Susan Hennessey of Lawfare recently tweeted court-packing is essential for Democrats to save the court. “Reluctantly,” she argues, because of Republicans’ “smash and grab” approach, it’s the only way to save democracy!
Unfortunately, Hennessey’s hyperbolic reaction isn’t alone. Articles and opinion pieces from the corporate media nearly universally oppose the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Such laments include charges Barrett is “anti-feminist,” “anti-democratic,” and that the Supreme Court should reflect the country in racial and sexual diversity.
Given the job of a Supreme Court justice is not to interpret the law or make new laws, but to adjudicate based on the existing text, it is baffling why these charges are being mounted. The job of a judge isn’t supposed to be a feminist activist, or a Democrat, or even to reflect the existing demographics.
Beyond all the hyperventilating, broad themes emerge. Barrett’s nomination has made it clear leftists desire power for the sake of power, and their superficial diversity rhetoric simply serves as a means to gain that power. For all the talk of saving institutionalism and norms, the reality is that leftists want to be in charge of the institutions and of setting the norms.
Sooner or later, as “democracy” is now considered synonymous with social liberalism, everything conservatives do will be considered a threat to the republic by a credentialled class of leftists.
Diversity is quickly becoming their favorite sort of credentialism — one that increasingly leads one particular set of people into the corridors of power. Diversity is only for those who fit the acceptable bill as liberal, Democrat, or feminist. To be sure, for today’s leftists, it matters not that Barrett is a woman from the middle class and the first non-Ivy League JD who would be in the Supreme Court.
This is an important phenomenon to understand and a useful lens that explains much of our current state of politics. Consider the vitriol in store for those who dare to break the chains of conformity. Recently, the Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a black American, was called a “sellout negro,” much to the glee of the primarily white leftist crowd of “Saturday Night Live.”
Indeed, this sort of thing is observable concerning nearly every minority-conservative. African American intellectual. Thomas Chatterton Williams and Coleman Hughes are castigated by leftists for the simple blasphemy of having an independent thought process. For the current left, it is unacceptable to be a person of color and not behave like a victim, blame structural racism, and ask for reparations.
Recently, Seattle’s black American police chief was almost coerced to resign because she opposed police budget cuts. Similar cases of black police officers being bad-mouthed by white leftists are all over the internet.
In the United Kingdom, The Guardian wonders why Indian-Brits are flocking to the Conservative Party. After all, how can minorities who prefer a hard day’s work and decent family life support those “fascist/racist/homophobic/sexist” conservatives? As credential-class leftists live in a world that has its own language and truly exists solely within their own minds, when that fantasy world collides with the normal, real, actual world, it causes a shock.
This is the same simple phenomenon that explains a lot of the opposition to Barrett’s nomination. Our current higher education system in the greater Anglosphere is designed to discourage free thought, in favor of liberal conformity. It has created a new hierarchy.
A conservative from a non-Ivy (US) or non-Russell Group (UK) university will not be privy to the language and ideology of the woke, which are purposefully designed to maintain the desired amount of gatekeeping.
If you can speak the language of intersectional-feminism, privilege, and critical race theory, you are part of the in-group. If you’re a mother of seven, with a JD from Notre Dame, you’re a threat. The only diversity that won’t be allowed by the left is viewpoint diversity, which is why, above all, Barrett is a threat to them. She’s the living embodiment that a different world exists.
