Childlike Dissonance

The reactions to the recent US Supreme Court decisions around affirmative action, student debt and free speech were similar to that of a child denied a McDonald's Happy Meal.  We look at these reactions and explore their origins.  

Transcript

Childlike Dissonance: The reaction to the 2023 US Supreme Court

July 2023

For my last three podcasts, we explored archeology in ancient Assyria. Then we looked at making babies today and throughout history. Finally, we toured a historical sampling of mercenaries ending with Putin’s rather interesting experience. Yet for this one, we will set aside core history for political commentary on adverse reactions to the last three Supreme Court decisions. The first is the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (and the University of North Carolina) relating to the end of affirmative action. The second was Biden v. Nebraska and the ending of President Joe Biden to cancel some $440 billion of student debt.  And the third was a freedom of speech case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, that dealt with whether a graphic designer had to create websites for gay marriages.  All three decisions are substantive and wholly aligned with the conservative ethos practiced on this podcast. I invite you to look at our five podcast series for a history of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to maintain any weekly historical content addictions you may have:

A Brief History of the United States Supreme Court - Part I: The Role of the Court

A Brief History of the United States Supreme Court - Part II: The Nadir of the Supreme Court - Plessy V. Ferguson

A Brief History of the United States Supreme Court – Part III: Two Presidents and a Marshall

A Brief History of the United States Supreme Court - Part IV: Judicial Activism and the Road to Roe

A Brief History of the Supreme Court - Part V: Borking, Thomas, and SCOTUS at the Center of Society

“Washington, one feels in Washington, is the spoiled child of the republic.”

Montgomery Schuyler

“We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.”

Robert Grudin

“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”

P. J. O’Rourke

We have all been there. At a restaurant, on a bus, at a ball game, and, the worst, on an airplane. I am talking of the screaming, whining child who, for the love of Pete, will not be quiet. 

Before having children, I could not understand why the parents could not do anything to shut up their screaming kid. After having children, my views modified a bit. I was sympathetic instead of questioning the efficacy of the parenting at hand. As one understands the psychology behind why a child cries, it becomes easier still to manage that ire. Human children begin to view the world and their place within it cognitively. They do not want to sit in a seat for three hours or be held by their parents. They want this, and they want that, and when denied their desires, they act out loudly. 

This realization does not alleviate the fingernails on the chalkboard aspect of the banshee-like wailing but goes a fair way to understanding the behavior. And I now know the frustrating powerlessness of a parent to manage these behaviors best.  

When reading the reactions of many leaders of the Democratic Party, progressive activists, and leftist academicians, the specter of the screaming child in Delta Row 17 comes to mind again and again. And we are not talking about the usual drunken bar stool ranting of some online Twitter posters sending their bile to the online world from their parent’s darkened basement. I am not talking about the usual suspects of MSNBC or CNN who know the game is to out-indignant their peers in a ceaseless quest for more clicks and viewers, dishing the acrimony by the tubful. I am not talking about Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or AOC, the politicians that Fox News hosts make their bones because the ludicrous nature of their commentary is so outrageous.  

Instead, I am talking about once-normal politicians and commentators like Chris Murphy, Senator of Connecticut, “This is a scandal. The Supreme Court is now just a 9-person legislature, slinging takes and making law with cases that are basically made up by friendly right-wing groups to get the new law they want from their six buddies on the Court.” Or this from Jen Psaki, who claimed the GOP was “trying to recruit” Muslims into being anti-transgender. However, activists from the Islamic community have disputed the claim peddled by the liberal network of a “toxic agenda.”

And once rational, reliable conservative Jen Rubin with this word salad, “Unhinged from judicial standards, the Court roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions, and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the Court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years.”

There is so much, too much to unpack here, but the new piece is that the debt cancellation is now student aid? Good grief. 

Let’s be clear about what was decided during the week of June 25. The Supreme Court of the United States dismantled a system, conceived some 60 years ago, that discriminated against a minority group (Asians) to assist other minority groups.  The Court decided that when a person takes out a loan, they should pay it back.  They decided that a person cannot be compelled to create speech violating their religious beliefs. In this case, a web designer when there were literally hundreds of alternatives.  

I can make counter-arguments to all of this. African Americans still need help. The HEROES Act, duly passed by Congress, had a statute to cancel debts during an emergency.  If I were running a website company, I would be happy to take the dollars of gay couples. And as a business open for the public, can they refuse? But my beliefs, stated above, are clear, and how is judging one by the color of one’s skin, expecting people to pay back loans, and having the 1st Amendment rights, when there is no harm, so radical?  

And I am talking about an intelligent Supreme Court Justice who sounds more like a Congressional squad member like Cori Bush than a circumspect jurist.  

In her dissent Kentaji Brown Jackson does what so many activists do, cite a history that though important, does not directly relate to the facts of the case. It is eight paragraphs of black history from slavery to Dred Scott to the 1960s Federal Housing Administration before Jackson even cites the law and the legal decisions at hand. And even then no legal citations, just more rhetoric

“So, too, for adults: Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as White men and have lower five-year cancer survival rates. Uterine cancer has spiked in recent years among all women – but has spiked highest for Black women, who died of uterine cancer at nearly twice the rate of “any other racial or ethnic group.” Black mothers are up to four times more likely than White mothers to die as a result of childbirth. And Covid killed Black Americans at higher rates than White Americans.”

I know what she is doing. She is trying to make a causal link between medical and economic inequities on the one hand and the ability to get more African Americans into college on the other. But even in this off-point dissent that reads more like a college admissions essay, or a DEI declaration, her argument is problematic. If, in the nearly 70 years, Affirmative Action has not cured the ills she has exhaustively documented, then why even maintain it? Additionally, her goal is to fix what she sees as systemic racism by maintaining a system that is racist, admittance based on the color of one’s skin.  

But even this argument is not about the issue before the Court. It is not about whether college helps African Americans but rather if current admissions policies are causing harm to another group, in this case, Asian Americans, the party with standing.  

Jackson then gets to an argument that might have held merit, arguing that in the North Carolina case, without a student’s need to disclose race, that would not be a determining factor. “UNC has developed a holistic review process to evaluate applicants for admission. Students must submit standardized test scores and other conventional information. But applicants are not required to submit demographic information like gender and race. UNC considers whatever information each applicant submits using a non-exhaustive list of 40 criteria grouped into eight categories: “academic performance, academic program, standardized testing, extracurricular activity, special talent, essay criteria, background, and personal criteria.”

Okay, but she makes this argument after a thousand-word essay on the ills of African American history, so her own positioning negates her argument. If race is not a factor in North Carolina’s decisions, why did she spend eight paragraphs discussing race? If an African American student were not to check that box and rely on the other criteria, then presumably, after elucidating the history, this would designate a denial.   

Then there is her conclusion, again, no citations of law, in a legal document, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”

And none of this directly gets to the position that Asian Americans, like Jewish Americans before them, were limited because of concerns they would come to dominate academic institutions. A system designed to restrict them is systemic racism, but not one well noted by the left. 

And of all the screeching discourse I have seen, I have somehow missed a pertinent, permanent solution to the real issue, African American students, by and large, are not able to compete, and to a lesser extent, neither are Latinos, hence the desire for AA. The concern expressed by progressive commentators is that whites and Asians will now dominate academic institutions as at no time since the 1960s when AA was first implemented. But can we ask, after 70 years, why that is? Working with activists in two non-profits, I will note this: they are tremendous at pointing out the ills of American History and great at citing stats showing inequities, but when it comes to actual, workable solutions, they all too often are missing in action. Sure, you get lots of information about how we must address inequities and create greater diversity, but the how is always missing. AA was one of the hows and why? Because it was so darn easy. Tell a school they need X amount. But the actual work, the reform of K12 education, or even a discussion around culture and family structure, and the kid on the plane emerges in total, umbrage-laden shouts. 

Part of this is that all roads to K12 reform go through Teacher Public Unions. The stranglehold they have on education during COVID, when they actually dictated policy to the CDC, or that AFT Randi Weingarten sits on the Department of Homeland Security School Safety Board, after advocating for lockdowns, and then later claiming she did not, tells you volumes about who is in charge of our schools. Hint, not the districts, the Department of Education, the principals, and most certainly not the parents.  

In the 303 Creative case Justice Sonia Sotomayor, misrepresenting the decision in 303 Creative—which was, remember, about whether a business can be required to engage in a form of speech that violates its owner’s conscience—by saying the “symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status.” 

As the Great Williamson writes, “Our progressive friends often purport to speak in behalf of “the people”—or, if you prefer, “the People.” But their attitude toward “the people” is approximately that of a rancher toward his livestock: Yes, they must be fed and cared for, but in a custodial and proprietary way, to serve interests that are, ultimately, not the herd’s own.  

At the heart of progressivism are the three roles of victim, hero, and villain. The role of villain is easy (the right, the GOP, me), but to have a hero, the progressive, there must also be a victim. When Brown Jackson notes, “No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race makes it matter more.”

There is nothing of the law here, but she does create the victimized straw man, “those cited who have lived experiences,” and the villain (the majority-read conservatives. No prizes for the hero of this story. And note the “It will take longer for race to leave us.” Of all the civil rights activists, there is never an end game. There is a dissonance between what progressives say they want (equality or equity) and what they are after (permanent victims for them to save). 

And one of the prime attributes missing in children is that of patience once thwarted.  The clever child knows that if they pick up the play room, there might be a treat at the end.  The impish one wants the treat now. Gerald Baker writing for the Wall Street Journal states, “The left’s response to the reversal of its long success in making the court a second legislative branch of government is also telling. Instead of accepting, as limited-government, originalist conservatives did, the need for a long campaign to undo the hegemony of the rival philosophy, they want to short-circuit the process. This means protecting or restoring their authority by making radical institutional changes to the court or, failing that, by delegitimizing it, using a friendly media to impeach the reputation of justices they oppose with spurious allegations of impropriety.  It is hard not to think of Roald Dahl’s all to on point character Veruca Salt and her catchphrase,  “but I want it now Daddy.” It is easy seeing AOC in this guise but a sitting Supreme Court Justice? 

When one takes a toy from a child, they scream and yell. In this case, the toys are affirmative action, debt relief, and coercive government power to compel opponents to give up free speech with which they disagree. All of these toys are useful for the progressive to maintain their heroic identity. SCOTUS has taken their toys, and the shrieks are unrelenting. Some days I would rather be on that plane with three-year-old little Susie screaming in the row behind than looking over leftist media from the purported adults.