Tag: Antonin Scalia

No lawyering this thing to death: Conservatives and the courts, from Nixon to Bush to Trump

Denouncing the federal judge who put a nationwide stay on his Muslim ban, Trump recently tweeted this: Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017 Picking up on how far-reaching Trump’s claim is, New York reporter Eric Levitz had this to say: But we have already become so desensitized to our new president’s 140-character authoritarianism, the fact that Trump characterized the “court system” as a national-security threat did not qualify as headline news Monday morning. We should not gloss over this. This was not merely an intemperate tweet. It was the president instructing the American people to view the […]

Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Leninist

Now that they’ve discovered the notion that a political party, faced with a dangerous political enemy, should suppress all internal criticism of its putative leader lest she be “harmed” by that criticism, and that the party should refrain from fractious internal debates lest it be ill-equipped to defeat the enemy, I wonder if liberals are rethinking their views on Lenin. The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party. Actually, by the standards of today’s liberal, Lenin’s strictures come off as relatively benign. He at least called […]

Law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America

Reading the liberal gushing over Scalia, the insistence that we give him his due, the kvelling over his friendship with Ginsburg, the somnambulant acceptance of the Republicans’ fuckery and the Court’s place in our elections, our politics, our lives—I’ve never felt more that Louis Hartz got it basically right: Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in America would be inconceivable without the national acceptance […]

Scalia: The Donald Trump of the Supreme Court

Antonin Scalia has died. Cass Sunstein, one of Obama’s favorite law professors and, for a time, regulatory czar in Obama’s administration, had this to say from his perch at Harvard Law School: Devastated by Justice Scalia’s death. One of the most important justices ever, a defender of the Rule of Law, and a truly wonderful person. — Cass Sunstein (@CassSunstein) February 13, 2016 (Suddenly I see the wisdom of Bill Buckley’s famous quip about Harvard.) In the coming days, the retrospectives on Scalia’s career and predictions of what is to come will be many; they’ve already begun. But for me Scalia is a figure of neither the past nor the future but of the present. If you want to understand how Donald Trump became […]

Liberalism = Conservatism + Time

Hillary Clinton in 2010 on the effects of racist colonialism on Africa: For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody. That’s the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa. Antonin Scalia in 1993 on the effects of racist segregation on America: At some time, we must acknowledge that it has become absurd to assume, without any further proof, that violations of the Constitution dating from the days when Lyndon Johnson was President, or earlier, continue to have an appreciable effect upon current operation of schools. We are close to that time. I was going […]

Nino! Now Playing at the Schubert Theater

In case you missed the whole Justice Scalia series, here’s a recap. Prologue: I’ve Got a Crush on You Scalia’s mission, by contrast, is to make everything come out wrong. A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules—leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative—but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being […]

Affirmative Action Baby

This is last of my 3-part series on Justice Scalia, Diva of Disdain.  Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.  The introduction is here. • • • • • In the United States, Tocqueville observed, a federal judge “must know how to understand the spirit of the age.” While the persona of a Supreme Court Justice may be “purely judicial,” his “prerogatives”—the power to strike down laws in the name of the Constitution—“are entirely political.” If he is to exercise those prerogatives effectively, he must be as culturally nimble and socially attuned as the shrewdest pol. How then to explain the influence of Scalia? Here is a man who proudly, defiantly, proclaims his disdain for “the spirit of the […]

Justice Scalia: American Nietzsche

This is Part 2 of my series on Justice Scalia, Diva of Disdain.  Part 1 is here; an introduction to the whole is here. • • • • • Like many originalists, Scalia claims that his jurisprudence has nothing to do with his conservatism. “I try mightily to prevent my religious views or my political views or my philosophical views from affecting my interpretation of the laws.” Yet he has also said that he learned from his teachers at Georgetown never to “separate your religious life from your intellectual life. They’re not separate.” Only months before Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1986, he admitted that his legal views were “inevitably affected by moral and theological perceptions.” […]

Diva of Disdain: Justice Scalia in Three Parts

Thanks to his rant from the bench yesterday—about the Arizona immigration law, which the Supreme Court mostly struck down—Justice Scalia is back in the news. But where many on the left see Scalia as a partisan hack, who twists the Constitution into a pretzel to get the result he wants, I’m more impressed by the  underlying consistency of his jurisprudence. That’s not to say he’s never inconsistent, but hackery is not his main problem. But to see the problem, you have to have a better sense of the man and his vision. In The Reactionary Mind, I devoted a chapter to that question. Last fall, I excerpted the introduction to that chapter. Given all the attention now being paid to […]

Isn’t It Romantic? Burke, Maistre, and Conservatism

  Over at The American Conservative, political theorist Sam Goldman offers a thoughtful response to The Reactionary Mind. Among its many virtues, Goldman’s post manages to get my argument right. As we’ve seen, that can be something of a challenge for some reviewers. Goldman also agrees with me on some fundamentals. Conservatism, he says, is a reactionary ideology. It is a defense of hierarchy against emancipatory movements from below. It’s not a disposition or an attitude; it’s not a philosophy of liberty or even of limited government.  (It supports the idea of limited government, Goldman says, but that’s a consequence, not a premise, of the theory.)  It is first and foremost a coherent set of ideas about inequality that gets […]

Easy To Be Hard: Conservatism and Violence

This is the second post in my (very) occasional series of excerpts from The Reactionary Mind. (You can read my first, on Justice Scalia, here.) This excerpt is from chapter eleven, “Easy to Be Hard,” in which I examine the relationship between conservatism and violence. I’ve removed all the footnotes; if you want to follow them up, buy the book! (Fun fact: an earlier version of this chapter appeared two years ago in The Chronicle Review.  It drove Jonah Goldberg crazy: “This piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education may be one of the uniformly dumbest piece [sic] of intellectual claptrap I’ve read in a good long while.”)   I enjoy wars. Any adventure’s better than sitting in an office. […]

I Got a Crush on You

With this post, I start an occasional (very occasional) series on this blog, which will feature brief excerpts from The Reactionary Mind. This excerpt is from chapter six, “Affirmative Action Baby,” which profiles the thought and theory of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Many think of Scalia as either a social conservative or fussy originalist. I argue that he’s neither. He’s something far stranger, more wild: one part Nietzschean, one part Social Darwinist, one part post-modernist, and two parts crazy.     Next to Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. He also loves the television show 24. “Boy, those early seasons,” he tells his biographer, “I’d be up to two o’clock, because […]