I must admit that when I headed down to Washington last week, I was expecting to encounter a good deal of gloating. The last time I spent any time with the Federalist Society crowd was on the Harvard Law Review, where a claque of right-leaning law students used to hang out late into the evening, grumbling about affirmative action and the New Deal.
So writes Adam Cohen in his “Editorial Observer” column on the Federalist Society in today’s New York Times, an article that perfectly embodies the resentful, condescending bitterness toward conservatives expressed by many establishment liberals these days. Their attitude resembles nothing so much as the response of a fading aristocracy to pushy nouveau riche (many of them immigrants with names like “Estrada,” a member of the Harvard “claque” mentioned above) taking over the country club.
Insofar as Cohen has an argument, it is the familiar one that Democrats and “moderate Republicans” must man the “mainstream” barricades to hold off the “archconservative” and “far right” barbarians, especially by being “vigilant about investigating [judicial] nominees’ backgrounds, and using the filibuster to prevent a far-right takeover of the courts.” But even this nasty call to bork plays second fiddle to the overall tone of the article, with its snidely superior and liberal (!) use of terms like “wacky” and “loopy” to describe conservatives.
Cohen concludes, as fading aristocrats are wont to do, with some advice about manners, what he calls
a point of sportsmanship: the only thing less appealing than a sore loser is a sore winner.
His article, however, gives the lie to even that assertion.
The resentful, condescending bitterness toward conservatives expressed by many establishment liberalis these days is more than adequately matched by the gloating, consdescending bitterness toward liberals expressed by many establishment conservatives these days. The difference is that conservatives keep trying to maintain the fiction that they’ve been shut out of the country club, which is patent nonsense.
Trevor Coleman, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, has apparently made it his life’s mission to alert the nation to the evil of the Federalist Society. (This piece is a good example — complete with McCarthy-like sidebar showing all of the Michigan judges who have connections to the Society). It’s laughable that the Federalist Society gets treated like some sort of behind-the-scenes Skull & Bones. It’s not the society — it’s the people who are members, and their (mostly) shared view of the law.
And it must be double galling to Cohen that Bush has taken the race card from the liberal’s hands by appointing people like Estrada and Rice and Powell. It was so much easier when Republicans could be stereotyped as rich white men who looked like the little man in the Monopoly set. It is driving the Belafonte crowd wild that such a thing as a Hispanic conservative could exist. Doesn’t Estrada know that he is a race traitor, an Uncle Tom, a house slave?