NEW STATESMAN:

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

John Stuart Mill’s classic treatise On Liberty, published 150 years ago, has a lot to teach an intellectually exhausted Left in Britain, writes David Marquand. For him, the true culprit is the Labour Party itself and its vision of democratic politics. “This was a vision of centralised power, exercised by an enlightened and benevolent state on behalf of a grateful and largely passive citizenry.” Marquand contends that Labour’s decline had set in even before the recession as “its statist and institutional engineering had run into the buffers”. Arguing that “an overmighty state would choke the springs of individuality and public spirit”, he goes on to say that, for Mill, liberty was means to an end. “The end was individuality.”

NEWSWEEK:

BEYOND THE PALIN

Rick Perlstein believes that “the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites”. For decades, the Republican Party has considered fundamentally socially conservative whites as an “inexhaustible election resource”. Now some Republicans, especially conservative intellectuals, have been “chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism”. Quoting from other sources, it shows that “the electorate’s portion of “under-30 downscale whites” has been stagnating, while the participation of both young upscale whites and African-Americans generally has spiked upward.” What’s making white conservatives nervous is “the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots”.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

RISE OF THE SULTANS

Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist and dissident who was imprisoned in Tehran from 2000 to 2006, wonders at the extent to which Iran’s rulers will go to consolidate their power. Ganji contrasts “the fundamentalist sultanism run by supreme leader Ali Khamenei” with its sophisticated political culture, comprising highly literate young people, which has brought Iran “farther along the path to democracy than most countries in the Middle East”. Terming it nothing “less than an electoral coup”, Ganji says that the aim is a “full-fledged takeover of the state”. One of Khamenei’s central goals “is to create a new unified ruling elite with vast political and economic power”. This project would make Iran resemble “the totalitarian militaristic bureaucracies of Latin America in the 1980s and of certain countries in the former Soviet bloc”. Ganji thinks Khamenei’s efforts, if left unchecked, would guarantee “the ultimate triumph of sultanism in Iran”.

... contd.