picaresque about a young black man who, sensing he needs a gimmick to make it in the white world, employs an economy-size jar of hair relaxer (“the red, white, and gold label guarantees that the user can go deep-sea diving, emerge from the water, and shake his head triumphantly like any white boy”) to achieve what he calls “the wig.”
He’s not happy to be mocked about his new mane. When a female friend yelps, “You’ve conked your hair,” he replies, “Do you want me to bash your face in?” His hair is so resplendent, and later so vividly red, that he wonders: “Would Time magazine review this phenomenon under Medicine, Milestones, The Nation, Art, Show Business, or U.S. Business?”
The wig does not take him far. He ends up working in a feathered costume for a fried-chicken joint. (To his dismay, the costume dents the wig.) This novel’s first four sentences could also be its last four, and they put me in mind of the antiheroes in Jim Harrison’s fiction:
“I was a desperate man. Quarterly, I got that crawly feeling in my wafer-thin stomach. During these fasting days, I had the temper of a Greek mountain dog. It was hard to maintain a smile; everyone seemed to jet toward the goal of The Great Society, while I remained in the outhouse, penniless, without ‘connections.’”
The final novel in Wright’s trilogy, “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About,” began as a series of columns in The Village Voice. The narrator by now has found a certain amount of fame as a writer, but it brings him little money and less joy. This is an often desultory novel that the writer David Freeman likened to “the rough draft of a suicide note.”
Wright’s heavy-drinking narrator declares early in the book, as if punching out Morse code: “Desperately trying to get a reassuring bird’s-eye view of America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sunny philosophy had always appealed to me. I believed in the future of the country. At 14, I had written: ‘I am the future.’ Twenty-six years later — all I want to do is excrete the past and share with you a few Black Studies.”
Wright’s eye remains sharp in this last book. His narrator stares at a photograph of Norman Mailer in a glossy magazine and thinks: “The face of an urbane carpenter in a $200 suit.” There is still some antic humor and a good deal of bawdy sex. He sleeps with a woman whose breasts, he notes approvingly, “seemed capable of guiding an ocean liner into harbor.” But the fire had largely gone out of Wright’s work.
It’s one of the tragedies of the last century’s American fiction that he wasn’t able to relight it. Wright wrote like it mattered and, though he conjured a world of trouble, he clearly got a bang out of being alive.
American Beauties is a column by Dwight Garner, appearing every other Friday, about undersung American books of the past 75 years.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner

Best Oscar Speech in 2017

Viola Davis, best supporting actress, “Fences”
Thank you to the academy. You know, there’s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered. One place, and that’s the graveyard. People ask me all the time: “What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola?” And I say, exhume those bodies, exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost. I became an artist — and thank God I did — because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.
So here’s to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people. And to Paramount [and the producers] for being the cheerleaders for a movie that is about people, and words, and life, and forgiveness, and grace. And to [fellow cast members, including Mykelti Williamson and Stephen McKinley Henderson] for being the most wonderful artists I’ve ever worked with.
And oh captain, my captain, Denzel Washington. Thank you for putting two entities in the driving seat: August and God. And they served you well. And to [my parents] who were and are the center of my universe. The people who taught me good or bad, how to fail, how to love, how to hold an award, how to lose. My parents: I’m so thankful that God chose you to bring me into this world. To my sisters ... thank you for the imagination. And to my husband and my daughter. My heart. You ... teach me every day how to live, how to love. I’m so glad that you are the foundation of my life. Thank you to the academy. Thank you.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Madonna in Fur Coat

ISTANBUL — A young Turkish man arrives in 1920s Berlin. Ignoring his business of soap manufacturing, he spends his days learning German and his nights reading books — especially the Russians, and especially Turgenev. He explores the city’s parks, its wide streets, its museums and art galleries. He is looking, as he put it, for something, “to sweep me off my feet.”
He finds it one evening at a gallery, where he stands transfixed in front of a painting of a young woman dressed in a fur coat. Day after day he returns to stare at the painting. One evening, drunk and out on the town, he sees the woman in the flesh. Her name is Maria, and the life of the young man, Raif, is transformed.
“All my life, I’d kept my heart closed,” Raif said. “I had never known love. But now, all at once, the doors had flown open.”
That is the basis of “Madonna in a Fur Coat,” a once-forgotten Turkish novel written nearly 75 years ago that has improbably become a best seller, outselling, these days, even Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate.
Published in 1943 and written by Sabahattin Ali, a leftist intellectual jailed for his political writings (much like his contemporaries under today’s government), the book’s newfound success has become a rare point of common cultural experience for a deeply polarized country.
“It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults,” Maureen Freely, who translated the book for the first time into English last year (with Alexander Dawe), wrote in The Guardian. “And no one seems able to explain quite why.”
If he were alive today, Mr. Ali would be shocked to see “Madonna” had become a best seller, his daughter, Filiz Ali, 79, said in a recent interview at her Istanbul apartment. (The book has sold nearly a million copies over the last three years, according to the publisher, YKY, and was recently published in English as a Penguin Classic.)
“My father didn’t really give so much importance to this book,” she said. “And his friends told him, ‘Sabahattin, you shouldn’t have written such a romantic book. It doesn’t look good on your reputation.’”
An erudite man of letters during the early years of the Turkish republic, and a devoted Communist, Mr. Ali wrote novels, stories, poems and articles that repeatedly got him thrown into jail. The parallels between what he endured as a dissident intellectual and the ordeals faced by modern Turkish writers arrested for speaking out against the current Islamist government help explain Mr. Ali’s newfound popularity among the Turkish public.
“The same things are repeating, much worse,” said Ms. Ali, referring to the current arrests of journalists speaking out against the current Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Ali was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1948, at age 41, at a lonely outpost near the Bulgarian border as he tried to flee to Europe.
The death of Mr. Ali remains, almost 70 years later, as mysterious as his newfound popularity. A smuggler who was “helping” Mr. Ali cross the border admitted to his murder and did a short stint in prison. But it is widely suspected, his daughter said, that he was actually killed by state security agents after he was interrogated. She believes that somewhere deep in government archives the truth could be found.
With the success of “Madonna,” Mr. Ali is now the rare literary figure who is embraced with equal ardor by teenage girls and intellectuals.
Sabri Gurses, a Turkish poet and novelist, said he was moved when he learned that Mr. Ali was carrying a German translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin,” when he was killed. Nowadays, he said, when he sees young people carrying “Madonna” on the streets of Istanbul he imagines many of them feel for Mr. Ali what the Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov, famously wrote about Pushkin: “He rose against the world’s opinion, and as a hero, lone he fell.”
The sudden success of “Madonna” — attributed to word of mouth, an interest by some Turkish teachers and social media — has become an opportunity for Ms. Ali, late in her life, to help reacquaint Turkish readers with her father. She has spoken at schools and conferences to promote the book, and says she often meets young readers, including boys, who come to her with tears in her eyes.
“They want a love like this,” she said.
“Madonna,” she said, is part autobiographical, as Mr. Ali spent time as a young man in Berlin in the 1920s. A letter to a friend that surfaced later revealed he had a friendship there with a woman, Maria Pruder, which inspired the novel. In the book, Maria was half Jewish, a revelation that foreshadows what was to come in Germany. Ms. Ali said her family has never tried to track down the real Maria or her family.
“Maybe she died in one of the death camps,” she said.
In a country so deeply polarized between secularists and Islamists, between urban elites and the rural poor, “Madonna” and the legacy of Mr. Ali have become something to unite over, at least for those who love books.
Sevengul Sonmez, an editor and literary historian, said that Turkish readers who love “Romeo and Juliet” are “now reading Maria and Raif, as the modern impossible love story.”
“We needed a classic as well,” she said. “I think that readers have needed, for a long time, a book they could love unanimously. ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ finally emerged as the common ground.”
If one can glean insights into a society from the books its citizens read, then one thing the popularity of “Madonna” may underscore about Turkey is the eagerness, among the country’s youth, to break free of the traditional gender roles and machismo pushed by Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan.
In the book, gender stereotypes are upended: Raif comes off as vulnerable and emotional, while Maria exudes independence and a lack of sentimentality for matters of the heart.
Kaya Genc, a young Turkish novelist and writer, quoted Susan Sontag, the critic, when asked about “Madonna’s” resonance: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
“This applies perfectly to Sabahattin Ali’s ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat,’” he said.
Back in her apartment, Ms. Ali recalled memories of her father, calling him a man with a quick wit who loved music and was devoted to his family, who did everything with her and her mother, and who in his younger years was a hopeless romantic.
“He fell in love all the time when he was young,” she said.

NietzscheMorality

Nietzsche and Morality

Roger Caldwell responds to an analysis of Nietzsche’s morality.

For many, Nietzsche and morality make an unlikely conjunction. Certainly, for all his challenging views – or perhaps because they proved all too challenging – he was until recently absent from traditional philosophy courses on ethics. To those who ask ‘what is the nature of good?’ he has little to say, except that they’re asking the wrong question. He’s an anti-realist about values: that is, for Nietzsche there are no moral facts, and there is nothing in nature that has value in itself. Rather, to speak of good or evil is to speak of human illusions, of lies according to which we find it necessary to live. He tells us that “man needs to supplement reality by an ideal world of his own creation.” That is, we are compelled by our biological natures to see the world through moral lenses, judging it in terms of good and bad, although the world is neither in itself.

The essays in this book look at a broad range of Nietzschean themes, including the will to power and the genealogy of Christian ethics as a slave morality. But there’s nothing on eternal recurrence (so dear to a former generation of Nietzsche exegetes), and the Übermensch (‘superman’) scarcely gets a mention. However, none of these themes is central to why Nietzsche often strikes us as uncannily prescient, and why he is so relevant to con temporary debates driven by evolutionary biology about human nature and morality.

First and foremost, like Spinoza before him, Nietzsche is a naturalist and a determinist. Human beings are not privileged over other animals – rather, like them, we are part of “a causal web that comprises the whole universe.” Where other writers speak of the freedom of the human will, Nietzsche tells us that the will is neither free nor unfree, but rather strong or weak. For Simon Blackburn he was the first philosopher to try to assimilate Darwinism. Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is an exercise in ‘animal psychology’, studying (in Nietzsche’s own words) “the physiology and evolutionary history of organisms and concepts.” In a number of other central works Nietzsche embraces science as providing access to what he sees as ‘the real world of nature’ – whereas our religious, moral and aesthetic sentiments belong only to the surface of things. Through our need to see the universe as existing for the sake of human beings, in effect we create a merely apparent world, which for Nietzsche is “the value-laden world as error.” (Human, All Too Human, §29.) To what degree we can live in truth not error is another matter, of course: in some moods Nietzsche praises the value of art precisely as that it protects us from reality. He dares us to be superficial. But it is nonetheless a central intention in his writings precisely to strip us of our illusions – not least the fundamental illusion that we are rational creatures.

For instance, Nietzsche denies that we can be rational deliberators in the way demanded by such philosophers as Kant. Kant sees us as choosing to act on the basis of reasons. Being the determinist he is, and taking the viewpoint on human nature he does, Nietzsche can have no truck with this. We are not for the most part conscious deliberators: rather, he tells us, “by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt.” (The Gay Science, p333.) Knobe and Leiter take the unusual step of seeing to what degree recent experimental findings in psychology support either Nietzsche or Kant. They have little difficulty in showing that Nietzsche is largely vindicated. For the most part we are not rational doers: the view that we choose our actions from a standpoint of deliberative detachment seems to be a Kantian myth. There appears to be no general accordance between our attitudes and beliefs, and our actions – in effect, we say one thing, but do another. Rather than acting for reasons, we tend to act, and invent reasons afterwards. In Nietzschean terms, the body acts, and, f illed as it is with “phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps,” the mind then falsely appropriates that action for its own justificatory purposes. Generally speaking, Nietzsche takes delight in showing us how we deceive ourselves.

For Nietzsche we act like other animals, primarily by our instincts. By contrast, the gift of reason is a late addition to those instincts, and by comparison only weakly efficacious. Nietzsche presents us with a fractured self: each of us is a site of competing biological drives without a controller in overall charge. Freud – a reader and admirer of Nietzsche – similarly presents the human being as a sort of battlefield between the ego, the superego and the id. More radically, Daniel Dennett [see p24], drawing on the findings of neuroscience, presents us with a ‘pandemonium’ view of the human psyche, where the self emerges from what he sees as so many ‘multiple drafts’ of reality as a sort of ‘fiction’. Dennett’s ‘fictional self’ is very much in accordance with Nietzsche’s views, as Dennett acknowledges. But even a ‘fictional’ self is still a choosing self, and not a merely passive receptor of experience. Here Nietzsche’s admonitions to “live dangerously” or to “multiply perspectives” seem adventitious. There is a tension in his work between his deconstruction of morality and his readiness to prescribe for us how we are to live.

Nietzsche has a tendency to throw out themes and leave us the task of seeing how they cohere. Many of the essays in this book try to tie up apparent loose ends, and make him say what he should have said if he had followed his insights through. We are entering a new era of Nietzsche studies. While the French-interpreted Nietzsche of recent years emerged as an out-and-out relativist and precursor of postmodernism, a number of the essay writers here see his views on morality from the perspective of his ‘biologism’. This is the very trait for which Heidegger once berated him, although there seems little reason why a philosopher should not draw on well-founded science.

If these essays open up a number of new perspectives, there are nonetheless opportunities missed. We have little sense of Nietzsche’s relation to his contemporaries or forebears. In particular, the perfunctory treatment in Risse’s essay of his relation to Spinoza, one of Nietzsche’s small ‘pantheon of the elect,’ is disappointing in view of the remarkable congruences between the two. Both replaced God by the laws of nature; saw human beings as an incidental part of nature in a deterministic universe; reduced good and bad to human (biological) needs; and denied the freedom of the will. For all their differences of style and temperament, there is surely much to be said for reading the immoralist Nietzsche with – and against – the arch-heretic Spinoza.

© Roger Caldwell 2008

Roger Caldwell is a writer living in Essex. His book of philosophical poetry, This Being Eden (2001), is published by Peterloo Poets.

• Nietzsche and Morality, edited by Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, Clarendon Press, 2007, 320pps, £35, ISBN 0199285934

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Marxist Conception of History

Karl Marx
materialist conception of history

Marx's theory, which he called "historical materialism" or the "materialist conception of history" is based on Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces. Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a world of appearances, and true reality is an ideal. Marx accepted this notion of the dialectic, but rejected Hegel's idealism because he did not accept that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. 

Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of production, literally those things, like land and natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the social relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. 

The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production. For Marx this mismatch between base and superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. The history of the means of production, then, is the substructure of history, and everything else, including ideological arguments about that history, constitutes a superstructure. 

Under capitalism people sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." 

Marx, however, believed that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy. 

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution was required. Finally, he theorized that to maintain the socialist system, a proletarian dictatorship must be established and maintained. 

Marx held that Socialism itself was an "historical inevitability" that would come about due to the more numerous "Proletarians" having an interest in "expropriating" the "bourgeois exploiters" who had themselves profited by expropriating the surplus value that had been attributable to the proletarians labor in order to establish a "more just" system where there would be greatly improved social relations. 

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Trump voters, your savior is betraying you by Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof

Dear Trump Voters,

You’ve been had. President Trump sold you a clunker. Now that he’s in the White House, he’s betraying you — and I’m writing in hopes that you’ll recognize that betrayal and hold him accountable.

Trump spoke to your genuine pain, to the fading of the American dream, and he won your votes. But will he deliver? Please watch his speeches carefully. You’ll notice that he promises outcomes, without explaining how they’ll be achieved. He’s a carnival huckster promising that America will thrive with his snake oil.

“We’re going to win, we’re going to win big, folks,” Trump declared Friday at the CPAC meeting, speaking of his foreign policy.

Great! Problem solved. Next? He then outlined his take on drug trafficking and what will surely be his outcome:

“No good. No good. Going to stop.” Wow! Why didn’t anyone else think of that?

Similarly, all looks rosy for tax outcomes: “We’re going to massively lower taxes on the middle class,” Trump said.

But that seems like a classic shell game. The Tax Policy Center estimated that Trump’s tax plan (to the extent that there is one) would hugely increase the federal debt and give middle-income households an average tax cut of $1,010, or 1.8 percent of after-tax income — while the top 1 percent would save $214,690, or 13.5 percent of after-tax income.

Trump made more than 280 campaign promises as a candidate, and a few — such as infrastructure spending to create jobs — would be sensible if done right. But there still is no infrastructure plan, and The Washington Post Fact Checker is tracking 60 specific campaign promises and found only six cases so far of promises kept.

It’s still early, and Trump has nominated a smart conservative to the Supreme Court and followed his campaign line on issues like barring refugees.

But while you voted for Trump because you put faith in his gauzy pledges, I bet he will do no better with campaign promises than with marriage vows.

Health care will be one of the greatest betrayals. On Friday, he described his plan: “We’re going to make it much better, we’re going to make it less expensive.”

Yet the steps that Republicans seem likely to take on health care will hurt ordinary Americans.

For example, Trump seems poised to weaken the contraception mandate for insurance coverage and curb funding for women’s health clinics. The upshot will likely be more unintended pregnancies, more abortions, more unplanned births — and more women dying of cervical cancer.

The biggest Trump bait-and-switch was visible Friday when he talked about giving Americans “access” to health care. That’s a scam his administration is moving toward, with millions of Americans likely to lose health insurance: Instead of promising insurance coverage, Trump now promises “access” — and if you can’t afford it, tough luck.

This promise of “access” is an echo of Marie Antoinette. In Trump’s worldview, starving French peasants wouldn’t have needed bread because they had “access” to cake.

Many of you voted for Trump because he campaigned as a populist. But instead of draining the swamp, he’s wallowing in it and monetizing the presidency. He retains his financial interests, refuses to release his taxes or explain what financial leverage Russia may have over him, and doubled the fee to join Mar-a-Lago to $200,000.

The greatest betrayal of all will come if, as some of his advisers recommend, he “reforms” and tears holes in some of the big safety net programs like Medicaid, Social Security or Medicare. Medicaid is particularly vulnerable.

Trump howls at the news media, not just because it embarrasses him, but because it provides an institutional check on his lies, incompetence and conflicts of interest. But we can take his vitriol: When the time comes, we will write Trump’s obituary, not the other way around.

Let’s not get distracted by his howls or tweets. What’s most important at this moment is not Trump’s theatrics, but the policies he is putting in place in areas like health care and immigration that will devastate the lives of ordinary Americans.

Trump’s career has often been built on scamming people who put their faith in him, as Trump University shows. Now he’s moved the scam to a much bigger stage, and he boasts of targeting Muslims, refugees and unauthorized immigrants.

Please don’t cheer, or acquiesce in these initial targets. The truth is that among the biggest losers from Trump policies will be you Trump voters, especially those of you from the working and middle class. You were hoping you’d elected a savior, and instead Donald Trump is doing to you what he did to just about everyone who ever trusted him: He’s betraying you.

The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you can fight back and push for policies that will protect your health care and Social Security, defend the integrity of our election system and protect your own interests. You have a false savior, and you will have to turn on him to save yourselves and our nation.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Death and Tax Cuts by Paul Krugman

Across the country, Republicans have been facing crowds demanding to know how they will protect the 20 million Americans who gained health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, and will lose it if the act is repealed. And after all that inveighing against the evils of Obamacare, it turns out that they’ve got nothing.
Instead, they’re talking about freedom — which these days is the real refuge of scoundrels.
Actually, many prominent Republicans haven’t even gotten to the point of trying to respond to criticism; they’re just whining about how mean their constituents are being, and invoking conspiracy theories. Talk about snowflakes who can dish it out but can’t take it!
Thus, Representative Jason Chaffetz insisted that the public outcry is just “a paid attempt to bully and intimidate”; Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, calls all anti-Trump demonstrations a “very paid, AstroTurf-type movement.” And the tweeter in chief angrily declared that protests have been “planned out by liberal activists” — because what could be worse than political action by the politically active?
SPICER: Protesting has become a profession now. This has become a very paid AstroTurf-type movement pic.twitter.com/Spa2qh3FFe
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) February 6, 2017
The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2017
But perhaps the saddest spectacle is that of Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, whom the media have for years portrayed as a serious, honest conservative, a deep thinker about how to reform America’s safety net. That reputation was never justified; still, even those of us who long ago recognized him as a flimflammer have been struck by his utter failure to rise to this occasion.
After years to prepare, Mr. Ryan finally unveiled what was supposedly the outline of a health care plan. It was basically a sick joke: flat tax credits, unrelated to income, that could be applied to the purchase of insurance.
These credits would be obviously inadequate for the lower- and even middle-income families that gained coverage under Obamacare, so it would cause a huge surge in the number of uninsured. Meanwhile, the affluent would receive a nice windfall. Funny how that seems to happen in every plan Mr. Ryan proposes.
That was last week. This week, perhaps realizing how flat his effort fell, he began tweeting about freedom, which he defined as “the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need.” Give me consumer sovereignty or give me death! And Obamacare, he declared, is bad because it deprives Americans of that freedom by doing things like establishing minimum standards for insurance policies.
Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need. Obamacare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your needs.
— Paul Ryan (@PRyan) February 21, 2017
I very much doubt that this is going to fly, now that ordinary Americans are starting to realize just how devastating loss of coverage would be. But for the record, let me remind everyone what we’ve been saying for years: Any plan that makes essential care available to everyone has to involve some restriction of choice.
Suppose you want to make insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. You can’t just forbid insurance companies to discriminate based on medical history; if you do that, healthy people won’t sign up until they get sick. So you have to mandate the purchase of insurance; and you have to provide subsidies to lower-income families so that they can afford the policies. The end result of this logic is … Obamacare.
And one more thing: Insurance policies must meet a minimum standard. Otherwise, healthy people will buy cheap policies with paper-thin coverage and huge deductibles, which is basically the same as not buying insurance at all.
So yes, Obamacare somewhat restricts choice — not because meddling bureaucrats want to run your life, but because some restrictions are necessary as part of a package that in many ways sets Americans free.
For health reform has been a hugely liberating experience for millions. It means that workers don’t have to fear that quitting a job with a large company will mean loss of health coverage, and that entrepreneurs don’t have to fear striking out on their own. It means that those 20 million people who gained coverage don’t have to fear financial ruin if they get sick — or unnecessary death if they can’t afford treatment. For there is no real question that Obamacare is saving tens of thousands of lives every year.
So why do Republicans hate Obamacare so much? It’s not because they have better ideas; as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, they’re coming up empty-handed on the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” It’s not, I’m sorry to say, because they are deeply committed to Americans’ right to buy the insurance policy of their choice.
No, mainly they hate Obamacare for two reasons: It demonstrates that the government can make people’s lives better, and it’s paid for in large part with taxes on the wealthy. Their overriding goal is to make those taxes go away. And if getting those taxes cut means that quite a few people end up dying, remember: freedom!
Read my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow me on Twitter, @PaulKrugman. 

ClosestToFrench

What is the closest language to French?
2 ANSWERS
Uri Granta
  • The closest overall is one of the other oïl languages such as Picard (spoken in Picardy) or Jèrriais (spoken in Jersey). 
  • The closest national language is probably Catalan (official in Andorra as well as in some regions of Spain). I'd previously suggested Romansh (spoken in parts of Switzerland), though I think Catalan is actually closer. 
  • The closest widely spoken language is definitely Catalan (spoken mainly in Spain by around 5 million speakers). 
  • The closest major international language is probably Italian. I'd previously suggested Spanish, which is more closely related genealogically, but Italian has a higher lexical similarity, making the written forms at least more mutually intelligible. I couldn't find details for spoken mutual intelligibility or phonetic similarity, so it's possible that Spanish still wins out there. (Thanks Davide Sestili for suggesting I look at this.)
UpdateBrais Martinez comments that the normative reform of contemporary Catalan at the beginning of the 20th century (spearheaded by Pompeu Fabra) actually drove Catalan closer to French than it had previously been.

Lucy Alexanyan
See :))