I think that what you're saying is that Never Trumpers are still on a mission of bad faith when it comes to monarchism vs. democracy -- playing at being serious democrats who don't mind taking your money but won't give you what we're all desperately striving for -- to complete the American revolution by democratizing the economy. Am I warm?
If I understand the post (and I’m not sure that I do), it seems that conservative pundits like Isgur and French are analyzing and arguing within the confines of a box, where the box is the Federalist Society ecosystem and, e.g., the particularized injury doctrine it concocted. They can only use the facts and logic that are available in the box. This is what I’m afraid of when I think of how Never Trumper conservatism will try to justify itself: thinking that expunging the “bad” - Trump-y - stuff will suffice, without acknowledging the conservative political continuum that led to it. So “who do you work for” is also “what box are you in”?
Anyway, it’s a terrific post, and had me thinking there for at least an hour and a half after reading it when I should have been mowing the grass/weeds.
You pretty much exactly hit the nail on the head. Sixty years ago, I was deeply into Buckley, National Review, and all things Conservative philosophy. By Nixon's resignation, I was 90% done. I stopped reading NR when they worried whether Weinberger was Conservative enough to be SECDEF. Between that and watching the repeated failures of their major dogmas which began with Reagan's first budget, they left my rearview mirror decades ago.
Ideologues are ideologues regardless of whether they're Left, Right, or Moonbeam. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the Plutocracy's 80-year slow-motion counter revolution to undo the New Deal, everything that came after, and lock the Constitution into a 17th century bubble.
People forget that he began winning primaries in 2016 because he campaigned like a New Dealer. The Right Wing commentariat lost its mind. Hell, I would have voted for him if I thought he'd do half of what he promised. But he's always about the con and ideologues are always conning themselves. It would be funny except for the pain and damage they cause for the world around them.
Yes! Your philosophical evolution is fascinating. Just wow on questioning Cap Weinberger’s conservative creds. For me, it has always been the “trickle down” theory. They argue for it and try it again and again, and always the same result. BUT, as you suggest, I need to apply the “who do you work for” (or my box theory) to the left, too. Or whatever “the center” is, for that matter. What are their boxes? Send me suggestions and/or pointers, if you have them. Thank you!
Thank you! That’s why I used the Latin “for example”. I was sure there were more doctrines but I’m not educated about this subject. So thanks for that pointer, and for pointing me to any other doctrines you know of. I’ve never been able to get my head around “modern” conservatism. I would try to follow the logic of a piece but then they would make a supposition that made no sense to me or I would feel that they were leaving something glaring out so they could arrive at their conclusion. David Brooks, for example. And thank you, Mike Brock, for encouraging me to learn about these things.
This is a very thoughtful and detailed explication of the old Upton Sinclair chestnut: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” These two wouldn’t have a job if they understood that hacking away at standing is a grave injustice.
If you read enough or listen to enough David French you can hear cracks in the ideology and then see him recoil to patch them. He is actually struggling a bit with the direction of things especially in regards to Christianity. Meanwhile all I ever hear from Sarah Isgur is non-stop equivocating. One of these people is reachable. One is not.
This post raises another question-- can the particularized injury doctrine be changed by legislation granting jurisdictional standing to individuals who suffer an injury of general impact? This is outside of my (former) practice area, and I am too old and tired to sit down and try to figure it out myself. I would be much obliged if anyone who has better informed insight into the question than I do would address it in these comments.
God, I’m grateful you took the time to deconstruct this person and her ilk. I sensed everything you prove herein but did not have the knowledge or skill to explain. She — Isgur — was a primary reason I didn’t last long as a subscriber to The Dispatch. And it’s been years now, so I’d forgotten her close association with David French who I’ve liked & trusted a lot and who I now associate primarily with the NYT. But… but… he has all that history with all the malignant right wing “legal” structure responsible for dismantling our nation. And I had no idea he’s still doing that weekly!
I am allergic to legalese. This bullshit term “concrete particularized injury” should be outlawed, along with 98% of the legal papers ever written, that is my considered opinion. The term is obviously a weapon of mass obfuscation designed to give bad faith/well funded actors a hammer with which to kill honest debate, prevent justice from ever getting a hearing, and allow victims to die of old age waiting for their alleged “protections” to materialize. Christ Almighty, the good Lord wrote the entire law on two tablets which I can recite from memory. And white Americans have spent 250 years editing it to secure their own privilege at the expense of everyone else, and hold fancy conferences every two weeks.
I damn sure understood this paragraph of yours, and it’s prolly the only one I will be able to regurgitate a week from now, no offense 👇
“The audience for this performance is the Never Trump conservative who needs to believe that the legal system is functioning within its appropriate constraints, that the constraints are necessary and proper, that the system is doing what can reasonably be expected of it, and that the failure of the system to constrain Trump in the structural cases is regrettable but inevitable rather than the consequence of a forty-year political project the audience and the hosts are both participants in. This audience is paying The Dispatch’s subscription fees in part precisely to be told this. The product is the reassurance that the system is working. The reassurance requires the obscurantism. The obscurantism is what produces the Advisory Opinions register, in episode after episode, year after year.”
And again, my prosaic response: fuck that!
Signed,
Ordinary citizen #288,006,383, watching my country *legalize* fascism while elevator music plays quietly in the background, an open copy of 1984 on my lap.
I disagree that FedSoc is a serious legal conservative institution. How could you function as a signal / pipeline to courts and stay independent, they shd be as good as the bar association
Standing sounds like causes of action as discussed by Litman in the Atlantic re recent SCOTUS decisions. I've been reading Steven Teles' The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement which meticulously and through numerous personal interviews the long road you describe. Why did the stalwarts of rights and autonomy not effectively combat the rise. As a life-long liberal I feel snookered because all along the conservatives were ridiculed while all along they were building an ediface of respect and responsibility when in reality they were like wolves slavering over a trapped sheep, us. Fortunately, their own blindness to the consequences of their version of society leads to destruction (vide licet: Trump now); unfortunately, us along with them.
Have you ever checked out her contributions as a panelist of the KCRW show Left Right and Center? It airs every Friday afternoon, and is available as a podcast following each broadcast. All I can say is that anytime she spouts some kind of doctrinaire response to a question, I just think to myself cripes this woman is batshit crazy. Not sure if that jives with your experience, but based on your essay, I'm guessing it's not too far off the mark.
“Suits by members of Congress (states’s attorneys general and others, as you said earlier in this essay) to enforce constitutional limits on the executive — all of these were routinely entertained by federal courts (until about the mid-twentieth century, you noted.) The system worked because the courts could reach structural constitutional violations even when no single plaintiff had been distinctively harmed.” Yes, Mike Brock!
To my mind, the Supreme Court above all has a duty to uphold the general intent and meaning of the American Constitution, Bill of Rights and Amendments, rather than specific wording and detail when it can be interpreted and used in opposing or incompatible ways. For instance, legal arguments which support gerrymandering, large-scale disenfranchisement, and broad legal immunity for the President in his acts of office—For heaven’s sakes! A bright school child could see through that nonsense! And understand how such legal rulings evade and pervert the purposes of our key laws.
Criticism is fair, and I agree in part. I let my Dispatch subscription lapse largely because of growing disagreement with parts of their content. But French and Isgur are not the same. Isgur is a diehard defender of the conservative right, who has persistent agenda points that drive her analysis, who treats friends differently (such as never criticizing the Fifth Circuit), who occasionally demonstrably misstates things (such as in the Trump disqualification cases) but more regularly offers a blinkered or biased portrayal, and who prefers to dismiss a lot of critics as partisans rather than even read them, much less take them seriously. I disagree with French at times, but he is a sincere and serious commenter, who (as you note with respect to Trump) has stuck with some commendable principles, who treats people with care, and who shares some desire for systemic change (such as abolishing qualified immunity and expanding the remedies and effects of section 1983). To achieve the change I think you want, there need to be appeals that can reach people like him.
I think that what you're saying is that Never Trumpers are still on a mission of bad faith when it comes to monarchism vs. democracy -- playing at being serious democrats who don't mind taking your money but won't give you what we're all desperately striving for -- to complete the American revolution by democratizing the economy. Am I warm?
If I understand the post (and I’m not sure that I do), it seems that conservative pundits like Isgur and French are analyzing and arguing within the confines of a box, where the box is the Federalist Society ecosystem and, e.g., the particularized injury doctrine it concocted. They can only use the facts and logic that are available in the box. This is what I’m afraid of when I think of how Never Trumper conservatism will try to justify itself: thinking that expunging the “bad” - Trump-y - stuff will suffice, without acknowledging the conservative political continuum that led to it. So “who do you work for” is also “what box are you in”?
Anyway, it’s a terrific post, and had me thinking there for at least an hour and a half after reading it when I should have been mowing the grass/weeds.
You pretty much exactly hit the nail on the head. Sixty years ago, I was deeply into Buckley, National Review, and all things Conservative philosophy. By Nixon's resignation, I was 90% done. I stopped reading NR when they worried whether Weinberger was Conservative enough to be SECDEF. Between that and watching the repeated failures of their major dogmas which began with Reagan's first budget, they left my rearview mirror decades ago.
Ideologues are ideologues regardless of whether they're Left, Right, or Moonbeam. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the Plutocracy's 80-year slow-motion counter revolution to undo the New Deal, everything that came after, and lock the Constitution into a 17th century bubble.
People forget that he began winning primaries in 2016 because he campaigned like a New Dealer. The Right Wing commentariat lost its mind. Hell, I would have voted for him if I thought he'd do half of what he promised. But he's always about the con and ideologues are always conning themselves. It would be funny except for the pain and damage they cause for the world around them.
Yes! Your philosophical evolution is fascinating. Just wow on questioning Cap Weinberger’s conservative creds. For me, it has always been the “trickle down” theory. They argue for it and try it again and again, and always the same result. BUT, as you suggest, I need to apply the “who do you work for” (or my box theory) to the left, too. Or whatever “the center” is, for that matter. What are their boxes? Send me suggestions and/or pointers, if you have them. Thank you!
Many such doctrines. Here's Chevron
https://youtu.be/ylwv2Pb0__0?si=i3AGlbDcpXRMSeA5
Thank you! That’s why I used the Latin “for example”. I was sure there were more doctrines but I’m not educated about this subject. So thanks for that pointer, and for pointing me to any other doctrines you know of. I’ve never been able to get my head around “modern” conservatism. I would try to follow the logic of a piece but then they would make a supposition that made no sense to me or I would feel that they were leaving something glaring out so they could arrive at their conclusion. David Brooks, for example. And thank you, Mike Brock, for encouraging me to learn about these things.
This is a very thoughtful and detailed explication of the old Upton Sinclair chestnut: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” These two wouldn’t have a job if they understood that hacking away at standing is a grave injustice.
If you read enough or listen to enough David French you can hear cracks in the ideology and then see him recoil to patch them. He is actually struggling a bit with the direction of things especially in regards to Christianity. Meanwhile all I ever hear from Sarah Isgur is non-stop equivocating. One of these people is reachable. One is not.
This post raises another question-- can the particularized injury doctrine be changed by legislation granting jurisdictional standing to individuals who suffer an injury of general impact? This is outside of my (former) practice area, and I am too old and tired to sit down and try to figure it out myself. I would be much obliged if anyone who has better informed insight into the question than I do would address it in these comments.
Almost any standing could be legislated into or out of existence.
For instance: trees given their importance to the creation of air for human existence.
Or at least forests lol
Correction needed: 400 US troops have not been killed. Approximately that number are casualties of which not even 20 were fatalities.
God, I’m grateful you took the time to deconstruct this person and her ilk. I sensed everything you prove herein but did not have the knowledge or skill to explain. She — Isgur — was a primary reason I didn’t last long as a subscriber to The Dispatch. And it’s been years now, so I’d forgotten her close association with David French who I’ve liked & trusted a lot and who I now associate primarily with the NYT. But… but… he has all that history with all the malignant right wing “legal” structure responsible for dismantling our nation. And I had no idea he’s still doing that weekly!
I am allergic to legalese. This bullshit term “concrete particularized injury” should be outlawed, along with 98% of the legal papers ever written, that is my considered opinion. The term is obviously a weapon of mass obfuscation designed to give bad faith/well funded actors a hammer with which to kill honest debate, prevent justice from ever getting a hearing, and allow victims to die of old age waiting for their alleged “protections” to materialize. Christ Almighty, the good Lord wrote the entire law on two tablets which I can recite from memory. And white Americans have spent 250 years editing it to secure their own privilege at the expense of everyone else, and hold fancy conferences every two weeks.
I damn sure understood this paragraph of yours, and it’s prolly the only one I will be able to regurgitate a week from now, no offense 👇
“The audience for this performance is the Never Trump conservative who needs to believe that the legal system is functioning within its appropriate constraints, that the constraints are necessary and proper, that the system is doing what can reasonably be expected of it, and that the failure of the system to constrain Trump in the structural cases is regrettable but inevitable rather than the consequence of a forty-year political project the audience and the hosts are both participants in. This audience is paying The Dispatch’s subscription fees in part precisely to be told this. The product is the reassurance that the system is working. The reassurance requires the obscurantism. The obscurantism is what produces the Advisory Opinions register, in episode after episode, year after year.”
And again, my prosaic response: fuck that!
Signed,
Ordinary citizen #288,006,383, watching my country *legalize* fascism while elevator music plays quietly in the background, an open copy of 1984 on my lap.
I disagree that FedSoc is a serious legal conservative institution. How could you function as a signal / pipeline to courts and stay independent, they shd be as good as the bar association
I could not believe you once liked French. There's a good reason left is very suspicious of many never trumpers.
Another candidate: Sarah carpenter.
Your friend French cant get a break, this time from the techno right.
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2071068696525877367
Standing sounds like causes of action as discussed by Litman in the Atlantic re recent SCOTUS decisions. I've been reading Steven Teles' The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement which meticulously and through numerous personal interviews the long road you describe. Why did the stalwarts of rights and autonomy not effectively combat the rise. As a life-long liberal I feel snookered because all along the conservatives were ridiculed while all along they were building an ediface of respect and responsibility when in reality they were like wolves slavering over a trapped sheep, us. Fortunately, their own blindness to the consequences of their version of society leads to destruction (vide licet: Trump now); unfortunately, us along with them.
Have you ever checked out her contributions as a panelist of the KCRW show Left Right and Center? It airs every Friday afternoon, and is available as a podcast following each broadcast. All I can say is that anytime she spouts some kind of doctrinaire response to a question, I just think to myself cripes this woman is batshit crazy. Not sure if that jives with your experience, but based on your essay, I'm guessing it's not too far off the mark.
“Suits by members of Congress (states’s attorneys general and others, as you said earlier in this essay) to enforce constitutional limits on the executive — all of these were routinely entertained by federal courts (until about the mid-twentieth century, you noted.) The system worked because the courts could reach structural constitutional violations even when no single plaintiff had been distinctively harmed.” Yes, Mike Brock!
To my mind, the Supreme Court above all has a duty to uphold the general intent and meaning of the American Constitution, Bill of Rights and Amendments, rather than specific wording and detail when it can be interpreted and used in opposing or incompatible ways. For instance, legal arguments which support gerrymandering, large-scale disenfranchisement, and broad legal immunity for the President in his acts of office—For heaven’s sakes! A bright school child could see through that nonsense! And understand how such legal rulings evade and pervert the purposes of our key laws.
Criticism is fair, and I agree in part. I let my Dispatch subscription lapse largely because of growing disagreement with parts of their content. But French and Isgur are not the same. Isgur is a diehard defender of the conservative right, who has persistent agenda points that drive her analysis, who treats friends differently (such as never criticizing the Fifth Circuit), who occasionally demonstrably misstates things (such as in the Trump disqualification cases) but more regularly offers a blinkered or biased portrayal, and who prefers to dismiss a lot of critics as partisans rather than even read them, much less take them seriously. I disagree with French at times, but he is a sincere and serious commenter, who (as you note with respect to Trump) has stuck with some commendable principles, who treats people with care, and who shares some desire for systemic change (such as abolishing qualified immunity and expanding the remedies and effects of section 1983). To achieve the change I think you want, there need to be appeals that can reach people like him.
You’re slandering good people
Incisive post. Thank you.