Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 26

Despite their obviously strong political differences, Stephen Carter confesses, in his Reflections, to a “daydream” that one day Thomas Sowell and Derrick Bell might shake hands across a conference table. This charmed aspiration is, ironically, a form of the same sin that Carter ostensibly addresses throughout Reflections: the sin of stereotyping. Profound disagreement is, in Carter’s daydream, happily remedied by shared brownness. Carter’s celebration of black diversity has room in its rainbow for every form of life except the black person who is bad for other black people. If melanin really works in this way, like teflon against claims of racism, then Ronald Reagan was surely right, as Stephen Carter reports, to seek Thomas Sowell’s services after winning the 1980 election. And Reagan and Bush were both right to create Clarence Thomas. In an enormous paradox, the Tough Love Crowd begins by posturing as heroic dissenters and ends by claiming nothing less than the right, single-handedly and assisted by the rhetoric of “common ground,” to redefine African American political interests. Stephen Carter, like Julien Benda, first declares that “just as I deny the right of the group (or any of its members) to tell me what to think, I deny the right of the group (or any of its members) to decide for me whether expressing my views will do harm or good.”

Despite conceding that his opponents, too, reject group vetoes, Carter persists in calling those opponents “would-be silencers.” Taken with his embrace of racial solidarity and with his express desire not to be considered a dissenter (“I don’t even want to be known as a dissenter”), Carter’s attack on the supposed silencers begins to look, paradoxically, like a power grab that would itself silence mass opposition to Toughs. Carter’s plea for common ground suddenly resembles something with tentacles.

Carter’s objection to the silencers, alarmingly, extends well beyond a defense of his right to hold his own views, unharassed. Carter objects, under the rubric of “silencing,” to the group moving as a group to take political action against black political appointees who hold views that the group opposes. He laments the fact that “there was a moment when it appeared that Clarence Thomas, a black lawyer, might lose a judgeship because of his vigorous dissents from the mainstream civil rights program.” (Carter, writing before the Supreme Court nomination, refers here to an earlier Thomas nomination to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia). Carter here attempts to transform, without argument, the very concept of “a judge-ship.” His language quietly recasts federal appeals court posts away from what they are (sites of political power) and toward what they are not: earned private or professional distinctions to which individual blacks have a career entitlement, properly beyond group interference. Carter’s arguments that judges are ideally not political actors are dealt with below. What’s interesting here is his attempt to get around the weakness of those arguments by appealing to an invented right of dissent. Carter’s “right to dissent” conjures a Tough entitlement to power, immune from those with the power to stop the Toughs in their tracks.

Carter’s model of judgeships as professional achievements is carried even further when he argues that for civil rights groups to have opposed Thomas more strongly than they did whites with similar political views would have been “reverse discrimination.” In this new objection, overtly appealing to an employment law concept, a judge’s power becomes Thomas’s entitlement. Carter’s “reverse discrimination” claim would be sufficiently distracting even within its usual labor law parameters. Outside those parameters, the difficulties multiply. We easily recognize, for instance, both that Justice Ginsberg is a talented individual and that she filled the Court’s too-long-vacant “Jewish Seat” (as it was widely described in the press). Moreover, then-President Bush’s claim that Thomas was chosen regardless of race was widely ridiculed. And we know Thomas filled Thurgood Marshall’s seat. In this setting it is hardly fanciful to say that, but for Thomas’s presence on the Court, the political pressure for an African American nominee would be irresistible. So the process Carter describes (more aggressive black collective opposition toward a black neocon than a white nominee like Souter) is entirely rational. Racial representation is already, in practice, a legitimate part of thinking about the Supreme Court.

Carter’s unfortunate assumption that nominees are entitled to judgeships reappeared, writ large, in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination itself. During the hearings the Senate Judiciary Committee assumed that Thomas was “innocent until proven guilty” of Anita Hill’s disclosures. Yet that legal standard is, as others have observed, irrelevant since the proceedings were not a criminal trial and the Senate’s task was to assess whether Thomas had the exalted fitness for the Court, not whether he could sustain a plea of “not proven” in the face of Hill’s disclosures.

Moreover, the Senate’s adoption of an entitlement-based model (and Carter’s lapse into such a model in defending Thomas as to the earlier hearings) contradicts Carter’s own considered view of the appropriate confirmation process. Carter has himself written that Senate participation in the confirmation process ought to be more than a “resume review.” The Senate ought also to reject the too-demanding role of inquiry into a nominee’s judicial philosophy (which Carter thinks is beyond the senators’ competence). The senators ought instead, Carter says, to confine themselves to probing a nominee’s “background moral vision and degree of moral reflectiveness.” Moreover, while a test of simple “moral vision” would be sufficiently unfathomable (its only determinate consequence is to deprive mass Negro opposition of its legitimacy), Carter also wants to exclude what he considers mere minor transgressions and mere personalization of the confirmation process. Carter’s test is designed to ensure that the right sort of “moral philosophers” sit on the Court. Let’s observe how Carter’s test, designed to sift mere trivialities from truly revelatory moral flaws, worked in the Hill-Thomas affair.

Carter publicly spoke up for Anita Hill’s integrity when her disclosures hit the news. He said that, as her personal friend, he did not doubt that her disclosures were accurate. He wrote an article defending Hill’s integrity. Surely, then, Thomas failed Carter’s moral vision thing? Wrong. Carter’s public intervention, in the Houston Chronicle, was headlined “Both the Accuser and the Accused Are Two Very Fine People.” Carter never once argued that Thomas ought to be denied confirmation (whether for want of credentials, judicial philosophy, or failures of moral vision). Yet Carter credited Hill’s story. Carter faulted the attacks on Hill by Thomas and his supporters. And Carter regretted that Thomas failed to come forth with “statesmanlike words” of apology. All this notwithstanding, Carter did not oppose Thomas. Rather, he praised Thomas as one of “two very fine people” (“fine” is surely now the 1990s’ least-coveted accolade). Carter’s test is not only unpersuasive legal scholarship and unworkable legal practice; it is also a Cakewalk. This is especially problematic since, on Carter’s view, the only other possible check (group mobilization against neocon nominees) is declared taboo as a form of “silencing.” Carter ritually invokes morally charged examples of people subjected to hideous abuse and drummed out of academic settings. Far less prominent in Carter’s analysis, however, is the complete irrelevance of these morally charged scenarios to ostensible dissenters like himself. The Tough Love Crowd is plightless. They are the exact opposite of victims. Speaking as if for an oppressed group, Carter opines, “Our need for these free-thinking dissenters may prove to be greater than their need for us. The black conservatives . . . are quite comfortable in their tenured academic positions and other posts, which is, after all, what academic sinecures are for.”¹⁰ (Note, in passing, Carter’s Bendaresque formulation of what academic posts “are” for.)

Carter’s use of the inclusive pronoun (“our need”) does not conceal the fact that this veiled threat is his own. He may be besieged, but his bushels are full, his powder is dry, and he will outlast us. “Silencing” nevertheless remains, despite its complete irrelevance to himself and the Tough Love Crowd, a conspicuous theme of Carter’s Reflections. Of the book’s nine chapters, one is called “Silencing Dissent,” another “On Contenting Oneself with Silence,” and a third “Silencing Doubt.” Almost every page of Carter’s book is shadowed by the imminent door knockings of an eerie thought police. The sympathetic reader might assume that Carter is on the verge of turning in his quill. But no: “Despite the name calling of their critics, they [i.e., the black conservatives] will not be silenced.” Despite his use of a distancing pronoun (“they” won’t be silenced) it’s clearly Carter strutting here. And while he forever urges the rest of us to face up to Tough professional competition, Carter’s rhetoric of silencing is itself a retreat from robust and legitimate debate of the differences that separate him and his critics. Continuing in this vein, Carter repeatedly warns us not to “alienate some of the best minds we have.”¹¹ This new phrase (“best minds”) now implies not only that there is a common cause (which itself needs argument, unless pigmentation is enough) but also that Carter and his Crowd have smart solutions that elude the rest of us. This argument is not only self-aggrandizing but—Carter seems unaware—also a political dead horse. The idea that “competence” solves political problems where “ideology” fails was the central plank of the unmemorable Democratic presidential campaign of 1988. Moreover, the Tough Love Crowd’s insufficiently challenged declarations of analytical prowess are overblown.