The new Pew survey has a lot in it to discuss, but for the moment I would like to focus on the foreign policy section. As Jim Antle observed in his post on the survey’s treatment of social conservatism, there are potentially problems in Pew’s definitions and questions as there usually are in these surveys, and this applies to the questions on foreign policy as well. For example, the statement, “It’s best for the U.S. to be active globally” is a statement that seems set up to maximize agreement. After all, how many people are interested in passivity and inaction as such? While this kind of statement can help reveal the public’s vague and unformed sentiments and attitudes, it doesn’t tell us all that much about how the public thinks the United States should be acting around the world. It is worth noting, then, that even now there is just a slight majority that completely agrees with this statement (51%), which is almost entirely a product of Democrats who were dissatisfied with Bush and are now content with Obama, and it is essentially identical to the figure from 2003 near the height of post-9/11 hysteria and panic about foreign threats. No doubt, as Iraq has disappeared from the headlines and the recession has occupied more of the attention of most Americans, concerns that the U.S. continues to be hyperactive abroad are going to fade.

The survey does not show anything like instinctive or habitual “isolationism,” which is the bogey interventionists use to mobilize their supporters. Indeed, 90% agree to some extent with the general statement. What it does show is a divided country in which at most half of most demographics believes that an active U.S. role abroad is “best.” There is a much lower floor of support for this statement among women, Democrats and independents. Agreement has increased the most among these groups over the last two years, but this shows how weak their agreement with the statement really is. There has been a drop-off in Republican support as well from 54% in 2003 to 47% now, bottoming out at 44% two yeas ago. Significantly, the strongest agreement with this statement comes from college graduates. Their agreement has not dipped below 51% over the last six years, and now stands at 62%.

On the face of it, this would indicate that half of the country is on board with America’s present role in the world. The relevant political point here is that the other half has almost no representation in government. Nonetheless, in the same survey 78% agreed that “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” This is again a very simple statement with which it is easy to agree, and it does not tell us what most Americans think would be the proper balance between the two. It is an encouraging sign that an overwhelming majority thinks that our priorities are out of order and our attention is too focused on foreign problems. As the survey report notes, this figure of 78% is significantly lower than it was in the early ’90s, but it remains remarkably high considering that the U.S. is engaged in two military campaigns and a larger, ill-defined Long War of which these campaigns are ostensibly a part. This suggests that there is no pressing concern about impending “existential threats” from abroad.

The “peace through military strength” question seems designed to elicit a favorable response from Republicans, many of whom would probably agree with any Reagan formulation regardless of what it was, so it is perhaps no surprise that Republicans overwhelmingly agree with this (75%). What is interesting is the difference in agreement among age groups. Back in 2002, a slim majority of 18-29 year olds agreed with this formulation (51%), but now just 38% agree. This is the largest drop in any age group, and helps explain why 18-29 year olds have fled the GOP in large numbers over the last five years. 45% of this group voted for Bush, and just 32% backed McCain. There are undoubtedly other factors that worsened Republican fortunes among so-called Millennials, but inasmuch as they regard the Iraq war as the product of a “peace through military strength” mentality they have turned against both that view and the party that espouses it most fervently. It seems improbable that they will be won back by redoubled hawkishness and nationalistic bluster.

I find myself compelled to keep writing about this subject. The continuing objections to Sonia Sotomayor as a racist and practitioner of identity politics simply baffle me. Her record on discrimination cases alone seems to show that the latter charge is bogus, and the other charge is so absurd that I can’t believe it continues to circulate. As if to show just how absurd the charge of racism is in this case, Jeffrey Lord sums up his view with a statement that I think can only be called crazy:

Were this nomination a Hollywood script it would be pitched as Birth of a Nation meets the Weather Underground.

Conservatives write things like this, and then they wonder why minorities flee from them in droves. What inspires someone to liken the judicial nomination of a rather boring, conventional center-left Puerto Rican judge to a film that glorifies the KKK and a modern domestic terrorist organization? Given Lord’s past writings, obsessive anti-racism run amok seems to be the answer here, but while he may be one of the most vocal Lord is hardly alone. During this entire debate, we are hearing endlessly about the importance of merit and why merit must never be outweighed by identity considerations. All right. We are reminded again and again of the hope that everyone will be judged by character and not by race. That sounds reasonable. So why is it that Sotomayor’s critics seem to be going out of their way to ignore her merits and her achievements and have been fixating on questions of identity and identity politics to the exclusion of almost everything else? Perhaps deep within the cocoon, articles that earnestly claim that Limbaugh and Martin Luther King are fighting the same fight seem credible, but what everyone else sees is little more than a collective panic that an Hispanic has been appointed to the Supreme Court. Her critics have been railing against her allegedly faulty judgment, but they have managed to make their arguments so poorly that it is the soundness of their judgment that most people are bound to question.

No less remarkable are the descriptions her critics offer about her. According to Shelby Steele, who writes on almost nothing except for subjects related to race, she is “race-obsessed.” Andrew chimes in and refers, apparently without any irony, to the “constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity” and goes on to say that “the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.” What evidence do we have that her consciousness of her identity is either constant or oppressive, or for that matter where is the evidence that she “harps on it” aggressively or otherwise? She talks about it, she refers to it, she takes pride in it, she thinks that it matters–this is not obsession or aggression.

As you have probably noticed already, two new blogs have joined the TAC line-up: Dan McCarthy’s Tory Anarchist, and the group blog PostRight. Dan is a colleague of many years, and I have always enjoyed the writing he has done on his blog, so I’m pleased to see that he will be doing more of it again. I’m looking forward to engaging with the arguments at PostRight, which I think my rather unusual mix of readers from across the spectrum will find very interesting. If you haven’t already, go take a look at the new arrivals.

Setting aside the banal fact that the judicial system is a part of our democratic process, there is a clear, straightforward and well-known way to overturn Roe v. Wade– pass a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion. ~Freddie deBoer

It’s a curious thing about such “banal facts”–sometimes they aren’t facts at all, but rather baseless assertions. The judiciary is part of our constitutional, formally republican system, but it is the one branch of government that is as far removed from “the democratic process” as can be. All of the things that we are supposed to prize about the judiciary–its independence, its (theoretical) adherence to the rule of law and its (theoretical) safeguarding of constitutional protections against the other branches–are not only undemocratic, but they are sometimes explicitly anti-democratic. It is set up this way in order to prevent ochlocracy and passions of the moment from destroying fundamental constitutional protections in fits of panic or anger. What Roe does, as Freddie knows full well, is to ground abortion in one of these fundamental protections, which therefore cannot be infringed upon by statute or referendum. To say that Roe doesn’t take the question out of the democratic process would be to say that the right that the Court discerned, or rather imagined, in 1973 isn’t considered legally to be the same kind of constitutionally protected right as any of the others. However, to admit that a constitutional amendment is required to make abortion illegal is to acknowledge that it is the same, and it is to grant that the right guaranteed by Roe is outside of anything like the normal democratic process as constitutional rights would have to be. If constitutional rights are still potentially revocable as part of the constitutional process, that isn’t what anyone means when he says that something is or isn’t subject to the democratic process.

Judges are not wholly unaccountable to the people, but in practice federal judges are never impeached for their rulings. This would be seen as political interference and a violation of the judiciary’s independence. In many cases, this arrangement is probably better than many alternatives, but like any ultimately unaccountable institution the Court can abuse and has abused its power, and it can do so in no small part because of the power it already arrogated to itself. Even to the extent that new appointments to the Court indirectly reflect the views of the majority at a given moment, the judges in question are expected not to serve as reliable representatives of their faction or ideological clique, but are instead supposed to respect precedent. This is particularly true of conservative judges, and it is especially true when it comes to their views on Roe. Even in those limited, roundabout ways that elections might influence the composition of the Court and affect how the Court rules on cases related to abortion, elections have their smallest effect on this specific question. Freddie knows all of this, so who is he trying to kid?

The amendment process is a somewhat indirectly democratic means to make changes to that system. This makes the amendment process a slow, drawn-out, but nonetheless democratic remedy to perceived flaws in the system. The amendment process is extremely slow and arduous because there was once a quaint idea that dramatic changes in the power and scope of government could and should only be achieved through this process. Likewise, there was an assumption that there needed to be numerous obstacles to amending the fundamental law to make it more difficult for majoritarian tyrannies to strip people of their constitutional protections. Once the Court began discovering rights, or, if we want to be less pejorative, extending the protections of existing rights in new ways, what had once been within the power of state legislatures and electorates to regulate as they saw fit was placed behind a series of huge obstacles that cannot be overcome without the building up of super-majorities throughout the entire country in favor of a certain position. That would all be well enough if the right in question were not so constitutionally dubious and morally outrageous, since this process is supposed to be extremely difficult and it is supposed to require the support of most of the people, but the so-called right we’re talking about is both of these things.

Each time someone proposes a federalist compromise on this question to return the issue to the individual states, defenders of the status quo insist, as one might expect they would, that the guarantees of constitutional rights cannot be left up to the states and the people, because they understand that returning the question to the political sphere and the democratic process would lead to at least some restrictions that they argue are violations of fundamental protections. For the most part, it seems to me that supporters of Roe are usually quite proud of the fact that the “right to choose” is no longer subject to the democratic process, and they are frequently alarmed by anything that threatens to return it to its former status. One cannot argue that there is both a constitutional right at stake and also argue that the entire issue remains subject to the democratic process.

Having drawn attention to parts of the Cairo speech I found quite lacking, I wanted to address some of the more recent criticisms of it that I have seen. For instance, David Frum lodges a complaint that I have seen expressed several times in the last few days:

But whereas in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Obama was explaining two groups of Americans to each other, in Cairo he exhibited the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies. It is as if he saw himself as a judge in some legal dispute, People of the Islamic World v. United States. But the job to which he was elected was not that of impartial judge, but that of leader and champion of the American nation.

This fails to appreciate fully what Obama is trying to do in all three episodes. Describing any of these speeches simply as attempts to explain two groups to one another is correct as far as it goes, but it is insufficient. The speeches are organized this way, which creates the illusion of a dialogue that Obama is serving to mediate, but to perceive Obama as “detached” and “equidistant” between the two sides is to fall for each speech’s main conceit, which is that retreating behind phrases such as “fair-minded words” or “mutual respect” allows Obama to dodge the hardest questions. In this way, the status quo may be preserved with relatively little controversy. After all, it was not primarily to build a bridge between pro-life and pro-choice Americans that Obama spoke at Notre Dame, but to partake of Notre Dame’s reputation to legitimize his policy views and signal that a major Catholic institution deemed his views normal and acceptable. That Notre Dame willingly played its part in Obama’s maneuver is one reason why the university’s administration has appropriately come in for so much abuse. As ever, Obama puts on a display of respect for opponents to gain ground for his cause and, when necessary, to defuse controversy surrounding himself.

The approach that conservatives find infuriating when directed at them is the same one he was using on Thursday in Cairo: define the limits of the debate, establish one’s own views as the balanced, reasonable center of the debate, invite people from either side to join the ostensibly reasonable center, and thereby marginalize those who continue to ignore or oppose you. What critics such as Frum keep missing, much as many others missed it during Obama’s time at the Trinidad Summit of the Americas, is that Obama is making it much more difficult for other nations to oppose the United States without marginalizing themselves internationally. With respect to the Cairo speech, it does not legitimize or empower fanatics to acknowledge concerns that they have traditionally exploited to their advantage. On the contrary, acknowledging these concerns deprives the fanatics of their monopoly on paying attention and defining the appropriate responses to these concerns. Better still, acknowledging a past event, such as the U.S. role in ousting Mossadegh, steals the power from those who have made use of a real grievance for their own ends. More than this, though, simple acknowledgment of past error allows for a delay and deferral of any substantive change in present-day policy. Ironically, the more unequal the comparison between U.S. actions and those with which Obama compared them, the less substantive change in present policy there will be. Mild displays of humility make real concessions less urgent, and it makes it more likely that they can be avoided entirely. Those who are generally satisfied with establishment policies and the current status quo as usual have the least to fear from Obama, and so it is fitting that they are the ones making the loudest complaints.

While I still think the Cairo speech failed, it failed because significant numbers of persuadable Muslims are not going to be won over by an appeal that urges a sort of satyagraha for the Palestinians at the same time that the bombardment of Lebanon and strikes in Gaza go unmentioned. Obama could have made similar acknowledgments of the costs of these campaigns, and thereby deflected attention from the foursquare backing the U.S. gave to both. Even better, he could have recognized that these campaigns were damaging to American and Israeli interests and benefited no one except for Hizbullah and Hamas, but there was no way Obama was going to say that.

On the other hand, Obama was wise not to do what Frum would have him do, which was to play the blustering cheerleader. We have had years of self-congratulation and championing of the American cause in words, but these have invariably been matched with policies that do not aid or champion American interests. If we must suffer the damage from bad policies, we may as well try to limit the damage with conciliatory rhetoric and Obama’s characteristic nods that are and always have been head fakes designed to throw his opponents off balance.

Update: Given that Dueholm is “invested” in preserving America’s position in the world, it is no surprise that he sees “Obama’s rhetorical embrace of even-handedness and humility as a feature rather than a bug.” If preserving and extending the status quo is what one wants, this is not a bad way to go about it. What continues to puzzle me is why other people who seem to be even more invested in the same thing do not take Dueholm’s view.

Second Update: It was bound to happen. Damon Linker and I agree on something.

I discuss the speech more in a new column for The Week.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, stretching from India to Indonesia and from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, which makes Islam perhaps the world’s most heterodox faith [bold mine-DL]. ~Lee Smith

Via Matt Feeney

I will leave the speech itself for another time, but this sentence in particular has to be one of the more odd responses to it I have seen. It is all very well to acknowledge that Islam is not monolithic and that there is a variety of sects, traditions and ethnicities among Muslims around the world, but this does not imply a greater degree of heterodoxy than there is in the other comparably large (indeed larger) world religion of Christianity. Smith really means to say heterogeneous or diverse or perhaps multifaceted. Heterodox is simply the wrong word. Given that there is no single recognized teaching authority in Islam and no widely accepted institutional authority, one might expect there to be a great deal more difference of belief among Muslims than there is. That said, this does not have the political implications Smith fears.

Smith worries that Obama will lend credibility to Pan-Islamist forces by addressing Muslims in general, but Smith need not be so concerned. Hawks are always complaining that Muslims fail to show sufficient Pan-Islamic solidarity when it comes to showing gratitude to the U.S. for having come to the aid of this or that Muslim group over the years, but if we ignore for a moment the one-sided nature of such complaints we can see that a lack of Pan-Islamic solidarity is normal, much as most Christians around the world are not much bothered by what has been happening to the Copts or Chaldeans. As I remarked during the last round of caterwauling about Obama’s speech in Ankara:

It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims. In other words, Americanists want Muslims to think like Pan-Islamists when it serves Washington’s purposes (i.e., when it is supposed to make Muslims favorably disposed to us), but Muslims must never think like Pan-Islamists when it doesn’t.

In any case, the fear of building up Pan-Islamist power is misplaced for the same reason that fretting about the threat from latter-day caliphalists is misguided. Smith has already hit upon one of the reasons why politically active Pan-Islamism will go nowhere: the internal divisions and differences among Muslims, which separate them by ethnicity, language, culture and sect, make Pan-Islamism as non-viable as a movement as the fictitious construct of “Islamofascism” is nonsensical propaganda. Like the fiction of a unified communist world, which conveniently ignored the national rivalries and hatreds that actually shaped the policies of communist states, the Pan-Islamist menace that Obama has supposedly helped to build up with today’s speech is imaginary and the product of exaggerating the size and nature of the threats to our security. If there is anything encouraging about the speech, which I found underwhelming for all kinds of reasons, it is that Obama showed no signs of defining America’s real enemies according to the outlines of jihadist self-presentation and refused to lend credibility to a simplified definition of jihadism that encompasses any and all Islamic resistance and revolutionary groups under some overarching banner that obliges us to make all of them our enemy.

As promised, here is the last Sotomayor post in my discussion with Jim Antle. Concerning Jim’s remark that we have begun repeating ourselves, I agree that it does seem as if we have spent much of the time talking past each other. It is almost as if our perspectives were informed by sufficiently different experiences that shape how we analyze and judge the very same materials and facts. Acknowledging this as a real factor in judgment does not make one a believer in things called Antle Logic and Larison Logic. It also doesn’t mean that there is not an interpretation that is more valid than another–not all frameworks are equal. One reading does do more justice to the text than the other, but it seems that consensus is unreachable at this point. From each perspective, the correct interpretation seems obvious, and it is mystifying to each one why the other person cannot see it. Meanwhile, the pitfalls and dangers of the distorting effects of the other’s framework are only too clear. Jim is wary of a breakdown of a certain universal rationality, and therefore finds in Sotyomayor’s remarks a defense of “a specifically Latino way of judging.” I tend to see far less danger arising from a synthesis of the particular and the universal, and so I do not detect any hint that she has posited the existence of “a specifically Latino way of judging” in the way that Jim seems to mean it.

She has said that her background informs her perspective, which seems like a commonplace observation. She described it using racial and gender categories, which is what makes people on the right nervous because they are wary of how these categories have been employed by people on the left over the last thirty years, but her remarks were actually unobjectionable. The overreaction to her statements mirrors almost perfectly the hysteria surrounding some of McCain’s campaign commercials last summer. Back then, it was liberals who were imagining racist tropes and symbolism where none existed, because they were convinced that the GOP simply had to be using them against a presidential nominee with Obama’s background. Conservatives who have been berating Sotomayor over this speech are making arguments that really are as unfounded as those made against those commercials last year.

A more important factor, then, is that Jim and I seem to be arguing in two very different frameworks, which is a problem I have mentioned before in connection with the debate over the relationship of doubt and faith. Once again, here is Fr. Behr discussing the Arian controversy:

This is an important point: at stake are different paradigms, within which doctrinal formulations take flesh. The similarity of terms and expressions, yet difference of paradigm or imaginative framework, explains why most of the figures in the fourth century seem to be talking past each other, endlessly repeating the same point yet perennially perplexed as to why their opponents simply don’t get it.

I imagine that Jim and I are equally perplexed by the other’s argument for this reason. The comparison is not exact, but I think it might be useful for thinking about significantly different structures of thought that can emerge within a religious or ethnic group, to say nothing of different structures that can develop between them. This can be understood entirely at the level of culture rather than nature. Despite our many points of agreement on politics and policy, I keep getting the impression that Jim and I aren’t just reading a few statements in different ways, but that we are pitting significantly different frameworks against one another and so we inevitably end up going round in circles. This becomes very frustrating for everyone in the debate. Julian Sanchez has more bluntly summed up his frustration:

For one, it is basically impossible for me to believe that anyone with two functioning brain cells could read the “wise Latina” speech in full and find the notion that it’s “racist” anything but laughable.

As understandable as Sanchez’s anger may be, this is not entirely fair. Given what Sanchez sees as manifestly unfair treatment of Sotomayor, he may not be terribly concerned about this, but it is too easy to write off her critics so quickly. On this question, they are clearly wrong, but again the problem is that it is not at all clear for those working from their assumptions. Ironically, even though the very intractable nature of the debate confirms Sotomayor’s point about different backgrounds and perspectives inevitably informing judgment (much as Jeffrey Lord’s autobiographical account explains why he interprets Sotomayor’s remarks so wrongly), the truth of her observation seems to guarantee that her critics will continue to find deeply offensive what is quite unobjectionable. Evidently, intelligent people can and do read the speech and take this interpretation seriously, and they in turn find the failure to see the merit in reading it this way to be “bizarre.” This seems baffling to Sanchez, as it does to me. I doubt it will work, but I will make one more attempt to discuss this in a way that will not baffle Jim.

Decentralists like to talk about place, and they usually prefer local control over as many things as possible. What does this have to do with anything? After all, why do I keep bringing up references to decentralism in a debate over a Supreme Court nominee? It is certainly not because I think that Sotomayor has any significant enthusiasm for the Tenth Amendment, but because those who are interested in decentralism and localism have no reason to employ universalist assumptions that one’s background and history are and ought to be irrelevant in judgment. If Sotomayor is invoking heritage and experience for different purposes than they would and if she is operating in a very different tradition, that should not prompt them to deplore such statements. I don’t assume for a moment that Sotomayor has any sympathy for decentralism (she is, after all, a federal judge), but those who do have sympathy for it shouldn’t want to employ arguments that, if accepted, would significantly weaken the case for decentralism.

What is one of the main arguments in favor of decentralization and local control? Of course, distributing and spreading out power to prevent it from becoming concentrated and dangerous are important, but one of the practical arguments in its favor is that locals understand their own needs and problems better than more distant officials. They are more likely to craft rules that accommodate conditions in their area and might be poorly suited elsewhere. Familiarity with local conditions informs judgments and decisions, and ensures that the quality of those decisions more often than not will be better than those made by people unfamiliar with those conditions. Even our hawkish friends can appreciate the appeal of this–these are those famous “conditions on the ground” to which Presidents always pay ritual homage. Somehow, what counts as necessary and vital for good decision-making in every other sphere of government is now not merely of no value in judging, but it has somehow become a serious liability.

Someone will say, “Yes, but a lot of what you’re talking about has to do with self-government and that’s part of the political process. Judging is different.” Indeed, judging is different, but not absolutely. If anything, the judges are under an even greater obligation to attend to both what the law requires and the specific circumstances of each case. That is, they should make themselves as familiar as possble with the conditions and factors that led to the case before them. How is it anything other than a benefit to have judges who could offer some partial insight into elements of the case that might remain opaque or hidden from the others because of their different experiences and perspectives?

Nobody as far as I can tell has criticized Sotomayor for expressing pride in her roots and her community. ~Jim Antle

No, Limbaugh and Gingrich have just called her a racist and declared her unfit to be a judge because she has done so, because these people have mistakenly read her statements to say something that they do not say. (I will not dwell on the more direct whining about the pronunciation of her name or her culinary preferences.) No criticism of her pride to be seen here–move along! Contra Antle, I am not “trying to shoehorn” Sotomayor’s remarks “into a context of particularism and a paleoconservative understanding of diversity.” I wouldn’t dispute that she was speaking in a context of “multiculturalism, critical legal theory, and more mainstream forms of judicial liberalism.” Clearly, she was. As Jim keeps reminding us, she was speaking at Berkeley’s law school, and she is indeed a judicial liberal, albeit evidently not the fire-breathing radical sort that some of her early critics imagined. However, I would reject entirely the idea that she is espousing racism in the process, and I would insist that conservatives who have sympathies for particularism and decentralism ought to criticize Sotomayor for just about anything else besides her statements about her identity, which Jim has halfway admitted she is “entitled to celebrate.” Her critics keep talking about what would have happened to a white man had he said something comparable. Well, consider what is going to happen in the future to anyone on the right who expresses even a smidgen of pride in his culture or heritage after the blatantly unfair interpretations her words have received.

As bad as the double standard is today, it can always get worse. Indeed, if the critics believe in the reality of said double standard, they must know that flinging these epithets will simply increase the disparity of standards. They may think they are redressing the imbalance by applying an absurd standard to all, but this is like trying to use the Ring to defeat Sauron: you will be consumed, and Sauron will remain. It is rather like using the language of rights and autonomy to oppose abortion. At first, it seems like the smart move, because it speaks to people in a language they will readily understand, but by buying into the assumptions of one’s opponents the debate’s outcome is fixed before it even starts.

The greatest flaw with multiculturalism is that it is vapid, superficial and in large part negative, but as Jim mentions Sotomayor’s statement is noticeably different from that:

Sotomayor’s remarks are preferable to other multiculturalist pronouncements in that she expresses pride in an actually existing culture rather than a generic celebration of non-whiteness.

Jim then resorts to a standard complaint against multiculturalism:

But at its root is a point of view where some cultures and heritages can be celebrated while others cannot (some are in fact denigrated).

There is truth to this when speaking about multiculturalism in general, as I have known first-hand in many school settings (memorably, I was informed by a classmate that, as a white person, I had no culture to celebrate), but what Sotomayor’s critics never seem to do is to get to a point where they can show that she has applied this lamentable double standard. If she does hold such a view, we cannot determine this from what she said eight years ago, and even if she believed this it would still make no sense for conservatives to turn around and deplore her celebration of her culture and heritage by pretending that an unobjectionable statement is actually an expression of pernicious racism. By the rules her critics are setting up, woe betide the particularist or decentralist who wants to stress the importance of place and rootedness. The localist who bemoans deracination will be even more of a target than he is today. No one who wants to promote this agenda could possibly want that. After all, someone will be at the ready to declare that all of this is code for racism and other ills, and Sotomayor’s critics will have provided a very public, memorable precedent for misinterpreting statements in just this way.

P.S. On the Ricci case, I have to keep driving home the point that one can believe that the panel’s ruling was entirely consistent with current law and that Ricci and his co-workers were shafted, as Jim puts it. As Noah said earlier in this debate, the latter problem is a matter of policy, and conservatives might profitably focus their energies on changing that policy and invoke Ricci’s case to make that change. Here is Noah:

Weighing conflicting claims to justice and coming up with workable rules for adjudicating them that can be the basis of social consensus is what the political process is supposed to do.

Now it seems likely that the Court is going to reverse the appeals court in the matter of Ricci, but what conservatives should be spending their time on is working to change the law so that such a case becomes far less likely. The idea that no one is questioning whether the New Haven firefighters in the case have been badly mistreated is odd. For the last week and a half, it seems as if quite a lot of people have been openly and actively questioning this very thing.

Jim writes elsewhere:

In the real world where this ideology has been in vogue, expressions like Sotomayor’s routinely coexist with accusations of racism against conservatives. I’d like to hear of an example where it has ever been the other way around.

I’m sorry, but if we are talking about the real world, could we remember back to the days of 2008 when Obama was routinely accused of racism or at least of sympathy with racists, and we were treated to more than a few celebrations of “Real America”? Jim might object and say that Obama did not suffer the same fate that would have befallen a white conservative Republican, which is true, but that didn’t make the obsession with Obama’s pastors and the deployment of guilt by association attacks any more sensible. Then as now, all of the haranguing of Obama about alleged racism simply reinforced the very double standard that bothers conservatives so much.

Jim:

Unlike some others, I have not actually called Sotomayor a racist…

No, not in so many words. What Jim said was this:

Moreover, the demographics of this country have reached the point where racialist and separatist statements [bold mine-DL] by nonwhites who aspire to high office have to be held to the same standard as those of whites.

So Jim thinks her statement was racialist, and not racist? Is that it? I can grant that there is a distinction between the two, but either way the misinterpretation is still pretty remarkable.

P.P.S. Jim concludes:

The only way I see any “boomerang” effect for conservatives is if they actually say or do something racist.

This is the whole point. What constitutes “something racist” is being watered down so much that far more conservatives will be deemed to have said or done “something racist” for the most simple expressions of pride in their own ancestry and culture. Had Sotomayor actually said that her “race physiologically qualifies” her to be a judge, that would be one thing, but yet again what she did say is being turned into something very different.

Update: Jim responds at some length. I will be writing my final post on the subject in reply, but there was one point I wanted to make now. Jim says that “the bulk of criticism of her Latina lecture that I have seen — and certainly the entirety of my criticism — has not been her discussion of her background. It has concerned her arguments with Miriam Cedarbaum and Sandra Day O’Connor about impartiality and race neutrality.” As for what he has seen, I will take Jim’s word for it, so I assume he would find Jeffrey Lord’s article on this subject, which dwells on the former with the zeal of an anti-racist inquisitor and barely touches on the latter, to be quite unsatisfactory. Likewise, I trust he would find Thomas Sowell’s weak analysis lacking as well.