Mr. Shanmugam, a partner at the Paul Weiss law firm, has argued 38 cases at the Supreme Court. He clerked for Antonin Scalia on the Court and was an assistant to the Solicitor General at the Justice Department. “I believe that those of us who practice regularly before the Court, and who thus have a unique familiarity with the Court and its work, should speak up when we believe that the Court is being unfairly attacked,” he told the Duke [University] audience. He’s right.
Take the claims of unethical conduct. “Many of the allegations are transparently insubstantial,” Mr. Shanmugam said, citing as an example the recent news of a $900 gift on Justice Samuel Alito’s financial disclosure. “Just last week,” he said, “we had the claim that there was something nefarious about a Justice and his spouse attending a concert with a, quote, ‘eccentric German princess.’” The proliferation of immaterial complaints suggests some critics “are more concerned with targeting particular Justices.”
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He warned that such rhetoric could damage public respect for the law. “I believe we are not so far from a President saying, in the manner of Andrew Jackson, ‘John Roberts has made his decision; now let him enforce it,’” Mr. Shanmugam said. “Ask yourself this question: If the Court ever has to resolve another presidential election, how confident are you that either side would simply acquiesce in the Court’s decision?”
[DBx: Ironically, these politically motivated attacks on the Court come today from the political left – that is, from people who self-righteously accuse the political right of undermining the rule of law.]
Mike Munger describes government welfare as a “jealous polygamist.” A slice:
Of course, that’s not how the architects of the welfare system think about it. These program heads no doubt see the system protecting women who are otherwise defenseless, with no other means of raising their children. The problem is that these “benefits” are contingent, and the contingencies — no jobs, no marriage — are detrimental to women long term, and disturbingly similar to the restrictions a polygamist would impose.
Martin Gurri decries the propensity of so many people to mistake Leviathan for God. Two slices:
To some extent, the cause of the crisis is thunderingly obvious. Representative government requires a strong bond of identity between the public and the political class. That bond has shattered like a mirror under the blows of the digital age. Elected officials are clueless about, and terrified by, the public. More importantly, the lives of politicians have become incomprehensible to ordinary people. Elizabeth Warren had trouble holding a beer bottle. Trump is forever riding that golden escalator into and out of his very own tower. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, once a bartender, now resembles a movie star treading the red carpet. Like a certain type of little dog, these hyperambitious organisms seem overbred to some singular purpose.
And here I have to deliver the bad news. The malady runs much deeper than this. At the heart of the crisis of representation we will discover an impossible longing for meaning and transcendence.
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The pathology has spilled over into politics. Hungry for a loftier state of being, many somehow imagine they have found it in bashing the dull machinery of representational government. These seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation. Only politics, they believe, can save the earth. Only politics can establish social justice. Only politics can preserve the “normies” from the pedophiles who run the country.
As it happens, they are demanding personal validation from an institution explicitly designed not to provide it.
Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” Young Thunberg was one of Haidt’s sufferers, healed by the miracle of environmental activism.
“Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat at home, with an eating disorder,” she tweeted. “All that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”
Thunberg is a fairly typical specimen of those who confuse politics with redemption. With an almost gnostic fervor, she hates the society in which she lives quite comfortably, and keeps breathlessly anticipating its doom. She’s wholly focused on personal theater—not surprisingly, her father is an actor, her mother an opera singer—with few, if any, perceptible consequences. She’s sustained by the absolute certainty that she embodies Truth in the eternal war against Falsehood. Above all, she needs the fuel of rage to lift her spirit above this meaningless world—the angrier she gets, the happier she is.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan:
The racist cult of “anti-racism” really does aspire to become our society’s official religion — a body of bizarre dogmas that everyone either (a) believes, or (b) pretends to believe out of fear.
Scott Lincicome reminds us that it’s been 35 years since Boris Yeltsin was gobsmacked by an ordinary American supermarket. [DBx: Supermarkets are indeed super.]
Scott Sumner ponders Americans’ failure to appreciate just how wealthy they are.
