Letters from Ithavoll

The term racism belongs to a class of expressions whose purpose is to be a conduit for social hegemony, rather than to convey meaning. Indeed, as the language is larded with similar totalitarian patois and circumlocutions for verboten ideas, it becomes increasingly difficult to express an unapproved thought, or, what's more, to think in ways that do not lead to self-contradiction. It is, as Orwell wrote, the objective of linguistic manipulation to make unauthorized thought impossible, since there are no terms in which to express it.

The coalition of anti-Israel rank-and-file progressives and the Israel-supporting Jewish donor class, while one of necessity in the past, may break apart as the left is forced to reinvent itself in light of its late electoral collapse. The new synthesis on which these forces converge is likely to be a co-opting of the socialist Left-Populism that Senator Bernie Sanders had hoped to harness in his ill-fated Presidential election bid (if a genuine bid it was, rather than a demographic feint). In this makeover, the face of the Democratic Party will become younger, as the party seeks relevance to millennials, many of whom no longer feel any sympathy with the post-war international liberal consensus. A doubling-down on the historic wager that the coalition of the fringes will hold, and that the Trump phenomenon is an anomaly would be a serious miscalculation. While the Trump victory certainly represents a paroxysm of antipathy to liberal elitism, it also expresses an eruption of white