WASHINGTON — Liberal opinion is now heavily engaged in
belaboring Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh for calling the
Prophet Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a
racist. The proximate cause for this charge is Judge Sotomayor’s
2001 statement to an audience at the University of California,
Berkeley, School of Law that “I would hope that a wise Latina
woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than
not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived
that life.”
Well, possibly the bigotry inhering in that line does not rise to
the level of being racist. So will the critics accept the
appellation supremacist? Based on the meaning of Judge
Sotomayor’s statement, supremacist certainly applies. Yet if
Judge Sotomayor disagrees with me I guess she is right. After all
I am a white male, and according to her she, “a wise Latina
woman,” will “more often than not reach a better conclusion” than
I. Now what kind of a society have we arrived at through Judge
Sotomayor’s reasoning? It is a society in which some groups are
superior to others, namely, wise Latinas are superior to the rest
of us. That is not what I call progress over intolerance,
bigotry, or, for that matter, stupidity.
Nonetheless, this is the mindset of Liberals who hold sway at the
nation’s law schools. Professor Barack Obama had the same point
of view when he taught at the University of
Chicago Law School, which he made clear back in the autumn of
2005 when as the junior senator from Illinois he voted against
the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court. As
Senator Obama saw it, Judge Roberts lacked the background to
judge with “empathy” on a range of issues from affirmative action
to abortion to something about the Commerce Clause — on that
something he was Obama-like inscrutable.
The consequence of Sotomayor’s and Obama’s bigoted mindset is
that they are by definition right and those who disagree with
them are wrong. This is classic ipse dixit reasoning,
which is to say: reasoning based solely on the assumed
superiority of one’s standing. Again, this is the reasoning of a
supremacist. It is intolerant, bigoted, and surprisingly stupid.
The position does not hold up to rational analysis. According to
Sotomayor and Obama, a person whose life experience has included
a select series of privations is better equipped to judge that
experience than persons who have not undergone those privations.
This novel way of viewing privation is right out of the 1960s
youth culture and the radical left. It is a flawed argument
generally recognized as “argument by assertion” or “argument from
authority.”
One could argue with equal cogency that a person who has suffered
these privations is unable to make wise judgments about
them. Arguably the deprived person has been traumatized by
privation. In fact, such claims were made by some social
scientists before the 1960s. They assumed that persons from
impoverished backgrounds lack a wider perspective on life. Thus
the deprived person could not judge bourgeois life clearly or
impartially. Only a “wise person” free of this experience of
privation would be capable of prudent judgment.
By Sotomayor’s and Obama’s reasoning, the best doctors for
treating cancer are doctors who have suffered cancer. The best
counselors for treating alcoholism are reformed alcoholics or
possibly practicing alcoholics. An even more illuminating
reductio ad absurdum of Sotomayor’s and Obama’s position
is this: the best counselor against suicide is a “wise person”
who had attempted suicide.
The problem with their position is that it assumes we are all
prisoners of our experience, except for Sotomayor and Obama who
have somehow transcended their experience. The rest of us cannot
think objectively. In fact, we cannot read the law or the
Constitution unimpeded by our backgrounds. Yet Sotomayor and
Obama are here to guide and to govern. At some point, perhaps, we
will get over this middle class idea of holding elections. Or
maybe Sotomayor and Obama will simply suspend them. They seem to
know what is best.
