aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, October 07, 2005

The liberal conervative elite

Noam Scheiber says the Miers nomination reveals a conservative schism:

In many ways, the biggest fault line emerging among conservatives is between East Coast elites, on the one hand, and rank-and-file conservatives elsewhere in the country. As soon as the nomination was announced, Beltway conservatives began griping that Miers, a former Dallas lawyer and a graduate of Southern Methodist University Law School, lacked the credentials to serve on the Supreme Court. “An inspiring testament to the diversity of the president’s cronies,” quipped National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that the conservative movement had spent decades grooming legal talent for the next Republican Supreme Court nomination. Promising young conservatives had attended top law schools, written weighty academic papers, embarked on distinguished careers as professors and judges--all to hone their legal philosophy for the day when they would be able to impose it on U.S. jurisprudence. For Bush “to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence” was “simply reckless,” Frum concluded.

Away from the Eastern seaboard, however, conservatives were warming to Miers. Irate National Review readers wrote to accuse the magazine of elitism. A conservative Texas lawyer complained that calling Miers’s old firm “undistinguished” was “the kind of thing that only an absolute snob--someone who takes the position that no Texas firm could ever be anything but undistinguished--would say.”

What’s important here, says Scheiber, isn’t ideology; it’s sociology:

[C]onservative elites are frequently as credentialist, even snobbish, as the liberal elites they scorn. Many conservative pundits and wonks attended top schools, read highbrow publications, and belong to exclusive professional societies. They firmly believe that elite credentials signify merit. This has important implications. For example, one of the reasons conservative elites are offended by affirmative action is that they equate it (wrongly, it turns out, but not preposterously) with a relaxation of standards. In their minds, in fact, cronyism and affirmative action are equivalent, since both undercut meritocracy for political reasons. “It’s not just that Miers has zero judicial experience,” wrote commentator Michelle Malkin. “It’s that she’s so transparently a crony/’diversity’ pick.”

To be fair, the conservatives who populate National Review’s blog retreated from the credentialist critique of Miers once the angry e-mails began pouring in. They emphasized instead that Miers lacked a coherent conservative legal philosophy--that she’d “never written seriously on constitutional issues,” as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote. But this is really just a politically correct form of the same argument.