Boogie
Late last week, President Bush announced his second nomination for a Supreme Court justice to replace retiring justice O’Connor. I won’t link to any stories—they’re very easily found, if you somehow managed not to hear anything about it.
I don’t post much about primarily political topics, but this struck me as odd. So many people feel so strongly about just how much a “slam dunk” is the Alito nomination that it leaves me wondering why he wasn’t nominated first. I’m tempted to consider the Meiers nomination a thinly-veiled ploy to kowtow to purported liberal interests—principally, the replacement of one female voice with another—without taking any great risk that a woman might actually be appointed. How could she be appointed if she were so obviously underwhelming in her qualifications?
Why should such weak quasi-Orwellianism be my first reaction? Sure, there are practically innumerable facets of the government’s administration of the public interest, and a litany of egregious affronts to that public interest is easily constructed. Does it follow, then, that any apparent controversy or deficiency should be initially met with an aggressively skeptical, conspiracy-theorizing scorn?
It’s less an irrational position than it might seem, but it’s not terribly productive, either. Given how embedded and largely inscrutable—in anything approaching its totality—the political system is, and given that aforementioned easily constructed litany, it’s just as reasonable to presume illicit confederacy as it is to presume either the lesser offense of partisan “strategery”, or just simple incompetence. It’s at least as reasonable because it’s historically justified; and it might be more reasonable because it’s more easily actionable.
With or without a multiparty system, the body politic and its representatives will always partition themselves into multiple philosophically-oriented factions, so partisanship is unavoidable however it might be executed. Calls to end it both enter a social consciousness saturated with such calls, and fall impotent against reality.
The members of any organization always have and always will suffer the incompetence of some of its membership. The universe in which this is not the case exists in the extreme of any distribution of possibilities as to be preposterous. Better to develop a system to mitigate rather than attempt to remove it completely.
Duplicity, now there’s something we can sink our teeth into. Just as the stage actor must be made up garrishly for the audience’s benefit, so, too, is the image of a nefarious, corrupt star chamber running the world from behind curtains of cigar smoke. Corruption is no less imminent than partisanship or incompetence, but the motivated activist can more easily (if only a little) focus her crosshairs there. In a cost-benefit analysis, this stands out against the alternatives as the most effective reactionary philosophy.
None of this should be read to say that we should dispatch more positively-aligned activism in favor of masking-tape X’s on our windows or aluminum foil helmets. However, as much as we might accomplish through positive reinforcement, the People must always vigilantly correct or punish the failing efforts of its representative body, and you could do worse than to take out the low-hanging fruit first.
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