Tushnet is the Harvard professor that Alito was referring to in his speech (transcript):
The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs. Over the years, I have sat on cases involving the rights of many religious minorities — Muslim police officers whose religion required them to have beards, a Native American who wanted to keep a bear for religious services, a Jewish prisoner who tried to organize a Torah study group....
A Harvard Law School Professor provided a different vision of a future America. He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won. The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945. Is our country going to follow that course? To quote a popular Nobel laureate, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."
Alito seems to like to refer to people without naming them. The "Harvard Law School Professor" was Mark Tushnet. Who was the Nobel laureate?
ADDED: Hey, Professor Tushnet, you say the war is over and you won and the other guy is the loser, but the Nobel laureate says:
... don’t speak too soonFor the wheel’s still in spinAnd there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’For the loser now will be later to winFor the times they are a-changin’
Posts
119 comments:
It was an nice constitution while it lasted.
With the Libs, it is always ipse dixit. Or the science is settled. Obey, or else. Censor and cancel anyone who disagrees.
Fuck’em.
The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars.
The Left's answer is "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."
The people who want to be left alone and not required to pretend that they approve of homosexuality, transgenderism, drug use, or promiscuity are just like Nazis and Japanese fascists?
That tells you everything you need to know about the left.
Alito: the question is, how should the winners behave towards the losers?
Tushnet: Only a loser would care about the losers!
Which is the more civilized expression?
Tushnet's attitude is ultimately self-destructive, and why I have a small amount of hope for the future: eventually his kind always turn on each other in their quest for increasing power. And the more he lashes out, the more people will start to look to the ideas that he's attacking and think "maybe there's something there..."
Mark Tushnet's "Mission Accomplished" moment.
The corrupt left and the corrupt media just stole the election for a corrupt man and his corrupt family.
Dark days ahead?
This "learned professor:" does he see himself as Yezhov, or Himmler?
4 large cities stole it for Biden
" How curious that, as Baris notes, “Trump won the largest non-white vote share for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”
Pollster: It's Curious How Biden Underperformed Hillary Clinton In Every City...Except These Four.
Robert Barnes, the foremost election analyst, observes in these “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.”
Trump’s victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were on target until, in the middle of the night, counting was arbitrarily halted. Miraculously, several hundred thousand votes – all for Biden – were mysteriously ‘found’; Trump’s real leads subsequently vanished.
The protracted, eventual outcome will determine the contemporary relevance of Stalin’s observation. No matter who wins, most pollsters already have lost their credibility and influence."
Lost the culture war?
That's like losing the game. Except its a football game, played on a baseball field using hockey rules officiated by physicist on a different continent.
It is hard to understand, but the United States is geographically huge and wildly diverse. It has been since the Pilgrims showed up. 150 years later wise men sought to create a govt to do things they could not do alone. Understanding the diverse cultures, the protected those diversities, by forbidding the new powerful central govt from having an opinion on culture issues.
Those things not enumerated in the controlling document, would be decide by the people, or the govt closest to those people.
In short, federalism protects against the first punch being thrown, before any war breaks out.
Judges believing a law degree makes them omnipotent, weighed in to decide things they have no business deciding.
Thats the real war.
Tushnet won't be so smug when his own put him up against a wall.
Obviously AA knows the answer to her question, but for readers who are not so familiar with his work, the Nobel Laureate is Bob Dylan.
Tushnet's view is that we should be governed according to cultural 'norms' prescribed by our elite betters who have decided on what those 'norms' should be - not some old written-down agreed-to laws that they would have to persuade the deplorables to change legally. And opt-out is definitely not allowed once the culture wars are 'won'. This is total war, and to the victors go all of the spoils.
Who was it that spoke of those who go to sleep and dream that they ate a large meal, but they later wake up and find that they are still hungry?
...they are drunken, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink. For Someone hath poured out upon them the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed their eyes....
My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.
Germany and Japan surrendered their weapons at the end of the war. Your judgement is waaay off...
"The very intensity of Justice Alito’s remarks seems to me to confirm my judgment about who won the culture wars. His are in fact the observations of a person who hasn’t come to grips with the fact that he’s been on the losing side of many culture war issues."
As we deplorables have been saying for some years now, occasionally right on this blog.
But Tushnet understates the nature of the victory: progs are not just squashing traditional believers on culture war "issues," they are squashing the very idea of liberty. Which Alito now understands. Althouse, with her faux neutrality, not yet.
Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties
The Left no longer pretends otherwise.
"The Left's answer is 'Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius'"
Translated by the Queen of Hearts, "Off with their heads"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtCQHCOls2E
The Romans also lost the culture war and eventually the Roman Empire disappeared...Mark Tushnet and his peers propably are on the way to repeat history.
The culture wars are not won by consensus in academia or on CNN. They are won, or lost, by society as a whole. And as a whole, if you can look around at America circa 2020 and think that what you see is an improvement in our culture, then I suggest you leave your campus and do some driving around the country.
We, conservatives, have not lost. The country has lost. And it is near the time to either recover what has been lost, or lose it forever.
"Obviously AA knows the answer to her question, but for readers who are not so familiar with his work, the Nobel Laureate is Bob Dylan."
And here I thought the embedded video was enough of a nudge.
If this is truly a culture war; I'd suggest to dear comrade Harvard professor that many didn't even know we were in a war to lose. While I think your analogy to Germany and Japan is 10 years later than the closer comparison; you'll need to understand your enemy isn't defeated simply because they've been kind enough to hear you out. I suggest you are taking a hardline at your own peril.
Curious George and Karga prompt the thought: The American left could destroy constitutional liberty only learn quite suddenly that they are pikers at being dictators compared to the CCCP. Anyway, my feeling is that a very large block of the US will not be going anywhere.
Leland, it was Alito who spoke of Germany and Japan. Not Tushnet.
The way Ann wrote it, I can see the confusion, but having read Alito he was the one who spoke it
The Romans also lost the culture war and eventually the Roman Empire disappeared...Mark Tushnet and his peers propably are on the way to repeat history.
The left's victories have been at the cost of increasing financial and social capital. They had to pretty blatantly throw the vote to Biden in order to win this last time, and couldn't even help down-ballot races in the process. At the same time, they've destroyed their credibility in the media, as well as weakened their control over popular culture.
Meanwhile, the right is pissed, organized, and increasingly united in its identity. Hopefully this leads the right to push for their own electoral college reforms. Not abolition of the EC, but instead ending the winner takes all format that allows those cities to have an outsized say due to fraud. Switch to a per-congressional-district arrangement where each CD gets an EV, and the state legislatures get to decide who gets the two statewide EVs.
We also need to encourage the growth of right-wing media to provide platforms outside of progressive control. Parler, alternatives to YouTube, new news media platforms, and even entertainment.
If this is truly a culture war; I'd suggest to dear comrade Harvard professor that many didn't even know we were in a war to lose. While I think your analogy to Germany and Japan is 10 years later than the closer comparison; you'll need to understand your enemy isn't defeated simply because they've been kind enough to hear you out. I suggest you are taking a hardline at your own peril.
To be honest, the closest comparison I can think of for our current state is the Holy Roman Empire circa the early 17th century. Not a comforting thought.
It's more of a split decision, even in Tushnet's own family.
I've always thought that Bush-era attempts to portray Red America and Blue America or America and Europe or Old Europe and New Europe as diametrically opposed and pulling in opposite directions were misguided -- the same trends are at work throughout the world and can't be separated and contained geographically -- but does that really add up to something so simplistic as "victory" or "defeat"?
America lost, the Republic lost, if tushnet who is the worst kind of statist drone, side prevails.
Oglesbys (senior sds official) plan for debazification)
And this is the means
https://mobile.twitter.com/almostjingo/status/1327237848454496258
white westerners won the culture wars, or
...check your Liberal Supremacy
"In Unusually Political Speech, Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties/The conservative justice’s pointed remarks, which he made in a speech to the Federalist Society, reflected thoughts he has expressed in his opinions" (NYT).
Per the speech transcript, Alito never once mentioned the word "Liberal" once.
Maybe that's because he agrees with Bari Weiss that the emerging ideology is anything but liberalism?
Stop Being Shocked
American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology...
American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly—and then to explain it to others.
Seems to me Justice Alito did just that.
No, it was Tushnet who mentioned Germany and Japan. There was some controversy about his remarks. A text is here Here is a longer quote:
The culture wars are over; they lost, we won…. For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.
Seems insufficiently dialectical. Not much room for nuance in his world.
Ann probably now really likes Alito with that Dylan reference.
Actually we did not take a hard line against Germany and Japan. Had we taken a hard line we would have instituted the Morgenthau Plan on Germany and a variant thereof on Japan. And would have decimated the population, killing millions outright and sending millions more to a slower death in concentration camps. In other words, we would have done to them exactly what they were planning to do to us in the event of an Axis victory. But we didn't. Much to the astonishment of the losers, we treated them with relative lenience. Is a America a great country, or what? Are Americans a great people, or what?
Anwser: It is, and we are.
No because we needed both in the Cold War, there wasnt even a pretense of accounting for the soviet devouring
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, to explain away failures of the most recent 5 year plan or the occupation of Afghanistan, without being blamed for the failures and sent to Yakuskt until retirement, variations on the phrase "external realities" were used. This meant the way things happened in reality, not Soviet ideology. A useful phrase, and an oft used one.
Today's culture warriors need something similar. They need to accept that lots of other people don't think, believe, or act like they do, without admitting their ideology is full of self contradictions and outright BS versus reality.
I suggest the Left follow the tactics of the dying Soviet Union, and just refer to everyone who is not of their particular bent, as "US citizens" who aren't operating under their unconstitutional diktats.
Hey Chuck,
Would you like to increase our bet on pdjt being inaugurated, again, in January to $10?
Same terms & caveats as original
Sorry to be off topic but needed to get this in before Chuck has his coffee.
As pdjt asked yesterday in a Tweet "it's Friday the 13th. What could possibly go wrong?"
At least for the demmies
John Henry
Imagine, 71 million losers! Poor Tushnet. Looking from the Harvard Yard out across the vast land he imagines is just clinging to his little citadel. He squints and convinces himself he can see all those losers, all at once. Standing high on the walls of a citadel can give you a sense of security all right. A false sense.
@ Mark
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/05/abandoning-defensive-crouch-liberal.html
Scroll down to Point Number 2
Awww... Hell.
Make it $15
John Henry
Sounds like the roar of a lion in the halls of Harvard. Sounds like the squeak of a mouse out here.
Forgot to update
https://youtu.be/33rlMWNJKNE
The intensity of Alito's remarks might come from the high estate that morons inhabit today.
What I think is funny is that Prof. Tushnet wants to crush his own daughter. It just goes to show that the whole liberal idea that increased exposure to people with different ideas broadens one's thinking is wildly off base.
So the Tushnet quote goes all the way to "1945." Alito should have made that clear.
He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won.
If only the culture wars would ever be over. Abortion is an example. Roe v. Wade isn’t enough — we have to have late term abortion, even if the baby would be viable. That makes people who possess a genuine moral sense pretty squeamish, but it happened. Now one would imagine that the abortion front of the culture wars would be over because at this point abortion is allowed at any point in the pregnancy and for any reason, or no reason at all. One would think that this part of the culture wars would be over.
And one would be wrong.
The Democrats here in Virginia have been pushing for post-partum abortion, meaning that a baby born alive would be left on a shelf to die if the mother could be persuaded to let it die. And Althouse dutifully burnishes her feminist credentials by saying that, yes, she could understand why that would be necessary. And so she stays on the winning side of the culture wars.
Thus far the good guys are holding. But the culture wars never end and dome day the culture warriors will slip past, and then a new front will be opened in the abortion fight. I don’t know what it will be, but there will be some new thing to fight over. That is certain.
America, the country where the Left and the Right both sincerely believe they are one election away from losing everything forever.
Greg Hlatky said...
""The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars.
The Left's answer is "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." ""
Had to look that up. I hope not
This is Harvard Law School provincialism. Not everyone in the wider world worries about whether transgenders are represented in the faculty lounge and regards it as a great triumph for humanity if they are. Not everyone views the world in such a polarized them versus us way, and if they do, they may not be thinking in terms of total victory and total defeat, but in terms of how people of different views can live together.
You can think of Alito as seconding the idea that Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed a century ago, if you substitute "social" for "economic" and make the other necessary changes:
But a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
Against Holmes, who was way too much a fan of involuntary sterilization, you could put John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." I'd be hard pressed to find an inspirational quote from such illustrious figures to support Tushnet's woke Jacobin view.
They gamed this out years ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=trk_gJx5yH8
You get the sense that for Tushnet it's about winning and nothing else. There are more Donald Trumps out there than most people realize.
But apparently there is a distinction between Holmes and Alito. Holmes would be more apt to accept legislation dictating behavior according to local mores, which may be those of Tushnet's woke Massachusetts. Alito would be more live-and-let-live.
Mark Tushnet is the kind of guy who could have used an ass whoopin' at some point in his self-anointed life.
He is the kind of fool who believes his "just so" academic arguments win anything but plaudits from other self-anointed jerks.
Also, Harvard is a shit hole school.
“Hi, I’m Bob Dylan... remember the 60s? Cream... Vanilla Fudge.. “
https://youtu.be/Oa-50ZYvHPw
Of course, to "liberal" and "progressive" State-fellators, anyone who is on the side of liberty is by definition a "loser." In 1776 these guys would have been Tories.
Just another of the type Neal Maxwell called, “ would-be Caesars who will refuse to settle for citizens who render to Caesar only that which is his—and unto God all that is His.”
Nothing new with SCOTUS justices citing Dylan. Both Scalia and Roberts have done so. Roberts actually gets into a jocular academic discussion about why he was correct to use "when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" without the "ain't" that Dylan sings in LARS (see link below).
Also from the article:The most cited Dylan lyric... came from “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” When judges want to reject expert testimony about an obvious point, say, they are apt to remind readers that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/us/politics/how-does-it-feel-chief-justice-roberts-to-hone-a-dylan-quote.html
You could also argue that the conservatives won the culture wars. We have come to accept gay marriage, but marriage is itself a conservative institution. That faction of the gays who advocated a bathhouse ethos did not triumph even in their own community.....People are more accepting of marijuana use, but there has also been less consumption of demon rum. Call it a draw. IN any event, most people still condemn the use of hard drugs. Burroughs and Hunter Thompson were not prophets....I don't know what's going on with sexual mores and never have, but it does seem that the wicked excesses of the Rolling Stones have not prevailed and become the norm......Most people in America believe you should work at a steady job, support your family, pay taxes within reason, and not cheat on your spouse. That's pretty conservative.
Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms, marijuana induces a lethe state of indolence and ignorance, everything they have pushed erodes civil society.
Mark said, "Leland, it was Alito who spoke of Germany and Japan. Not Tushnet. The way Ann wrote it, I can see the confusion, but having read Alito he was the one who spoke it."
Yes. And it is confusing. For when Alito says,
"My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945. Is our country going to follow that course?"
Is he really saying that is his opinion, that this is what he would do?
I don't think so. I think he's being sarcastic. I think he's mocking Tushnet. I think he's implying that this is what Tushnet wants and will do if he can. Now not knowing Tushnet I don't know whether that is true. But I wouldn't be surprised if it is true.
I believe the point that Alito is making is that if you really believe that people on the right are Nazis then this is how you would treat them.
But I also think Alito misses the full horror of the situation. The America that won World War II (or the right if you notice the culture the left strives to erase from history) was merciful towards the Germans and the Japanese after the war. But this is not the nature of the left.
Our conservative control of the culture is what gives America its freedom! in the first place!
I greatly appreciate professor's neutrality on that crucial matter!
Thank you Lurker21 for finding the Tushnet context that Alito must have been referring to. Alito was paraphrasing Mark Tushner. Whether Alito paraphrased or summarized Tushner fairly or not is up to the reader, but I think it was close enough.
Mark Tushner, quote:
"The culture wars are over; they lost, we won…. For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won."
in retrospect, unconditional surrender as a demand, made the war grind on longer, they had nothing to gain if the regime was to be abolished, in the case of germany and japan, their were changes in leadership but not changes in structure, the zaibatsus became keiretsus, the gehlen org became the bnd, the founders of the ldp were class a war criminals, had they known that, there would been an accomodation, yes nurenberg thinnned the ranks but only at the top and middle levels,
I don't know if anyone above mentioned this, but Mark Tushnet spent many (I assume happy, or at least happy for him) years at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he made his chops pushing Critical Legal Studies. He moved to Harvard after he had become a leading Crit.
I have tried over the years in the comments to tease out from Althouse what it was like with Tushnet in the house, but she has never responded. She is very discreet about her personal experiences as a law professor, which I think is both wise and polite.
In a job interview once, I asked one of her students about her classroom demeanor. He said she was very accessible to students, and she never referred to her blog in any way.
I'd say that was about perfect classroom demeanor.
Amadeus 48 @10:18 AM:
Yes, but did she ever admit she was wrong? ;-)
Historical note: I read the Manchester bio of MacArthur. At the end of WWII, MacArthur was markedly lenient towards Filipino collaborators and Japanese war criminals. The Japanese war criminals had a lot of blood and cruelty on their hands. They treated American POW's far worse than the Nazis did, but MacArthur let them off easy. The New Dealers back in Washington criticized him for this,but his opinion prevailed. It should be noted that MacArthur's supervision of the American occupation of Japan is generally regarded as a success. Maybe MacArthur was right.....The harsh treatment that the Allies gave Germany after the WWI Armistice doesn't support the wisdom of an "eat shit and die" approach to dealing with the losers.
'He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won. The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945. Is our country going to follow that course? To quote a popular Nobel laureate, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."'
Mmm. Is that all Tushnet? Or just the bolded first sentence? It kind of makes a differenc4e.
Interesting statistical analysis of voting. Longish (~ 1 hour) but compelling that the voting outcome was tweaked by some external agency.
https://youtu.be/Ztu5Y5obWPk
Tushnet is 75.
He’ll be dead before the culture war turns to a civil war.
The America that won World War II (or the right if you notice the culture the left strives to erase from history) was merciful towards the Germans and the Japanese after the war. But this is not the nature of the left.<
A friend of mine, who became a Marine Corps pilot in Vietnam, was born in Germany during WWII. His father was a German soldier who was captured/surrendered at the end of the war. My friend's mother was able to visit her husband in the Russian POW camp. The next time she tried to visit, she was told he had died of "pneumonia." She got her children out of Germany somehow and they ended up in Minnesota. He flew 600 missions in Vietnam.
The model for the left in treating "losers."
Jupiter quotes @ 10:43 a.m.:
'He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won. The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945. Is our country going to follow that course? To quote a popular Nobel laureate, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."'
Jupiter responds, also @ 10:43 a.m.: Mmm. Is that all Tushnet? Or just the bolded first sentence? It kind of makes a differenc4e.
If you had perused the comments, you'd realize that commenter Bob Boyd @ 8:27 a.m. answered your question by supplying a link to Tushnet's remarks in 2016: Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism:Mark Tushnet.
And I quote:
For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)
The Nobel laureate remark came from Alito, but as you can see, the rest came from Tushnet.
Jupiter: Also note that Lurker21 @ 8:12 a.m. provided the same link to Tushnet's remarks that Bob Boyd did @ 8:27 a.m. Lesson: read the comments before commenting.
William said...
You could also argue that the conservatives won the culture wars.
That is certainly one way of looking at it. People used to talk about French intellectuals who "talked left" and "lived right," that is to say, they were full of left-wing rhetoric but enjoyed all the privileges of bourgeois luxury. That's true of some of our rulers today, except the "left-wing" rhetoric has taken a very different form -- it's about "woke" cultural preferences, not about actual socialism.
But many in the upper middle class "talk left" and "live right" today in a different way. They tolerate and even advocate all manner of transgressive behavior in the proles but avoid such behavior themselves and expect their offspring to avoid it as well. Hard drugs and promiscuity are accepted in others but avoided by oneself and one's peers, who are expected to avoid such indulgences for success in their careers. People who scoff at the bourgeois work and family ethic when others defend or promote it, actually practice it in their own lives. I'd say, though, that it adds up to neither side winning and everything still being in flux.
Nobody picked up on my comment about Tushnet's family. I kept it cryptic because I was accused on another site of indulging in ad hominem arguments because I was so interested in who is married to whom and who is related to whom. One of Tushnet's daughters followed him into the very liberal faculty of Harvard Law School. The other is a conservative/libertarian Catholic - and gay - blogger. Like I said, nobody won and everything is in flux - and if you want to start suppressing the other side, you may have to scratch your head about what to do with your own family.
The right has been purged from academia. This has been true for decades. In some places, some of the consequences (I don't think this is the end of it) of the left winning are already self-evident.
But many in the upper middle class "talk left" and "live right" today in a different way.
I can confirm that's true in the San Francisco East Bay. As I've noted before, my neighbors all got married before having children, they stay married, they have a profound work ethic, and they invest an enormous amount of time and money raising their children. The neighborhood is so safe that I've left the doors unlocked at night for the past twenty years. In every possible way it’s like living in an idyllic small town from the 1950s, except that a three-bedroom, 2,000 square-foot bungalow house costs $2 million.
My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)
I think Tushnet's examples don't quite say what he wants them to say. Does Tushnet believe the North "won" Reconstruction? Actually, I think Civil War historians would say that Reconstruction was a failure that damaged the South for generations & that left the North chained to an economic corpse. It was so much of an exercise in retributive justice as it was an exercise in corrupt & incompetent federal management. As for Brown, desegregation was more often than not slow-walked through the country, and not just in the South, either. Americans, especially northern liberals, like to forget the anti-busing riots in the North (e.g. Boston).
Germany & Japan!? What does Tushnet want to do? Carpet bomb flyover country? The Deplorables are not crushed & most certainly not disarmed. This is why I think Conservatives' discussions of the Benedict Option leave the wrong impression. The Benedictines didn't own over 300 million guns. History would have been very different if they had.
Tushnet is famous for saying that the Supreme Court should decide cases in the way that was "most likely to advance the cause of socialism."
Tushnet was the clerk for Justice Marshall when Roe v. Wade was written. The original idea was to call for a constitutional right to abort pregnancies in the first trimester. Tushnet was the force behind the memo that argued that the abortion line should be pushed late into the pregnancy because of "the difficulties which many women may have in believing that they are pregnant and in deciding to seek an abortion..."
Mr. Alito, and the Supreme Court, should recognize the humanity of unborn children and acknowledge they are people, and the equal protection clause should apply to abortion politics.
Socialists--whether they are international socialists or national socialists--murder innocent people. It's what they do.
so he's another death eater like emmanuel, who will be exempt of the death panel for those in his age bracket,
Actually, I think Civil War historians would say that Reconstruction was a failure that damaged the South for generations & that left the North chained to an economic corpse.
And it fed resentment to this day. Lincoln planned something like the Marshal Plan and, after he was assassinated by Booth, Stanton decided to take revenge on the entire South. It led to "Jim Crow" and segregation for 100 years.
>>A Harvard Law School Professor provided a different vision of a future America. He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won.
He's right, you know. The networks have called the war for the Left, so it's over.
"Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)"
**********
Notice the comparison of Americans purportedly defeated in a cultural war with people defeated in real ones?
We are the enemies, and now we should be treated like conquered peoples, POWS.
Totalitarianism to the core.
Only an effete urban professor would not understand what "taking a hard line" with tens of millions of Americans, many with weapons, will result in.
Easy to say when you're ensconced in the People's Republic of Cambridge.
The only reason the Left feels comfortable taking self-declared 'hard lines' and taunting people from the Right with such nonsense is because they do not appreciate how completely annihilated the Germans and Japanese cultures were in WWII. They've been too busy destroying history to attempt remembering a little of it. They've omitted thinking how much violence was expended by both sides to get to the end in WWII, and misinterpreted the absence of it now, aside from Antifa's weak and unopposed version. They might be in for a surprise.
It's just culture. The elites tell their minions it's war to garner votes and contributions. Angst dialed to 11 puts butts in seats.
"My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all."
*****************
Note the prissy "no normative pull at all". By that he means our opinions and values don't mean shit.
That's from a Harvard law professor.
Nuance, I guess.
Michael K
A friend of mine, who became a Marine Corps pilot in Vietnam, was born in Germany during WWII.
There are a number of memoirs from Germans who were children during WW2 and later emigrated to the US.
Here are 2 from 2 German emigrants who had US military careers:
Eric H. Vieler, A Journey on My Own
Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, German Boy
More from those who didn't have military careers:
Jurgen Herbst, Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood Among the Nazis
Wolf Dettbarn, From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany
Karl Heinz Strick & Adam Johnson &
Frances L. Strick, Boy with a White Flag: Memoir of WWII Germany and the Post-War Years
Maria Ritter, Return to Dresden
Karen Truesdell Riehl, Helga: Growing up in Hitler's Germany
Bernd Heinrich, the Snoring Bird.
Bernd Heinrich and his father were both field biologists, though of different specialties and perspectives. The book is more about his father, who collected all over the world.
My late brother-in-law also emigrated as a child from Germany to the US several years after WW2 ended, which explains my interest in such memoirs. He also served in the US Army.
It's not over. Liberalism is a divergent, typically generational, sectarian ideology. #PrinciplesMatter #HateLovesAbortion
For those who know history, victories can be very fleeting. Many an empire did not survive its founder and some empires fell apart while their founder was still alive. For that matter, some victories did not survive a full year or, in some cases, a few days. The field of history is strewn with the corpses of victors.
they approve of homosexuality, transgenderism
The transgender spectrum. The Rainbow (i.e. exclusive of black, brown, and pride in the shredded remains of white) symbolism is blemished and progressive. Pure trans/homosexuals do not approve of others in the transgender spectrum, including: bisexuals, intersexuals, neosexuals (i.e. indoctrination, medical corruption). There is a reason why in the early to mid-twentieth century the social liberals appropriated and reoriented "gay" and "lesbian", and why they adopted political congruence ("="), a sociopolitical construct of selective exclusion, and feminists in a PC alliance (e.g. projections of rape-rape culture) went along to distract from their Choice of affirmative discrimination and exclusion. A wicked solution and progression.
whether they are international socialists or national socialists--murder innocent people
They have that propensity. They are known to establish amoral (i.e. selective, opportunistic, ethical) institutions, and their sociopolitical constructs reduce competing interests that will mitigate progress of a dictatorial minority or democratic majority to run amuck.
The other is a conservative/libertarian Catholic - and gay - blogger. Like I said, nobody won and everything is in flux - and if you want to start suppressing the other side, you may have to scratch your head about what to do with your own family.
Whether to normalize, tolerate, or reject, consistently, on principle, is settled through reconciliation, not selective, opportunistic quasi-religions, and politically congruent ("=") sociopolitical constructs.
narciso @10:15 AM:
Totally disagree with you on this. One of the few times I do.
Truth and Reconciliation Committee/Nuremberg Trials - as long as they hang a few conservatives it's all good.
I watched some of Alito's presentation and though I agree with most of his opinions he takes "dryness" to a new level.
Michael K said... And it fed resentment to this day. Lincoln planned something like the Marshal Plan and, after he was assassinated by Booth, Stanton decided to take revenge on the entire South. It led to "Jim Crow" and segregation for 100 years.
Stanton's actions and policies were not what "led" to Jim Crow and segregation for 100 years. That's like Betty Broderick saying that the gun "accidentally went off while I was holding it"; it's the Claudine Longet explanation ("ooh, mais oui, the gun somehow fired and killed Spider!"). Jim Crow and segregation, and the comprehensive oppression and terrorizing of blacks in the South, was entirely the work of recalcitrant Southerners, men and women alike, who would not yield in their hatred of blacks. Southerners had agency in this, and they exercised it. They weren't victims of circumstance. It wasn't their environment or upbringing that "made" them so hateful toward blacks, and to deny blacks their civil right and even their humanity. That's the same reasoning used to excuse the inner city black violence, and it's just as specious and egregious.
The unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan was necessary as the only means of convincing Germans and Japanese, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that they and their evil political systems were beaten. The only means of achieving this end was total war, and all that implies: the destruction of their cities, the ruination of their infrastructure, mass collateral civilian deaths, the total defeat of their armies in the field, all of it. They had to be humiliated and driven to their knees and made to beg to surrender. They had to be taught a lesson that they would never forget, and a harsh less it had to be in light of the enormity of the evil they had inflicted on the world. The destructiveness of total war was further warranted and justified as retribution, and vengeance.
We couldn't make the same mistake as was made in 1918. The Great War ended too soon. It should have continued on into and through 1919, and in fact detailed planning had already been made by the time of the Armistice to invade Germany, with American armies spearheading the effort. The Allies should have invaded and overrun Germany and then partitioned it into zones of occupation governed and administered by the Allies. The occupation should have lasted for the most part of the 20th century, and transitioned into the creation of at least three separate and sovereign German states (e.g., a Northern German Union, Saxony, and Bavaria).
Think of the course history might have taken had the Allies followed this path. Think of what WOULDN'T have happened.
Germany was NOT treated harshly after the Great War. That is a myth, promulgated by the Germans themselves and sympathetic leftists in the interwar period, and it was akin to the Dolchstoßlegende promulgated by Germany's military to paper over their military defeat by the Allies. Harsh treatment would have entailed the invasion, occupation, and partitioning of Germany in 19919. And the Germans would have deserved it, and the world would have been better off for it.
I'm not aware of any wars the left won that were also wins for the people, but there sure are a lot of example of the opposite approaching 100%.
I'm not aware of any wars the left won that were also wins for the people
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a win for the people?
well the junkers were left mostly untouched, the common people not so much,
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a win for the people?
Do you think it would have passed without Republicans?
Stanton's actions and policies were not what "led" to Jim Crow and segregation for 100 years. That's like Betty Broderick saying that the gun "accidentally went off while I was holding it"; it's the Claudine Longet explanation ("ooh, mais oui, the gun somehow fired and killed Spider!").
I'm glad we have a time traveler who can describe what happened 150 years ago so well.
I wonder if you know how Stanton went after Sherman ?
There are a number of memoirs from Germans who were children during WW2 and later emigrated to the US.
Manfred's call sign was "Fokker." He was one of the most famous Marine pilots of the Vietnam era. He was group commander in Gulf War I.
How come if the Left "won the culture wars", all the great victories in that war were in the Supreme Court: Abortion on demand, gay marriage, rights for transgenders, affirmative discrimination, etc., etc. The Left was unable to persuade the majority of Americans on these issues. Yes, most Americans are well-behaved and do our best to put up with what we are told by our betters is the moral position, but have we been persuaded? I am not so sure. I think we are even LESS likely to be persuaded if we are told that we should be treated like defeated Nazis and Japs.
reconstruction was an imperfect system, kind of the cpa in iraq, but the terror that came after supported by the southern bourbons, by the way the corrupt bargain of 1876, was necessitated by the intimidation in states like mississippi and florida,
France got a pretty good deal at the Congress of Vienna, despite the fact that Napoleon had lost his wars not once but twice. The Prussians wanted a much harsher fate for France. Perhaps if they had broken up France into several countries and granted some German principality sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine, then the Great War could have been avoided.....The French generals felt that WWI should not end in an Armistice. They wanted to press on and have a victory parade in Berlin. Had they done so, WWII would have been avoided and everyone in perpetuity would have cursed the vainglory of French generals who caused the needless deaths of thousands of men just so they could have their victory parade.....Perhaps if the Germans could have considered the cost of just one allied bombing raid in WWII, they would realize what a terrific bargain they were getting with those reparations....I think it's fair to say that if the Germans had been treated as generously at Versailles as the French were at the Congress of Vienna, history might have turned out differently and better. Also if the Germans had been made to come to terms after a military defeat and occupation rather than an armistice and blockade, they might have come to a different appreciation of their military prowess. Also if Wilson hadn't been such a wad and had kept us out of the war or had not over promised and under delivered a peace settlement, then things might also have been different. Also if Ronald Coleman had shot Hitler that day when they were shooting at each other, things might have worked out better. Well, all that's water under the bridge. The important thing now is to provide fair and equitable bathroom facilities for the transgendered.
Are Supreme Court justices available for elective office?
Blogger Earnest Prole said in response to...
“I'm not aware of any wars the left won that were also wins for the people”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a win for the people?
You’d better check who voted to pass that.
Earnest Prole said...
I'm not aware of any wars the left won that were also wins for the people
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a win for the people?
Is that really your best answer?
Given the context of Jim Crow and the CRA you must realize that doesn't work very well.
It also reveals the paucity of democrat and republican accomplishment.
Tushnet is 75.
Yes, and his article got a lot of negative feedback when it came out and then just sort of sank. I'm sure that he feels that way about his enemies, and some of his students and colleagues probably do to, but I wonder just how widespread his view really is. That's a problem we have in dealing with all these blogposts picked out and publicized: how much more are they than just one person's ranting and raving?
As Newsweek explained, "We Are All Socialists Now."
Not yet, I hope. But the Left keeps trying to make sure that the rules are altered just enough to make sure that next election is the last one.
The irony is that the left's insanely nihilistic pursuit of victory at all costs has caused them to lose sight of whatever good thing it is that they thought victory would bring. From what I can see, it will be some sort of transbiological Mad Max realm of ever more impoverished mush, with lots of bad music on the side.
“I'm not aware of any wars the left won that were also wins for the people”
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a win for the people?"
"You’d better check who voted to pass that.
Exactly. If the movement for civil rights was anything but a win for the people, Liberal Republicans would not have joined forces with the Democratic Left against the George Wallace Democrats.
Earnest Prole
If the movement for civil rights was anything but a win for the people, Liberal Republicans would not have joined forces with the Democratic Left against the George Wallace Democrats.
The problem with your statement it wasn't just Liberal Republicans who supported the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, but Republicans of all ideological stripes. Nobody would characterize the Republicans in 1964 as being predominantly Liberal. In the House, 80% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights bill. In the Senate, 82% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights bill. Conclusion: there were quite a few conservative and moderate Republicans who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
Recall also that President Eisenhower, no one's idea of a Liberal, proposed and got Civil Rights bills passed in 1957 and 1960. Senator Dirksen of Illinois, a conservative Republican from Illinois, played a leading role in getting the 1967,1960 & 1964 Civil Rights Bills passed.
Yes, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was a win for the people, but given the 80% Republican support for the bill, I would consider it far-fetched to call the bill a victory for the left.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/republicans_led_the_way_on_civil_rights.html
80% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights bill. In the Senate, 82% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights bill. Conclusion: there were quite a few conservative and moderate Republicans who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
It should be all [American] conservative Republicans. The Declaration, The Constitution, do not indulge diversity, not limited to racism, and affirmative discrimination. That is a liberal ideology and pathology.
AA, your analysis is somewhat in the ballpark! But, your inserting Dylan's lyrics was kind of strange. I take advice from my parents over Dylan or 'Dear Abby' anytime. Next you'll be quoting those social media experts the "Kardashians" for advice?
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