In2HiDef
08-30-2011, 07:06 AM
Walter Russell Mead
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin) in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
This is one of the most startling reappraisals to appear in The New Yorker for many years. It is hard to think of other revisions as radical as the declownification of Clarence Thomas: Herbert Hoover as the First Keynesian? Henry Kissinger as the Great Humanitarian? Richard Nixon, the most liberal president ever (that one might even be true)?
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/files/2011/08/436px-Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/files/2011/08/436px-Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg)Clare nce Thomas (Wikimedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg) )
There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonin Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.
Toobin is less interested in exploring why liberal America has been so blind for so long to the force of Clarence Thomas’ intellect than in understanding just what Thomas has achieved in his lonely trek across the wastes of Mordor. And what he finds is that Thomas has been pioneering the techniques and the ideas that could not only lead to the court rejecting all or part of President Obama’s health legislation; the ideas and strategies Thomas has developed could conceivably topple the constitutionality of the post New Deal state.
Reshaping the Constitution
Back in Pundit High, they used to teach a fair amount about constitutional history in the US history course; phrases like “Marbury vs. Madison” and “Fletcher vs. Peck” had an ugly way of turning up on quizzes and tests. Our American history teacher, besides discreetly taking some of the boys aside from time to time to explain the dubious origins of their family hoards, was steeped in New Deal constitutional views and made a point of telling us that two of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights were vestigial organs, constitutional equivalents of the appendix. The Second Amendment on the right to bear arms simply meant that states could have militias; the Tenth Amendment reserving all additional powers to the states meant nothing at all and had simply been thrown in as a sop to ignorant know-nothings of the age.
Other parts of the Constitution, by contrast, gained in importance over the years: the commerce clause, for example, gave the federal government a practically unlimited power in this modern age to regulate everything under the sun.
In that as in so much else Pundit High prepared us to move into the liberal world of the day; we were being given exactly the ideas and opinions that would prepare us to lead the next generation of American liberalism in the New England way. Until very recently the constitutional vision I was taught in my teens remained, as they say, hegemonic. The enlarged role of the commerce clause was uncontested and the two amendments dangled with the other dead constitutional provisions — letters of marque and reprisal, no bills of attainder, the prohibition on quartering — in constitutional limbo.
The way we learned them, the Second and Tenth amendments were as dead as the three fifths clause: so dead that there was no point in asking why they died or what they were doing there. Like the “begats” in the Bible (long tables of genealogy listing endless generations of people who are otherwise entirely forgotten) they padded the document without doing any work. The federal government faced few realistic constraints on its power and the constitutional settlement of the New Deal was unshakably firm.
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin) in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
This is one of the most startling reappraisals to appear in The New Yorker for many years. It is hard to think of other revisions as radical as the declownification of Clarence Thomas: Herbert Hoover as the First Keynesian? Henry Kissinger as the Great Humanitarian? Richard Nixon, the most liberal president ever (that one might even be true)?
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/files/2011/08/436px-Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/files/2011/08/436px-Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg)Clare nce Thomas (Wikimedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clarence_Thomas_official_SCOTUS_portrait.jpg) )
There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonin Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.
Toobin is less interested in exploring why liberal America has been so blind for so long to the force of Clarence Thomas’ intellect than in understanding just what Thomas has achieved in his lonely trek across the wastes of Mordor. And what he finds is that Thomas has been pioneering the techniques and the ideas that could not only lead to the court rejecting all or part of President Obama’s health legislation; the ideas and strategies Thomas has developed could conceivably topple the constitutionality of the post New Deal state.
Reshaping the Constitution
Back in Pundit High, they used to teach a fair amount about constitutional history in the US history course; phrases like “Marbury vs. Madison” and “Fletcher vs. Peck” had an ugly way of turning up on quizzes and tests. Our American history teacher, besides discreetly taking some of the boys aside from time to time to explain the dubious origins of their family hoards, was steeped in New Deal constitutional views and made a point of telling us that two of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights were vestigial organs, constitutional equivalents of the appendix. The Second Amendment on the right to bear arms simply meant that states could have militias; the Tenth Amendment reserving all additional powers to the states meant nothing at all and had simply been thrown in as a sop to ignorant know-nothings of the age.
Other parts of the Constitution, by contrast, gained in importance over the years: the commerce clause, for example, gave the federal government a practically unlimited power in this modern age to regulate everything under the sun.
In that as in so much else Pundit High prepared us to move into the liberal world of the day; we were being given exactly the ideas and opinions that would prepare us to lead the next generation of American liberalism in the New England way. Until very recently the constitutional vision I was taught in my teens remained, as they say, hegemonic. The enlarged role of the commerce clause was uncontested and the two amendments dangled with the other dead constitutional provisions — letters of marque and reprisal, no bills of attainder, the prohibition on quartering — in constitutional limbo.
The way we learned them, the Second and Tenth amendments were as dead as the three fifths clause: so dead that there was no point in asking why they died or what they were doing there. Like the “begats” in the Bible (long tables of genealogy listing endless generations of people who are otherwise entirely forgotten) they padded the document without doing any work. The federal government faced few realistic constraints on its power and the constitutional settlement of the New Deal was unshakably firm.