Persuasion

What's right? And what works?

These two questions periodically bother me because their answers are so frequently different, even incompatible.

Right now, there's something dismal (and familiar) going on in the Sonia Sotomayor pre-confirmation-hearing chatter: Conservatives, united in purpose, are fighting among themselves over the second question.

Sonia Sotomayor has said some pretty astonishing things about the essence of race--I can't count the number of times I've seen this quote in recent days:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

It's pretty hard not to cry foul about such things, really (and before I get email about how I'm reading out of context, I even read Kos on this one). As others have said, this is a concrete example ofObama's "empathy" standard, and it reeks of partiality in a place where partiality is supposed to be unconscionable--it's why portrayals of Justice in art figure a blindfolded woman with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.

Cue Rush Limbaugh. "Racist" is what he calls Sotomayor's approach. (I prefer the term "racialist" because it's a larger concept involving the positive as well as negative considerations of race--but that's a relatively small matter.) It's not hard to say that, but it doesn't usually carry the day when Conservatives use the term. There are reasons for this, and none of them are fair. But they're real all the same. (Rich Lowry makes that point here.)

Krauthammer argues sensibly: "Use the upcoming hearings not to deny her the seat, but to illuminate her views." Well, of course. She's going to be confirmed anyway, because Republicans don't have the votes; Republicans just need to get very energetic about making Sotomayor's jurisprudential ideas the stuff of dinner-table conversation.

Mark Krikorian adds something that Krauthammer left to the imagination: "Gingrich, Limbaugh, and Tancredo crying "racist" isn't going to help at all." Of course, Rush is offended (I got quite an earful on his show today in just the first hour), and not without cause. It's hard not to be offended when you're being told not to say what is true and evident on the grounds that it won't help.

I think the clash here is relatively minor, and I think that the Republican Party will be no more prone to the charge of racism after opposing Sotomayor than it was before. But it's going to be rough for a patch here, and the Democrats are eager to scatter the Conservatives any way they can. Obama is clearly setting a trap to consolidate already well-recognized Democratic gains in the Hispanic population. But as Michael Gerson explains,

Republicans must still enter the trap -- with open eyes and no expectation of gain -- not to defeat a nominee but to maintain a principle.
The principle is simple: A court should be a place where all are judged impartially, as individuals. The Obama/Sotomayor doctrine of empathy challenges this long-established belief. It is not a minor matter.

And I think Rush jumps to the end of the argument. Really, that's the only mistake he makes. What we've got here is a lot of conditioned thinking (constructed in part by historical events located mostly in the 1960s, but more recently by malicious political race-baiting). Conservatives have to go back to the beginning and argue the things they know so well that it bores them now. The goal, of course, is to adjust the popular stereotypes about race toward something that actually resembles the truth. For instance:

-All people are unique and have capabilities that differ as much with personality as they do with circumstance.
-The essence of economic and political freedom is the ability to alter one's circumstances by dent of creative and motivated effort (or, to state the negative side of that, by dent of destructive activity and indolence).
-The examples of creativity and rising out of adversity that we remember and love are inspirational precisely because we would like to think of ourselves as having within ourselves (our unitary selves) the power to produce something valuable. Think of a child--aged two or three--pushing aside the willing assistance of a mother or older sibling with the words "I can do it by myself!" There's pride and dignity there, and it's beautiful.

Such points are important to make over and over again. There's another level:
-It's cheating to take proxies for individuals for the sake of economy in policy or argument--it diminishes the value of the individual even as it makes statistical analysis easier.
-Pop culture occasionally provides an interesting perspective. Think about this deadly serious set of instructions from a kid's movie (The Incredibles): "Put these [masks] on. Your identity is your most valuable possession. Protect it. And if anything goes wrong, use your powers." The use of anonymity can augment personal strength by aiding, among other things, mobility. But that's the point: it should augment, not diminish, personal power. Becoming little more than a statistic in a racial or socio-economic breakdown of society is hardly the kind of anonymity that boosts individual power.

Only after covering such concepts can you ascend to 30,000 feet and look down at the state of things far below and observe thoughtfully: "Gee, that's interesting. When we go around treating whole groups of people "specially" and "differently" based on their racial classification, isn't that strangely similar to that great evil thing we worked so hard to destroy called 'racism'?"

Rush says all of these things, but he's remembered best for his broad conclusions. We have a whole society to persuade, so why don't we dwell on the steps toward the broad conclusion, even as a justice with repugnant racialist views waltzes onto the nation's highest court. There really is a lot to say, and it won't all fit into a single word.

This is how an out-of-power party starts swinging a nation toward what is good and right and true, even as the government is growing and consolidating its power at the expense of individuals.

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