Back of the Envelope

This one's been floating around the blogosphere. In an article on Clarence Thomas, Jan Greenburg argues that all the stereotypes of him being Scalia's lackey are wildly off target:

From the beginning, Justice Thomas was an independent voice. His brutal confirmation hearings only enforced his autonomy, making him impervious to criticism from the media and liberal law professors. He'd told his story, and no one listened. From then on, he did not care what they said about him.

Clarence Thomas, for example, is the only justice who rarely asks questions at oral arguments. One reason is that he thinks his colleagues talk too much from the bench, and he prefers to let the lawyers explain their case with fewer interruptions. But his silence is sometimes interpreted as a lack of interest, and friends have begged him to ask a few questions to dispel those suggestions. He refuses to do it. "They have no credibility," he says of critics. "I am free to live up to my oath."

But the forcefulness and clarity of Justice Thomas's views, coupled with wrongheaded depictions of him doing Justice Scalia's bidding, created an internal dynamic that caused the court to make an unexpected turn in his first year. Justice O'Connor -- who sought ideological balance -- moved to the left. With the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the court now is poised to finally fulfill the hopes of the conservative movement. As George W. Bush told his legal advisers early in his presidency, he wanted justices in "the mold of Thomas and Scalia." Interestingly, on President Bush's marquee, Justice Thomas got top billing.

It's an interesting article, and I look forward to seeing where the court goes next.

With all the talk about the surge in Iraq, you may be wondering how I'm feeling. I've always been cautiously optimistic about Iraq, since the very first stages of the war. Even when things seemed to be going very well right afterwards, and after the first couple of elections, my optimism was still cautious. And when thigns were going bad and violence was surging, I was still optimistic, if more subdued. You have to look at the long-term trends rather than get bogged down in the day-to-day events. It's difficult to make sense of the day-to-day events, with the media calling Iraq a failure no matter what happens, and the military putting its own spin on things.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people are wondering why Bush is only doing this now, after the midterm elections, when he should have done it a long time ago. And frankly, I think it's because Bush's attitude is close to mine. Through 2005, things seemed to be going pretty well in Iraq. Granted, there was still violence, but Iraq had its own government, and it looked like soon the Iraqis would be able to take charge. Things only turned nasty in 2006, and while Bush may have wanted to try a different approach, Rumsfeld and the generals on the ground didn't. Bush had put his trust in these folks, and they had been pretty successful so far, and they were there and knew the situation better than anyone, so I can understand his reluctance to get rid of them. An uptick in violence for a few months did not make Iraq a catastrophe any more than the previous upticks had. Only when the long-term trends made it clear that Rumseld's and the generals' methods weren't working, and they showed no sign of being willing to change them, did he make the decision to replace them with people who would get the job done. Unfortunately, midterm elections probably had a role in this, and for numerous reasons, Bush didn't want to be seen as changing tactics right before the election. For one, it would have been seen as a political ploy rather than a serious bid to change the course of events in Iraq. And maybe he did fear it would cost Republicans some votes, although everyone else was arguing the opposite. I still don't know whether it's such a bad thing that the Republicans lost big. I think that, to some degree, having an opposition government has made Bush freer. He doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected, and now he doesn't have to worry about keeping his party in power by not doing anything to offend the "moderates" whose votes they depended on. Granted, the Democrats will try to stop this, but they're pretty limited in what they can do. It's one thing to call for troops to return, but they lack the Constitutional authority to actually force that to happen, and not too many will be willing to actually stop funding the war. It's one thing to oppose sending troops, another thing entirely to abandon those now there.

Anyway, that's the political side. Do I think we should be doing this? Ever since we caught Saddam, I've believed we were doing the right thing in Iraq. Before the war started, I wasn't so sure, as I was always a bit iffy on the whole WMD issue. But once Saddam was caught and we'd completed our initial mission, the question was do we just leave and let a society rent apart by a tyrannical dictator further destroy itself, or do we stay and try to help them create a new society. We had what we wanted, and what we had to gain by staying was very idealistic: a civil society in the Middle East that would hopefully be a model for others. That's all. For all the talk of blood for oil, I don't see it. We decided to stay, and it was the right thing to do. A very hard thing, true, but the right thing. And if we're going to do it, we need to do it right, and that means winning. I don't think our former strategy could accomplish that, but I think this one might. It's not guaranteed, but let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.

This is an interesting argument, and one that strikes me as containing some truth. From Jonah Goldberg, at the Corner:

Did feminism undermine socialism? I'm just thinking out loud, but think about it. When women weren't part of the workforce in large numbers, the idea of organizing society and politics around our jobs was enormously popular. Syndicalism, socialism, trade unionism, corporatism, Veblenism, Swopism, big chunks of social democracy, etc etc, were premised in large parts on the idea that your job was your identity. "Workers of the world unite" and all that jazz. When women who didn't work for a wage claimed that they were citizens — or fully entitled to citizenship — it undermined the view that You Are Your Job. And as women entered the workforce, the willingness of men to identify themselves solely by their work tended to erode. Perhaps sexism drove men to say that they were more than their job if a woman could do their job just as well (or well enough).

There's more, but as Jonah himself notes, you have to be careful. While the old-style "Workers of the world unite!" socialism may have died, the new style nanny-state socialism is clearly alive and well. I think his analysis misses a big point, though, which is that women are less willing than men to be defined by their jobs. While a man can derive much of his identity from work, women tend not to, which means that they are less sympathetic to that old-style socialism. Thus, when the unionization efforts had to recruit women, they needed to take a different tact, which ultimately played a part in changing the tone of the labor movement.

There were other issues as well, although most of the ones I'm thinking of weren't real influences until the mid-20th century, which was after old-style socialism's heyday.