Just what the American public wants to hear from Republicans:
“We are very excited about waging an ideological debate,” says Richard Viguerie, the well-heeled conservative fundraiser and direct-mail guru. “We never lose battles. Even if we lose the vote we win, we build the movement.”
“Remember,” adds Princeton law professor Robert George, founder of the National Organization for Marriage, “that the base does not expect to win this. That’s the little secret. [Republicans] don’t have the filibuster, the Democrats have the votes. For [the conservative base], this is about the future of the Republican Party, not who is going to sit on the Supreme Court. . . . . That is why conservatives are going to be interested in it, and what they are going to hold people accountable for.”
Let’s see. Battle you know can’t win? Check. Ideological battle no one but the fundies is interested in? Check. Possible party purges down the road? Check.
Even when conservatives lose, they win. The conservative cause can never fail, it can only be betrayed.
(By the way, I know I’ve asked about this before, but why are there so many crazy wingnut law professors? Instapundit, Dijon guy, she who must not be named, this guy. It’s not like this in other areas.)
Stephen1947
Over at Daily Kos, Lithium Cola has an essay on the main page that speculates about some of these issues. Titled “The Jihad-O-P and the President’s National Security Speech,” the article opines that the Newt, the Dick, and the radio fat ass who likes to suck big cigars are more like Hamas participants who want to keep things stirred up than leaders of a “loyal opposition.”
The only strategy LC can see in all this is an attempt to split off enough ‘independent’ votes for Publicans to sometimes win an election here or there.
The essay is much more thoughtful than I’m able to capture here, and gives plenty of food for concern about the state of our political system. Go read it.
kid bitzer
this george guy–i see he’s a professor of jurisprudence, but i don’t think princeton has a law school.
so, yeah, i guess he’s a law professor in some sense, but maybe a little different.
i also note that he’s a staunch catholic.
DougJ
Yeah, you’re right.
DeadlyShoe
The conservatives have always prioritized their legal movement. Over the years they have pumped a lot of resources and time into training conservative lawyers then appointing those lawyers to judgeships.
some of those lawyers became law perferssers instead.
wvng
“Even if we lose the vote we win.” You always win if you are a repuglican!
Starbursts for everyone.
kid bitzer
@dougj–
yeah, it was really politico’s characterization i was disagreeing with (“…adds Princeton law professor Robert George…”), not yours.
as far as his pedigree goes (harvard law, dphil w/ finnis, “first things”, aei), he is pretty recognizable type.
if he’d gone for a clerkship instead of the dphil, he’d be an alito or a roberts by now.
demkat620
I still think this is one of those places where their mythology has become too complicated. They will start this activist judge crap and the majority of the country will roll their eyes and look away.
It keeps their loonies happy but bores everybody else to tears.
Mattius
I don’t know, I kinda see the guy’s point. They’re right where they want to be – in fantasyland. They’re not responsible for anything, and in not being responsible for anything they can make whatever reality they want. In having such a small minority, they’re as free to say and believe what they want as much as a street-corner preacher. They can rail on and on about how bad things are under democratic management and how much different things would be under republicans and they don’t have to take so much as half a step in their professed direction because they don’t matter. It’s perfect for them – they can be all the bluster and blather and ballsiness they’ve always dreamed of being without any of the messy follow-up.
Whether this is a long term strategy isn’t relevant to the party of projection – they figure democrats will screw it up eventually anyways, just like they did, and at that moment people’ll come flooding back to republicans out of necessity, nostalgia, desperation, or lack of other alternatives.
sal
Lawyering, especially at the teaching level, is a pretty anal retentive field. Hence, it attracts assholes.
Redhand
Because if they are fucked up enough, just maybe one day they can be in a position to do real damage, viz. John Yoo.
NonyNony
You get wingnut types in engineering schools too, as well as in business schools. The engineering profs don’t blog about politics because they are too busy either giving the “there is no global warming” movement academic credibility or they’re too busy giving the “intelligent design is totally scientific” movement academic credibility. As a future graduate of an engineering program I wish it weren’t true, but it is.
I’m not sure why the business school types don’t blog more about politics, though. Maybe they are and no one cares?
Dennis-SGMM
Because nothing says “thoughtful opposition party” like announcing that you’ll fight the nomination before the nominee has even been named.
How’s that working out for you? Is there some cracker in the backwoods somewhere whom you haven’t reached?
And the filibuster was done away with exactly when? Remind me, which party talked about the “nuclear option” in the Senate?
Paranoid schizophrenia:it’s not a treatable illness, it’s a political movement.
kid bitzer
@11–
good point about engineers.
arthur butz is an ee prof at northwestern, and a holocaust denialist.
i think you get extra points for holocaust denial. it’s kinda the granddaddy of all denialisms.
JGabriel
Richard Viguerie:
I think Viguerie is confusing politics with bowel disorders. Which, when you think about the Republican party, would explain quite a lot.
.
Donna
@Mattius:
and that’s where they went wrong over the last 8 years — their boys were in power so they had to dance, spin even faster and use sparkly sleight of hand to get the rubes to think they weren’t responsible.
Now all they need do is sling slogans and other lies — Obama’s Economy, Obama’s War.
RSA
Have you noticed how many hardcore libertarians (including Ayn Rand fans) tend to work in the software industry? That’s always puzzled me, though I have my theories.
Hook Em Bucky
The GOP doesn’t lose, they just run out of time.
Barry
“By the way, I know I’ve asked about this before, but why are there so many crazy wingnut law professors? Instapundit, Dijon guy, she who must not be named, this guy. It’s not like this in other areas.)”
As said above, the others don’t get the publicity (creationism, climate fraud, etc.). Also, law in the beginning, middle and end is about power. The right recognizes that; liberals sorta forgot that.
Read The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, by Steven Teles. It describes how various factions in the 1970’s started a major movement to drag the law in a right-wing direction.
Xel
Basic rule for any democrat: NEVER repeat NEVER assume the lumpen won’t side with the republicans just because you or anyone sane cannot possibly fathom why anyone would want to.
No one in their right mind would try to talk about “criminalizing policy differences” when it’s merely a matter about criminalizing and investigating the downright criminal. Yet Cheney is gaining some traction with that canard, and ignoring that or panicking over it are equally bad responses.
These are people who want to ignore Reagan’s signature of human rights conventions from 1984, either because they don’t want the GOP to be humiliated by being held accountable like Clinton or because they really really hate the people who want to hold the previous administration accountable to laws Reagan ratified. We can joke about them all day long but no way in hell should we assume they are harmless.
The one thing we can count on is that Obama won’t give in and prevent investigations anymore than he will promote them. He doesn’t want a part of any of this but everything he has said or done so far suggests that he doesn’t want to put any undue weight on either of the scales.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m still convinced that the Dijon guy was parody.
Little Dreamer
My guess is they felt threatened by liberal college education and so, just like politics and school boards and whatever level of authority they felt they could crash (because they complained liberals had all the power, ya know), they decided to fight back with right wing ideologue professors.
And Law is special, they make the rules. ;)
Do I get a prize? Just wondering. ;)
Little Dreamer
@Hook Em Bucky:
Why was I thinking they’d run out of votes?
Tiger
Robbie George is a professor in Princeton’s politics department, not a law professor. And yes, his involvement in NOM is generally considered an embarrassment here, though he does teach a popular and hard-as-nails class on constitutional interpretation. Most people’s opinions of him take a David Caruso’s career nosedive when they learn he helped write the Federal Marriage Amendment.
Brandon
I should have applied to Princeton Law. Instead I went to Georgetown. :(
Interrobang
Have you noticed how many hardcore libertarians (including Ayn Rand fans) tend to work in the software industry? That’s always puzzled me, though I have my theories.
My hypothesis, speaking as someone who’s three or four times an outsider in IT (female, non-programmer, not well-paid by IT standards, disabled, etc.) is that for a lot of these guys — and they are almost all guys — they spent a lot of time having other people not only not understand what they were doing, but completely depend on them. This was on top of the normal able-bodied white male socialisation, which tends to give most of the type the sense that they can pretty much do whatever they want anyway, as long as they don’t infringe on the actions of higher-ranked ABWMs, that is.
Considering that besides all that, a lot of these guys spent most of their formative years getting crapped on by ABWMs further up the social hierarchy than they were. Now, suddenly, the guys who kicked the shit out of them in elementary school need them desperately. If that doesn’t convince you that you are one of the Undisputed Champeen Secret Masters of the Universe and that everything will fall to hell around everyone else’s ears if you leave, I don’t know what will.
‘Course, one would think that the democratisation of computing and the concomitant huge drop in wages might have caused them to rethink, but being Randroids, all they do is whine instead, and/or get even more extreme.
r€nato
Dear Republicans:
You know what would really grow the movement? Losing elections for the next 40 years.
Trust me on this one.
DBake
A fair assessment of Robbie George would have to be pretty mixed. He’s definitely smarter than some other asshole law profs you might have in mind. He’s written a few papers in Constitutional interpretation and philosophy of law that are supposed to be pretty serious. He’s also supposed to be an excellent teacher, even when working with students who strongly disagree with him.
At the same time, he wrote this laughably awful paper explaining why the Catholic Church’s position on marriage is the only morally acceptable one. His argument is that married people, by inserting the penis into the vagina, achieve “two-in-one flesh communion.” Buttsex does not involve a two-in-one flesh communion. So if you have buttsex, you are treating your body like a pleasure-producing machine, which means you are a dualist (like Descartes), which is bad. I am not making this up.
Condoms also fuck up the two-in-one flesh communion.
Keith
It should have been obvious that there are tons of right-wing legal professors given how long the GOP has been railing against lawyers and the professorial college elite. I call it “glass house innoculation”.
jcricket
I have totally noticed this (I work in IT). I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to argue with someone about the “money shouldn’t be taxed more than once” canard that Libertarian “intellectuals” (*cough*) seem to think is some brilliant proof that corporate taxes should be eliminated. Annoying.
And it’s not like us software folks start off all sunshine and roses either :-)
Frankly, I think based on polls of “real people”, the amount of Libertarianism and Libertarian ideals on the Internet vastly overstates the appeal and popularity in general. Sure, Republicans co-opt some of the rhetoric, but judging both by election results and by issue polls, the American public is 90-95% against Libertarian economic ideas.
Patrick
Could it be that there are not that many right-wing law professors, but the one’s around are particularly wingnutty? Republican Presidents have been nominating judges for 20 of the past 28 years and 28 of the past 38. If you were good enough to be a law professor who gets quoted in the press, but are not a judge, it must mean you are so wingnutty as to actually have inspired backbone in Dem senators.
JasonF
Politico is so hacky. Chief Justice Roberts got more than 75 votes for confirmation in a hundred-member body. More than half the Democratic caucus voted for him. This is considered a “rough go”?
I also love the way we’re ignoring the crap the GOP did to President Clinton’s nominees for the Courts of Appeals. Because somehow, those don’t count.
tammanycall
@jcricket:
If internet popularity was any indication of real world popularity, [Insert Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV series here] would never have been canceled.
@Jason F
Transparent Drudge baiting on Politico’s part. Still annoying, though.
joey giraud
Libertarians in IT?
reasons:
1. Geeks tend to be anti-social, self-centered and “superior”.
2. Past 2 decades, high-tech/computer industries were almost perfect models of “free market” in action.
3. Lots of money to be had.
4. Computers not really that hard, mostly received wisdom, not as intellectually pioneering as commonly perceived.
The top in any intellectual field; those who really push the edge of knowledge, are virtually *never* conservative ( or religious, for that matter. ) But wingnutty or libertarian types do fine with complex subjects requiring cleverness within a stable and authoritative structure of knowledge.
Jen R
You don’t “wage” debate, you wage war. Viguerie doesn’t know what debate is — he thinks it’s just beating people over the head with words rather than with weapons.
Monty
Someone help me out here, please – I am apparently not as much of an insider as I thought:
I am pretty sure that “she who must not be named” refers to Ann Althouse but who the hell is “Dijon guy” ?
grumpy realist
“Dijon guy” is the wingnut guy at Cornell (prof in law dept IIRC) who originally sparked the Dijon meme.
Martian Buddy
It’s ideological guerilla warfare. Remember, these people genuinely believe that America was founded and governed as a wingnut Christian nation until those wily liberal atheists managed to trick their way into power. As they see it, they’ve infiltrated one of the bastions of liberal power — the universities that indoctrinate our youth into homosocialiberalism — to teach THE TRUTH. It’s the same reason you’ll see so many wingnut teachers, pharmacists and doctors, and the same reason why half the members of the Texas Board of Education are wingnuts.
Will
In the 80’s the GOP pumped a lot of money and other resources into developing legal “talent” through the Federalist Society, etc. A lot of those people became judges, others professors.
M. Bouffant
Wing-nut law professors? Those who can, do, those who can’t …
They’re either colossal assholes who can’t make it practicing law (It could happen!) or they’re not the right kind of asshole to succeed in legal practice. Either way, they have to retreat to law school.
As far as IT & the like: I think a large number of contractors (IT & otherwise) who get 1099s (instead of having taxes w/held) have a visceral, psychological problem w/ having to shell out an entire yr.’s taxes at once (or even quarterly) as opposed to never seeing the money, & possibly getting a refund (most of you workers).
And I think a lot of people resent that, highly paid professionals that they are, they can’t do their own taxes, & feel like they’re paying an extra fee to the CPA for the privilege of being robbed. Check “flat-tax” or fair-tax” or whatever the hell advocates: “Do your taxes on a postcard & mail it in!!” is a big part of their argument.
Not the only reasons people are like this, but there are certainly psychological factors at work.
Jon
Princeton hasn’t had a Law School since the 19th century, so is this guy with Law & Public Affairs?
William
Regarding libertarians in IT:
I’m a software developer, one with mild libertarian leanings, and I think there’s a substantial inverse correlation between technical skill and social skill/awareness. It’s easy to think that people should be basically left alone if you are more comfortable being alone. It’s easy to think that you’re an island if you aren’t particularly aware of your own inner workings or those of others. And the intellectual independence necessary for the work inclines one to non-authoritarian appraoches.
Plus, simpler systems are easier to maintain, analyze, and debug, and so libertarian approaches fit well with the aesthetic sense of the typical engineer.
I say this all with sympathy; it’s taken me 20 years of hard work to struggle my way up something approximating socially normal.
William
Regarding wingnut lawyers:
Having at various times been roommates with, gone into business with, and dated lawyers, I think the good ones are all incredibly focused. They’re also trained to reduce things into zero-sum interactions and stories with exactly two sides, one of which is good and flawless, and the other of which is terrible and wrong in every way.
I think the intensity plus the building-a-case instincts make them all a little prone to getting obsessed. I don’t know any law professors, but my academic pals definitely average more crazy than the norm. But I’d guess nutty lawyers end up more on the right-wing side because black-and-white thinking is currently much more acceptable there.