It’s worth noting that not everyone who writes for National Review is as dumb as Jonah Goldberg. For example, today Ross Douthat links to a pretty good NR article by Kevin Williamson dedicated to debunking some supply-side myths. It’s a good piece, and I hope conservatives read it.

What I hope doesn’t happen—but fear will—is that conservatives generally won’t read it, conservatives generally will keep peddling the same nonsense they’ve been selling for 30 years, and then when some liberal complains that American conservatism is dominated by cranks and morons someone from the smart set will point to Williamson’s article as an example of how that’s not true. So it’s worth noting that supply side mythology didn’t just come from nowhere. Here’s Larry Kudlow pimping it in NRO. And here’s Thomas Nugent in NRO. And Donald Luskin. One could go on.

At any rate, Williamson deserves credit for his piece. But the piece downplays the extent to which the myths he debunks are utterly central to conservative politics. He argues, for example, that there’s a real sense in which the Reagan tax cuts “didn’t happen” since there were no spending reductions. There’s something to be said for that point of view, but it makes utterly nonsense of the mainstream conservative story about the past 30 years’ worth of US domestic policy. Maybe Williamson is downplaying the bite of his argument on a “you catch more flies with honey” but realistically I think it’s just a sign that intelligent conservatives have little intention of doing battle with the charlatans who dominate their movement.

Whenever liberals point out that the entire conservative case against climate change legislation consists of the ravings of cranks, liars, and know-nothings someone eventually trots out Jim Manzi. Indeed, National Review tapped Manzi to write its big feature-length denunciation of the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Manzi, you see, isn’t a crank, a liar, or a know-nothing—he’s cooked up some wonky reason for agreeing with the cranks, liars, and know-nothings on the question of climate legislation.

Then Jim Manzi read Mark Levin’s book, focused his attention on its climate section, and discovered that Levin is a crank, liar, and/or know-nothing. The result? Manzi is savagely and hypocritically attacked by the staff of National Review. Because, after all, the crankery and the know-nothingness is the essence of conservative politics. The wonks are useful just insofar as they can be used to support the crank agenda—when they take the cranks on, they get trashed, even by publications that were happy to cite them as experts on the very issue at hand just a few months ago.

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Sonia Sotomayor is “race obsessed”:

In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

Jason Zengerle observes that the speech probably used the terms in question a lot because she was attending a symposium on “”=Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

In the real world, the only “race obsessed” people in this debate are the Victor Davis Hanson’s of the world who’ve consistently refused to see the Sotomayor nomination through anything other than the lens of her ethnicity. Zengerle alludes to the fact that nobody on the right seems to be upset about Justice Alito’s speech “Reflections on growing up as an Italian-American in New Jersey”. It’s just a broad fact of American life that the majority of people define themselves, in part, as members of an ethnic community of some sort (those who don’t appear to be predominantly of Scotch-Irish ancestry). The fact that Sotomayor has referenced this on some occasions is not an “obsession.” What would be truly bizarre would be a Latina judge who for some reason went around refusing to ever speak on this topic.

Meanwhile, in the Sotomayor debate it’s the opposition who are unequivocally presenting themselves as the defenders of racial (white) interests and the voices of racial (white) grievance. Which makes sense. After all, whites are a numerical majority in this country, so it stands to reason that white identity politics is and always has been a more viable political strategy than black or Latino identity politics. But we should all be clear on who’s doing what here.

And ’twas ever thus. Here’s Victory Davis Hanson’s National Review on the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Same as it ever was.

Neil Sinhababu has a smart take on the NR Sotomayor cover:

[T]he way I see the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think that definitely captures some of what’s happening here. It should also be said that some of the ugliness of this whole thing clearly stems from the whole dysfunctional relationship our political system has to Supreme Court appointments. I remember from the Alito nomination that it’s somehow very difficult to articulate the view that “the president is someone whose ideas I think are wrong so I’m convinced that his SCOTUS pick also has bad ideas, but those who like the president are bound to see this differently.” Instead, there’s incredible pressure to “unearth” the “truth” about the nominee and how deep down he or she is history’s greatest monster.