His survey of what the friends and enemies of conservatism have to say about its way forward is a must-read.    

A look at Administration economic policies makes it difficult to swallow the moderate, pragmatic image he wishes to project, but he is certainly trying.

I notice that Sotomayor has talked a lot about the narrowness of not regarding DIVERSITY as a legal category. Maybe the Republicans should try to educate Americans about the injustice the Court has defended or, better, created of having the educational goal of classroom diversity trump normal considerations of racial justice and considering people as individuals before the law. You don’t have to believe that all affirmative action or race conscious policies are unconstitutional to see that only possible constitutional justification for them is remedying the effects of past discrimination or past injustice. Here, the dissent of Thomas in GRUTTER is the primer.

Doug LaGrange
Brian Bishop
Joe Winbigler
Robert Belshaw
Rachel Stern

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At first glance therefore it makes little sense that 49 percent of those from households making more than $100,000 a year (26 percent of the electorate) opted for the Democrat, up from 41 percent in 2004, as did 52 percent of those raking in over $200,000 (6 percent of voters), up from 35 percent last go round. . . .

Mark Penn notes "While there has been some inflation over the past 12 years, the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters . . . has been those making over $100,000 a year. . . .In 1996, only 9 percent of the electorate said their family income was that high .  .  . [By 2008] it had grown to 26 percent." . . .

2004, 20 percent of "Lower Richistanis," those 7.5 million households (the number would be lower now, but it then would have constituted roughly 6-7 percent of the U.S. total) struggling along on a net worth of $1 million to $10 million, spent more than they earned."

In a shrewd article written for Politico shortly after the election, Clinton adviser Mark Penn tried to pin down who exactly these higher echelon Obama voters were ("professional," corporate rather than small business, highly educated, and so on). Possibly uncomfortable with acknowledging anything so allegedly un-American as class yet politically very comfortable with this obvious class’s obvious electoral clout, he eulogized its supposedly shared characteristics: teamwork, pragmatism, collective action, trust in government intervention, a preference for the scientific over the faith-based, and a belief in the "interconnectedness of the world." We could doubtless add an appreciation of NPR and a fondness for a bracing decaf venti latte to the list, and as we did so we would try hard to forget this disquieting passage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians." . . .

See how the emergence of a mass class of super-rich could fuel growing resentment both within its ranks and, by extension, without. By "without," I refer not to the genuinely poor, who have, sadly, had time to become accustomed to almost immeasurably worse levels of deprivation, but to the not-quite-so-rich eyeing their neighbors’ new Lexus and simmering, snarling, and borrowing to keep up. The story of rising inequality in America is a familiar one: What’s not so well known is that the divide has grown sharpest at the top. Frank reports that the average income for the top 1 percent of income earners grew 57 percent between 1990 and 2004, but that of the top 0.1 percent raced ahead by 85 percent, a trend that will have accelerated until 2008 and found echoes further down the economic hierarchy. . . .

Barack Obama, a politician who has explicitly and implicitly promised the managers, the scribblers, the professors, and the now-eclipsed gentry that he would finish what the market collapse had begun. He’d put those Wall Street nouveaux back in their place. Higher taxes will claw at what’s left of their fortunes and, no less crucially, their prospects. What taxes don’t accomplish, new regulation (some of which even makes some sense) and the direct stake the government has now taken in so much of the economy will. Better still are all the respectably lucrative, respectably respectable jobs that it will take to run, or bypass, this new order. . . .

The notion that some of the very richest Americans (not all, of course) support the Democrats should no longer be seen as a novelty. . . . The shrewdest or most cynical amongst them will have realized [that]. . . The onslaughts on Lower Richistan and on Wall Street will make it more difficult for others to join them at mammon’s pinnacle.

a) the choice of his first Supreme Court nominee.

b) the choice of the Obama family dog.

Then there’s this in The Politico: "Gay Groups Grow Inpatient with Obama."

Sotomayor’s defenders will gleefully cite to the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in NRA to cast her decision refusing to apply the Second Amendment to the states as a restrained decision. But her glib assertion that Second Amendment rights are not fundamental undermines this claim, and puts her well outside the judicial mainstream. The lack of any support for the statement regrettably tracks her similarly glib decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case currently pending before the Supreme Court, in which Clinton-appointee Judge Cabranes chided her panel for failing to even address the constitutional questions. There, as here, her defenders have made the thin assertion of restraint. There, as here, her grossly adequate treatment of claims makes clear that she was seeking to impose her own policy preferences under the pretext of restraint.

Furthermore, unlike Easterbrook, who may well have ruled contrary to his own personal policy preferences, Sotomayor’s ruling seems to have reinforced them. The question for those reading her Second Amendment case to divine whether she was actually acting with “restraint” or giving short-shrift to claims she disfavored is this: do you honestly believe that Sotomayor would have adhered to old, dismissed, and distinguishable precedent (i.e., precedent interpreting a different clause in the Constitution (Privileges and Immunities) than the claim (selective incorporation through the Due Process clause) raised before her), if the case involved something that evoked her “empathy,” like a question of race or gender? Her own statement that judges are not able to put aside their biases in most cases (and suggesting that it might be a disservice to the country for her to do so) would seem to answer that question.

Legal academics have great fun discussing the doctrine of incorporation—the process by which selective rights in the Bill of Rights are made applicable to the states. But Judge Sotomayor’s opinion reveals little about her views on this doctrine, while suggesting a hostility to and willingness to be dismissive of Second Amendment rights.

Cross-posted at Bench Memos on NRO.

So at what point do bleeding taxpayers and parents forking over exorbitant tuition begin to ask the same questions? If that first story is not enough to inspire the questioning, then take a gander at the other two items from that newsletter: if you’re out of work it’s a good idea to ask your friends if they know about jobs and if you want to change jobs, you should have a plan. This kind of exhaustive research and draining of the mental energies demands a sabbatical, I think--a permanent one.

But in the past few months, a second wave has taken hold — writers are moving past merely venting and are trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement. Carl Honoré is one. He calls it “slow parenting” — no more rushing around physically and metaphorically, no more racing kids from soccer to Suzuki. Lenore Skenazy is another. She calls it “free-range parenting,” a return to the days when childhood was not ruled by the fear (overblown, she says, with statistics to prove it) that children would be maimed, kidnapped or killed if they did something as simple as riding their bikes alone to the park.

Here’s the deal: when you have kids, YOU have to raise them. Some people are going to do a better job than you do. Plenty will do worse. Mothers need to put their big girl pants on, look around, learn what they can, avoid getting over-wrought in discussions of "parenting" and do the best job they can manage with the information and the capacities that they have. That’s all any kid needs or has a right to expect. Children are not made of steel, but neither are they made of glass. They are precious, yes, but they are not our possessions.

A friend of mine recently told me about another friend of hers who had lost a child in a tragic accident. She said that the family is coping with the loss by remembering to consider that the child "was not theirs" in the first place. They were blessed by this child’s presence in their lives for a short time, she noted, but they felt lucky to have had him at all rather than cheated by his being taken away. They focused on gratitude for his life instead of anger, sadness and regret at his death. I admit that this is probably more than I could muster in that situation . . . but how can one not admire it? Since hearing about it, I have tried remember it--not so much as a guide to understanding the proper way to react to death (God forbid a thousand times!) as it is a good general guide for understanding how to approach life with your children. There is only so much you can do or expect as a parent. Ultimately, you are talking about another soul--not an extension of your own. The only formula is that there isn’t one.

Yes, marriage isn’t just about children and childrearing, but our understanding of it--however badly articulated by some proponents--naturally begins there. Chait’s, er, argument is so focused on the fulfillment of individuals who seem selfish or self-centered by definition (they’re choosers, not bearers of responsibility) that he can’t see the force of that point of departure. He diminishes our responsibility for the sake of our freedom.

To be sure, the proponents of same-sex marriage aren’t alone in making this argument and they’re just following in the footsteps of other "possessive individualists." The real argument isn’t about same-sex marriage, it’s about what it means to be a responsible member of a community, about whether our burdens must be accepted or are only legitimate if they’re freely chosen.

The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise. Yet if this is the goal, surely there are better ways to allocate $60bn than to buy GM? The funds would be better spent helping the Midwest diversify away from cars. Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.

But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it. A strong constituency wants to preserve jobs and communities as they are, regardless of the public cost. Another equally powerful group wants to let markets work their will, regardless of the short-term social costs. Polls show most Americans are against bailing out GM, but if their own jobs were at stake I am sure they would have a different view.

I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process. . . . .

And if I look at my own reasoning, well, frankly, it’s not even reasoning. I’ve never sat down and thought, "how do I know that Africans are human beings?" I know. And I’m enough of a Chestertonian to be okay with that way of knowing. But presumably if I’d been raised in 1840 Alabama, I’d know just as certainly that they weren’t.

We accept that when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders--had Tiller whipped out a gun at an elementary school, we would now be applauding his murderer’s actions. In this case, the law was powerless because the law supported late-term abortions. Moreover, that law had been ruled outside the normal political process by the Supreme Court. If you think that someone is committing hundreds of gruesome murders a year, and that the law cannot touch him, what is the moral action? To shrug? Is that what you think of ordinary Germans who ignored Nazi crimes? Is it really much of an excuse to say that, well, most of your neighbors didn’t seem to mind, so you concluded it must be all right? We are not morally required to obey an unjust law. In fact, when the death of innocents is involved, we are required to defy it.

As I say, I think their moral intuition is incorrect. The fact that conception and birth are the easiest bright lines to draw does not make either of them the correct one. Tiller’s killer is a murderer, and whether or not he deserves the lengthy jail sentence he will get, society needs him in jail for its own protection.

One can have compassion for workers who lose their jobs when a plant closes. They can be seen. One cannot have compassion for unknown persons in other industries who do not receive job offers when a compassionate government subsidizes an unprofitable plant. The potential employees not hired are unseen.

One can empathize with innocent children born with birth defects. Such children and the adversity they face can be seen. One cannot empathize with as-yet-unborn children in rural communities who may not have access to pediatricians if a judicial decision based on compassion raises the cost of medical malpractice insurance. These children are unseen.

In other bankruptcy-related news, I wrote a piece for WLF last month examining the risk of increased forum shopping which could occur as bankruptcy filings increase. Whether this will pose a serious threat to the rule of law may well turn on the Marshall v. Marshall, the Ninth Circuit’s remand of the infamous Anna Nicole bankruptcy case which was decided by the Supreme Court in 2006. Like Bleak House, all of the original litigants in the case are now deceased, but the litigation lives on. If the Ninth Circuit were to permit Anna Nicole Smith’s estate to use the bankruptcy courts to re-litigate claims she lost in state courts, and thereby to get millions of dollars from her late husband’s estate contrary to his estate plan, then look for an explosion of bankruptcy filings, made by those seeking to use bankruptcy courts to achieve ends other than relief from debts.

Cross-posted on Bench Memos.

While I’m at it, and on a related subject, volume 1 of The Age of Reagan comes out in paperback next week, a prelude to the August launch of the second and final volume. Get your pre-orders in now!

The title of the review, "Lincoln’s Black History," says all one needs to know of the portrait of the Great Emancipator rendered by Wills. Toni Morrison can rest easy; it’s not one that touts Lincoln as the first black president. His “black” history, with “black” connoting a pejorative (I’m surprised the Review let that pass), is Lincoln’s views and policies regarding blacks in America, which were racist in some form or fashion. How seriously can one take an analysis of Lincoln on race and slavery when Wills gives the last word on Lincoln to his nemesis, an unabashed white supremacist, Stephen A. Douglas?!

Wills agrees with Douglas against Lincoln in his interpretation of what the Founders meant by equality in the Declaration of Independence. Not to worry, though, as Wills assures us that Lincoln’s “bad history” at least promoted a myth that helped Americans produce “good politics.” In short, we all now think the Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” really means all people, black and white, male and female—even though the Founders, as Douglas correctly taught us, never meant this. Wills calls Lincoln’s misinterpretation of the Declaration “one of those creative misreadings” that ultimately did us “the favor of fruitfully being wrong.”

Trying to keep this short, let me just say that Wills divides his account of Lincoln’s black history into three categories: slavery, black inferiority, and colonization. These are not bad, but the devil is definitely in Wills’s details, for he quotes Lincoln (and his critics) selectively, and unfairly presents Lincoln’s controversial statements without sufficient context. In some cases, he omits remarks by Lincoln that would lead to opposite conclusions about his view of slavery and blacks.

To cite just one example, he says that Lincoln “did not show a personal revulsion at slavery” right after noting an 1855 letter from Joshua Speed, at the time his closest friend and a slaveholding Kentuckian. The fact that Wills is aware of this letter from Speed suggests Wills is quite aware of Lincoln’s letter to Speed, wherein Lincoln does show a personal revulsion of slavery: “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Lincoln goes on to say that recalling a shackled group of slaves he saw on a trip down South “was a continued torment to me” and “continually exercises the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.”

Other statements could be cited to support this sentiment of Lincoln’s. Lincoln’s views of slavery, black Americans, and colonization all deserve greater attention, but neither Wills nor Gates (who also produced a flawed documentary, “Looking for Lincoln,” which aired on PBS in February 2009) shines the proper light on America’s “peculiar institution” or Lincoln’s approach to eliminating it. They have now helped produce a Lincoln for the 21st century that mangles both Lincoln’s legacy and that of the Founders. This makes the public more susceptible to the opinion that what is good in Lincoln had less to do with the United States of America at her birth and more with the notion of an evolving standard of right. Lincoln as a Progressive. Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and their presidential protégé Barack Obama couldn’t be more pleased.

"Following the Allies’ success, Britain went to the polls in 1945 to decide their post-war prime minister and ruling party, taking over a week to tally all the votes. Incumbent Prime Minister Churchill went on holiday to France with his wife and daughter to anxiously await the results. Using those 10 days as a framework for the story, INTO THE STORM follows Churchill as he awaits his fate, reminiscing about the war years and how he guided his beleaguered nation through that difficult and challenging time."

The Court appointment just isn’t that important. I’m all for Republicans articulating the basic differences in constitutional interpretation and all that. But social reform, in the president’s view, isn’t going to come from judges overflowing with empathy. When the Court errs on "identity politics," after all, it does so by not declaring unconstitutional excesses originating from the more political parts of government. It, by itself, is not going to be going rogue in that area. And, of course, any Democratic appointee is not going to be about the business of revisiting ROE or going after the initiatives described below.

So all honor to George Will and especially Gov. Mitch Daniels for highlighting the fact that this is an especially unfortunate time for expanding the entitlement mentality. Policies of questionable constitutionality and, more importantly, undeniable stupidity are being adopted quickly and somewhat thoughtlessly. It’s not government’s job, for example, to seduce people into buying cars that are somewhat more fuel efficient but significantly less safe.