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The Spectacle Blog
An entirely different tide of Crimson:
As Barack Obama puts together his administration, more than 20 Harvard Law School classmates dot the ranks of his transition team - solidifying the Crimson connection as his most enduring, yet least-known, personal network.
Eyeing the presidency as a freshman senator, Obama turned to his classmates first for their high-level contacts, and then to help raise campaign cash. Now, they’re putting their day jobs on the backburner to help their friend build a government.
So control of the White House goes from Yale Law (Clinton) to Harvard MBA (Bush) to Harvard Law (Obama). Oh, beware this ugly resurgence of populism David Brooks keeps warning us about!
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More Blog Posts by Robert Stacy McCain
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iamse7en| 12.5.08 @ 4:12PM
Are most lawyers democrat? If so, why?
Louis Case| 12.5.08 @ 8:16PM
The New Deal Lawyers by Peter Irons documents what the first wave of Ivy League socialists and fascists did to us. They didn't have the advantage of a Treasury Secretary with standardless and unreviewable discretion and a seemingly unlimited supply of money. God help us.
Bob| 12.6.08 @ 11:26AM
iame7en -- you inquired about the party affiliation of lawyers. I would guess that most lawyers today are Democrats. The reason for that is the takeover of the Republican party by so-cons which value belief over reason. How could your defend a person who did something morally offensive to you? Most lawyers must be willing to defend both sides of an issue and thus must value reason over belief. Besides, being so-con today means you are an anti-intellectual and devalue Ivy League education.
RSM - Brooks was right about populism, especially of the Huckabee/so-con variety. So what graduate degrees did Reagan and Bush have? None. McCain did not have a graduate degree and neither did Palin. So-con, anti-intellectual populism is alive and well in the Republican Party.
MRB| 12.6.08 @ 9:02PM
iame7en and Bob:
I am a lawyer, and I can tell you that indeed most lawyers are Democrats, though my firm leans slightly Republican. (This is one of the reasons I chose it, in fact.) Furthermore, the trial lawyer bar in particular gives millions of dollars each year to Democrat candidates and much, much less to Republicans. The American Bar Association and the American Trial Lawyers Association are both thoroughly liberal organizations.
No one reason accounts for this. Part of it is that liberalism is good for lawyers' personal bank accounts--the more control government exerts over society, individuals, and businesses, the more opportunities there are for lawyers to make money. For lawyers, more laws equal more money.
Perhaps more important, though, is the sorry state of college education in this country. Students enter law school without a firm foundation in history, economics, literature, logic, or any other field of knowledge that prepares the mind for a legal education. That leaves them susceptible to the drivel that the predominantly liberal faculty members dish out each day. In law school myself and the few other conservative students--the only ones who understood or cared about such "quaint" concepts as the U.S. Constitution or natural law--were the only students who truly understood most issues and could argue both sides. The liberal students, on the other hand, were intellectually unprepared to understand or argue all sides of an issue--or even to recognize that another viewpoint existed. This means that law schools today produce lawyers by the thousands who think they are able to think critically, but who in fact lacks the basics for true critical thinking and the ability to understand ideas about the law that differ from what their liberal professors teach them. You can easily see to what this leads to over time.
Incidentally, Bob's view of conservatism--and social conservatism in particular--is nothing more than a caricature. Bob, since you have expressed such admiration for the power of reason, I presume you consider yourself "open-minded." If that is the case, I suggest you consult the writings of Pope Benedict XVI, particularly his Regensburg speech, on the absolute link between faith and reason. From that starting point you should be able to see how social conservatism is in fact based entirely in reason. Reason forms the basis for all conservative positions.
Also, Bob, please be aware that most lawyers do not engage in criminal law. That was the implication of one of your sentences, at least as I read it.
Finally, while real education is extremely important--and social conservatives do value it--it is far, far from true to suggest that the Ivy League is the only place to receive a real education.
Bob| 12.7.08 @ 9:26AM
MRB -- I am familiar with the Pope's Regensburg speech. I studied religion when I was young and translated the original five books of Moses from the original Aramaic when I was 10.
We can get caught up in the definition of "reason". Reason is a logical construct tying facts together in a manner that seems convincing to others. But as we learn from St. Thomas Aquinas, reason is only as good as the underlying assumptions used to start the chain.
Reason, as used by the Pope, was used as an argument for a moral framework of society. I assume you've studied logic -- it is a closed loop argument and holds together because you accept the underlying assumptions. If you don't agree with the underlying assumption, reason causes this argument to fail
However, the reason I am discussing is secular reason that deals with secular, governmental policy decision. It is using pragmatism and facts and intelligence to come to good policy decisions. When we diagnose a disease, we do tests and then reason a diagnosis. When you inject religion into the situation, let's say Christian Science, you end up killing people. The Bush administration used a faith based logic to enter Iraq -- and they were wrong. The Bush administration used a faith based logic to hire people like Brownie and Monica Goodling and they were incompetent for their positions. The White House was filled more with Regent University graduates than any other college and it was the most incompetent administration in history. They were a concrete example of the use of faith over reason in decision making.
The real problem I have with so-cons as they exist in the Republican party is not their beliefs, but their total disregard for the legitimate beliefs of others and their intolerance for other points of view. I support faith based initiatives because they work, not because I believe in the specific faith. I support religious groups meeting in public areas and arguing their ideas in schools as long as it is an open discussion.
The real problem is not the theory, but the execution of the so-con agenda. It is intolerant, biased, closed minded, and in many cases, ineffective. Your statement concerning social conservatives valuing education is spurious. You show beliefs by what you do, not what you say. So-cons support people without high levels of education or those that did not do well in school. They have proven, de facto, that they do not value education.
Regarding criminal defense lawyers being the only ones that must take cases that belie their moral beliefs, this is not true. I've been in a number of corporations where staff lawyers and their respective law firm counterparts support a position they don't believe in whether it is in copyright infringement, monopolistic practices, claim adjudication, etc.
My basic premise is that in a society that supports freedom of religion, we should not favor one religious belief over another unless there exists a proven secular benefit. The so-cons, de facto, have dumbed down our culture thereby helping to make it coarser. It has no reason to be a major part of a political party in our country.
Ran Hay| 12.7.08 @ 9:48PM
RSM:
So what of Brooks' admonitions? He's the "conservative" only liberals read.
As for this Ivy League ilk... Since when does the intelligence of a small gaggle of very intelligent people trump the collective intelligence of millions, many of whom are equally intelligent? Clearly the Obamanauts, Bushies and Clintonistas have shown that they believe that they can make better decisions than the markets. Fools, they, and even greater fools, we, if we let them.
Ran Hay| 12.7.08 @ 10:02PM
"I was young and translated the original five books of Moses from the original Aramaic when I was 10."
To the child genius called "Bob"... The original Five Books Of Moses - the Pentateuch, if you will... was originally in Hebrew. Aramaic was a more recent development. There are a few words common to Aramaic in the Five Books, surely you would know them - but you would also know that Aramaic was NOT the language used. Hell, it's exactly like saying you'd translated the Iliad from the original Latin.
Comically enough, a great deal of what you go on to say has the same ring of truth to it. Ditties such as "The real problem I have with so-cons as they exist in the Republican party is not their beliefs, but their total disregard for the legitimate beliefs of others and their intolerance for other points of view."
Goodness! It may be your point of view that Aramaic was the original language of the Torah, but please don't hold it against me if I disregard it - and just about every other unfounded, silly concept you toss at us.
Thanks - it's been a rough day. I needed a good larf.
Bob| 12.8.08 @ 8:46AM
Actually, Ran, about 10 chapters of the Torah was written in Biblical Aramaic -- the rest was written in Hebrew. You are confusing biblical Aramaic with modern Aramaic. But then again, you are proving my point about so-cons being "anti-intellectual".
Here's a source written in English for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic
I'm glad you got a laugh at your own expense.
Don West| 12.10.08 @ 1:54PM
How is it that certain state issued permits are not valid in certain cities?(NYC) but city issued permits are valid throughout the state?(NY)
pigment Red | 4.4.10 @ 6:06AM
pigment Red
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Although Obama has run his campaign Organic Pigmentsalmost completely as a to the administration of one George Ink Pigments the parallels between their campaigns are apparent.