A stopped clock is correct twice a day, David Brooks rather less often. Today, he comes out in favor of Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But being a New Yorker (though born in Toronto), he has to give her a Bronx salute before he can say so. The form it takes is not the usual raised middle finger. Instead he comes to bury, not to praise, her ethnicity and gender.
If she were older, he argues, she would have assimilated (like award-winning singer, actor and dancer Rita Moreno (Rosita Dolores Alverío), a specific example Bobo avoids), and her ethnicity would have been irrelevant. If she were younger, had she gone to Princeton and Yale in the 1980’s, "her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting", but of no importance (like Michelle Malkin or Rachel Paulose). How Bobo comes to that imaginary conclusion, he doesn’t say.
Not unlike a Dickens’ character, Ms. Sotomayor was born neither early nor late: she was born when she was born.
These were the days when what we now call multiculturalism was just coming into its own. These were the days when the whole race, class and gender academic-industrial complex [sic] seemed fresh, exciting and just.
There was no way she was going to get out of that unscarred.
Her gender and ethnicity are entirely relevant, but not in the passive, sexless, deracinated way Bobo would prefer. Ms. Sotomayor didn’t discard her past, like a thick accent, or become forced into a stereotyped supporting role. She wasn’t simply a beneficiary of change. She made it, slowly, carefully, for herself and those immediately around her. (Slow and careful are the parts Bobo admires.) As a prosecutor and judge for more than two decades, that includes the public, the rich and poor, the well-represented and the legally destitute, who appeared with in her court.
As a rich white man writing for other rich white men, Bobo doesn’t much care for change. He likes things the way they are. He is about as uncomfortable with change as Mr. Obama is with controversy. It is Ms. Sotomayor’s willingness carefully to speak out, to articulate concerns that should be addressed by an informed community, that makes her a "radical", but a restrained one the Right can accept:
[S]he has given a series of speeches that have made her a poster child for identity politics.
For Bobo, anything other than falling in with the crowd – changing one’s name and identity to suit the majority white’s expectations or not having to, because your peers no longer care – is "radical". It’s an attitude that corporate ownership has made the norm among "journalists". Little wonder that Bobo wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday and the New York Times today.
What does excite Bobo about Ms. Sotomayor is that she’s an incrementalist, a judicial minimalist, who worked her way up from the streets, like a private who made general.
More than any current member of the Supreme Court, she worked her way up through the furnace levels of the American legal system. And when she reached a position of authority, she did not turn herself into an Al Sharpton in robes.
She is quite liberal. But there’s little evidence that she is motivated by racialist thinking or an activist attitude.
That used to be the kind of sentiment we lauded. But in those who speak with a Wall Street Journal twang, it rings hollow, like an echo of the company propaganda that once claimed that "employees are our most valuable asset."
Bobo is a great hater of technocrats, highly competent bureaucrats who create, implement and run government programs. (When they walk through the revolving door into the arms of corporate America, they are "responsible change agents".) So he damns with faint praise when he describes her opinions as,
the products of a clear and honest if unimaginative mind. She sticks close to precedent and the details of a case. There’s no personal flavor (in the boring parts one wishes there were). There’s no evidence of a grand ideological style or even much intellectual ambition. If you had to pick a word to describe them, it would be “restraint.”
He may have gone to Chicago, but Mr. Brooks knows how to sling a Harvard faculty club put down. If Ms. Sotomayor were a neocon, "restraint" would be a lost opportunity. In the hands of Dick Cheney, it’s an epithet, like "law abiding".
David Brooks is telling rich white men they can let go of their balls. They can take off the overstuffed metal codpiece borrowed from Mr. Bush. Ms. Sotomayor is not interested in cutting them off. She may not religiously rule in favor of government or private executives, like the Supreme Court’s current conservative brethren, but she doesn’t tilt at social wind mills or contest the powers that be without clear precedent in her favor. She’s the best the Right could hope for, so it should be thankful Mr. Obama agrees with them on where they moved the "center".
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My vote is that Brooks is jumping on the bandwagon in favor of Ms. Sotomayor’s confirmation. Like Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fl), he’s telling his peers to get on before the carriage leaves the station.
If Brooks is ‘on the bandwagon’ “>maybe it’s time to look closely at the bandwagon.
Earl, I don’t know how old you are but there is really a difference in attitude and the expression thereof between people who went to college in the 60, the 70’s and the 80’s. Bobo’s points are well taken in that regard. Yours are not.
This is in contrast with Republicans. An imaginative Republican is another name for a liar. An unimaginative Republican is a bad liar.
I think Brooks is giving his grudging acceptance of Sotomayor, precisely because she isn’t a liberal and because she has often ruled in favor of corporations, you know the people who supply Brooks with his salary and kneepads.
Oh and HanTran, Brooks was born in 1961 so he didn’t hit college until about 1980, that radical period in our history known as the Reagan years. So all this revolutionary chic you are alluding to from the 60s and 70s by the 80s had become disco. Is that what you are saying by the way, that Brooks’ political and cultural insights come out of his experience with disco? I admit that would explain a lot.
Mr. Brooks chides Ms. Sotomayor not for existential or universal failings, but for not being like him. He was born in the ’60’s, schooled in the early ’80’s, and a neocon employee for much of his career: the WSJ (reporter, OpEd page editor, foreign correspondent – covering Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the comfort of Brussels); the Weekly Standard; and now a Rightist contributor for the NYT.
If Chicago ever had a radical period, it was over by 1979-83 when Brooks was there. There was also a considerable difference in the experiences between students at university from the 1960’s – 80’s that precludes them from being glibly lumped together. The early ’60’s was a vastly different experience than 1968-72. The Watergate years were different than the Iran hostage crisis years starting in 1979. The “greed is good” Gordon Gekko/Ronald Reagan period, when Brooks went to school, was different again, and so on.
Hugh is right. Sotomayor is acceptable because she isn’t a liberal and because the Right’s calculus is that she’ll be confirmed. They’ve used the opportunity to slam Obama and to recite their scary mantras – radical, socialist, femmi-Nazi, etc., – which is all the post-Cheney Republican Party seems capable of. The campaign against Ms. Sotomayor was a warm-up, not the main event. Sadly, Obama’s commitment to avoiding giving the Right a target results in unprogressive candidates (and one or two, like Koh and Johnsen, who languish unapproved) who are happy to leave the goal posts where the Right has moved them.
Brooks’ cultural “insights”, such as Bobos in Paradise, are superficial and opportunistic, Tony Robbins meets Sociology 101. Bobos, BTW, is Brooks’ contraction of bourgeois and bohemian, the supposed amalgam of traits and hypocrisies he discerned in his peers, the contemporary East Coast well-to-do, circa 2000.
Bobo has a keen eye and a literary flair. He can be witty, mostly when he pokes fun at the behavior he likes and admires. But his work is insincere and disingenuous. He may be a conservative, but he knows Bush and Cheney are not. Like Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, they are radicals in black robes instead of bell-bottom jeans. He knows Sotomayor is not a liberal, his claimed description of her, but a superb scholar whose chosen path is fine readings of established law.
Brooks uses his gifts to service the Party. He is a propagandist hoping that some day, his penny-loafered feet will fit into Bill Safire’s steel-toed wingtips. He is not a neutral, credible public intellectual.
The point is not that the ’60’s were different from the ’80’s, that race, ethnicity and gender were perceived differently in one era than another. It’s the utility Brooks would make of those differences. His argument is that participating in making change ipso facto makes one a radical, and therefore undesirable, a reactionary generality too grand to be of value.
Those characteristics should be relevant to good judging, to the extent they inform a judge about the practical consequences of their actions. The Solomonic decree to cut the baby in half is murderous unless the judge knows his litigants and uses it as a ruse to interrogate them, not as a naked judgment that he intends to be carried out. Judging is not only about the law; it’s about its practical applications to real people and circumstances, which is the point Ms. Sotomayor made in talking about them.
For Bobo, they are also relevant, to the extent they suggest a judge will uphold his conservative political values. He just dresses it up in pretend “universals”.