Culture Con
I will be writing a column for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s magazine Wisconsin Interest. They are calling it Culture Con. You can read the first one here.
Politics as Total War
A few years ago, a Department of Defense official called for a boycott of tony law firms that represented — on a pro bono basis — Guantanamo detainees. He was roundly — and I think justly — criticized.
But his view of politics as total war — something to be imported into nonpolitical walks of life — seems to be gaining currency. Earlier this year, One Wisconsin Now organized a phone campaign in which it urged its supporters to call and complain to a large local law firm about the pro bono work of one of its young associates. This young woman was apparently donating her time in support of Wisconsin’s marriage amendment. The objective was to use a law firm’s natural desire to avoid controversy and her economic vulnerability to shut her up and deny a party the legal representation of its choice.
Paul Soglin’s WMC Watch and full-court press for disclosure of donors to political conduits is concerned, at least in part, with a desire to place pressure on businesses that don’t behave politically in much the way that Epic Systems forced a contractor off WMC’s board.
Is there something wrong with this? Shouldn’t we all vote with our pocketbooks? Isn’t the personal political?
Epistemological Privilege and the Law
As the Sotomayor hearings proceed, I thought I would turn again to the issues raised by the judge’s oft-cited “wise Latina” speech and similar remarks suggesting that there may be a connection between judicial decision-making and a judge’s ethnicity and background.
One common approach is to wonder whether this is “racist.” Shortly after the nomination was announced, I did a segment with Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Republican Radio. She seemed perplexed that I refused to assume the “racism” position, playing a clip of Tom Tancredo making that charge as if it to tell me that I wasn’t a team player.
But I think it is unfair to say that she was making a claim for some form of racial superiority.
Another common approach is to say that she was simply suggesting that judges need to be aware of the biases that arise from their backgrounds so that they can check them, and that a panel consisting of persons with different backgrounds will be more likely to, collectively, identify and deal with these biases.
I think that Judge Sotomayor almost certainly believes this, and I agree that there is a great deal of truth in it, although I may be less likely to believe that gender or ethnicity implies common histories and assumptions.
The reason that the debate has not — and should not — end with the second approach is that it is — literally — not what she said, both in the La Raza article and on other occasions.