.. like many Republicans, he’s having a hard time explaining why he will not even give a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court. In defense of his position, Grassley gave a speech on the Senate floor that was close to breathtaking in its intemperate incoherence. The speech was an extended attack on Chief Justice John Roberts, who had recently expressed the unexceptional view that the Court should stay out of partisan politics as much as possible.
.. This hostility to Roberts comes in the face of the Chief Justice’s down-the-line conservatism in nearly every other case of his decade in office. Roberts joined the majority in Citizens United and in Shelby County (which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act), and he dissented in Windsor, the case that invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell, which brought same-sex marriage to all fifty states. The decisions Grassley disagrees with are “political,” whereas the ones he likes are, presumably, just good judging. The crudeness of Grassley’s attack on Roberts, from a senator who claims to want to avoid a politicization of the court, is astonishing.
.. the Court approved a voting-apportionment process—currently used by every state—that requires all legislative districts to have an equal number of people. Conservatives had demanded a system where states could require districts of equal numbers of voters, so state legislators could ignored the numbers of non-citizens, children, disenfranchised felons, and others not eligible to vote in every district.
.. The Court responded to this obvious injustice by finding that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, courts must require that districts be drawn according to the principle of one person, one vote. No Justice has challenged this basic idea.
Now Thomas has done so, writing that the Court “has failed to provide a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle because no such basis exists.” His opinion excavates, as Thomas often does, his understanding of what James Madison intended when he wrote the Bill of Rights. In Thomas’s view, this history amounts to an almost total abdication by the Framers in favor of the rights of the states. By ruling that the Constitution requires the states to follow a one-person, one-vote principle, Thomas writes, “the Court has arrogated to the Judiciary important value judgments that the Constitution reserves to the people.”
.. In his opinion, Thomas ignores racial discrimination—and thus the central reason the Court, in the nineteen-sixties, imposed the one-person, one-vote rule. Thomas’s blindness to the realities of American life—and concomitant obsession with his understanding of the Framers’ intent—reflects his bizarre jurisprudential views.
The Art of Subversion: What transgressive tastemaker John Waters teaches the right.
“You need to prepare sneak attacks on society. ‘Hairspray’ is the only really devious movie I ever made,” Waters boasted during his 2015 commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design. “The musical based on it is now being performed in practically every high school in America—and nobody seems to notice it’s a show with two men singing a love song to each other that also encourages white teen girls to date black guys. ‘Pink Flamingos’ was preaching to the converted. But ‘Hairspray’ is a Trojan horse: It snuck into Middle America and never got caught.
.. Conservatives, by contrast, never fought the culture war with the intention of winning converts. Instead, they simply watched their circles become smaller, older, and more exclusive. They reduced themselves to remnants of the Moral Majority and became more concerned with winning elections than winning the culture of the future.
.. He was part of that change, helping to bring it about, but he did it without ever seeming like an angry ideologue. “I always used left-wing politics, I love the Yippies and the comic terrorism,” Waters told the British Film Institute. “I think it could be effective today, you humiliate your enemies by comic terrorism, by embarrassing them, and doing ridiculous stunts and hoaxes against them.”
.. What’s more, “I respect everything I make fun of,” the filmmaker wrote elsewhere.
.. Conservatives hardly ever take on their peers in fear that they will be considered unfashionable, be disinvited for radio and cable news show appearances, and lose the chance at becoming the next established figurehead. The right needs its own brand of radicalism if it’s going to fight the culture wars from its new place as the underdog, the new counterculture. It’s not enough to create an endless series of pie charts about how the wage gap is a myth; conservatives need to create a moment that people will grab onto because it is interesting, fun, and has a purpose. No one ever started a chant because they read a pie chart.
Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives
According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them. For example, in a study published in January, a team led by psychologist Michael Dodd and political scientist John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives’ eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement—suggesting that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats.
.. “These are not superficial differences. They are psychologically deep,” says psychologist John Jost of New York University, a co-author of the bedroom study. “My hunch is that the capacity to organize the political world into left or right may be a part of human nature.”
.. Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. “Conservatism, apparently, helps to protect people against some of the natural difficulties of living,” says social psychologist Paul Nail of the University of Central Arkansas.
.. In an ingenious experiment, the psychologists reframed climate change not as a challenge to government and industry but as “a threat to the American way of life.”
.. Liberals, he says, tend to value two of them: caring for people who are vulnerable and fairness, which for liberals tends to mean sharing resources equally. Conservatives care about those things, too, but for them fairness means proportionality—that people should get what they deserve based on the amount of effort they have put in. Conservatives also emphasize loyalty and authority>, values helpful for maintaining a stable society.
.. In a 2009 study Haidt and two of his colleagues presented more than 8,000 people with a series of hypothetical actions. Among them: kick a dog in the head; discard a box of ballots to help your candidate win; publicly bet against a favorite sports team; curse your parents to their faces; and receive a blood transfusion from a child molester. Participants had to say whether they would do these deeds for money and, if so, for how much—$10? $1,000? $100,000? More? Liberals were reluctant to harm a living thing or act unfairly, even for $1 million, but they were willing to betray group loyalty, disrespect authority or do something disgusting, such as eating their own dog after it dies, for cash. Conservatives said they were less willing to compromise on any of the moral categories.
Rod Dreher on David Brooks and Morality
In 1830, in this country, it was totally acceptable to go to work, drink all day, drink afterwards, go home and beat your wife. By 1840, that was completely unacceptable. There was an awakening, and people said no, we don’t tolerate that.
.. The central insight of traditionalist conservatism was articulated by Russell Kirk: “At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.”
.. Brooks says when he talks about things like this in places like suburban Connecticut, the women in the audience love it, but the men get antsy, tell him that he’s making them uncomfortable, and that they would rather talk about Chris Christie’s prospects.