The recent performance of the Supreme Court may not create confidence in those who like to think of law as a principled bulwark of republican government, but compared with some influential legal scholarship of the past 20 years it’s downright inspirational. If you don’t believe that, take a look at The Top Ten Politically Correct Law Review Articles. Out with comparison and doctrinal analysis, in with provocation and utterly subjective storytelling!
There are justifications for what’s done, of course. If you “know what you know,” and you’re the only one who can know it, criticism of your story is simply an attempt at hegemonic marginalization. No doubt there are problems. If truth is wholly personal, or at most race, class and gender based, it’s not clear what someone else is supposed to do with your story once he’s done genuflecting to you for telling it. He can give you what you want, I suppose, but will that always be practical? Suppose personal stories conflict? Still, such concerns need not interfere with publishing this stuff, treating the people who produce it as “public intellectuals,” appointing them to prestigious academic chairs and advisory commissions, and pretending to hold them in high regard as major contributors to scholarship.
You can’t laugh the articles off by saying they’re extreme cases. These are influential articles, fertile in scholarly progeny, published in top law reviews by academics in prestigious positions. The author of the piece doesn’t seem particularly partisan. If the pieces he describes are thought to constitute legal scholarship, and they are, then something has gone radically wrong in the way law is understood by its academic custodians.
When I was in law school in the late ’70s legal scholarship was pretty uniformly left-liberal, except for a few law-and-economics types like Richard Posner and a fair amount of work that simply attempted to present the state of a field of law for the benefit of practitioners, with maybe a few comments on policy thrown in. When it dealt with political and social issues it tended to be formulaic, manipulative, self-righteous and smug. All of which suggests a few thoughts on what’s happened:
- Some smart people with the moral qualities required to get places in rather unpleasant environments decided it was stupid bothering with the appearance of rational analysis when it’s obvious what’s wanted anyway. Why not just scream about what you want and abuse everyone who stands in your way?
- Some not-so-smart people were hired because of affirmative action and didn’t have what it takes to be intellectually manipulative. Nonetheless, they found they had as many wants as anyone, thought they had a right to be judged by special standards of their own creation, and were accustomed (again, by screaming) to getting their wants and self-defined rights respected.
- Others went along and joined in to some extent or anyway facilitated things because it was what was going on and seemed to be what the best people thought was the proper next step. I imagine that was so with one female academic mentioned in the article, who I remember as a very nice well-brought-up girl from a very respectable liberal family who always did what was expected of her. I have no doubt she continued her very successful career on the same lines.
Still, there’s a lesson to be learned here for right-wingers: don’t shut up but keep making your pitch, if you believe in it, and eventually liberal opponents will find it hard to avoid dealing with you. What you say will become one of the possibilities.
The link to the “Top Ten PC
The link to the “Top Ten PC Law Review Articles” doesn’t seem to be working but judging by the log entry one can imagine what the articles are like.
Mr. Kalb writes,
” … [T]here’s a lesson to be learned here for right-wingers: don’t shut up but keep making your pitch, if you believe in it, and eventually liberal opponents will find it hard to avoid dealing with you.”
This is extremely, extremely important. What we’re confronted with now is nothing less than the attempt to deliver the final death-blow to all we hold dear as a culture, history, country, nation, collection of ethnicities, collection of races united under one predominant one, the white (Christian) predominantly Anglo-Saxon one and ones closely related to it of northwestern Europe. (I am white Christian of Central and Eastern European extraction without any A-S or northwestern-European ancestors. If I wanted to live in an Eastern European country, which would be closer to my ethnicity than Anglo-Saxon, I assure everyone I’d have moved to one by now. I don’t and have no intention of doing so, and I have no intention either of living in an A-S one that the Tranzi Bush family has transformed racially—yes, racially: let’s not shrink from saying what we mean—into an extension of rural Mexico.) There is no mincing of words by the other side now, regarding this aim of theirs to actually, literally extinguish us, wipe us out, kill us. They are the side where are found such degenerates as Harvard “Professor” Noel Ignatiev and the majority of contributors to Harvard of course, alumni and otherwise, who MUST warmly applaud everything he says or they would have seen to it long ago that he was chased out of there. As the other side doesn’t mince words, neither must ours. We must now start saying clearly that this is in part a struggle for the right of a race, an ethnicity, an ethno-culture to live in a racially/culturally more or less homogeneous nation-state—a nation-state of course in which minorities are welcome and are fully guaranteed the same rights as everyone else BUT in which minorities will NOT be permitted to overthrow the race or culture of the majority whether through racial/ethnic/religious hatred of it (a principal reason for what’s going on now) or from any other motive. We must start saying exactly what we want—not only an immigration moratorium but a reversal of the ethnic imbalance of this country that has come about as a result of the Kennedy-Celler Immigration Holocaust bill of 1965. We must say these things and other things frankly, simply, matter-of-factly and not be cowed by the other side’s tactics. They are now saying openly that they want to, and will, kill us, eliminate us from the world, and from history, and no one—no one—is speaking up to shout them down. We must speak up for ourselves and we must say exactly what we think and want, just as they do, with no mincing of words. What we want is impossible? But what they want—the death of white-Euro Christianity—used to be impossible, yet in only thirty-five short years they’ve brought it about. They did NOT accomplish it by constantly saying to themselves how impossible it was.
Once again,
” … [T]here’s a lesson to be learned here for right-wingers: don’t shut up but keep making your pitch, if you believe in it, and eventually liberal opponents will find it hard to avoid dealing with you.”
Fixed the link.
Fixed the link.
I read several pages of the
I read several pages of the article. Not many Turnabout readers will be able to get through the entire thing, needless to say. What’s going on—surprise, surprise! who would’ve SUSPECTED!—is an attack on traditional values, normal society, and normalness itself by nutcases of various types. No need to go further into it than that. This is material for psychiatrists (the pre-1973 variety, back when they admitted that homosexuality was a sexual perversion) and psychological counselors, not college law or literature professors. The alums and foundation heads who continue to financially support Harvard “University” and similar manure pits filled with this caca aren’t all nutcases themselves, just extremely malcontent with the society we normals love very much—otherwise they would have seen to it that this toilet got flushed a long time ago, better believe it. Imagine how fast they’d boot Rush Limbaugh if ever HE taught a course at Harvard. This stuff is going on because they LOVE it! It’s malcontents like George Soros who are delighted to see this sickness doing the dirty work they dream of seeing succeed. Everything we revere they desperately want to see the last of. They tried to kill our society with Marxism but saw that just wasn’t going to cut it, so now they’ve trundled out Phase-II: post-modernism, deconstructivism, radical women’s lib, etc. The stuff is meaningless, in any sense other than as a weapon to bludgeon society to death. No normal person should waste any time on it: simply know that it’s out there, so you can reject it utterly whenever and wherever it rears its sickening head. The worst mistake is to spend any time or effort “analysing” it: caca only gets analyzed in the hospital pathology laboratory.
I see that my old law school
I see that my old law school prof Richard Delgado made the top ten.
My one published law review article was a group project on restricting scientific research on research into the link between race and IQ. I realize now that Delgado wanted to ban such research. I, however, wrote the “least restrictive alternative” section which argued that more research was the solution based on Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am certain that Delgado had never heard of this seminal philosopher/sociologist before I introduced him to Kuhn, but, hey, ignorance is not a reason not to play God and impose your views on everyone.
In re Mr. Bradley’s comment:
In re Mr. Bradley’s comment: The holier-than-thou feeling which comes of loudly denouncing the “racism” of others is so powerful for some—such an intensely pleasurable feeling for them—that it starts to act like a narcotic. Many of these leftists who don’t want research on the race-IQ nexus to proceed are concerned mainly, whether consciously or subconsciously, over the prospect of not being able to get more of their narcotic—of having to go cold turkey. Anyone who has ever dealt with an addict knows what a powerful motivation this is for them. They can become hysterical trying to head off the moment of truth when they must face the need to get off narcotics.