Bush Has Done The Impossible…

… He’s made most of a Harold Meyerson column in the Washington Post seem sensible.

Meyerson argues, in “The Right’s Dissed Intellectuals,” that in nominating Harriet Miers

Bush flouted both his supporters’ ideology and their sense of meritocracy.

Worse, he bypassed the opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual seriousness — conservatism’s intellectual seriousness….

Many conservatives assumed that Bush knows his Harriet Miers and concluded that she’d probably move the court, and nation, to the right. But her nomination was nonetheless an affront to the amour-propre of conservative intellectuals everywhere. “For all we know, she will be so conservative that she’ll make Clarence Thomas look like Kanye West,” wrote commentator John Podhoretz. “It’s still an unserious nomination, which is what those of us who are objecting to it are objecting to.”

I believe this point is essentially correct. Many conservatives are disappointed in the Miers nomination because, on the evidence available, she seems to lack sufficent intellectual depth to contribute to the movement for conservative legal reform, notwithstanding the fact that she may well vote the way those disgruntled conservatives would like. Even here, however, Meyerson’s pejorative use of “meritocracy” is misplaced. The point is not that other candidates somehow deserve to be appointed because of their proven and distinguished records but rather that any number of them could be expected to make a more substantial contribution to the development of American law than Ms. Miers. (A reply, I suppose, could argue that with such chiefs as Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas on board all the court needs is another Indian.)

It is impossible to imagine a Meyerson column where everything is right, and true to form the misplaced “meritocracy” is not the only thing wrong with this one. Thus Meyerson concludes by arguing that the Miers nomination is emblematic of the need for the conservative revolution to proceed by stealth since most people disagree with their agenda.

… [J]ust because the conservative intellectuals are itching for a fight over first principles doesn’t mean their country is….

Most of the right wing’s legal agenda commands minority support in the country and provokes majority opposition. How many battles of ideas can Bush afford to lose?

With the Miers nomination, the counterrevolution proceeds again by stealth. It is, on the fundamental issues, the only way it can proceed.

To listen to Meyerson, either repealing racial preferences is not a part of “the right-wing’s legal agenda” … or most people in the country support the government distributing benefits and burdens on the basis of race.

Maybe that’s why most people don’t listen to Meyerson, and in Michigan even Meyersonians are scrambling as hard as they can to deprive citizens there of the opportunity to vote on that issue.