Ted Kennedy, horrified that GW appellate-court nominee Judge Janice Rogers Brown has "criticized the New Deal" -- tributary of his own out-of-the-mainstream political career -- tries to convince himself she and other GW nominees are "outside the mainstream." (Senator Edward M. Kennedy Online Office photo)
"The things she says and does could lead other blacks to begin to think independently -- and that in turn threatens the whole liberal house of cards," writes Thomas Sowell re Janice Rogers Brown, associate justice of the California Supreme Court nominated by President Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In advice-and-consent limbo for more than two years, her nomination is expected to enjoy a coveted up-or-down vote of the Senate in the next few days thanks to last night's "Group of 14" deal, blogged here. "She is a champion of property rights and an opponent of the Nanny State, both of which directly oppose the position of today’s Democratic Party," notes the Blogger News Network. Now here's Judge Brown in her own words, excerpts from a speech to The Federalist Society at the University of Chicago Law School a couple of years back [thanks to blogfriend Mr. Kurtz for the link]. It's full of quotable quotes, and you must read the whole thing to savor the excellence of her thinking, her scholarship and her rhetorical style:
We are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration.
It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse — whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism — has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.
[Socialism's] ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man. He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues: "There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature." As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, 'Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'"
It's the tragic vs. utopian view of human nature we're forever blogging about. Brown continues:
I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country's founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document.
At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth -- what Revel describes as "an almost pathological indifference to the truth."
Can you say Marcusian inversion?
For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court.
It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging."'What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union . . . is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.' In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute." Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?
Better watch your back, Teddy. Talking heads are saying Judge Brown's going to be a shoo-in.
Update: Beautiful Atrocities links with "A Message from Barbara Boxer."
I hated to see you contaminate your web site with the photo of low life Teddy but it was putting the truth where we can see it. Never in my experience has Teddy been honest. Only people like Janice Rogers Brown can save The USA from the dictatorship which one must have to suppress freedom enough to establish the socialism our "Intellectual Morons" desire.
Posted by: goomp | May 24, 2005 at 05:02 PM