Of all the strange courses taken by the Republican party over the last five years, I think the oddest is the strange, contradictory attack on, not just elitism, but on intelligence.
I say it's strange and contradictory because it is. Yes Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College, but for the most part the conservative movement and the Republican party of the last 50 years has been grounded in a very educated and very intelligent elite. It would be hard to argue that people like William Buckley, Frank Meyer, Lewis Powell and later George H.W. Bush and James Baker were not very educated, very intelligent, elite men.
So now we have Elena Kagan.
The major complaints I've seen are:
A) She's never been a judge. I think the statistic I saw is that 40% of the Supreme Court justices over the last 100 years were never judges before serving on the highest court. So that's not a real concern.
B) She "flipped" on don't ask, don't tell. She worked for Clinton who crafted the policy and now she opposes it. I can live with that, most people who supported it knew it was a stop-gap.
C) She's a Jew from New York. Recent opinion pieces say she is not in touch with the average American. First of all, she's lived in Boston, Chicago, and New York. The Supreme Court still resides in Washington, D.C., the last time I checked. If I'm not mistaken, those four cities are still in the United States, which would mean that she will have lived in more, different places in the country than most people.
D) She's "elite", from Harvard. You know what? I've argued in the past that it's a little concerning to me that of our large body of elected legislators to national office, an enormous percentage are lawyers from 5 schools. I stand by the idea that this is not very representative and it's pretty insular a way to think about the world and its problems. But for the nine most elite, most intellectual, least representative positions one can hold in the United States government, I'm okay with a dominance of highly educated, highly intelligent people. I will similarly argue that I think it's okay for our Joint Chiefs of Staffs to generally be from our service academies and other dedicated, elite military schools. I think it's prudent that if Harvard is the best law school in the country, that a lot of our justices went there. All? No. Most? I think that's okay.
And in general, I think it's a bad idea to propose that our Supreme Court appointees be average.
I say it's strange and contradictory because it is. Yes Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College, but for the most part the conservative movement and the Republican party of the last 50 years has been grounded in a very educated and very intelligent elite. It would be hard to argue that people like William Buckley, Frank Meyer, Lewis Powell and later George H.W. Bush and James Baker were not very educated, very intelligent, elite men.
So now we have Elena Kagan.
The major complaints I've seen are:
A) She's never been a judge. I think the statistic I saw is that 40% of the Supreme Court justices over the last 100 years were never judges before serving on the highest court. So that's not a real concern.
B) She "flipped" on don't ask, don't tell. She worked for Clinton who crafted the policy and now she opposes it. I can live with that, most people who supported it knew it was a stop-gap.
C) She's a Jew from New York. Recent opinion pieces say she is not in touch with the average American. First of all, she's lived in Boston, Chicago, and New York. The Supreme Court still resides in Washington, D.C., the last time I checked. If I'm not mistaken, those four cities are still in the United States, which would mean that she will have lived in more, different places in the country than most people.
D) She's "elite", from Harvard. You know what? I've argued in the past that it's a little concerning to me that of our large body of elected legislators to national office, an enormous percentage are lawyers from 5 schools. I stand by the idea that this is not very representative and it's pretty insular a way to think about the world and its problems. But for the nine most elite, most intellectual, least representative positions one can hold in the United States government, I'm okay with a dominance of highly educated, highly intelligent people. I will similarly argue that I think it's okay for our Joint Chiefs of Staffs to generally be from our service academies and other dedicated, elite military schools. I think it's prudent that if Harvard is the best law school in the country, that a lot of our justices went there. All? No. Most? I think that's okay.
And in general, I think it's a bad idea to propose that our Supreme Court appointees be average.
1 comment:
Republicans railing against elitism requires a certain cognitive dissonance, since they are entirely the party of the elite, at least socially and economically. But they have this weird unholy populism as well, which is necessary if they are going to attract non-elite voters, and raging against the elite is a good way to engage the rank & file and keep them motivated. So it's a tactical stance rather than a genuine one.
I actually miss the intellectual giants of the right. I did not agree with them, but they deserved respect and they were largely honest in their arguments. There are precious few in today's GOP about whom I could say the same.
A) I read the last guy on SCOTUS who hadn't been a judge was Rehnquist. So while I agree it's not at all a genuine argument against Kagan, I do have to concede that it is a departure from a "recent" custom which has been in place our entire lifetimes.
B) Yeah, I file that as "so what?" Hell, Sam Nunn and the Joint Chiefs have flipped! Times have changed, and for that matter, the Clinton administration was never happy with that turd of a compromise (which was really more of a defeat than a compromise).
C) Four of Five Boroughs will now be represented on SCOTUS. Now they need someone from "Real America" -- Staten Island. (I think I heard that on Colbert)
D) Yeah, that degree of inbreediing is weird. It's not terrible, since it does reliably select out really really sharp people. But Fucking weird. You mean there's nobody out of Stanford Law qualified for SCOTUS? Npbody from Northwestern? From Vanderbilt? Strange. It must have to do with social connections and the "Ivy Club." It's unfortunate, but it doesn't threaten the Republic.
you forgot:
E) She banned military recruiters from Harvard Law. The best rebuttal to that, of course, is that there were 44 other law schools that did the same thing in a coordinated manner - it doesn't reflect personal animus toward the military but a principled opposition to discriminatory hiring practices.
It's fair to mention that there has also been opposition to Kagan from the Left. Glenn Greenwald has been the lead man on that front. While his points seem very valid, I can't seem to bring myself to view her with a lot of concern.
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