Response to Goldberg
8th June 2016
According to the available metrics, the most-read JAG post to date—by a significant margin—has been “Trump and the Judge.” We think it’s a pretty good post. But still. This fact alone would seem to vindicate our contention that all is not well with America or with conservative intellectualism. Or, to be less circumspect, that America has become, or is well on the way to becoming—in the classic sense—a corrupt republic.
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Here’s what’s really going on. The old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups, content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it—but also demands that we keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright that “these rules don’t apply to our side.” They can be openly biased, and justly so, because of past injustice, present white privilege and so on. But for the right, it’s always 1963. And not the actual 1963 (which was bad) but the 1963 of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech (one of the greatest ever, by the way), as if it were actually the law of the land right now. Which, of course, it isn’t.