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How the Administrative State Serves Clients and Hurts Citizens: The Case of the Non-Organic, Organic Food By Henry I. Miller and Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

The late economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman used to say that only in government, when a program or project fails dismally, the instinctive response is to make it bigger. This is especially the case in a modern Administrative State like the one we have in America today where a program alleged to serve the well-being of the public is most often proven to serve, in a big way, the interests of a large client of that administrative state.

We’re seeing Friedman’s observation validated yet again in the congressional response to an exposé of the pervasive dishonesty in the organic agriculture industry.

Following a scathing report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s inspector general that details fraud, mismanagement, and negligence throughout the global organic agriculture/food supply chain, Congress wants to throw yet more money at the problem.

Last month, Reps. John Faso (R-New York) and Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-New Mexico) introduced the “Organic Farmer and Consumer Protection Act.” It would nearly triple the budget of the USDA’s National Organic Program, which oversees the country’s organic standards and commerce. Faso said in a news release that the legislation will “provide for a modernization of organic import documentation, new technology advancements and stricter enforcement of organic products entering the US.”

The organic industry is cheering Faso’s bill; the Organic Trade Association says it “would make significant strides to improve the oversight of global organic trade, create a level playing field for American organic farmers, and establish a better system to ensure the integrity of organic.” Integrity of organic? Rubbish; it would only create a bigger fig-leaf.

When the organic designation was established in 1990, then-Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman emphasized its fundamental meaninglessness: “Let me be clear about one thing, the organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.” The Faso-Grisham legislation is yet another special interest bonanza designed to further subsidize domestic organic farmers and enrich the bottom line of already hugely-profitable organic businesses.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration should oppose the legislation and, beyond that, demand explanations of the multiple violations revealed in the recent USDA inspector general’s report. After a year-long investigation, the Inspector General found serious breaches in the international organic market that may result in “reduced U.S. consumer confidence in the integrity of organic products imported into the United States.” Federal authorities failed to verify whether imports were organic, did not perform mandatory on-site visits of exporting countries and ignored requirements to resolve the different organic standards among exporters. Moreover, imported agricultural products, whether organic or conventional, are sometimes fumigated at U.S. ports of entry to prevent alien pests from entering the United States. USDA investigators found pesticides that are prohibited under organic protocols were being sprayed on organic shipments.

At every point in the supply chain, National Organic Program officials have been negligent, allowing the participants in this booming sector to mislead consumers into believing organic food is healthier, safer and more eco-friendly than non-organic food—none of which would be true even if there were strict adherence to organic standards.

The misrepresentation and chicanery in the supply chain aren’t new, and the feds have long been aware of that. For example, USDA reported in 2012 that 43 percent of the 571 samples of “organic” produce tested were in violation of the government’s organic regulations, and that “the findings suggest that some of the samples in violation were mislabeled conventional products, while others were organic products that hadn’t been adequately protected from prohibited pesticides.”

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Europe’s Imperial Dilemma By Sumantra Maitra

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

Europe has an imperial problem. Put simply, the European Union, formed as a political union to prevent war on the continent, is slowly morphing into a liberal utopian empire, undermining Westphalian nation-states with its open migration policy and fiscal meddling. Inevitably, this has resulted in the rise of pre-Westphalian ethno-nationalist sentiments. The imperial character of the EU has long term ramifications for great maritime powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as for revanchist land powers like Russia. Put simply, the EU imperium, which started as a prospective solution to the problems of a continent ravaged by centuries of war, is now turning out to be the cause of new and predictable troubles.

As Catalonia stands on the brink of secession from Spain after a controversial referendum, with Spain poised to send in troops to restore “constitutional order,” and terrorism and migration on mass scale result in ethno-nationalist backlashes, their is an increasing and urgent need in for policymakers in the United States and the United Kingdom, to engage in a serious reflection upon and reassessment of the character of EU.

The Forces of Ethno-Nationalism

Historically, Europe was never united, either culturally, linguistically, or tribally. The only way Europe was unified, in temporal phases, was through imperium. But those forced attempts at imperium also resulted in nationalist reaction and inevitable backlash. The Romans fell prey to imperial overstretch, which resulted in differing ethnic tribes waging war against the central authority and, eventually, the dissolution of the Roman empire. From Bonaparte to the Habsburgs, Kaiser to Hitler, all of them tried to dominate continental Europe through sheer strength of arms. Similarly, during the last days of the Cold War, contrary to what liberal historians preached for the last quarter century, it was not liberalism that saw off the Soviet empire, but conservative nationalism in Eastern Europe against Soviet imperium. There’s a reason some countries like Poland are skeptical of a European superstate run from Brussels and similar attempts at social engineering through forced migration and settlements. They hear echoes of the past in this attempt to create a new and benign EU-SSR.

The European Union, however, seemed a necessary idea when it started, after years of conflict ravaging the continent. As Churchill wrote, the aim of British foreign policy for 500 years has been to see that there’s no single dominating hegemony or empire in Europe. After the fall of the British empire, the United States carried on the same balancing principle, which resulted in the United States confronting the Soviet Union. The geopolitical logic behind that was simple. Any single hegemon that controls the entire European landmass is bound to be powerful enough, militarily and economically, to dominate other great powers across the globe.

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House GOP leaders open probe into FBI’s handling of Clinton investigation By Olivia Beavers –

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

The chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into how the FBI handled last year’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State.

“Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement.
The two Republican leaders said they have questions about the FBI’s decision to openly declare the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information, while quietly investigating Trump campaign associates.

They said they also want to know why the FBI decided to formally notify Congress of the Clinton probe on two separate occasions; why the FBI — rather than the Justice Department — recommended that Clinton not be charged after the investigation concluded; and the reasoning behind their timeline for announcing such decisions.

“The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken,” their statement continued.

Former FBI director James Comey apparently began drafting his statement that the FBI would not recommend charges months before his July 2016 announcement.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) first announced in late August that Comey had drafted a statement on Clinton months before making a public statement, saying the decision was drawn up “before the FBI had interviewed key witnesses.”

The revelation sparked a flurry of questions about why Comey waited months after beginning to draft a statement to announce the end of the investigation in the midst of a heated presidential race.

President Trump fired Comey earlier this year, citing his handling of the Clinton probe. Special counsel Robert Mueller, however, is investigating whether Trump fired Comey to obstruct justice in the Russia probes. Comey was leading the inquiry at the time.

The top Democrats on these panels, Oversight’s Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Judiciary’s Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), slammed the decision as an attempt to distract the public eye from the Russia meddling investigation that they said is picking up speed.

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One Year Later, Coastal Elites Still Don’t Understand Why Voters Turned To Trump By John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

A year ago this week, I flew to Cleveland, rented a car, and spent the next ten days driving across eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania, stopping in small towns and cities to talk to people about the upcoming presidential election.

Like most journalists and political pundits, I thought Hillary Clinton would win, but narrowly, in part because of places like Trumbull County, Ohio, and Luzerne County, Michigan—places that had historically voted Democrat but I thought might go for Trump. To use a now-cliché term, I suspected these “white working class” communities, many suffering from decades of industrial decline, felt left behind by the Democratic Party and ignored by the GOP. I thought voters frustrated by the establishment in Washington DC might just vote for a political novice like Trump, warts and all.

It turns out, I was right—more so than I realized. Enough people in the Rust Belt voted for Trump (against all expectations he won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to hand him the Electoral College and send him to the White House. A year later, many media and political elites still don’t understand why or seem the least bit curious to find out. The mainstream media, convinced it’s the last line of defense against a fascist Trump regime bent on shredding the Constitution, has sunk to pedantic meme-making in response to credible charges of bias and incompetence in its coverage of the administration.

The Democratic Party has begrudgingly admitted it needs to talk more about the economy and reach out to voters in the middle, even as Democrats themselves have steadily moved left on everything from abortion to health care. For their part, Republicans continue to be divided among Never-Trumpers, befuddled conservatives, and pro-Trump populists who’ll support the president no matter what he says or how little his administration accomplishes.
Many Trump Voters Were Looking For a Scapegoat

Lost in all of this are the people across the Midwest who actually voted for Trump. They had their reasons, some of them good and some of them terrible. But a common theme was a seething discontent with the status quo, and not just the political establishment of the two major parties but also the media, which many people told me was part of the problem.

Oftentimes, this discontent was directed at the wrong things, the misfortunes of a town blamed on the wrong causes. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the town of East Liverpool, Ohio, a hollowed out place that sits on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Ohio River some 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. I stopped there on a weekday afternoon and found the downtown eerily silent and nearly abandoned.

One of the only storefronts that wasn’t boarded up or vacant was a gaming shop, video games and board games and such, whose owner, a heavyset woman in her fifties, was more than happy to talk politics. She was voting for Trump, she said, because she was sick of both parties and their inaction on illegal immigration, which she said was ruining the country.

At first, this struck me as odd. East Liverpool is the second largest town in Columbiana County, which is 95.5 percent white and virtually devoid of immigrants, legal or illegal. It’s possible the owner of that store had never encountered a single immigrant in her town. But when you consider what’s happened to East Liverpool, it makes sense that some residents would look for something or someone to blame.

Its industry—East Liverpool was once known as the “pottery capital of the world”—has been gutted by globalization. Its population has shriveled by more than half since 1970. Its claim to fame last summer was a Facebook post by the city police department that went viral: a photo of a man and woman slumped over in their car seats, mouths agape, overdosed on heroin while in the backseat, a four-year-old boy looks on.

Trump won 68 percent of the vote in Columbiana County. The last time the county went for a GOP presidential candidate by anything close to that margin was the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover.

It wasn’t just embittered small business owners in dying towns like East Liverpool who blamed Democrats or globalization on the problems they saw around them and saw a glimmer of hope in Trump. All across eastern Ohio I met Democrats who told me they were planning to vote for Trump: a woman in Youngstown who’d been a Democrat her entire life but was registering Republican this year and volunteering for the Trump campaign; a gay man in Akron whose small business was crushed by government regulations; a retired Army veteran in Warren who was sick of the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on social issues.

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UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY: OCTOBER 24, 1917

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

One hundred years ago today (October 24), Lenin’s bolsheviks seized power in Russia and the world has been a worse place ever since. Essays by the gross will be written to observe the anniversary, but Steve Kates at Catallaxy Files sums up the enduring consequences with a minimum of wasted words:

Here is the reality. The socialist left is filled with people whose lives are driven by envy and hatred for the productive, contented and self-reliant. Ruining their lives makes no one better off, other than those who take power … every socialist so-called solution to our existential and economic problems has been disastrous for everyone but those who seize power. Every socialist leader is a Stasi agent lying in wait.

In Ukraine, the locals have unveiled a puckish appraisal of the man whose tyranny and successors killed so many of their forebears. Follow the link below to see the re-casting of Lenin in a role for which he would have been a natural.

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A Century of Murder and Illusion The New York Times’ continuing romance with an evil ideology cries out for an answer. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

To mark the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution The New York Times has been running a series called “Red Century.” In the spirit of its Pulitzer-Prize winning Moscow correspondent and uber fellow-traveler in the thirties, Walter Duranty, the articles in the main are an exercise in rehabilitation rather than historical evaluation. Given communism’s historically unprecedented and copiously documented record of slaughter, torture, mass imprisonment, brutal occupation, and utter failure to achieve its workers’ paradise of justice and equality, the question why the Times would attempt to mitigate the evil of a totalitarian ideology that led to 100 million dead cries out for an answer.

The first place to look for an explanation is the rise of scientism in the increasingly secularized 19th century. The success of legitimate science in understanding the material world, and turning that knowledge into practical use by creating life-improving technologies, fostered the illusion that human nature and behavior could be similarly understood and improved by the same methods. As Isaiah Berlin described this Enlightenment optimism,

The success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.

Marxist theory was the child of this belief, which also created psychology, economics, sociology, and all the other “human sciences.” As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” And once those “laws” were understood, “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin put it, could create a better world of equality and social justice––if they had the political power to reorganize society and eliminate those who stood in the way.

Communism, then, was taken not as a political philosophy, but as a scientific discovery that only the irrational, the evil, or those blinded by bourgeois “false consciousness” would reject. Like science, communism was about progress, optimism for the future, and the liberation of humans from social and political bondage by improving the economic and social conditions of human life. It had “an inherent optimism for the future,” as one Times article gushed. This notion that humans can be shaped and improved by rational technique still remains a dominant sensibility in the West, which explains the continuing hold of leftist ideology. From Obama’s 2012 campaign slogan “Forward,” a traditional leftist motto, to the fads of “behavioral science” like “implicit bias,” our world is still enthralled to this superstition that “human sciences” can improve life and transcend the historical disorder and evil our ancestors attributed to a flawed and tragic human nature.

Of course, this optimism is predicated on a category error. Humans, each a unique individual endowed with a mind and free will, lie beyond the “complexity horizon,” and so cannot be reduced to mere matter determined by the laws of physics or economic development, as Marx believed. Communism fails because it must diminish this human complexity so that people can be shoe-horned into the theory. It is reductive and simplistic, and necessarily dehumanizing. And dehumanization has ever been the precursor to mass murder and totalitarian tyranny. In the case of communism, its followers’ fanatical certainty that their beliefs were the fruit of objective “science” and the vehicle of universal human improvement, made it easier to ignore their own destructive passions and flaws, particularly their lust for power and domination; and to remove “by any means necessary” the stiff-necked opponents of humanity’s glorious future––the “eggs” that must be broken to make the communist “omelet,” as Walter Duranty reported in the Times in 1933.

But as the history of communism has shown, its road to utopia runs over mountains of corpses.

The second cultural transformation that has kept a failed and murderous ideology alive is the radical secularism of the last two centuries. The decline in faith created a vacuum of disbelief intolerable to human beings. Substitutes had to be found to explain existence and human nature, provide a meaningful narrative that identifies the good and the evil, and describe the destiny awaiting those who accepted the new revelation. Political religions, whether fascism, “blood and soil” nationalism, or communism, filled the spiritual emptiness of a secularizing age. But communism was more attractive and powerful than fascism, for it was the bedfellow of scientism, the other pseudo-religion of modernity that promised salvation, only in this world rather than the mythic “heaven” of oppressive and irrational religious belief.

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Our Taxpayer Funded Palestinian Saddam Terror, lies and taxpayer money. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but a Saddam Hussein memorial has grown in Qalqilya.

Qalqilya is one of those ancient, historic “Palestinian” cities. So it dates back all the way to 1893. The population of Qalqilya more than quadrupled under Israeli rule. That’s typical of Zionist genocide which somehow vastly increases the number of Arab Muslims and their shrill accusations of genocide.

In the ancient 19th century Palestinian city of Qalqilya, dating back all the way to the days of President Grover Cleveland and the invention of the jukebox, Hamas is popular. It even elected its own mayor before he was removed from office and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah was put back in charge. Politics in Qalqilya remains a pitched battle between Hamas and Fatah over who hates the Jews more and has the best plan for destroying them.

There isn’t much to do in Qalqilya except visit its zoo. The Qalqilya Zoo is the worst zoo in the world and embodies everything wrong with “Palestine”. Israelis helped set up the zoo as a gesture of peace. It was supposed to be a “jewel in the crown of Palestinian national institutions.”

And it just might be.

Recently, a bear ate a 9-year-old boy’s arm at the zoo. The zebras and the giraffes allegedly died as a result of Muslim attacks on Israelis near the zoo. The self-taught taxidermist who runs the zoo has an exhibition of dead animals he has stuffed and mounted, and whose deaths he blames on Israel.

Like everything else about “Palestine”, Israeli goodwill ended in death and anti-Israel propaganda.

But Qalqilyans or Qalqilyites now have something else to do besides get their arms ripped off by a bear or visit one of the city’s 26 mosques. They can stop by the Saddam Hussein Memorial.

One side of the memorial has Saddam Hussein in a beret saluting himself. The other shows an older Saddam waving his rifle in the air. If the city fathers of Qalqilya had been more on the ball, they could have acquired the Ruger M77 bolt-action rifle in question for under $50K after it was taken from the rubble of his presidential palace in Mosul and sold at auction by a senior CIA officer in Baghdad.

The Saddam Hussein Memorial bears such cheerful welcoming messages as “Saddam Hussein – The Master of the Martyrs in Our Age,” and “Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea.”

Governor Rafi Rawajba compared Saddam, Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas: the current head of the Palestinian Authority. “Saddam was an emblem of heroism, honor, originality and defiance, as was the martyr Yasser Arafat.”

“President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) makes sure to follow in the footsteps of these two great leaders,” he gushed.

Qalqilya Mayor Othman Daoud, also of Fatah, had previously paid tribute to Saddam for sticking to “his principles and the Palestinian cause until his death as a Martyr.”

The governor of Qalqiliya was appointed by Abbas. While the Palestinian Authority president doesn’t have Saddam’s arsenal or snazzy berets, he has the same affinity for democracy as Saddam.

President Abbas was elected to a four-year term in 2005. It’s been the longest four years ever.

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The ‘Never Trump’ Construct The president’s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP’s internal strife. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

“Meanwhile, the administrative state expands, the debt is headed for $21 trillion, crass identity politics tear the nation apart, the effort to restore deterrence abroad grows ever more dangerous, and the campuses, Hollywood, the NFL, and the media are reminding us that progressive politics are now our culture’s orthodoxy, vital for success in nearly all fields. And dealing with all that is the only conservative fight that counts.”

For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him.

Bitterness Over the 2016 Election?

So a vocal Never Trump Republican establishment had not much effect on the 2016 election. Voters do not carry conservative magazines to the polls. They are not swayed much by talking heads, and on Election Day they do not they print out conservative congressional talking points from their emails.

John McCain and Susan Collins are as renegade now as they were obstructionist in 2004. If in 2016 it is said that John McCain cannot forgive President Trump for his 2016 primary statements, it was also said in 2004 that John McCain could not forgive President Bush for how he won the 2000 primaries. Trump is called a Nazi and a fascist. But so was George W. Bush in 2006. Reagan in the campaign and during his first few months as president was slandered as a pleasant dunce as often as Trump is smeared as a mean dunce. If neocons are now on MSNBC in 2017 trashing a Republican president, paleocons were doing the same in 2006 over Iraq. Parties always have dissidents.

Donald Trump got about the same percentage of the Republican vote (about 90 percent) as John McCain won in 2008 — slightly less than Mitt Romney’s supposed 93 percent in 2012. If Romney’s 93 percent is the standard of party fealty (Obama usually pulled in about 92 percent of the Democratic vote), then it is hard to know whether the 3 percentage points fewer of Republicans who could not stomach McCain were about the same as the 3 percentage points fewer who were Never Trump. In either case, 90 percent party loyalty was not good enough for McCain, and even 93 percent did not win Romney an election. Both, unlike Trump, lost too many Reagan Democrats and Independents in the swing states of the Electoral College.

So the present civil war did not translate into much in 2016. United or divided, the Republicans have lost the popular vote in four out of the last five national elections — 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2016 — not because large numbers of Republicans voted for the Democratic candidate, but because there are not enough Republicans to begin with. And their candidates were not able to capture enough Independents and Democrats, or to motivate enough first-time or lapsed Republicans to register and turn out to vote, or to flip new demographic groups to conservatism.

Trump won no more of the voters who turned out and who identified as “conservative” than did Romney. But again, Trump apparently did get Democrats, Independents, and lapsed and previously uncounted Republicans to vote in key states in a way that Romney and McCain did not. The few Republicans that Trump lost were more than made up by others who were won over. (This raises the question of whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the two phenomena. But I doubt that the reason working-class voters turned out to vote for Trump was that most writers at National Review and The Weekly Standard were against him.)

There should not be any bitterness over the successful 2016 election, unless the pro-Trump side believes that they could have won the popular vote or more Senate seats if they’d had Never Trump support, or unless the Never Trumpers wish that more Republicans had stayed home or voted for some else. Otherwise, the civil war of opinion makers changed few opinions in 2016.

Ideological Fissures?

Among the voters themselves, the populist-nationalist wing is said to be irreconcilable with the establishment mainstream. But it is hard to see where too many of the lasting irreconcilable differences lie — other than the same old gripe over politicians who get entrenched in Washington and the “mavericks” who want to take their place and likely turn into what they once damned.

Both sides in the civil war favor increased investment in defense and especially missile defense. Both are mostly now foreign-policy realists in the sense that McMaster, Mattis, Kelly, Haley, Pompeo, Tillerson, and most of the cabinet could work in a Marco Rubio administration. Both factions are strong on the Second Amendment. Both favor bans on most forms of abortion. Both like Trump’s judicial appointments. Both oppose identity politics. On illegal immigration, the establishment opposes a wall and likely strict enforcement, but in any national election (see Romney’s 2012 positions), their view sounds no different from Trump’s. On Obamacare, the mainstream is a bit more reluctant to repeal rather than reform, but both sides may end up supporting either.

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John O’Sullivan: Mistaken Identities

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

It is held to be morally wrong to assert that someone who is a man biologically but a woman by choice and surgery is not genuinely female. Likewise with national identity, but here the problems of transforming, say, Germans into ‘Europeans’ gets somewhat stickier.

Identity politics is the order of the day, it seems, whether you approve of it or not. But what is identity politics? Do we mean the politics of personal identity or sexual identity that we see playing out in America’s universities? Or the politics of national identity versus European identity that we see in the Brexit debate? Or the politics of racial identity throughout the advanced world, including the US and Australia?

About twenty years ago I got very interested in that question, then just beginning to be a political one. It seemed to me that all these different identity disputes offered roughly the same choice: do we think that identity is something that we get handed down to us by our parents, society, sex, class, nation, race, and then take for granted as we grow up? Or is it something we think about and choose voluntarily? It was clear then that a “postmodern” (though it has been in the air for two hundred years) concept of identity was advancing in psychology, the neuro-sciences, the media, the theatre, film, the world of culture generally, and above all in the universities, the intelligentsia, and the young. This was the theory that the self is almost infinitely malleable and that we may choose our identity (or identities) rather than simply receiving them from either our genes or society or wider environment. Its spiritual godfather was David Hume, who wrote:

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.

Consequences flow: if there’s no hard, given core central to our personality, then our identity is malleable, maybe infinitely so, and we can choose several identities on different occasions (as both Pirandello and Woody Allen have suggested, in plays and films like Zelig). Indeed, the principle on which we choose an identity has been laid down by the greatest living American psychologist, Tom Wolfe, in his essay “The Me Decade”. It began life as an advertising slogan: “If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde.” The charm of this principle for constructing a new identity is that it is almost infinitely accommodating. It enables us to say to ourselves: If I have only one life to live, let me live it as … (fill in the blank).

All that sounded highly theoretical when I wrote about it first twenty years ago. I doubt that Hume or Pirandello would have imagined young intellectuals taking their theories to the extent of believing that their sexual identity, indeed their biological identity, was entirely a matter of their own arbitrary choice. (Tom Wolfe is a different matter—he might well have imagined just that.) Yet that is the situation we see today in some of the best universities in America or the world. Moreover, the choice of the identity-bearer, however seemingly arbitrary, is then enforced on his fellows by college administrations that insist we all address him or her by whatever neologism he or she has invented to express their new identities. (This also plays hell with traditional rules of grammar.)

As Richard Neuhaus observed in a different context, “Once orthodoxy is optional, it sooner or later becomes prohibited.” Professors who resist this new fashion in elective identities and continue to refer students as “him” or “her” (and related atrocities) are threatened with serious penalties, including the loss of their positions. This must be an especially tricky judgment for anyone of precise judgment because the rules governing the protection of new identities keep changing and are anyway beset with contradictions.

For instance, it is held to be morally wrong to assert that someone who is a man biologically but a woman by choice and surgery is not genuinely female. At the same time as sexual identity was becoming a voluntary matter, however, sexual orientation was being decreed to be a hard-and-fast certainty that brooks no alteration. Again, it is a secular sin to argue that someone who is gay might be able to change his sexual orientation to a heterosexual one by either religious commitment or psychiatric treatment. Indeed, so-called “reparative therapy” that promises to do just that is now outlawed in some jurisdictions—generally the same jurisdictions that encourage and even finance sex-change operations. Desire is fixed, it seems, but not the object of desire. And Harvey Fierstein’s defiant hymn to a gay identity, “I Am What I Am”, must be replaced by “I’m Not What I Was”.

If personal identities as seemingly fixed as one’s sex are malleable, however, then surely collective identities of nation and religion must be more so. After all, there may be disagreement about the degree to which a personal identity is socially constructed, but there can be no real doubt that a national identity is a social and collective one. That belief was the foundation of several ideologies in the last century that sought to replace the taken-for-granted national identities of Britain, Australia and the US with new post-national identities that looked beyond the nation to new collectivities rooted in ideology—whether ideologies of class or race.

Today we see the same impulse to replace nationhood with something else in the “Europeanism” of the European Union, in multiculturalism, in globalisation and global governance, and even in jihadism (which, viewed from a certain standpoint, is Islam’s umma transformed into a new post-national global identity). These new post-national identities were even seen as “inevitable” since according to German professors, nations and nationalisms were withering away and would need replacement institutions.

Recent elections have shown, however, that ethnic, national and religious identities have revived in Europe and the United States even though the intellectual consensus was that such identities were at best nostalgia and at worse fascism of one kind or another. Brexit, the support for Trump’s “America First” in “the white working class” in America, the rise of what is called “populism” in much of Europe, most significantly the upsurge of anti-immigration sentiment in countries like Germany and Sweden (which had been strongholds of the new intellectual post-nationalism) illustrate the stubborn persistence of traditional identities.

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Anguished Liberals Plan to ‘Scream Helplessly at the Sky’ on Anniversary of Trump Election By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 24th, 2017

Progressives have taken their Trump derangement syndrome to a whole new level…

Thousands of anguished libs in Boston and Philadelphia will be taking part in scream fests on Nov. 8 to commemorate the anniversary of Donald Trump’s election. Liberals in other cities around the country are likely to step up to the crazy plate as well as the big day draws near.

Over 4,000 Facebook users in the Boston area have RSVP’d to attend the event they’re calling “Scream helplessly at the sky on the anniversary of the election.” Another 33,000 have expressed interest in attending the event at the 383-year-old Boston Common.

The organizers say in a Facebook post: “Come express your anger at the current state of democracy, and scream helplessly at the sky!”

“This administration has attacked everything about what it means to be American,” Johanna Schulman, an activist and one of the organizers of the event, told Newsweek. “Who wouldn’t feel helpless every day? Coming together reminds us that we are not alone, that we are part of an enormous community of activists who are motivated and angry, whose actions can make a difference.”

Their actions may make a difference, to be sure, but perhaps not in the way they are intending. The sight of these unhinged minions binging on bitterness, self-pity, and outrage coming together to collectively howl at the moon is something that will drive more Americans into the arms of Trump.

“While the event calls upon people to Scream Helplessly, we want to convert that sense of helplessness into resistance, into action, and maybe even into optimism,” Schulman told Newsweek. “Although it is important to acknowledge the tragedy that befell our country on November 9th, we cannot let it defeat us!”

In Philadelphia, 538 people also plan to “scream helplessly at the sky” to mark Trump’s one-year anniversary as seen in a similar Facebook post. More than 3,000 people are “interested” in attending the event.

The event description reads: “Let’s have a primal scream for the current state of our democracy! Gather together after work at Philadelphia’s City Hall.”

The event is hosted by Philly UP (Philadelphia United for Progress), which describes itself as a “grassroots, feminist, intersectional group of passionate Philadelphia progressives.” CONTINUE AT SITE