Strictly Ballroom At Senate Dance Hall

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police... midnight raids, schoolchildren... evolution, writers and artists... censored... and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

What Senator Kennedy inaugurated with this monstrous canard was twenty years of thuggery, during which liberal bullies roughed up mainstream conservative judicial nominees with impunity.

But the Bork era is over. Last week conservatives beat the street thuggery of the liberal bullies. How did they do it? The surprising answer is “strictly ballroom.” The exquisite legal dancers Jacqui Roberts and Sammi Alito showed how to lead the Senate street thugs out onto the floor and dance through constitutional law and complicated precedents for hour after hour without error. But it was terribly frustrating for liberal Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Said he to Hugh Hewitt:

Alito on the Supreme Court is likely to vote to eliminate the Lemon test, which is the separation of Church and state, to allow far more presence of religion in government, and government-aided religion. Alito on the Supreme Court is likely to vote to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, to eliminate affirmative action on college universities. Alito on the Court is going to be a vote to allow much more government regulation of abortion. And if you like those results, then that’s why you want Samuel Alito on the Court.

Well now. A liberal finally found a government regulation to oppose.

But Prof. Chemerinsky is wrong. Conservatives are sick to death of “results.” The conservative critique of liberal jurisprudence is based not on a lust for results but a faith in process. And it is based on an almost erotic love for the mystery of law and the miracle of the Founders and their constitution of 1787.

Liberals act as though the law is all about them: their rights as political activists, their right as liberal women not to have children, their right as artists and writers to challenge society without mercy or decency. But if you look at the history of law you will find that, for the most part, it is not about liberals. Since its Babylonian origins it has focused much more on trying to sort things out when they go wrong, particularly when things go wrong in complicated commercial and trading ventures.

Take the case of the ship laden with grain that docked over two thousand years ago in the Piraeus, the port of ancient Athens, after an eventful voyage from Syracuse, Sicily. The problem was that two parties claimed ownership of the cargo, relates John Maxcy Zane in The Story of Law. There was another complication. On the voyage from Syracuse, one of the claimants had smashed a hole in the ship and then jumped off the stern to take off in the ship’s boat. Only he missed, fell in the water and was drowned. So who owned the cargo, counselor?

The heroic liberal era in jurisprudence began with the expansion of the commerce clause in the 1930s. It reached its apogee with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that sliced through the tangle of racism and forced Americans to confront their nation’s original sin of slavery and its shameful aftermath. But then the Supreme Court, egged on by the chattering classes, proceeded to coddle criminals, chase religion out of the public square, and free well-born women from the inconvenience of children. The result was a mess.

When there is a mess, when things are out of joint, then people start to think it is time for a change. They begin to feel that it is time to change from Senator Kennedy’s corrupt liberal America to Judge Alito’s decent conservative America.

And who knows? Maybe they are right. Then they start to write manifestos.

Our America, Senator Kennedy and Professor Chemerinsky, is a land where women, especially professional women in blue states, will have the right to an abortion but will know it is shameful, blacks will finally be freed from the liberal plantation, children will no longer be warehoused in monopoly government schools, writers and artists will no longer be censored by government university speech codes, and the federal courts will no longer be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens while liberals conduct seances on penumbras and emanations inside.

America will be a land purged of the gross accumulation of liberal injustice, the precipitate of liberal power wielded too proudly for too long. And liberals will be better for it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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