Ginni Thomas
All the talk in this election season about the tyranny of elites has got me thinking about Walter Miller’s 1960 post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic Canticle for Leibowitz. And no, it’s not because I think this is an apocalyptic election, despite all the heated rhetoric we’re hearing.
As commentators have pointed out, people who complain about elites often think their criticisms apply only to other people. For instance, Ginni Thomas, wife of the Supreme Court Justice and head of the Liberty Central fundraising organization, warns that “we are ruled by an elite that thinks it knows better than we know and tells us what to do” and that has “burrowed into the media, our churches, schools and publishing houses.” But as Newsweek and Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick asks, who is more elitist than members of the Supreme Court?
The court doesn’t embrace the grungy masses; it fears them. That’s the reason it just sealed its front doors. Everything Ginni Thomas is agitating for, and she is very clearly agitated, counsels against the lifetime tenure her husband has both earned and enjoyed. If Ginni Thomas is serious about opposing privilege and experience and institutional wisdom and elitism she must, in all fairness, oppose the court above all.
Likewise, when Charles Murray goes after elitists in a recent Washington Post article, Annie Appelbaum (not exactly a liberal) replies that his biggest mistake is saying “they” when he should be saying “we.” Murray is a Harvard-educated member of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Appelbaum notes,
He is right that there is rebellion afoot against the meritocracy — a group that, in a different political climate, he used to admire — but he is wrong to think that people like himself aren’t meant to be the targets.
You can choose to live in Virginia instead of Maryland. You can choose to watch NASCAR instead of the World Cup. You can even vote Republican. But when politicians use the words “Ivy League” as an insult, and when Glenn Beck mocks higher education in general, their targets are people exactly like Charles Murray. The language being used right now in American politics is not merely “anti-liberal-elite,” as Murray and others keep claiming. It’s “anti-elite,” and specifically “anti-educated-elite.” Period.
Canticle of Leibowitz describes a similar kind of lumping together. The world has been ravaged by nuclear holocaust and the survivors, angry at science, start attacking all knowledge and learning. In what becomes known as “the Simplification,” they kill anyone they find who can read.
I seem to remember the novel saying that they also kill anyone who is wearing glasses (it’s been decades since I’ve read it), but I may be conflating Canticle for Leibowitz with the actions of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. If so, the novel becomes disturbingly prescient. At any rate, the mobs in Miller’s book don’t distinguish between liberals and conservatives when they engage in slaughter.
Maybe the book helps explain some of the anger in the current electorate. If the right is attacking universities, science, newspapers, the court system, international institutions, and other achievements of the enlightenment, maybe it’s because the world seems out of control. Therefore anyone who tries to apply rational measures to the problem (starting with our very rational president) is seen as the problem.
Politicians, commentators and the like who think they can twist that frustration to their own ends had better be careful. There’s no guarantee that others won’t confuse them with their enemies. As Lithwick points out , in the rally at which Ginni Thomas spoke,
It’s not completely clear that the assembled crowd agrees to exempt the high court from its rather fierce anti-Washington elites sentiment, either. The two speakers before Thomas excoriated, respectively, the Supreme Court’s reading of the commerce clause in Gonzales v Raich (with Justice Scalia concurring) and “a Supreme Court that has nullified the Tenth Amendment.”
Lithwick adds sarcastically,
But perhaps when the Tea Party assails the current Supreme Court, they actually mean to exempt Justice Thomas. Or perhaps when Ginni Thomas warned George Stephanopoulos that a “big tidal wave is coming” what she meant was that it was a medium-sized tidal wave that would wipe out the House, the Senate, the executive branch and the eight other seats at the Supreme Court.
If you dance with the devil, can it come as a surprise when you find that someone else is leading the steps?
