Strictly Ballroom At Senate Dance Hall

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police... midnight raids, schoolchildren... evolution, writers and artists... censored... and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

What Senator Kennedy inaugurated with this monstrous canard was twenty years of thuggery, during which liberal bullies roughed up mainstream conservative judicial nominees with impunity.

But the Bork era is over. Last week conservatives beat the street thuggery of the liberal bullies. How did they do it? The surprising answer is “strictly ballroom.” The exquisite legal dancers Jacqui Roberts and Sammi Alito showed how to lead the Senate street thugs out onto the floor and dance through constitutional law and complicated precedents for hour after hour without error. But it was terribly frustrating for liberal Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Said he to Hugh Hewitt:

Alito on the Supreme Court is likely to vote to eliminate the Lemon test, which is the separation of Church and state, to allow far more presence of religion in government, and government-aided religion. Alito on the Supreme Court is likely to vote to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, to eliminate affirmative action on college universities. Alito on the Court is going to be a vote to allow much more government regulation of abortion. And if you like those results, then that’s why you want Samuel Alito on the Court.

Well now. A liberal finally found a government regulation to oppose.

But Prof. Chemerinsky is wrong. Conservatives are sick to death of “results.” The conservative critique of liberal jurisprudence is based not on a lust for results but a faith in process. And it is based on an almost erotic love for the mystery of law and the miracle of the Founders and their constitution of 1787.

Liberals act as though the law is all about them: their rights as political activists, their right as liberal women not to have children, their right as artists and writers to challenge society without mercy or decency. But if you look at the history of law you will find that, for the most part, it is not about liberals. Since its Babylonian origins it has focused much more on trying to sort things out when they go wrong, particularly when things go wrong in complicated commercial and trading ventures.

Take the case of the ship laden with grain that docked over two thousand years ago in the Piraeus, the port of ancient Athens, after an eventful voyage from Syracuse, Sicily. The problem was that two parties claimed ownership of the cargo, relates John Maxcy Zane in The Story of Law. There was another complication. On the voyage from Syracuse, one of the claimants had smashed a hole in the ship and then jumped off the stern to take off in the ship’s boat. Only he missed, fell in the water and was drowned. So who owned the cargo, counselor?

The heroic liberal era in jurisprudence began with the expansion of the commerce clause in the 1930s. It reached its apogee with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that sliced through the tangle of racism and forced Americans to confront their nation’s original sin of slavery and its shameful aftermath. But then the Supreme Court, egged on by the chattering classes, proceeded to coddle criminals, chase religion out of the public square, and free well-born women from the inconvenience of children. The result was a mess.

When there is a mess, when things are out of joint, then people start to think it is time for a change. They begin to feel that it is time to change from Senator Kennedy’s corrupt liberal America to Judge Alito’s decent conservative America.

And who knows? Maybe they are right. Then they start to write manifestos.

Our America, Senator Kennedy and Professor Chemerinsky, is a land where women, especially professional women in blue states, will have the right to an abortion but will know it is shameful, blacks will finally be freed from the liberal plantation, children will no longer be warehoused in monopoly government schools, writers and artists will no longer be censored by government university speech codes, and the federal courts will no longer be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens while liberals conduct seances on penumbras and emanations inside.

America will be a land purged of the gross accumulation of liberal injustice, the precipitate of liberal power wielded too proudly for too long. And liberals will be better for it.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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