Roberts Nomination Strategery At Work - Road to the Middle Class

THE FIRST REACTIONS to the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court indicate that the Bush Administration has thought long and hard about court nominations. Roberts is young, brilliant, boringly straight arrow, and has only been on the bench for a year and a half. Thus Charles Hurt forecasts an easy nomination process, and John Podhoretz evaluates him as suitably boring. As the nomination process starts let us conduct a quick tour d´horizon.

Grand Strategy We want liberals to abandon their living constitution doctrine. They have developed this doctrine over the last half century because they have come to rely on the Supreme Court to rule in favor of their educated elite agenda. We want to change their minds. We want them to see the constitution as a bulwark against the evil right-wing agenda. They will start to change their minds when a conservative court starts goring their oxen. Putting a conservative on the court hastens the day when they will opportunistically discover the virtues of a “dead” constitution over a living one.

Strategy We want a court that has a smaller appetite for power, that does not seek, like the Massachusetts High Court, to be out there on the cutting edge of societal evolution. In that sense Roberts appears to be a good choice. He appears to be a work horse, not a show horse.

Tactics In the past few years as Microsoft has begun to focus above all on the issue of security they have come to appreciate, like the military, the advantage of a small target. A small target is more difficult to destroy. So they have begun to work to make Windows smaller, with fewer entrances and exits. The Bushies have applied this understanding in the Roberts nomination. Roberts has spent most of his life litigating, so he doesn´t have a long paper trail. Also, he appears to be a mild-mannered man without enemies. Writes Podhoretz:

Roberts has, by all accounts, an astonishingly mild demeanor. He´s a churchgoing father of adopted children, personally well-liked on all sides of the political spectrum — evidently because he hasn´t given anybody a reason to dislike him personally.

Notice too that if this mild-mannered man gets confirmed without a big fight it cools down the whole judicial nomination furnace. It will be harder for the liberal activists to blow their supporters up into white heat for the next nomination.

No doubt Ralph Neas of the (liberal) People for the American Way and Nan Aron of the (liberal) Alliance for Justice will deploy every argument they can against Roberts. But, as of today, it looks like they have an uphill fight ahead of them.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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