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Returning to the Sotomayor discussion one more time, I wanted to respond to something else Jim Antle said. He wrote:
The practical result of eliminating color-blind justice will not be that all Americans celebrate their rootedness in unique, decentralized communities instead of being deracinated, atomistic individuals. And in terms of political norms, refraining from criticizing Sotomayor will not keep conservatives from being called racist when they criticize immigration policy, racial preferences, or anything else that gets conservatives called racist.
It is questionable whether “color-blind justice” is actually in danger here, or at least it is questionable whether it is in danger because of a judge such as Sotomayor. More to the point, it is much less likely that Americans will be able to “celebrate their rootedness in unique, decentralized communities,” if they are going to be able to do this at all, if Americans of all backgrounds are confronted with social stigma and ostracism for expressing pride in their roots and communities. The question, then, is why those conservatives who presumably could see some virtue in “rootedness in unique, decentralized communities” should be so scandalized by statements that reflect positively on particularity and diversity. Indeed, one of the main things that is so deeply troubling about official celebrations of diversity is that they are so very often wedded to programs of political centralization and uniformity.
As for the other point, it is true that refraining from making baseless charges of racism against Sotomayor will not stop other baseless attacks against conservatives from being made. However, it does seem all but certain that making such baseless charges one of the main lines of attack against Sotomayor will make it far more likely that even those conservative arguments that were once given the benefit of the doubt will be willfully misread in just the same way that critics seem to have been misreading Sotomayor’s statements. If there are already some conservative arguments on immigration, affirmative action or other policy questions that are frequently dismissed and ridiculed as racist, how many more will be tarred with this label as a result of conservatives’ having dramatically lowered the standards of what counts as a racist statement? How many conservative pundits and radio talk show hosts will wind up on the wrong side of the sweeping, unreasonably broad defintion of racism that conservatives are now employing to try to trip up Sotomayor? Perhaps most telling of all, this smear on Sotomayor will not advance conservative causes one inch, but will boomerang and harm them significantly, and those who recklessly flung these charges should not be surprised if they come back to haunt them later on.
Filed under: politics
“…those who recklessly flung these charges should not be surprised if they come back to haunt them later on”
That assumes that people like Rush or Levin or even Newt have anything to be haunted about. None of them are running for election and as far as I can tell, they are all about selling politically based entertainment. They’re already considered racists by large swaths of the populace, so they risk no loss in image — just an even more dedicated frothed up angry base to gain.
Maybe some of these folks don’t care, but it will be rich if they complain about such attacks directed against them in the future. It’s as if someone who spent a significant amount of his time criticizing Israel decided to start flinging the charge of anti-Semitism around with abandon to serve some other, more immediate purpose after having spent years or decades resisting the excessive and abusive deployment of the same charge against him. Even if such a person believed that the charges were valid, he would never be able to outdo his opponents in outrage and demonization on this score in any case.
The more recent conservative habit of using fascist as a pejorative term against jihadis or even against their domestic opponents is another case in point. Conservatives are not going to help themselves by expanding the definition of fascist to apply to more and more kinds of views, because this overly-broad definition will then be applied to them even more rigorously by their opponents. It is just very foolish to do things like this.
You also have idiots like G. Gordon Liddy on the air apparently referring to the Spanish language as “illegal alien” and questioning what sort of judgments Sotomayor might make when she’s PMSing, and all manner of people advancing an argument that she’s unqualified and purely an affirmative action pick, without much apparent review of her record or resume. So not only is the bar being lowered in terms of what’s considered racist, but a decent number of conservatives are making what are by fairer standards actually rather racist/sexist arguments. I’m pretty liberal so obviously my opinion on this is suspect, but I would guess most people are not coming out of this episode with a favorable impression of the GOP’s attitudes about race and gender.
A sort of Gresham’s Law of disputation has been at work for a long time when it comes to a presentation of the conservative case. Republican/Conservative standard operating procedure for at least two decades has been to flood the tv and airwaves with spin, much of it frivolous and tangential, whenever a major issue of public policy or a personal action made its way onto the front burner. This coincided more or less with the take off of talk radio and cable news which provided a perfect vehicle for this sort of argumentation. It was fairly bad in the 90’s but really assumed monstrous proportions after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion as Rove and the Republican political machine sought to frame the debate in their favor. Gradually the stridency became greater and greater, and the tendentiousness of the claims ever more extreme. Good conservative argument was driven out by bad as the lies, exaggerations and distortions, not to mention the massive incompence of the Bush administration, undermined the credibility of “anything” conservatives had to say. Finally, the rhetoric surrounding the Sotomayor nomination has moved into the the surreal. Fat, middle aged, mainly southern, white men accusing a hispanic woman who grew up in the projects and propelled herself to the top of her profession of being racist, reverse racist, a member of a hispanic KKK, worse than David Duke, lacking intellect and having menstrual problems have an Alice in Wonderland quality about them. But a very ugly one. The public doesn’t make distinctions between Session and McConnell (who in any case have been somewhat reticent about stamping on this kind of stuff) and Gingrich, Limbaugh et al. In the public mind all these guys ARE the Republican party. It’s hard to believe the president and his political henchmen didn’t anticipate all this, the mystery is why the elected leadership of the GOP doesn’t show the remotest political acumen in dealing with it. The irony is that with this as with so much else (polarization, the southern strategy) the Republican party is being hoist on its own petard because it forgot Gresham’s Law can apply to other things than money.