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To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.
Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.
Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."
Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."
So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.
Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.
Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.
So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.
Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.
There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision. Seriously, I'm anti-term limits, but if some future Gibbon wrote the history of the decline and fall of the American empire, I can already feel the bored teenagers of some future century, their eyes glazing over trying to understand why this obscure fight over the appointment for certain bureaucrats was so pivotal to world history. It would be like trying to explain the intricacies of doctrinal disputes in medieval Christianity, the kind of thing that just seems monumentally obscure.
This isn't to say that liberals haven't lost The Common Touch, it takes a real galaxy brain to explain why the people burning down a Target are fighting for equality or something, you just can't explain that to a peasant. But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me." The American common men are definitionally Conservative, and if they aren't then they aren't really American common men. The common touch is talking about immigration and inflation. It's talking about the constitutional right to bear arms. It ain't term limits.
This feels off to me. Term limit proposals for SCOTUS were a debate in my AP US Gov textbook in 2008. They were picked up as a major policy proposal in 2020. But there's a long history of proposals for reform of SCOTUS terms.
I'm glad you acknowledged that Republican appointees have held the majority since 1970. Once again, a Conservative majority is defined by McLaughlin as "agrees with me." Particularly, agrees with McLaughlin on social issues to the extent he'd like them too. Ignoring the various other rulings made on a thousand other issues. As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.
But at what point does ideological drift become a skill issue for the other major party? When you say:
Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs? The GOP held the Governor's mansion in California as recently as 2011. They've held the presidency for the majority of the last 70 years. Fox News, their partisan outlet, has been the top rated cable news channel for 22 consecutive years, and the top basic cable channel period for 8. And yet, let's rephrase your question:
Somehow, in a two party system, your opponents can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population while you continue to lose every election. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.
Why is the GOP so incompetent that they can't get wins out of the supposed rank incompetence of Democrats? Is that Mr. McLaughlin and the National Review's fault, or are they just helpless passengers over at one of the major ideological organs of one of the two major political parties?
Then again, the NR folks have sure seemed to be helpless passengers against a certain short fingered vulgarian, so perhaps when they talk about conservatives finding themselves helpless against the least dirty trick from Dems, they're just describing themselves.
This seems like a pretty aggressive way to miscast what I wrote in that paragraph, which concerned the arc of French's ideological evolution over the last decade. I guess I don't really associate "New York Times Columnist" with "the Common Touch," but I suppose YMMV. Ditching your congregation over political disagreements and then later publicly shaming them for ditching you over political disagreements is also pretty lofty stuff. His bad take on the Supreme Court is in this context just the latest capitulation to his new social group, for whom he seems to serve as a highly convenient "token conservative."
Not at all. Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today." As far as I have been able to determine, French--who has a lot of published positions!--has somehow never thought to endorse term limits on SCOTUS justices until it became a talking point for the Democrats in this election cycle. Even if term limits for SCOTUS justices is a fantastic idea, getting conspicuously behind it now seems like a pretty clear (and potentially even costly) signal, not that you believe anything in particular about the structure of our government, but that you are Team Blue.
Indeed. And yet even though it would have been politically beneficial for them to do so, conservative presidents and legislators declined to exercise any authority, Constitutional or otherwise, to undermine the Court. They continued to accept their defeats, eventually won some control of the Court through the usual means (and a whole lot of luck), and then it became a good idea to reform the judiciary? I feel like you have to be giving McLaughlin a shockingly uncharitable read to characterize his problem as merely "these people don't agree with me."
I didn't do that at all. If I wanted to attribute a lack of agency to the GOP, I would have said so. My point was precisely that political competition isn't happening at the object level, and your flipping of the hypothetical to "GOP electoral incompetence" instead of "Democrat managerial incompetence" only illustrates the same point in a different way: political battles are no longer about governance, or at least they are less about governance than they once were (and ought more to be). They are about the meta, they are about tribes, they are about picking a winner and ensuring that the loser never gets a chance to make a comeback. And I think that all of these criticisms apply very well to a great many Republicans, too, such that your closing paragraphs are, at best, ill-targeted rhetoric.
Fair enough, that's not at all how I'd read that Kipling line. I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line. After all, it makes little sense to oppose retaining the common touch to
If the common touch is the ability to keep your virtue when the crowd is going the other way.
Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch. Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.
Which I think is where we're at cross understandings.
Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.
For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.
That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.
Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising. The NR audience is nearly three quarters men. 5% of their subscribers live in DC, less than a fifith of one percent of Americans do. The median NR reader is 66 years old, and 82% of them are over 55, as compared to numbers for America of 38 and ~30%. A little under 40% of Americans have college degrees, while 80% of NR Online readers have one. 43% of NR readers have a net worth over $1mm, only 5% of Americans meet that number. The NR represents a group that is vastly richer, older, more educated, more politically active than the Common American.
And that's what has made the NR an important publication! They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral. But the common man? They are not and haven't been. There are multiple ideological alternatives to taking orders from The Cathedral. A Catholic bishop does not represent "The Common Touch," and he doesn't take orders from that Cathedral; rather he follows his own intellectual tradition. Following any intellectual tradition ("If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue") in the face of popular opposition is admirable, and important for a publication to maintain intellectual integrity. But imagining that the National Review represents the common man's viewpoint is a very common error in assumptions that will produce bad conclusions.
To imagine that the Common Man looks like an NR reader requires excluding from your definition the vast majority of actual Americans, it makes "salt of the earth" an honorific rather than a description.
*I found a similar breakdown for the NYT here. Unfortunately, they don't use the same numbers in their statistics, so I'm not sure how to parse the comparison accurately. They list the number of 18-34 print subscribers (29% as compared to 20% nationally) and the median net worth for all subscribers ($508k, 54th percentile nationally). The gaps in the data are such that I'm not sure the two groups couldn't look more or less identical but reported differently, so I don't want to push the contrast analysis too far. It's reasonable to assume that both groups are wealthier, more educated than the median American, though the NYT numbers look much closer to "normal" there is some portion of their subscriber base that is looking for local NYC news, one can even imagine a guy who buys it primarily for the sports page, where the NR is essentially just the NYT Sunday magazine.
That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.
Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.
I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.
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You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.
Huh?
I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:
If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.
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