Where is 1MDB’s Brader Arul?

October 28, 2018

Where is 1MDB’s Brader Arul?–Braders  MIA

by R.Nadeswaran

http://www.malaysiakini.com

Brader Arul probably back to Sitiawan to sell Boe-Tie Chendol

COMMENT | Six months ago, he was a much sought-after speaker. Not so for pre- and post-dinner entertainment but to propagate to the masses that everything is hunky-dory in a company called 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).

He undertook a series of 30 roadshows throughout the country. However, for all intents and purposes, they were political gatherings in support of the then ruling party. The blue buntings and minders dressed in blue vests with the “dacing” logos gave away the charade.

He didn’t exactly draw big crowds or enthral them with his mantra. But the media copiously repeated his chants through interviews.

Brader Apandi silenced

On eve of Election Day on May 9, he declared that the roadshow had achieved its objectives, claiming more and more people were beginning “to understand and accept the issues facing the 1MDB”.

Forty-eight hours later, Arul Kanda’s world came tumbling down. So did the fate of thousands of others who thought that their shenanigans and tom-fooleries had been adequately covered so that they could continue ripping the nation.

Despite the entire hullabaloo and the worldwide coverage of the US Department of Justice findings, Arul Kanda had once famously boomed: “I have no idea of the identity of Malaysian Official 1 (MO1) in the report and do not want to speculate”— even after BN propaganda chief Abdul Rahman Dahlan’s admission on the identity.

Brader Ali Hamsa put to pasture

These prophetic words were plentifully and profusely reproduced in the subservient mainstream media in its election propaganda. After all, wasn’t he the Messiah who had arrived from the Middle East to save 1MDB? Wasn’t he willing to face all and sundry in any debate at anytime and anywhere? Wasn’t he touted by some sections of the Royal Military College alumni that only a “budak boy” could put the house in order?

Flamboyant Brader Irwan Serigar Abdullah  put in cold storage pending trial

Wasn’t he the man whose magic wand could turn bad to good; wrong to right; losses to profits; and anything he touched would turn into gold?

Creative accounting

Those who questioned any activities of 1MDB were treated as “enemies of the state” and he was the much-sought after person by news persons in the BN-related media houses. He attached labels on his detractors. He could do no wrong. And their responses were spiked by editors.

 MP Tony Pua –The Luke Sky Walker of The 1MDB Saga

After Petaling Utara MP Tony Pua  made a series of satirical videos, Arul Kanda bellowed: “He is a hypocrite and would make a great comedian.” He described fellow Malaysiakini columnist P Gunasegaram (pic below)  a “coward”. But when the writer invited Arul Kanda to a public discussion on 1MDB, the latter chickened out. The last we heard on the issue was: “I will await their (his lawyers’) legal advice on how best to clear my name and to let the facts stand on its own.”

T

hen the facts and figures which Arul Kanda and company were fudging with some sort of creative accounting emerged. On May 23, the new Finance Minister revealed that 1MDB was unable to pay its debts. For that too, he had an answer— he didn’t know financial details of the company.

Wasn’t he the same guy, who went on the roadshows to tell Malaysian voters “the truth” among which was his claim that the 1MDB’s debt of US$7.75 billion is backed by US$11 billion in assets?

Why the sudden interest in Arul Kanda? On Thursday, Najib Abdul Razak and former Treasury chief Irwan Serigar Abdullah pleaded not guilty in the Sessions Court in Kuala Lumpur to six counts of criminal breach of trust (CBT) of RM6.64 million of funds belonging to the government.

The offences were alleged to have been committed at the Finance Ministry Complex in Putrajaya between December 21, 2016 and December 18, 2017. Wasn’t this done for 1MDB which was then under Arul Kanda’s watch? And wasn’t he aware of these arrangements when he went on his roadshows?

Let’s digress. Najib wanted to gag the media when he was first charged with offences related to SRC International last month, claiming he did not want a “trial by media”. He failed.

It is the same Najib now, trying to provide his defence via the media. He spoke to reporters after the proceedings, proclaiming innocence.

This man and his infamous wife have been striped of their titles by The Ruler of Negri Sembilan and are now on bail pending trial for corruption, money laundering and abuse of power.

“My conscience is clear that the decisions were taken in the interest of the nation, in context of when you receive certain money, you will have to pay it back.

Otherwise, we would be at default and it would lead to a collapse of the bond market. That would be very serious.”

In a Facebook post, Najib said four of the six charges were related to a settlement with the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), where the government had to pay US$1.2 billion in arrears last year.

Let us put this into perspective. N is the owner of a hospital. Money, say RM100,000, has been set aside for payment to the food contractor, RM100,000 for pharmaceuticals and RM50,000 for cleaning services. N tells the finance director, S, to “pakat” with him to pay a bank loan unrelated to the hospital. S then instructs A, the chief executive officer to remit RM250,000 to the bank to prevent foreclosure.

Is it acceptable for N to come out and claim that those transactions had to be done to avoid embarrassment to the hospital and other loans will be recalled? It is true that N, S and A received no personal gain. But wouldn’t that be wrong in the eyes of the law?

We will leave it to the legal eagles to sort this out but on the issue of 1MDB, IPIC and related issues, the silence from Arul Kanda is deafening. He had previously talked about “solid assets” and “units” which could be converted to cash. Where are they?

For someone who came with his guns blazing, giving Najib cover, Arul Kanda appears to have taken to the bunker as the bombs drop all around him.

For a man who thumped his chest and said “take me on”, he has become as silent as a church mouse. Malaysians are not exactly watching a double-tragedy play like Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, but it is worth asking: “Where art thou, Arul Kanda?”

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R NADESWARAN is keeping track on the key players who put their hands in the cookie jar in the name of development. Comments: citizen.nades22@gmail.com

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

Trump’s uncanny political instincts and his ruthless “amorality”—A Formidable Challenge

October 28, 2018

Trump’s uncanny political instincts and his ruthless “amorality”—A Formidable  Challenge to Blue Democrats.

by Dr. Fareed Zakaria

ttps://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2018/10/25/trump-owns-the-bloody-crossroads-of-american-politics

“Democrats create mobs, Republicans create jobs” has become a rallying cry for Republicans ahead of the midterms

For those who believe that President Trump is a clownish know-nothing who somehow tapped into the mood of the electorate, or just got lucky in 2016, the last month has been instructive. Trump has demonstrated uncanny political instincts.  When combined with his ruthless “amorality” — a term used by one of his own senior officials in an anonymous New York Times op-ed — he presents a formidable challenge to his opponents.

Trump faces a familiar landscape. The party that holds the White House traditionally has low turnout and does badly in the midterm elections. But rather than accept this as inevitable, Trump has been aggressively trying to beat the odds. He’s turned what are usually disparate races in the House and Senate into a single national election, fought on an agenda that he has defined.

Item one on his agenda is immigration. The reason is obvious: The issue rouses his voters like no other. Trump campaigns relentlessly on it, making the false accusation that if the Democrats win, they will open up the borders and let everyone in.

He has used the current caravan of Central American migrants to highlight his case against the Democrats. Since Republicans are also still highly motivated by fears of terrorism, Trump threw in the accusation that there are “Middle Easterners” in the caravan. (First, there is no evidence for that claim, which Trump himself even admits; and second, if there were, it is an ugly slur to imply that any Middle Easterner is a terrorist.) As the media eagerly fact-checks his rhetoric, Trump seems well aware that they are incidentally repeating his claims and reinforcing the suspicion and fear in the public’s mind.

The second way Trump has turned the midterms into a national vote is by raising the specter of impeachment. Nothing would anger his base more than the notion of an elitist conspiracy (of lawyers, journalists and judges) determined to undo the results of the 2016 election. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declared that impeachment is “the only message [the Democrats] seem to have going into the midterms.”

Trump’s midterm strategy was foreshadowed by Stephen K. Bannon several months ago, when he explained, in an interview with me on CNN, that the Republicans needed to turn the midterms into a referendum on Trump. “Trump’s second presidential race will be on Nov. 6 of this year,” Bannon said. “He’s on the ballot, and we’re going to have an up-or-down vote.”

How does one counter this campaign? Many Democrats angrily maintain that they do not, in fact, favor open borders and impeachment — that their positions are more nuanced. But when you are explaining nuance in politics, you are losing. The Democratic Party has not found a way to go on the offensive and get Trump to explain that he has, in fact, a more complicated position on any given topic.

But there is a substantive problem in addition to one of style and tactics. The Democratic Party is insisting that recent election results are an unmistakable sign that it needs to change course and become far more populist on economics. But the data clearly show that the American public is very comfortable with where the party is on issues such as health care and inequality.

The challenge for the Democrats is a set of cultural issues — chiefly immigration, but also things such as transgender bathroom laws and respecting the flag — on which a key group of Americans thinks the Democrats are out of touch. An excellent study by the Democracy Fund found that people who had previously supported Barack Obama and then voted for Trump in 2016 (a crucial segment that Democrats could win back) agreed with the Democrats on almost all economic issues but disagreed with the party on immigration and other cultural matters.

Put simply, the study makes clear that the challenge for the Democratic Party politically is not whether it can move left economically but whether it can move right on culture. I say this as someone who agrees with the Democrats on almost every one of these cultural issues. But a large national party must demonstrate that it can accommodate some people who disagree with it on some issues. Doing this without abandoning one’s core principles is a challenge, but it is a challenge Democrats will have to embrace if they seek a durable governing majority.

Eventually, the electorate will be more young and diverse, but in the meantime, the Republican Party is utterly dominant in American politics because it owns the bloody crossroads where culture and politics meet.

 (c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Directions for Malaysia’s Economic Policy

October 28, 2018

by Cassey Lee / Khmer Times

History repeats itself but often in slightly different ways. So it is with the tabling of the Mid-Term Review of the Eleventh Malaysia Plan (MTR-11MP) on October 11 by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Some 34 years ago, in March 1984, Mr Mahathir unveiled the mid-term review for the Fourth Malaysia Plan (4MP) (his first since assuming power in 1981). The Eleventh Malaysia Plan (11MP) is the country’s latest five-year development plan covering the period 2016 to 2020. It serves as a tool for medium-term economic planning. The mid-term review of the Plan essentially takes stock of the progress achieved half-way through its implementation period.

Though both the 4MP and 11MP were crafted under heightened fiscal constraints and contained significant new policy directions, there are some notable differences. A key difference is that the new policy directions in the MTR-11MP are noticeable but contain less implementation details. This is to be expected, as the new Pakatan Harapan (PH) government, which came into power in May, probably only had about three to four months to shape the MTR-11MP report. Work on the report commenced in October 2017 and was supposed to be tabled in Parliament by July or August.

Taking this time-constraint into account and the fact the new administration has had to struggle with a host of concurrent issues (including fiscal consolidation), the report is nevertheless a compelling read as it provides the first broad overview of the future directions of the PH government’s economic policies.

The report itself is divided into two major components. The first component which covers chapters two to eight provides reviews of the six strategic thrusts of the 11MP which were crafted by the Barisan Nasional government.

Aside from providing statistical updates on the progress achieved, the reviews are generally critical in the sense that they often attribute problems to existing institutional deficiencies. This then leads to the second component of the report (chapters 10 to 15), each of which contains one of the six “pillars” or new policy directions.

These are: (i) reforming governance towards greater transparency and enhancing efficiency of public service, (ii) enhancing inclusive development and well being, (iii) pursuing balanced regional development, (iv) empowering human capital, (v) enhancing environmental sustainability through green growth, and (vi) strengthening economic growth.

Comparing the MTR-11MP with the 11MP, there are some similarities in the themes and emphases of the two reports e.g. human capital, environmental sustainability and inclusiveness.

The significant departures from the original foci of 11MP are in pillar (i) on institutional reforms and pillar (iii) on regional development.

The institutional reforms detailed in chapter 10 are likely to have drawn from the report from the Institutional Reforms Committee which submitted its final report in July. The reforms include policies to strengthen check and balance mechanisms, revive the spirit of federalism, deepen the anti-corruption agenda and drive political reforms.

One political reform proposal that has received media attention is the implementation of a two-term limit for the Office for the Prime Minister, Chief Minister and Menteri Besar. Given the importance of institutions as key determinants of long-term economic development and growth, the emphasis on institutional reforms is both appropriate and encouraging.

The renewed emphasis on regional development is refreshing and surprising. Surprising, because regional development was largely neglected during Mr. Mahathir’s first term as Prime Minister (1981-2003). Though the 11MP did promote the development of regional economic corridors, the new emphasis is on reducing state-level developmental gaps that have persisted. The report contains proposals to improve development allocations to less-developed states, namely, Sabah, Sarawak, Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah and Perlis.

This strategy is both equitable and politically astute – the latter because the PH government needs to win the trust of rural Malay voters in northern Peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysian voters before the next general election.

Dr Cassey Lee is Senior Fellow, and co-coordinator of the Malaysia Studies Programme, at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This article first appeared in ISEAS Commentary and it can be read at https://bit.ly/2PgakFW

Malaysia:The Rule of Law must prevail and Justice must be done

October 27, 2018

The Rule of Law must prevail and Justice must be done–The Case Against Najib Razak, former Malaysian Prime Minister and Finance Minister

 

Mahathir: Saudi Minister’s U-turn is ‘immaterial’, RM2.6b is from 1MDB

by Annabelle Lee & Hariz Mohd  |  @www.malaysiakini.com

Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has dismissed the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister’s apparent U-turn on the source of former premier Najib Abdul Razak’s infamous RM2.6 billion donation as “immaterial”.

This is because the government “knows” that the money is indeed from 1MDB. At a press conference at the Bersatu headquarters tonight, Mahathir confirmed that Saudi Minister Adel Ahmed Al-Jubeir had called on him recently and had denied that the donation had come from Riyadh.

When pressed on why Adel had contradicted his 2016 statement – where he confirmed that the donation had indeed been from Saudi royalty – the Prime Minister said he did not inquire further.

Asked if the denial was done to appease the Pakatan Harapan government, Mahathir answered “maybe, but I don’t know what he was thinking”.

Saudi Minister Foreign Minister Adel Ahmed Al-Jubeir

Following a bilateral meeting with Najib in Istanbul in 2016, Adel (photo) had told the press that the RM2.6 billion had been a “genuine donation”.

“We are aware of the donation and it is a genuine donation with nothing expected in return. We are also fully aware that the Attorney-General of Malaysia (Apandi Ali) has thoroughly investigated the matter and found no wrongdoing. “So, as far as we are concerned, the matter is closed,” he was quoted as saying by Bernama.

‘It comes from 1MDB’

Today, when asked further which of Adel’s statements on the donation were to be believed, Mahathir contended that providing documentation of the transaction was more important. “It is immaterial.“[…] What is important is documentary proof that the money comes from 1MDB or from Saudi (royalty).

“You can’t transfer large sums of money without (any) record. If they say it is from Saudi Arabia, show the records. If they say it is not from Saudi Arabia, we’ll have to find out where it comes from.“As far as we know, it comes from 1MDB,” he said.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has affirmed that the sum had originated from 1MDB and ended up in Najib’s personal bank accounts before being transferred to another account controlled by Jho Low.

Malaysia: Malay Political Dominance remains despite UMNO’s rout

October 26, 2018

Malay Political Dominance remains despite UMNO’s rout

Regime change at GE14 did not change the dominance of Malay politics.

by John Funston

 

http://www.newmandala.org/malay-dominance-remains-despite-umnos-rout/

Malay Political Dominance is here to stay. UMNO ?

Analysts of Malaysia’s 14^th General Election (GE-14) agree that the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) suffered a humiliating defeat. But there is less unanimity that this also applied to the dominant party in BN, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).

BN’s loss is clear to all. On election night BN won only 79 seats, down from 133 in 2013. Soon afterwards, several coalition members and UMNO representatives declared independence. BN was left with the pre-BN Alliance three of UMNO, MCA and MIC, and by September had only 51 members in the 222-seat parliament (two contributed by MIC and one MCA). BN’s share of the popular vote before desertions declined from 47.4% to 33.7%.

Nonetheless many UMNO leaders, and political analysts, argue that this was not a rejection of UMNO. The party’s Information Head, Annuar Musa, declared UMNO had obtained 60% of the Malay-Muslim vote. Former Prime Minister Najib Razak said there was no Malay tsunami against UMNO in GE14, only a divided Malay electorate. Current UMNO head and former Deputy Prime Minister, Zahid Hamidi, claimed that UMNO still had strong Malay support of 46%, and “it is higher than the previous elections.”

Similar views have been expressed by academic commentators. One analyst claims that UMNO enjoyed the support of 46.29% of the Malay electorate, compared to 28.14% for PAS (Parti Islam), and 25.47% the ruling Pakatan Harapan (PH, Alliance of Hope) coalition comprising PKR (People’s Justice Party), Democratic Action Party (DAP), Parti Bersatu (PPBM, or United Indigenous Party), and Amanah (National Trust Party), together with its Sabah ally Warisan (Heritage). A widely quoted survey by the respected Merdeka Centre put Malay support for the PH and Warisan at only 25-30%, while PAS received 30-33% and UMNO 35-40%.

While there are difficulties getting a precise measurement before detailed examination of individual constituencies, it is clear that UMNO’s influence in the Malay community is not as high as these figures suggest.

UMNO was able to gain some support in rural areas – voting data in the Perak constituency of Sungai Siput showed that UMNO won 52% of the rural Malay vote, a result likely replicated in some similar constituencies. But UMNO seats declined from 88 to 54 (48 after resignations in June, July and September), its worst result ever. Its total vote in an expanded electorate declined from 3,416,310 of 11,257,147 votes (30.4% of popular vote) in 2013 to 2,552,391 of 12,299,514 in GE14 (20.8%). In earlier elections, UMNO lost only 6-7 of 54 rural constituencies with FELDA development schemes, while in 2018 it lost 19. There is even evidence that Malay bureaucrats, the police and the army abandoned UMNO in significant numbers. And these opposition gains came after a pre-election redelineation designed to benefit UMNO and BN. It also continued to benefit from a strong weighting in favour of smaller predominantly Malay electorates – in 2013 BN required 39,381 votes per MP to Pakatan’s 63,191 votes, while in 2018 the ratio was 46,836 to 77,943.

Nor should the vote for PAS be considered anything but a rejection of UMNO, notwithstanding an understanding between UMNO and PAS leaders to divide the Malay vote to their mutual benefit. With widespread speculation that UMNO was about to win the state of Kelantan, PAS voters united against the traditional enemy, UMNO, as they had many times in the past. PAS support remained concentrated in its traditional heartland, and the small increase in its popular vote from 14.7 to 16.9% was not exceptional given that it contested more than double the number of seats it had in 2013, 157 seats as against 73 for Malaysia as a whole, and on the peninsula, 143 compared to 65.

How then was Malay support divided in this election? It must first be noted that virtually all comments on this refer only to the peninsula, as the Malay electorate is a minority in Sabah and Sarawak and does not necessarily represent the same interests as those on the peninsula. By my calculations, Malay support for UMNO on the peninsula was about 5% higher than support for PAS and PH. This is indicated in the table below:

The Peninsula Electorate

Total votes: 10,347,357

Total Malay: 6,346,739 (61.34)

UMNO vote: 2,323,665 (36.6%)

PAS vote: 2,012,381 (31.7%)

Other (PH): 2,010,693 (31.7%)

Source: calculated from EC statistics and racial breakdown detailed in Malaysiakini’s https://undi.info/

True, the UMNO vote cannot simply be equated with Malay support for UMNO. Some of the UMNO votes would have been contributed by non-Malays, while Malay UMNO supporters in other constituencies would have expressed their support for UMNO by voting for other BN candidates. Not many non-Malays would have supported UMNO candidates – most estimates are that over 93% of non-Malays voted against the BN. But nor are many Malays likely to have supported non-UMNO BN candidates, as the massive defeats suffered by these candidates indicates. It should, however be noted that UMNO contested in nearly twice as many seats as other BN (106-59). I therefore assume that non-Malays supporting UMNO and Malays supporting non-UMNO BN candidates would approximately cancel each other out, and that the percentage vote for UMNO would remain around 36.6%.

For the PAS vote it seems safe to assume that non-Malay support would have been negligible, so its share of the peninsula vote would have been around 31.7%.

That leaves another 31.7% of the Malay vote unaccounted for, and this could only have been directed to PH.

Noteworthy also is the fact that PH also had more Malays elected on the Peninsula than UMNO – 51 (PKR 26, PPBM 13, PAN 11, DAP 1) compared to 46. UMNO was soon reduced to 41 after 5 resignations.

Even these figures may flatter UMNO. On election night, the EC declared the voter turnout to be 76%, but revised this by more than 6% to 82.32% two days later. No explanation for this extraordinary difference was given, but the EC’s past record suggests that figures may have been adjusted to strengthen the UMNO-BN vote.

The GE-14 result reflects PAS’ enduring influence, yet the PH parties together with IKRAM and ABIM offer a viable ‘Islamic alternative’ for pious Muslim voters. Can PAS expand its support base in urban areas, and might Amanah make further inroads into the east coast PAS heartland?

One analyst has expressed concern that the Malaysian government is now dominated by non-Muslims, since for the first time non-Muslims outnumbered Muslims in the ruling coalition (PH and Warisan). The government has 66 non-Muslim MPs. It has only 58 Muslims – 27 from PKR, 13 Bersatu, 11 Amanah, 6 Warisan, and one DAP – comprising 46.8% of the total.

 

This is indeed the case. Although somewhat similar to the 1999 election, when for the first time UMNO won fewer seats than its coalition partners (72 of 148, or 48.6%), 11 Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu representatives in Sarawak lifted the BN Muslim component to 83, or 56.1%.

But the small non-Muslim majority of government MPs has not meant that this group dominates the government. The Cabinet is overwhelmingly Malay-Muslims, as 18 of its 26 members are Malays (69%), including the key posts of Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

And the Parliament remains a predominantly Malay-Muslim institution. The PH and UMNO Malays elected for the peninsula on 9 May totaled 97. To this must be added a further 10 Malays elected for BN in Sarawak, and 15 in Sabah (8 UMNO, 6 Warisan and one from PRK). In total 122 members (55%) of the House of Representatives are Malays.

New York Times Book Review–Unhappy Conservatives

October 26, 2018

Books of The Times

In Two New Books, Unhappy Conservatives Ask: What Now?

To hear Max Boot tell it, he feels as forlorn as the despondent, battered elephant on the cover of his new book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.” Boot minutely describes a disillusionment that wasn’t only “painful and prolonged” but “existential.”

Here he is — a lifelong Republican with sterling neoconservative credentials (an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War and a champion of “American empire”) — explaining why he’s eager for the day when “the G.O.P. as currently constituted is burned to the ground.”

The scorched-earth rhetoric reflects not just a pro-war pedigree but also a profound feeling of betrayal. In the run-up to the November 2016 election, Boot was a vocal Never Trump conservative who couldn’t fathom that a “crudely xenophobic” reality television star would become the standard-bearer of the Grand Old Party, much less president of the United States. Along with Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse’s “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal,” another new volume by a Republican critic of Trump, Boot’s book attempts to answer a looming question for conservatives unhappy with the current occupant of the White House: What now?

“The Corrosion of Conservatism” does double duty as a mea culpa memoir and a political manifesto, detailing Boot’s “heartbreaking divorce” from the Republican Party after decades of unstinting loyalty. He charts a political trajectory that gave his life social and emotional meaning. As the 6-year-old son of Jewish refuseniks, Boot emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976; at 13, he was inducted by his father into the world of “learned, worldly, elitist” conservatism with a gift subscription to National Review.

Max Boot CreditDon Pollard

Years later, even amid the peer pressure of “Berzerkeley,” the young Republican persisted. He may have been a white man of some means, but he enjoyed seeing himself as a besieged minority.

He “loved making a bonfire” of Berkeley’s “liberal pieties” in his column in the student newspaper and trolling his peers with a “Bush-Quayle ’88” sticker on his dorm-room door. He swiftly clambered up the echelons of the conservative establishment, editing the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal by the time he was 28 and eventually advising the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio.

Those candidates all lost their bids for the highest office, but it would take Boot a while to get to where he is now — repulsed by the Republican Party’s fealty to President Trump and instructing Americans to “vote against all Republicans.” His surprisingly anguished book is peppered with so many penitential lines (“I am embarrassed and chagrined”) and so much bewildered disappointment in figures like Rubio (“I thought he was a man of principle”) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (“I had viewed him as smart, principled and brave”) that even the most die-hard leftist might be moved to hand Boot a hankie.

Not that he’s a particularly moving stylist; Boot’s clean, starched prose marches forward with all the spontaneity of a military parade (he’s uncommonly fond of words like “pusillanimous” and “japery”). But the stodginess reveals how much soul-searching it must have taken to write this candid, reflective book.

For his entire life, Boot wanted to be a good soldier. Instead he’s now in his late 40s, waking up to the historical brutality of “white identity politics” (“I have had my consciousness raised,” he says) and incredulously wondering: “How could all these eminences that I had worked with, and respected, sell out their professed principles to support a president who could not tell Edmund Burke from Arleigh Burke?”

How indeed? And Arleigh who? The confident name-dropping (of an admiral in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, natch) is quintessential Boot, who describes himself as one of the “sophisticates” of the Republican Party.

There’s something refreshing about an elite conservative owning up to being an elite conservative. The closest that Ben Sasse comes to doing the same in his new book is a cryptic recollection about how, when he and his wife lived in Chicago, they “were fortunate to be able to make ends meet.” (He was working as a management consultant at the time.)

BenSasse (B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. from Yale) spends a great deal of “Them” honing his down-home credentials (Nascar, TGI Fridays). He emphasizes the importance of civil debate, denouncing Fox News and MSNBC, and laments the extreme partisanship that characterizes public life in the Trump era. But “the dysfunction in D.C.,” he says, stems from something “deeper than economics,” and “deeper and more meaningful” than politics. “What’s wrong with America, then, starts with one uncomfortable word,” he writes. “Loneliness.”

He shores up his argument by referring to scholars of social isolation like Robert Putnam and Eric Klinenberg — though the socially conscious Klinenberg (with his emphasis on the crucial role of publicly funded institutions) might find it hard to recognize the conclusions Sasse has drawn from his work. Community, Sasse says, is fostered by individual acts of charity and fellow-feeling; government does what it needs to do when it gets out of the way. “Citizens in a republic must cultivate humility,” he writes in a section titled “Civics 101.” It’s “the only way to preserve sufficient space for true community and for meaningful, beautiful human relationships.”

This is standard conservative stuff; a little cloying in the delivery, sure, but not shocking. After all, Sasse — who regularly boasts about having one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate — doesn’t have a responsibility to become a Democrat in the Trump era, much less satisfy Boot’s desire for a politician who can “make centrism sexy.” (I had to laugh before I cringed.) Even Sasse’s ability to sentimentalize “rootedness” in little communities in one breath and welcome the “uberization” of existing industries in the other can be chalked up to an old strain of techno-optimism among business-friendly conservatives.

What’s curious, then, is not so much the careful avoidance of politics — politicians are really good at this — but Sasse’s repeated assertions that political solutions are meaningless. “Ultimately, it’s not legislation we’re lacking,” he writes. Public servants like him “simply need to allow the space for communities of different belief and custom to flourish.” It’s a pretty idea, though anyone familiar with how “belief and custom” have long propped up local prejudices (Jim Crow being a glaring example) knows that there’s nothing simple about it.

As he did in his previous book, “The Vanishing American Adult,” Sasse talks a lot about the importance of “meaningful work,” yet he has chosen to be a United States senator, spending five days a week away from his family back in Nebraska in order to do whatever it is he does in Washington — which is what? Apparently vote with Trump close to 90 percent of the time and help his party try to bulldoze health care legislation and tax cuts through Congress, keeping crucial details secret until the last minute — all the while writing a book that solemnly proclaims the necessity of respectful debate and “engaging ideological opponents.”

“Our occupation links us to other people and gives us an identity and a sense of meaning,” Sasse muses, before waxing lyrical about a bedbug exterminator. For all his paeans to other people’s jobs, you might begin to wonder what the senator makes of his own.

Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

The Corrosion of Conservatism
Why I Left the Right
By Max Boot
260 pages. Liveright Publishing. $24.95.

Them
Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal
By Ben Sasse
272 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $28.99.

 

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 25, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dismantle The G.O.P.? Or Just Look Past Politics?