Liberals and Empathy

We know conservatives are outraged by the question of Empathy vs. Justice. But what about liberals? After all, it was Candidate Obama who brought "empathy" onto the national radar when he talked about the importance of empathy in a Supreme Court Justice.

Feminist Wendy Kaminer wrestles with the question over at The Atlantic.

Sonia Sotomayor is either an injudicious advocate of identity politics or candidly realistic about the possibility of entirely objective decision-making.

You are not really supposed to admit that you have biases. But then we all have them.

Admitting such a bias goes against the life-work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you see.

In the early 1970s, as founding director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Ginsburg led a groundbreaking battle against discriminatory laws that meted out rights or entitlements on the basis of sex and assumptions about characterological, temperamental, and intellectual differences between men and women.

But, as we conservatives have complained, the problem that feminists immediately ran into is that women really are different and really do have special needs in law. So they smuggled discrimination back into the law through the back door. Only now, of course, the new discriminations would have a liberal secular cast rather than the cultural assumptions of a the white patriarchal culture that produced Anglo-Saxon law.

But Kaminer sees a problem in the excitement of the sisterhood over a second woman on the court.

Does the chauvinistic reaction to Sotomayor's nomination represent a repudiation of Ginsburg's fight for equality?

But it's ok. She notes that even Ginsburg has often railed against the insensitivity of the males on the court to feminine sensibilities.

[It took a] Ginsburg to decry the evident inability of her male colleagues to recognize the shame a junior high school girl feels when strip-searched by school administrators who suspect her of hiding advil in her underwear.

The problem is, though, that conservatives don't trust liberals when it comes to "empathy," the special shame that teenage girls may have over strip searching. In our hearts we agree with Ann Coulter when she says:

But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims -- always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups. As Joe Sobran says, it takes a lot of clout to be a victim.

And that means, writes Coulter, that for liberals, "'Empathy'... is nothing but raw political power."

That's because the further you travel from the notion of blindfolded Justice balancing the scales with no thumbs in sight, the closer you inevitably come to simple patronage politics and raw power. Because that's the natural political instinct: to take care of your own.

Empathy and Justice

President Obama spent paragraphs in his introduction of appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor telling the Teleprompter how judges should follow the law and not their personal preferences. David Limbaugh was not impressed.

True to form, President Barack Obama... said he was doing one thing while doing the exact opposite. He articulated his criteria for the optimal nominee yet chose someone who falls squarely outside those criteria -- as best we can tell.

That's because, in her speeches and her actions as a judge, Sonia Sotomayor has demonstrated pretty clearly that she belongs to the "empathy" school of jurisprudence. Never mind the law, vote your heart.

Of course, the law has always recognized, in the words of a famous fictional woman lawyer, that the "pound of flesh" in a contract must always be leavened with the quality of mercy. That's because if you bite too hard on the letter of the contract, it will end up biting you back.

But we know what liberals mean by "empathy." They mean that they will put a thumb on the scales of justice to make sure that the result is correct. Sonia Sotomayor understands what it means. That's what the mandatory quote about a "wise Latina woman" is all about. It's OK to upend centuries of white male jurisprudence if it helps the poor and the weak in their struggle with an oppressive world.

If that were all, it wouldn't be so bad. But empathy leads quickly to injustice, as the New Haven firefighters case so conveniently demonstrates. After all, who deserves empathy there? The black firefighters that didn't come close in the promotion exam, or the dyslexic Italian American who studied night and day to pass the exam? Does race trump disability? No doubt the lawyers that prepared the case for the firefighters knew exactly what they were doing in setting up two liberal enthusiasms to fight each other.

I keep coming back to the same point. The progressive educated class has dominated the culture and the public square for the last century. In or out of office they have had the power to enforce their view of government and society upon America. After a while, however idealistic the revolution that brought it to power, a new elite becomes just another ruling class. It is not that they are bad people, although there are always bad applies in the barrel. It is just that an established ruling class becomes insensitive and unable to understand the injustices that they inflict upon the people they rule.

In a way, our liberal masters understand this. That is why President Obama is always saying one thing and doing another. As Rush Limbaugh puts it: liberals can't admit who they are. On this view the Obama campaign and presidency thus far have been masterpieces of misdirection. Yes, he's all for Hope and Change, but his policies mean more of the same Big Government.

In the Wall Street Journal today Bret Stephens invokes the South Park "Gnomes" to explain this. These gnomes are running around South Park episode in 1998 collecting underpants.

What's the big idea? The gnomes explain:

"Phase One: Collect underpants.

"Phase Two: ?

"Phase Three: Profit."

That seems to be the way that the Obama administration works. The all important Phase Two always gets elided. How do we get to actually close Gitmo while keeping those high-value terrorists in custody? How do we lower costs in health care while providing universal coverage. And how do you do "empathy" on the Supreme Court without sacrificing justice?

Go ahead, Mr. President. This is your moment. What is your plan? You do have a plan, don't you?

The trouble is that President Obama really does have a plan. It is bigger government. It is more of the cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded liberal administrative state.

Understandably, he can't tell us that because if he did, the American people would upchuck him immediately.

Sotomayor: A Liberal Bully?

This morning President Obama nominated appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to a seat on the United States Supreme Court. She is, according to first reports, about as liberal as you can be and still get confirmed by the Senate.

So this is what conservatives warned about. Elect Obama and you'll get a radical left-winger on the Court.

Of course, the only thing worse is to nominate a moderate and get a solid liberal vote on the court--someone like retiring Justice Souter.

Actually, I'm encouraged. Here's a look at Sotomayor from New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen.

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it...



Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

We should take this kind of talk with a grain of salt. There's a tendency for highly educated law clerks to value intellectual gifts over more mundane gifts of energy and persistence. Intellectual gifts have their place. But so do other gifts.

Still, if you asked me what I would want in a liberal Obama appointee it would be that they didn't quite get it. That they didn't know where the skeletons were buried and why.

In my view, whether the future is conservative or liberal, the past century of liberal jurisprudence is going to start getting unpacked and reversed. That's because, liberal or conservative, a lot of it is just bad law. If you were a liberal, you'd want a first-class mind to conduct the strategic retreat and save the really important legal assets in the march.

The New Haven firefighters case shows how this might play out. Judge Sotomayor was part of a panel on the case that tried to bury the case without really examining it on its merits. In other words, she and the other liberal judges on the court were engaging in a bit of liberal skulduggery to prevent the white firefighters (and one Hispanic) from getting their day in court.

Is it just to bury a case in which a municipality junked the results of a firefighters' promotion exam because it didn't promote enough blacks (even though the exam had been carefully designed to be non-discriminatory)?

When liberals long for a liberal turn for the Supreme Court, you wonder what they really want. More race and gender obsessed jurisprudence? I say: Bring It On.

Because political change comes out of rage and injustice, and the more injustice that liberals cook up the better the chance conservatives will get to build a "broad coalition" to change America for the better.

Should GOP "Reach Out?"

After two successive defeats at the polls, what should the Republican Party do to "reach out?"

There are two approaches. One is to get back to basics, and emphasize the conservative roots of the Republican Party. You could say that Rush Limbaugh represents that approach.

The other approach is the "reach out" strategy. The Republican Party is excessively male and white, on this view, and can only expect to get back into power if it reaches out to minorities and women. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell seems to be eager to own this approach.

Conservatives like Limbaugh have been less than polite to Powell for his "reach out" views, especially since Powell publicly backed Barack Obama for president in the fall of 2008. Rush has said that Powell had essentially left the party by backing Obama. Former Vice-President Cheney has publicly agreed with Rush.

Now Colin Powell has used the Sunday talk show Face The Nation to reply to Limbaugh and Cheney. And he's gathered support from former Governor Tom Ridge (R-PA).

“I think Rush articulates his point of view in ways that offend very many,” Ridge said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Even Newt Gingrich got in on the action:

"I don't want to pick a fight with Dick Cheney, but the fact is, the Republican party has to be a broad party that appeals across the country,"

All this is good clean fun, but it rather misses the point. If the American people really want a social democratic state like Europe, then there is no need for the Republican Party. The US has a welfare-state party and that party is the Democratic Party. They do welfare-state politics much better than the Republicans Party.

In 2008 Candidate Obama ran on the ancient platform of "Time for a Change" and he won. He talked optimistically about healing the sick and lowering the oceans, but didn't talk too much about the costs of his change.

If, after four or eight years, President Obama's health care reform and his cap-and-trade plans are a roaring success, then it will truly be time for the Republican Party to reinvent itself.

But if American women revolt against massive changes in their health care, and if President Obama's policies create an energy shortage, and if taxes go up all round, then Republicans might suddenly find themselves the majority party again without lifting a finger.

A look at the experience of the Conservative Party in Britain is helpful. In 1997, Tony Blair was elected in a massive landslide and promised to make over the British National Health Service and the state education system. The British people were entranced, and for three successive elections wouldn't pay any attention to the Tories.

Finally, after the third election loss, David Cameron moved to the center to show that the Tories weren't the nasty party and that they were ready to be modern and green. Real conservatives hated his tactic and the media loved it.

But now people are moving to the Conservative Party not because it is modern and green, but because the Labour Government under Blair and Brown has wrecked the economy. They've pumped hundreds of billions into health care and education, and nothing much has changed.

There's a simple lesson here. The center-left parties tend to overspend and run out of money. They do this because they see the economy as a source of funds for their government programs. Center-right parties tend to see the government sector as a place to spend money if the economy is in good shape.

When the center-left party runs out of money, then the center-right party gets a chance to come in and fix the mess.

The moral of the story? Don't Panic.

Sure, there's a place in the Republican Party for moderates, especially in the North East. But if the Republican Party stands for anything it must stand for reform of the welfare state. The question is: how to reform and how to present the reform to the American people.

Anyone who can figure that out is a genius and should go immediately to the head of the class.

Obama's Speeches: Extraordinary or Contemptible?

Yesterday, May 21, 2009, President Obama gave a speech on terrorism in which he attacked the previous administration and set the face of his team against "torture."

Conservatives are enraged. Mark Steyn called it "revolting and contemptible" on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Over at The Atlantic James Fallows is still excited about the president's speech at Notre Dame last Sunday, "another extraordinary performance" to rank with the race speech in 2008, the Prague speech on nuclear weapons, and the Georgetown speech on long-term economic policy.

What made these presentations extraordinary was not any single phrase or sentence, nor any paragraph-long flight of fine language... Instead the power of those speeches comes from the quality of their thought -- from the ideas and truths the speaker is trying to grapple with:

It goes without saying that conservatives don't think that way at all. Hugh Hewitt comments on a central paragraph of the president's terrorism speech:

BHO: All too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight. But all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists and citizens, fell silent.

HH: Mark Steyn, this is a deeply dishonest statement. It lacks the specificity that would allow people to rebut it, and it is an attempt to give himself credit for that which he does not deserve, the national security success of the last eight years, and to diminish that success.

You can see what is going on here. Liberals love the rhetoric that the president is using. They do it themselves all the time, distancing themselves morally from the actions of the US government and the American people. They do it on Pearl Harbor, on Hiroshima, on Vietnam, and Iraq.

For conservatives, this distancing is outrageous, for it supposes that liberals are helpless victims, borne along by the tide of governmental malfeasance. Conservatives cannot accept that. Conservatives live lives in which they are knocked upside the head by liberal political power every day. Whaddya mean, helpless victim?

But for liberals like James Fallows and your liberal friend next door, President Obama's rhetoric is the very essence of moral inquiry. It is exhilarating to live in a time when you can listen to a president who says such wise things. I remember a liberal friend who was utterly bewitched by Candidate Obama's race speech in 2008--in the week before Obama threw Reverend Wright under the bus.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental question here. Liberals and conservatives can't both be right about President Obama. Someone is living a fantasy here, and someone is going to get a nasty rendezvous with reality.

Well, it ain't gonna be me! But you never know. Maybe we conservatives are so blinded by our "hate" that we can't see reality. Or maybe not.

But here's a reality check. The point about President Obama is not that he is a left-wing radical. Maybe he is' maybe he isn't. The point is that he is saying and doing exactly what mainstream liberals want him to say and do.

We know that Obama's politics causes Obama Derangement Syndrome in conservatives. The question is: what do moderates, particularly moderate women think. And what will they think in 2010 and 2012?

That is the question.

UK Parliament Falls on Sword

As the Parliament in Britain has become less and less powerful, it has become more and more corrupt. The last two weeks have been full of reports of outrageous expenses claimed by Members of Parliament. My favorite is the Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, who got the taxpayer to pay for cleaning the moat at his country house.

So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has decreed that Parliament will no longer answer to itself--like a "gentlemen's club"--but will answer to an outside regulator.

This means that the great institution that once toppled a king is going out into the night, never to return.

There have been a couple of articles pointing out that "gentlemen's clubs" would never have tolerated the trotters-in-the-trough attitude that has overwhelmed the mother of parliaments. Writes historian Andrew Roberts

If club members were caught doing half of what it turns out MPs have been up to, they would immediately be forced to resign their memberships and never show their faces again.

Clubs and associations belong to a different world from today's world. The club is a voluntary self-governing association. It believes in trust and ancient liberties, responsibility and respect.

But we live in the age of the overweening expert. People can't be trusted to do the right thing. You have to have a professional ethicist to tell them what to think.

You can see this attitude here in the United States. Banks can't be allowed to govern themselves. You have to have a central bank to tell them what to do, and when that doesn't work you add an additional layer of regulation.

Auto companies get saddled with intransigent unions, and can't adapt to new market conditions. So what do you do when the auto company goes bankrupt? You stiff the bondholders and give the company to the union--supervised of course by expert regulators in the government.

There's a reason why our founding fathers set up a republic with limited government. It's because they believed that people ought to be self-governing. They ought to be free, and they ought to be responsible. And they ought to have the power to show their mettle.

But that was in the old days before the rise of the progressive educated class. The educated class has nothing to do except regulate and second guess. So they have systemically demolished the old world of freedom and responsibility and replaced it with a system of administrative oversight and regulation.

It's just as well that the whole thing will collapse in ruins pretty soon. Because that will give us the best chance in generations to pick up the pieces and resume the great American experiment: freedom and responsibility under law. As Ronald Reagan said:

[America's] still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.

What a concept!

"Smattering" of Voters Kill CA Tax Props

There was only a "smattering of California voters" out yesterday according to Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times. but they voted down all but one of Governor Schwarzenegger's propositions to fix the state budget hole by increasing taxes and juggling spending allocations.

The tax increases didn't just go down. They went down big. Here are the numbers as of Wednesday morning.

Proposition	Yes vote	No vote
1A - Rainy Day Fund	34%	66%
1B - Education Funding	33%	66%
1C - Modernize Lottery	37%	63%
1D - Child Services Funding	35%	65%
1E - Mental Health Budget	34%	66%
1F - Elected Official Salaries	74%	26%

The main proposition was Proposition 1A. It would raise taxes now and create a rainy day fund later. The other propositions would reallocate special funds into the general fund, allow the state to borrow against future lottery proceeds, and prevent increase in elected officials' salaries in any year in which there was a deficit.

Today, of course, Governor Schwarzenegger is accepting the will of the voters and vowing to move forward.

“We face a staggering $21.3 billion deficit and in order to prevent a fiscal disaster, Democrats and Republicans must collaborate and work together to address this shortfall,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “The longer we wait the worse the problem becomes and the more limited our choices will be.”

But the real potential for disaster is the one that Schwarzenegger doesn't mention. Suppose the state cut spending and the world didn't end?

That is a prospect that doesn't bear thinking about.

But maybe President Obama will bail the state out. Why not? He's bailed just about everything else out in the last 100 days. Why not California?