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.

Michael Barone argues that Republicans should pursue opposition to centralization, particularly as it relates to the actions of the Treasury and Fed in recent months and years, and on the whole I agree. This is what I have been calling for since last autumn. It helps Republican credibility somewhat that even in the waning days of the Bush administration more House Republicans rejected the TARP than accepted it, but Republican leaders and the Bush administration were necessarily identified so closely in public with the measure that it is virtually impossible for the same House and Senate leadership to rail against it now. As an earlyandfrequentcriticofthebailout, I welcome Barone’s recognition that populist opposition to the bailout is the right thing to do as a matter of politics and policy. There are several serious obstacles that make it difficult to take this route, not least of which is the genuine obliviousness of most Republicans to the dangers of the housing bubble when it was expanding, their long record of treating Alan Greenspan as an all-seeing oracle, and the unwillingness to accept that the bubble and the enormous risk-taking that went along with it were in no small part consequences of decisions taken by Bush and Greenspan.

One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the crash solely on the other party, which had not been in power during most of the period in question. One might be able to understand, if not condone, this on account of the timing right before a general election, but the infuriating thing is that they actually came to believe that these tall tales were correct and they have continued to repeat them as if they were true. Unanimous House GOP opposition to the stimulus bill seemed unwise to me at the time because it suggested that the party had learned nothing from its electoral repudiations, and more than this it suggested that the party was unwilling to take responsibility for decisions that its leaders had endorsed over many years. The attitude seemed to be that opposing “wasteful spending” would have some sort of rejuvenating political effect. The party leadership, compromised for the most part by its past support, had no interest in fighting Obama on the financial sector bailout. Having missed the opportunity to own up to their mistakes, the party leadership wanted to pretend that its compromises in the fall would be forgotten and that it would receive credit for resisting Obama’s spending. Failing to take the right stand when it would have stopped the creation of the TARP and done them some good politically, the GOP leadership in Congress capitulated to one of the most unpopular Presidents of all time in support of a bad policy. The leadership then turned around four months later and pledged a fight to the death against a new, fairly popular President on a spending bill that, for all its real flaws, was far less objectionable than the bill they had helped to pass the year before. In short, the leadership took the wrong side on the obviously winning issue of resistance to the bailout and then took the right, but politically toxic side in the stimulus debate, all the while believing that it had behaved both responsibly and cleverly. If there is to be any credible Republican opposition to centralization, it is not going to come from the current House and Senate leadership. The leadership must be replaced. It will be as clear a break with the Bush-accommodating ways of the past as the GOP can manage at the moment, and it could bring to the fore a new set of leaders in the minority to craft an agenda, or for that matter simply an alternative budget proposal, that will not be immediately laughed out of the room.

Victor Davis Hanson writes one of the odder critiques of affirmative action I have seen in a while:

Indians, Basques, Greek-Americans, Arab-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Chinese-Americans-regardless of their appearance or superficial distance from the dominant “white” tribe” -are probably not going to receive special consideration to trump strict criteria like GPAs and test scores when applying to medical or law schools. American-Indians, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans are. That any individual of the former group might in fact be far poorer than any member of the latter group matters not at all. That any of the former cadre may also be more instantly recognizable as non-white matters likewise not a whit.

I see what Hanson is trying to do here. He is trying to demonstrate that affirmative action is not a fair system that universally remedies socioeconomic disadvantages of ethnic and minority groups, and I understand that he is not doing this to argue in favor of a more universal system of “positive discrimination.” However, his argument seems to me to be as flawed as the occasional non-interventionist complaint that humanitarian interventionists ignore any number of other atrocities and civil wars around the world. Hanson’s “what about the Punjabis?” plea, which is, of course, entirely rhetorical and not a real complaint about any injustice being done to Punjabis, is the equivalent of the non-interventionist retort, “Well, what about the Congo?” Indeed, what about the Congo? Everyone in the debate knows that the non-interventionist isn’t actually saying that the government ought to be more activist in its overseas deployments and uses of force, and the humanitarian interventionist isn’t going to be embarrassed into abandoning one of his unjustified campaigns just because he cannot, as of yet, advocate for additional campaigns elsewhere. Hanson’s argument will be no more effective, and will instead lend strength to the defenders of the current system.

The non-interventionist raises other humanitarian disasters to show the inconsistency and arbitrariness of military interventions, which usually have little or nothing to do with humanitarian motives and are almost always driven by other, more questionable concerns, but the danger is that the interventionist will readily see through this and note that the non-interventionist has absolutely no interest in meddling in Congolese affairs, either. Having implicitly granted for rhetorical effect the interventionist assumption that Washington must act to halt this or that foreign conflict, the non-interventionist has given up on a far more powerful argument against interventionism as such. This sort of argument saps the foundation of the non-interventionist view, whose strongest claim is that it is inherently wrong and contrary to American interests to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. In the same way, Hanson’s argument here saps the strongest claim that can be made against affirmative action, which is that it is inherently wrong and ultimately harmful to the interests of all involved to take such factors into account for anyone.

The force of Hanson’s protest here dissipates completely once it becomes clear, as it would very quickly become clear, that he wouldn’t want positive discrimination for the Arab or Indian-American, either, even though they might very well face social and economic discrimination because of their background and because of negative stereotypes about Arabs and South Asians that we all know are prevalent in no small part because of “war on terror” propaganda. Indeed, the main effect of this sort of attack on affirmative action isn’t to make a supporter of these measures conclude, “There shouldn’t be any system of preferences or positive discrimination,” but instead the supporter will say, “We haven’t gone far enough in extending this arrangement to all those who need it.” For a laugh, the supporter might add, “Even Victor Davis Hanson agrees!”

Hanson’s litany of the woes of presumably deserving cases that were not taken seriously by the current system at first reads like any bleeding-heart account of social injustice, but at each point in the article the reader is compelled to ask what kind of consideration Hanson thinks the “dark daughter of the Kurdish taxi driver,” his Coptic student and the Okie-descended poor whites deserve. One assumes that Hanson would insist that merit alone should determine outcomes, in which case his Coptic student and the Okie-descendants might do no better, but what would stop a defender of the current system from taking the same examples and saying, “Yes, Hanson has a good point here–we need to create an even more elaborate, detailed system that can take account of the needs of our increasingly diverse population”? As far as I can tell, nothing at all.

One does not make the case for eliminating a policy by saying that it is insufficiently coherent, consistent and universal. Its defenders will simply say, as they have said time and time again, “Mend it, don’t end it,” and will propose to “rationalize” the existing system to remove the flaws Hanson has described. Instead, one should argue that such a policy is fundamentally misguided and wrong. Someone might say that this is a simple sort of argument, but it is all the more compelling and concedes far less for that reason.

On a final Sotomayor-related note, Hanson makes the following incredible claim:

Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown. In these first days of the Sotomayor nomination, we are not discussing Justice Sotomayor’s judicial competence as much as her Latina identification-and the political ramifications of such tribalism.

Who is this “we” he’s talking about? It’s true that these have become central parts of the discussion about Sotomayor. Hanson neglects to mention that they are central to the discussion at this point because her critics on the right have obsessed about these to the exclusion of almost everything else. If this is what “we” are discussing, it is because so many of Hanson’s colleagues made these the main topics of discussion.

Returning to the Sotomayor discussion one more time, I wanted to respond to something else Jim Antle said. He wrote:

The practical result of eliminating color-blind justice will not be that all Americans celebrate their rootedness in unique, decentralized communities instead of being deracinated, atomistic individuals. And in terms of political norms, refraining from criticizing Sotomayor will not keep conservatives from being called racist when they criticize immigration policy, racial preferences, or anything else that gets conservatives called racist.

It is questionable whether “color-blind justice” is actually in danger here, or at least it is questionable whether it is in danger because of a judge such as Sotomayor. More to the point, it is much less likely that Americans will be able to “celebrate their rootedness in unique, decentralized communities,” if they are going to be able to do this at all, if Americans of all backgrounds are confronted with social stigma and ostracism for expressing pride in their roots and communities. The question, then, is why those conservatives who presumably could see some virtue in “rootedness in unique, decentralized communities” should be so scandalized by statements that reflect positively on particularity and diversity. Indeed, one of the main things that is so deeply troubling about official celebrations of diversity is that they are so very often wedded to programs of political centralization and uniformity.

As for the other point, it is true that refraining from making baseless charges of racism against Sotomayor will not stop other baseless attacks against conservatives from being made. However, it does seem all but certain that making such baseless charges one of the main lines of attack against Sotomayor will make it far more likely that even those conservative arguments that were once given the benefit of the doubt will be willfully misread in just the same way that critics seem to have been misreading Sotomayor’s statements. If there are already some conservative arguments on immigration, affirmative action or other policy questions that are frequently dismissed and ridiculed as racist, how many more will be tarred with this label as a result of conservatives’ having dramatically lowered the standards of what counts as a racist statement? How many conservative pundits and radio talk show hosts will wind up on the wrong side of the sweeping, unreasonably broad defintion of racism that conservatives are now employing to try to trip up Sotomayor? Perhaps most telling of all, this smear on Sotomayor will not advance conservative causes one inch, but will boomerang and harm them significantly, and those who recklessly flung these charges should not be surprised if they come back to haunt them later on.

Whenever I come across people like Dreher and Friedersdorf piously attacking movement types, it miraculously makes me want to stick up for the Dittoheads (quite an accomplishment.) ~Richard Spencer

Let’s suppose for a moment that I understand why Richard wants to do this. In this view, there are the “wishy-washy” and the strong, and Richard seems to define who counts as the “wishy-washy” according to the tendency to criticize members of the conservative movement. That is, they are “wishy-washy” in that they are not always willing to be team players and keep their mouths shut. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t make the critiques Rod and Conor have made any less correct, nor does it actually make “the Dittoheads” deserving of his defense. If the instinct in these instances is to rally to the cause of “the Dittoheads” against their often more-reasonable detractors, it raises the question of what alternative the alternative right is actually offering.

As for the question of proper language, there was a time when conservatives wrote books called The Ethics of Rhetoric. It might not hurt to reacquaint ourselves with the sort of restraint of the tongue that the ancients believed was imperative for bridling the passions and cultivating wisdom and virtue. I think it fair to say that Weaver would have found crude and insulting language directed toward women not only appalling in itself, but would have taken it as evidence of personal moral failure and deep civilizational rot. Those sympathetic to Levin’s better ideas, assuming that he has them, ought to have passed over this episode in an embarrassed silence and tried to limit the damage rather than celebrate his horrendous behavior as if it were an example to be imitated.

P.S. On a related point, I wanted to say something about Richard’s description of a “Jacksonian conservative”:

He might try to make time for the Permanent Things on occasion, but mainly he likes attacking lily-livered liberals.

To which John Lukacs had the answer 25 years ago:

Even though intellectuals of the American conservative movement were often more generous and less narrow-minded than were liberal intellectuals, they seldom hesitated to ally themselves with, and to seek the support of, some of the most uncouth and slovenly minded people and politicians. That was just the trouble. As Jonathan Swift said, certain people “have just enough religion to hate but not enough to love.” Many American conservatives, alas, gave ample evidence that they were just conservative enough to hate liberals but not enough to love liberty.

For some reason, Richard has penned a glowing defense of the antics of Mark Levin and Robert Stacy McCain. Richard mentions near the end:

Republicans have a tendency to sound like Ron Paul when they’re out of office, and then act like LBJ once they get elected.

The two people he defends in that post epitomize the kind of conservative that makes this possible: tribalistic in partisan loyalties, provocative without being interesting, utterly lacking in imagination and completely conventional in their political enthusiasms for pseudo-populist Republican politicians. Furthermore, to the extent that their pugnacity trumps any actual policy arguments or ideas and they embrace political organization centered on politicians that are “one of us” (e.g., Palin), pro-life welfarism, which Richard finds so intolerable, is exactly what their sort of conservatism will get you. They have little or nothing of their own to offer policymakers when it comes time to govern. They will be able to sneer at the meliorists who end up advising on policy, but they will not be able to do much else. Even when they see a foreign war to be a mistake, they will not have the conviction to oppose it openly once the war begins because of ridiculous nationalistic attachments to “strength” and projecting power. Conservatives have been caricatured as substituting macho posturing for political thought, while McCain takes pride in doing that practically every day of the week.

Richard concludes:

Whatever our disagreements, I’d take “Levin and puerile Jacksonians like Stacy” over the Crunchies any day of the week.

He is welcome to them, but he might consider that in preferring them Richard is not going to be pushing the current GOP to its doom. On the contrary, by choosing the cheerleaders and enablers of that party, he is helping to sustain the very things that he and his alt-right colleagues claim to despise.