Self-Extracting Stupidity
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KTK
Ramesh Ponnuru never ceases to amaze. He’s so dumb that you can tell he doesn’t know what he’s talking about even when you don’t know what he’s talking about. His writing is like some sort of auto-installing ZIP file that unpacks idiocy on your monitor as soon as you click on the link.
Today he’s responding to someone else’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent anti-desegregation decision. Not having read that article, and being familiar with the decision only from news reports, I would refrain from commenting on any intelligent person’s discussion of the matter. But that in no way constrains me from commenting on Ponnuru’s. It takes no knowledge of the subject (i.e., a level of knowledge no greater than Ponnuru’s own) to spot this nonsense:
Risa Goluboff writes [in Slate]:
Stevens and Breyer are right. . . . The plurality and concurring opinions undermine and misinterpret decades of efforts to undo the long American history of racial segregation, discrimination, and inequality.
Except that pretty much the rest of Goluboff’s article is devoted to showing that the interpretation of Brown given by Roberts and Thomas is entirely reasonable, Brown itself having been insufficiently egalitarian for the author’s taste. You can make either argument—Roberts and Thomas as betrayers of Brown, Brown as insufficient—but to make both at the same time would require skills that Goluboff evidently does not have, and that Slate’s editors are unwilling to demand before publishing an attack on the conservative justices.
Why would this possibly be true? Of course Goluboff could have contradicted herself, though I would wait for a reader of greater perspicacity than Ponnuru to tell me so before believing it. But Ponnuro comes close to saying that to simultaneously criticize the de facto overturning of Brown, and also to claim that the Brown decision “did not go far enough”, is impossible - or at least so tricky as to be reachable only by writers of some exalted level of skill.
Why? Isn’t it perfectly obvious that anyone who supports the continued application of Brown would also think that (a) Brown is still necessary and (b) it is wrong to overturn it at this time? The positions that Ponnuru declares no one could hold simultaneously are the obvious and necessary ones for anyone who takes the basic stance he attributes to Goluboff.
And is there perhaps something just a bit fishy about his claim that “Goluboff’s article is devoted to showing that the interpretation of Brown given by Roberts and Thomas is entirely reasonable” - especially in the face of his direct quote of her saying that they “undermine and misinterpret decades of” jurisprudence on racial equality? Taking it for granted that Goluboff is against racial segregation, would anyone of normal intelligence read that last-quoted sentence and then imagine that its author was likely to write an article “devoted to showing . . .” that those opinions were “entirely reasonable”?
[OK - I cheated here: I read the Goluboff article.] Of course Goluboff says nothing of the kind. Her claim is that Brown was argued on too-narrow grounds, as an attack on explicit de jure segregation and not on the effects of racial stigma and substantive inequality resulting from private and de facto segregation.* The result is that it is possible for conservatives to cynically “abstract” the Brown decision away from the actual facts of its own underlying cases - that is, to characterize it as being entirely about explicit and formal segregation alone and not about racial equality in any substantive sense. She does say that “the way [the Brown decision] was structured, and the way it has often been read since, lends credence to the conservatives’ modern interpretation”. But she also says:
The fact that the conservative justices can so easily transfer this abstract concept of harm to whites shows that their jurisprudence has nothing to do with actually remedying inequality. The equal protection clause is their supposed text, but inequality is not their real concern. . . .
[C]ertainly, readings of Brown as portending actual integration and not simply an end to state-mandated segregation are still possible. . . .
Justice Stevens is right to point out that none of his brethren in 1975 would have understood Brown and its progeny in the cramped way the court does today. . . .
The fact that Brown itself offers up a formalistic vision of racial harm does not preclude it from offering up other visions.
She says that “the conservatives’ modern distortion of Brown is embedded in the case itself” - from this Ponnuru concludes that she thinks it is the case, and not the distortion, that is wrong!
Can anyone read the above and conclude that she supports the Roberts decision? Could anyone conclude that she believes, or that anyone could believe, that decrying the obvious wrongness of the Roberts decision is somehow not compatible with hoping for more robust applications of Brown in the future? On logical grounds alone, when she says that decision is a “distortion” that “does not preclude [the Brown decision] from offering up other visions”, could anyone conclude that that compatibility was anything other than her central point?
Ramesh Ponnuru could, but he’s a jackass.
* I think she’s straining her argument a bit, here. One of the motivating themes of the Brown decision was that “separate but equal is not equal” - i.e., that what was wrong with de jure discrimination was precisely its effects, and not merely that it was government-mandated segregation. And the court case in Brown involved extensive sociological testimony of the effects of segregation on black children (most famously the “doll experiments” of Kenneth Clark).
