Sotomayor brings out the crazies, pt. 1
Image by talkradionews via Flickr
You’d think, 40+ years after the Civil Rights Act, the GOP would be wise enough to find someone other than an Alabama Senator with a thick drawl and a racist background to be its representative during the hearings for the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee. You’d think. But then you’d be doing something conservatives have preferred to avoid doing in recent years. Need evidence? Just head over to the website of National Review today.
There, you’ll find Mark Goldblatt decrying Senator Dick Durbin’s assertion that the judgment of history “is likely to revolve around the question, ‘Did she restrict freedom or did she expand it?’” Goldbatt considers this a ridiculous assertion. He writes:
..it’s virtually impossible to expand freedom without simultaneously restricting it. Take, for example, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared racial segregation illegal in public schools — a ruling now deemed sacred by liberals and conservatives alike. In one sense, Brown expanded the freedom of African Americans to send their children to previously all-white schools. In another sense, however, Brown restricted the freedom of communities in Kansas, and across the country, to keep their schools segregated along racial lines.
I really can’t get over this paragraph, and these sentences in particular: “In one sense, Brown expanded the freedom of African Americans to send their children to previously all-white schools. In another sense, however, Brown restricted the freedom of communities in Kansas, and across the country, to keep their schools segregated along racial lines.”
In one sense this is obviously true. But without acknowledging the fundamental ethical value of the Brown decision, it’s utterly vacuous. It’s bigotry dressed up as moral relativism. Try replacing, for instance, desegregation with murder: “In one sense, laws against murder expand the freedom of people to live with less fear of being murdered. In another sense, however, laws against murder restrict the freedom of people from murdering.” That’d be a perfectly meaningless statement…
Which make its something Jeff Sessions might say.
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Mr. Porter,
I believe that your blog is deficient in two areas, one substance and the second style.
First, you entirely wrong that Mr. Goldblatt’s comments, which presumably are representative of Republican thinking are nonsensical. It is nothing of the sort, it makes perfect sense. What he is saying is that for Black people achieve full equality with white people, white people have to loose some privileges, “freedoms” in Mr. Goldblatt’s terminology. This is both completely logical and patently true. That you and the vast majority of Americans believe Black and white Americans ought to be equal and that hereditary racial privileges are un-American does not mean it is illogical. This is indeed the core logic of racism. You simply find that logic reprehensible which is something quite different.
Further, since the Republican Party’s base in general and Mr. Sessions base in particular is deeply racist and desperate to hold on their last remaining racial prerogatives, a rear-guard defense of racism is only logical. The Republican Party is also the anti-immigrant party so Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination represents a double threat.
Additionally, there is the issue of gender. The Republican Party is also the party traditional male dominance. From their view no woman could possibly be as qualified for a seat on the SCOTUS as any man. How could the party of racism, male supremacy, and anti-immigrant policy not oppose Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination, to do so would be illogical.
Second, the style question, or lack thereof. Your blog begins with how the Sotomayor “brings out the crazies”. You then note how Mr. Sessions is racist and that Mr. Goldblatt is illogical and then you just end the blog. There is no flow or development, it is just a couple of disjointed observations about two isolated individuals.
What might have worked was the observation (that many have already made) the party’s base of conservative, angry, white rural men is surely shrinking and to continue to pander to such a base is ultimately political suicide, and thus crazy. What is really crazy though is that what choice do they have? Can the Republican Party make a serious play for the non-white, non-male, non-rural, non-racist population? No, they have dug in too deep to get out now. Stirring up the base is their only play. That is crazy.
Those are my thoughts.
[...] hearings in conservative press has been just as cringe-worthy and revealing—take an editorial that my friend Ethan highlighted on his blog, originally from the National Review’s website, in which Mark Goldblatt[,] [...]