This confirms what I expected in regard to the Grutter decision. The left has really won the field and the best we can hope for in the short term are rear-guard actions to slow the onslaught somewhat. We will probably see the enactment of a never-ending stream of “hate speech” laws, etc. and the creation of a “Diversity Directorate” to enforce them. If the “compelling interest” of Diversity trumps the letter of the 14th amendment, there is no reason to assume it will not trump the 1st, the 4th, or any other constitutional liberty. We’d best enjoy VFR while it’s still here.

Yeah, but this will energize the Right for decades, esp. as horror stories filter out into the Internet and non-mainstream culture of the deliberate ethnic profiling against whites and the ruinous and unqualified minority applicants who won’t hack the workload. Check out MIT’s pitiable record. Smart blacks get discouraged rubbing shoulders with Oriental and caucasoid basic boy wonders.

How is it in French? Erase the infamy!

The Court has given the Right a gift—a brush to allow the Supreme Court’s image to be whitewashed as the unelected legislators that they have allowed themselves to be. If there be a judicial category of sin, they are rampant sinners.

And now we have the critical mass to undo much of the damage the Court has performed lo this last thirty-five years or so.

We just have to think long term and make the nomination of legitimate federal judge appointees, who view the Constitution as dead not living, as a national referendum during presidential contests.

What this website is invaluable for is the prospect that Bush II (like father like son) is not a bona fide conservative, what with his out-of-control federal spending and acquiescence in the cultural war.

One needn’t be as pessimistic as Irving Kristol. Thank goodness for the Internet.

P.S. Now on the horizon: Federal legislation to curtail the influence of conservative talkmeisters on the radio.

Yeah, but this will energize the Right for decades, esp. as horror stories filter out into the Internet and non-mainstream culture of the deliberate ethnic profiling against whites and the ruinous and unqualified minority applicants who won’t hack the workload. Check out MIT’s pitiable record. Smart blacks get discouraged rubbing shoulders with Oriental and caucasoid basic boy wonders.

How is it in French? Erase the infamy!

The Court has given the Right a gift—a brush to allow the Supreme Court’s image to be whitewashed as the unelected legislators that they have allowed themselves to be. If there be a judicial category of sin, they are rampant sinners.

And now we have the critical mass to undo much of the damage the Court has performed lo this last thirty-five years or so.

We just have to think long term and make the nomination of legitimate federal judge appointees, who view the Constitution as dead not living, as a national referendum during presidential contests.

What this website is invaluable for is the prospect that Bush II (like father like son) is not a bona fide conservative, what with his out-of-control federal spending and acquiescence in the cultural war.

One needn’t be as pessimistic as Irving Kristol. Thank goodness for the Internet.

P.S. Now on the horizon: Federal legislation to curtail the influence of conservative talkmeisters on the radio.

The combination of Grutter/Gratz and Lawrence, and the role of Republican appointees in them, should cure conservatives of any illusions about the Supreme Court’s respect for the law and Republican presidents’ interest in appointing constitutional judges. I say should because I do not believe it will.

Republican-voting conservatives - both real conservatives and mere non-liberals - have swallowed such enormities for decades without turning their backs on the Republican Party and the poodles of the Left (no insult intended to the better breeds of poodle!) that it nominates.

The list of unconstitutional rewritings of the Constitution by liberal Republican appointees is very long. Brown; Lemon v. Kurtzman; Miranda; Roe; Bakke; Planned Parenthood v. Casey; Grutter; Gratz (itself a bad decision as it accepts the diversity-as-compelling state interest rationale of Grutter); Lawrence: these are only some of the low points in a long string of abuses of the Constitution that those Republican appointees have written into the United States Reports. Republican voters have borne them all, and kept coming back to the GOP.

Some of the names bear repeating; what is conservative about a party whose presidents appoint the following?: Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter - again the list is incomplete because I don’t want to lower such fence-sitters as Burger, Rehnquist, Powell and Stewart to quite the depths of the first list. Arguably, the only constitutionally faithful justices of the last half-century have been Scalia and Thomas - and we all know why GHWB appointed Thomas, so his constitutionalism is a happy accident for which no Bush deserves any credit. We will not see their like again, certainly not from GWB, who is reported to favor Hispanic activist and abortion and race preference supporter Alberto Gonzales as his first nominee and O’Connor as the next Chief Justice. The mind reels, but the Republican faithful won’t.

The American electorate has no conservative core. The Left’s takeover of the American mind is almost accomplished. As a result, as long as the Democratic Party exists as a bogeyman to its left, the Republican Party will draw the votes of most white American voters no matter what it does. They have no point of principle beyond which they will not go. In their fear of Democrats, they will accept such things as Bush’s lauding diversity and the Supreme Court for discriminating against them. Mark my words, when Bush, Vicente Fox and their coteries succeed in ramming an amnesty for Mexican illegal aliens (and who really believes it will stop with Mexicans?) down our throats, the Republican faithful will swallow that too; they swallowed the same “medicine” from Reagan, after all. I fear they would stick with the Republican Party even if it abandoned the pro-life cause (it has effectively abandoned it already, disguised by the odd unsubstantiated lip-service in speeches).

That is why, as I posted earlier, I think the Republican Party has to fail electorally for there to be any hope of a material third party anywhere to the right of the Democrats.

There is another solution to the Grutter problem, one the current Congress would not contemplate. The 14th Amendment gives the Congress the power to enforce it through appropriate legislation. The Congress could legislate to remove the issue from the jurisdiction of the federal courts. (Set aside for the moment whether the Incorporation Doctrine applying the 14th Amendment against the states is legitimate; I don’t think so, but the Supreme Court does.) Until something like that happens, all we’ll have on the anti-preference side is the laments of such as Abigail Thernstrom, reduced to hoping for something she must know will never happen.

Please excuse the length of this post - there is a lot to think about here.

Mr. Sutherland wrote:

“There is another solution to the Grutter problem, one the current Congress would not contemplate. The 14th Amendment gives the Congress the power to enforce it through appropriate legislation. The Congress could legislate to remove the issue from the jurisdiction of the federal courts.”

A quick note to say, I don’t think it’s under the 14th amendment that Grutter was decided, but in spite of the 14th amendment. Without the 14th amendment and the ‘64 civil rights act, I don’t think there would be any federal law against state race preferences for blacks. It’s a complicated issue that I will write about when I get a chance.

I’ve received the following e-mail from Ward Connerly:

Larry,

Excellent piece! You may post the following:

I can’t believe, for one moment, that the American people are content to resign themselves to the Grutter/Gratz decisions of the Supreme Court, as some of my fellow conservatives suggest. Should we be outraged that the court has sanctioned racial discrimination, contrary to the Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act? By all means! Should we regard these decisions as a setback? Ditto! Should we honestly acknowledge that the country, with a Republican-controlled Congress, a seemingly conservative Republican president and a so-called conservative court, has legitimized the amorphous goal of “diversity” and elevated it over the principles of equal rights and individual merit? An emphatic “yes!” But, should we regard the Supreme Court as the highest authority in America? Hell, no! Where we have the capacity to negate these decisions, such as at the ballot box by voter approved referendum and initiative and through the election of legislators, governors and members of Congress, we have a duty to continue the fight and to do so more vigorously than ever before.

I am sure glad that our founders and others who came before us didn’t quit so easily when confronted with obstacles.

Ward Connerly

I had sent the original article to David Horowitz with the following cover note:

“Last January you dismissed my alarm about Bush’s position on the Grutter case. You said (I’m paraphrasing): ‘We’re moving forward one step at a time, don’t be so impatient, by opposing Bush you’re helping the left.’

“But the reality, as we now see, is that instead of moving incrementally toward the elimination of race preferences, as you suggested, we’ve had this revolutionary move by the Supreme Court in the opposite direction, placing race preferences in the Constitution, a move helped and cheered by Bush. Do you admit you were wrong when you defended his support for diversity last January?”

Here is the reply I got from David Horowitz:

“No. You really should find something other than politics to think or write about. You have a craving for certainties and hard lines and resolutions. Politics is fluid and the battle is never over. I’m not happy with the stands Bush has taken, but what would you expect him to do? He’s got a war on his hands. He has a treacherous opposition party that will take him down no matter what it takes to do it. He lost the last election except for the 537 vote margin in Florida. He has to pick his battles, and obvioiusly this one is not one he thinks he can win on. If you were Bush would you want to pick a fight with blacks a year out from the election?”

David Horowitz’s response is interesting, but I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny. Why should the Republicans concentrate on pandering to 12% (at the most) of the electorate? Their pandering efforts would reap a much greater reward if they were directed at whites instead. Also, if the supreme court has declared an interest that trumps the constitution itself, in what way is that a temporary, fluid item subject to change? Another point Mr. Horowitz has ignored is that fact that there are at least a few religious conservatives who are quite unhappy over GWB’s pandering to the sodomite agenda, even if they are clueless about Grutter. If lots of those folks stay home, do Rove and Bush really think they’ll gain enough of the black vote to offset it?

There is something to Horowitz’ reply, but probably not something he would like or want to accept. Democracies are guaranteed to produce bad outcomes on average (see Arrow’s Theorem - a democracy with more than one or two important issues on the table is mathematically GUARANTEED to produce a bad outcome — that is, an outcome that nobody thinks is good).

A democracy inherently reduces the fundamental political questions to “issues”, because they have to be put to a vote. (Representative democracy or republican democracy rather than direct democracy do not avoid the problem.) This formal treatment of political power imposes a certain structure on how things are decided. In order for traditional morality to win one issue, there are overt concessions on some issues and unstated concessions on hundreds of others.

A genuinely conservative vote on a conservative issue generates +1 point for conservatism. All the concessions necessary to get that vote through the filter generates +99 points for liberalism. Do the math.

Horowitz probably wouldn’t like the notion that in order to ever win anything sustainable for conservatism we have to completely abandon equal freedom (even of the procedural kind) and democracy. Lots of people won’t like to face that fact. It is true though. All this sound and fury about coalitions, concessions, practicality, etc are sound and fury that do nothing but guarantee the defeat of the traditional moral order. Horowitz and other conservatives — good as their intentions may be — are caught in a never-ending dance of the Hegelian Mambo. They feel as if they are accomplishing something, but in the end they do nothing sustainable. All of their victories — every last one — are fleeting and illusory. All they substantively accomplish is to provide liberalism with a sustained long life as they eagerly gobble up its table scraps.

Natural conservatives tend to be compromisers; reasonable people who will make concessions, who don’t expect the world to be perfect or for things to be perfectly fair, who just want to preserve the good stuff and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately that natural posture in this case is fatal, and is why liberalism now dominates all political thought and discussion. In the end you can’t compromise with evil.

I second Carl’s two rhetorical questions in reaction to Horowitz’s reply to Mr. Auster.

In electoral terms (which I suspect are ultimate terms for President Bush, as they are for most pols), the black vote is not worth a Republican’s extra effort. It is not large enough, and too monolithically Democratic. What worries me, and what motivated my previous posts, is that Bush and his ilk can kick any amount of sand into the faces of their core voters (mostly white native-born Americans; not black, not Hispanic, not Jewish, not Asian, not immigrant) and get away with it. Most white Americans have become such multiculturalized sheep that they will not condemn pandering to minorities, even when it is against their own interests - to say nothing of anti-constitutional. I suspect it is because they have been indoctrinated to think it virtuous and compassionate, and have been instructed to be vaguely ashamed of themselves for racial reasons. More and more, today’s Americans are people who have been taught that Martin Luther King is America’s greatest hero.

I ask the same question about Bush’s hispandering (today’s news reports he is again contemplating a Mexican illegal alien amnesty even wider-reaching than the one Texas Sen. Cornyn - another Repoodle - has before the Senate). Steve Sailer’s analyses of how small the Hispanic, especially Mexican, vote still is, are a good antidote to BushRovian propaganda. They are on VDare.com under Steve’s name. As it is, Bush’s pandering is contradictory. He wants to pander to blacks, yet black Americans are the people most harmed by the illegal alien invasion from Latin America, Asia and Africa, yet Bush welcomes the invasion ad infinitum of indigent Mexicans.

My comment on Congressional legislation enforcing the 14th Amendment was unclear. Accepting the Incorporation Doctrine (which all three branches of the federal government do), the Congress can pass a law specifically outlawing the sort of racial preferences Bakke, Grutter and Gratz have endorsed. Some would say they already have, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ‘64 CRA is a bad law, an overbroad invitation to mischievous litigation and regulatory social engineering. A law such as I have in mind would have to be clearer and focused on higher education.

Horowitz has a deserved reputation as a fighter, but I detect defeatism in his peevish reply to Mr. Auster. His tasking Auster with spending too much time on politics is rich! Has Horowitz become one of those non-liberals I mentioned before who will swallow anything from Republicans just because they are not Democrats? Using the war (an unwarranted invasion of a remote country that is no threat to us) as an excuse for Leftist domestic policy is a weak dodge. I think his post makes my point that such people will only give up the Republican Party when it becomes obvious that it can no longer win elections. By then, of course, it will be very late in the day.

My question remains: how do we alert those Americans in the middle to the fact - obvious to us, and not to them - that today’s Republican Party is effectively as hostile to them and their interests as the Democratic Party?

Please excuse another long post. HRS

A couple of years ago, I was talking to a black man who is a fellow employee where I work. He started railing against GWB, who had been in office about six months. First, he complained about tax cuts. Then he said,”What is Bush doing legalizing illegal aliens. It’ll take away our jobs.”

He went on like this. He was VERY opposed to hispanic immigration. He blamed Bush for all of it. I explained to him that his own politicians back the same policy. He had a hard time understanding this. One reason blacks went more heavily Democratic than usual in 2000 was reaction to Bush’s aggressive pro-hispanic stance, I believe.

A few days ago, I asked this same man if Bush will increase his share of the black vote if he occupies Liberia. He laughed at the very idea.

I recommend today’s front page story in The Washington Times (available on-line) about the NAACP convention for a reality check about how the official black establishment views Republicans and President Bush. Actually, Julian Bond’s comments are worth reading to see how this Official Black Leader views white people generally. Southerner that I am, I was especially touched by his reference to the “Confederate swastika.”

If Bush had any sense (there is little evidence that he does, alas), he would write off pandering to such as the NAACP altogether, and go hunting where the Republican’s ducks are. HRS

It’s grim business around here, fellas!

To Mr. Sutherland’s suggestion that “The Congress could legislate to remove the issue [of racial preferences] from the jurisdiction of the federal courts,” I think such action would be authorized under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.

I’ll note that the brilliant political philosopher Willmoore Kendall predicted the rise of the Imperial Judiciary way back in the early sixties (with the Griswold decision) and proposed various structural remedies: Article III, Section 2, impeachment of judges, constitutional admendments limiting judicial oversight, etc. His warnings and recommendations, of course, were not heeded, by either the Republican Party or the conservative movement.

Kendall’s essays addressing this question were collected, I believe, in his book Contra Mundum.

I would like to see Matt (or anyone) cite an example of a former or present undemocratic government that was as prosperous, as free, and as generally well-liked by its citizens as America. If one has never existed, what would the outline of one look like? Matt regularly states some very interesting ideas. Examples are Arrow’s Theorem and the idea that rights are authoritative discriminations. I am sorry to be trying to collar Matt with this duty, but he does regularly question democracy intelligently. (Of course there is no actual duty here.)

Mr. Murgos:
“…was as prosperous, as free, and as generally well-liked by its citizens as America.”

I am not given to “dissing” America because it is my country, which I love and defend. Mr. Murgos’ question therefore isn’t one I particularly like to answer, but it is a fair one.

Part of the answer is that the experience of America he describes exists only for some, and only at the expense of stopping up our eyes and ears. Some polities have had their razor wire and gas chambers; we have our clinics and medical waste bins. If the notion is that it is difficult to argue with the prosperity of “reality television” and 40 million murdered infants then I really don’t know what to say.

On the other hand Mr. Murgos is probably right to observe that no place in history has more successfully created the appearance of happiness alongside actual material prosperity better than America. I am proud, awed, and terrified. She is like pagan Rome reascendant.

Two things, though. One, America’s material prosperity I think has more to do with her ethnically anglo traditional modality than her propositional liberal modality (Jim Kalb’s essay “Traditionalism and the American Order” is useful background here). Two, from the perspective of Heaven the question is not how many SUV’s and big-screen TV’s were produced, even if lots of people happen to like them; but how many souls were damned.

I think there is a narcissistic element to liberalism that makes it ask “who would not die for the privilege of being me?” As Jesus Jones sang on MTV and the Berlin Wall fell, “right here right now, there is no other place I’d rather be… Right here right now, watching the world wake up from history…” We are a great country, but we are also filled to high heaven with conceit.

If Mr. Murgos question is simply what examples exist of good polities (besides or in contrast to America) then we have to decide what we mean by good. Few or none have produced as great a triumph of rational hedonism as America; but perhaps Kurt Cobain’s shotgun in the mouth isn’t all there is to the good life.

Perhaps a well-organized association or party could use Arrow’s Theorem by focusing on just one or two well-chosen, decisive issues at a time and not compromising on other issues. The association’s members might need to endure great sacrifices for a long period, but in the end, it might succeed. If the association’s opponents did not stick together, the association could win. An indication of vulnerability in America’s system was Jesse Ventura’s election. If liberalism is self-destructive, there is an opportunity to wait liberalism out. It seems certain they will win in the short term, but history has shown that power corrupts them. People become fed up with liberal leaders. No one predicted the Republican takeover of Congress in the early 1990’s.

“If liberalism is self-destructive, there is an opportunity to wait liberalism out.”

I’m not sure if this observation fits with the preceding discussion, but it occurs to me, doesn’t Grutter itself mean the death of liberalism, or, at least, of right-liberalism? If (apart from the legal question of further judicial decisions leading to its being officially overturned) Grutter is not decisively repudiated by the American people as I have been calling for, then right-liberalism, the American Creed, the America of “certain unalienable rights,” is dead. But I’m not sure that the death of that liberalism is what we have been hoping for. There is, after all, still left-liberalism to contend with.

The principles of right-liberalism are being dramatically and systematically eviscerated, but the right-liberals are very accomplished at adjusting their principles to correspond to the new status quo. They are quite conservative in that dreary sense.

Moreover, they are quintessential partisans — willing, even eager, to expend large amounts of energy to silence right-wing critics of “their team.” This we can see in the right-liberals, most of whom fancying themselves as conservatives, praising an incorrigible leftist and enemy of Christianity like Christopher Hitchens while turning a cold shoulder on his brother Peter, the Christian, the localist, the cherisher of simple traditions and simple people.

(See my essay on the Hitchens brothers here:
http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_cellasreview_archive.html#105676897545061565)

Mr. Auster asks:
“…doesn’t Grutter itself mean the death of liberalism, or, at least, of right-liberalism?”

The right wing of liberalism is always dying out though, as the whole creature moves leftward (which is to say, further from the traditional moral order and Christendom).

I’m a little uncomfortable with the sort of sweeping statements Matt is making here. If we were to accept Matt’s terms, no moment in the history of America and the modern West would be any different from any other; since all of it is based on false premises, all of it is always false and always dying, etc. etc. This approach tends to erase important distinctions, between, say, the America of 1910 and the America of today. Was right-liberalism just as dead then as it has been since Grutter was announced? I don’t think so.

Mr. Auster asks:
“Was right-liberalism just as dead then as it has been since Grutter was announced?”

Mr. Auster is right that I have equivocated, although without realizing it.

The current right wing of liberalism is ontologically different from past right wings, and my equivocation involved the conflation of the two.

Liberalism itself has ontological stability. At any moment in time it has a right wing and a left one, defined by the current fashion in unprincipled exceptions. The liberal bit IS always false, and the unprincipled exceptions ARE always dying. That doesn’t make 1910 indistinguishable from 2003, though.

Ok, cool, but it’s not just the nature of right-liberalism in 1910 and today that’s different, it’s the nature of that which is dying. In other words, not only are different historical stages of right-liberalism different from each other, but the nature and severity of the “deaths” they respectively undergo are different.

I’m there.

Raising a glass of Dewers to Matt. (I have somewhat more plebeian tastes than he does.)

::: Raising glass of Talisker (the cherry-cask double-matured) to Mr. Auster :::

The only reason I’m a Talisker fan is because I once had the pleasure/privilege of visiting the distillery in Corbost on the Isle of Skye. Mostly I’m a beer guy.

Both of you late night tipplers should try the MacAllan. I’ve found none better. HRS

Grutter is an unsurprising dictate and can be thwarted. Surprising was the Court’s reluctance to wait so many years after Bakke. The Court has been making really bad constitutional law for at least decades, not that making bad law is new to the Court. The Court has been making bad law for at least 200 years. Around 1800, the Court in Marbury v. Madison presumed it had the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. This decision made the Court a loose cannon, which many justices since have mightily attempted to control for fear of losing the Court.

Even the current justices posture and strain intellectually to pretend everything is under control despite their latest knuckleball decision. Who knows what the Court’s decisions mean? It’s hard to justify nonsense to the skeptical half of a nation. So the Court constructs penumbras, spirits, and phrases such as I-know-it-when-I-see-it, which was one former Justice’s definition of pornography. One modern but deceased Justice, Thurgood Marshall, said to the effect, “I do what is right and let the law catch up.” Lovely ain’t it?

The dissenters whine and accomplish little. They are unwilling to take a stand. Surprising would be a Justice that rejected the Court as a failed institution in need of repair. Politics is the source of the Court’s power and the Court’s destruction. Therefore, a gifted leader with working supporters can effect a reasonable change.