Thursday, February 23, 2017
JOCHEN BITTNER JOHN LENNON STEVE BANNON
This editorial sums it up nicely. It doesn't get much of the history behind the present situation. It favors Lennon over Bannon, as the West has done at least since 1789.
The big problem for Bittner's position now is that all the evidence has been that if you believe in the viability of civilizations, such as the West, you have to be wary of Lennonist globalization.
It you really want a West, or a Western nation state with any real cultural or economic integrity, then you can't really also have a Lennon world. They are mutually exclusive.
I don't really know what Bannon's ideal world would ultimately look like, and if he were merely a neoWesternizer for the West, which I doubt, he came much too late for that.
Bittner's analysis highlights, it seems to me, some of the limitations and errors of Bannon's position. Bittner paints Bannon as a basically secular ideologue. I question that. He also characterizes hims as ok with free trade.
One begins to see Bannon, under Bittner's view, as just a little more conservative liberal, with a strong anti Islamist bent. I don't think Bannon is quite in that mold, but maybe I am wrong.
Bannon does seem to have inherited, parenthetically, the same prejudice against Islam for which I criticized Huntington's The Clash, although as I have pointed out,The Clash has a lot of other very very insightful civilizational analysis as well.
Bittner, like other liberals, wants to see, and hopes he sees, a return to a center, a so called vital center, really, like the one I have already criticized here for having gotten us into this globalization trap in the first place.
But, as with others like Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Krugman, et al, they fail to see the hopelessness of Western Lennonist liberalism and its vital center, the very thing that caused the decline of the West under its own sponsorship of globalization.
It has lead to relative decline of the West. It is leading to average or median income convergence across a globalized work force. It has not, and will not, lead to peace, as its Lennonist proponents have claimed going back to Cobden, etc., in the 19th Century.
You can kid yourself about it. Do the numbers. Not Piketty's, mine. It is basic math. Even Martin Schulz could do it, even though he didn't graduate from high school. He must be a talented rhetor.
Bittner's analysis highlights, it seems to me, some of the limitations and errors of Bannon's position. Bittner paints Bannon as a basically secular ideologue. I question that. He also characterizes hims as ok with free trade.
One begins to see Bannon, under Bittner's view, as just a little more conservative liberal, with a strong anti Islamist bent. I don't think Bannon is quite in that mold, but maybe I am wrong.
Bannon does seem to have inherited, parenthetically, the same prejudice against Islam for which I criticized Huntington's The Clash, although as I have pointed out,The Clash has a lot of other very very insightful civilizational analysis as well.
Bittner, like other liberals, wants to see, and hopes he sees, a return to a center, a so called vital center, really, like the one I have already criticized here for having gotten us into this globalization trap in the first place.
But, as with others like Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Krugman, et al, they fail to see the hopelessness of Western Lennonist liberalism and its vital center, the very thing that caused the decline of the West under its own sponsorship of globalization.
It has lead to relative decline of the West. It is leading to average or median income convergence across a globalized work force. It has not, and will not, lead to peace, as its Lennonist proponents have claimed going back to Cobden, etc., in the 19th Century.
You can kid yourself about it. Do the numbers. Not Piketty's, mine. It is basic math. Even Martin Schulz could do it, even though he didn't graduate from high school. He must be a talented rhetor.
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