A Glass Menagerie
David Brooks lives with his gentlemen callers and a glass unicorn, a wounded child-adult living in a conservative world gone by. He is forever appealing to the ghost of Edmund Burke, an 18th century political commentator who left no,

straightforward legacy to any political party or to any ideological brand of thought, though plenty have tried to appropriate him,

who understandably remains mute to his appeals. (Like many, he opposed the excesses of the French Revolution, and his writing in support of rank, property and tradition – often taken out of context – fascinates the Right.)

Bobo himself, though, is like Tennessee Williams’ Laura in The Glass Menagerie. He collects one glass curio after another as substitutes for the reality of politics and governance. Bloggers are more like Laura’s brother Tom, who leaves behind his mother’s oppressive apartment for the real world, where unicorns are breakable objects, not dreams of a life unlived. We aspire to help make America’s aspirations real rather than dream about them. Mr. Brooks would substitute nightmares for dreams and make them real.

In his, The Empathy Issue, David Brooks stirs the faux controversy surrounding Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Like other GOP performance artists, he doesn’t analyze her fifteen years of work as a federal judge, but unlike them, he doesn’t make stuff up. His schtick is to attack her reputation rhetorically, as might a Southern gentleman of a type well known in the halls of Ivy and the halls of Congress.

Mr. Brooks does lapse into a moment of honesty when he refutes the Rightwing law caucus’ meme that appellate court judges have no emotion, that they interpret the law using only reason, not emotion or political preference.

The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood….that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges…put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.

Most people know this is untrue. In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances.

A nice twofer. Brooks-the-termite nibbles at the foundation of the Constitution, that we are a "nation of laws" (doing Cheney’s business for him), as a segue into the reality-based observation that judges are no more immune from their emotions than most of us.

Mr. Brooks repeats the technique, throwing truisms among a string of falsehoods: Emotion, not reason, is necessary to determine how much something is worth. Preconceived notions are the lens through which we and judges make decisions. Two comparably talented and informed judges can look at the same facts and come to different conclusions about what they mean. Decision-making (as opposed to connection-building) is unconscious and often the result of a Eureka moment in the shower.

Outside of Brooks World, the best judges devote enormous effort to make fair decisions. They painstakingly inform themselves about the law, the precedent from higher authority that binds them and the persuasive arguments of their peers and lower court judges. They acknowledge and wrestle with their own emotions, as they do with the arguments of opposing counsel.

Inside Brooks World, though, "reason is weak and emotion is strong, so good decision making comes from balancing emotions against each other." Argh.

Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.

A writer who wanted others to agree with him would have answered that question by looking at Ms. Sotomayor’s work. Answering the question is not Bobo’s goal. Asking it is, so that those who oppose her can answer it themselves without letting facts interfere. Bobo helps that along by continuing his theme of Southern chivalry, with a whiff of Burke and none too subtle echoes of Southern racism.

[T]he law is not only a bunch of statutes but a code of chivalry. The good judges seem to derive a profound emotional satisfaction from the faithful execution of time-tested precedents and traditions.

Brooks kicks his opponent when down – a move not in the chivalric code – by flipping from the universal to the particular when he describes the purportedly, "murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature" of Ms. Sotomayor’s (not all judges’) decision-making. That’s a ruthless academic put-down. Nothing gentlemanly about it.

Had Mr. Brooks read one or two Ms. Sotomayor’s detailed opinions or a blog comment by Dahlia Lithwick, Glenn Greenwald, or Daphne Eviatar, he wouldn’t have had to write this in the abstract:

Because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist….judges who decide cases narrowly, who emphasize the specific context of each case, who value gradual change, small steps and modest self-restraint.

He would have endorsed Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination because that is precisely how she crafts many of her opinions. But Bobo wants to leave readers with the tension of unanswered questions and the impression that he is a public intellectual in the image of "right-leaning thinkers", like Edmund Burke, who understands,

that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.

The silently acidic Clarence Thomas and the shouting cleric Antonin Scalia fit that description to a "T". John Roberts and Sam Alito, on the other hand, have manners. As with Bobo, they hide rather than inform their radical views.

When it comes to clinging to a faded past and hopes of inheriting Reagan’s mythical political fortune, a better analogy for Bobo’s work might be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Bobo, like Paul Newman’s Brick, is in muted love with his party’s romantic past. He is unable to live with its sordid present or accept the earthy ecstasy promised by his lovely wife. Unable to choose, Bobo drinks his own potion of fables.

Big Daddy is the republic on which we stand. Possessed of a fortune but with a cancer no one wants to tell him about, he jousts with his wife and children, who appeal to his vanity in hopes of becoming his sole heir. The whole, like Bobo’s GOP, oozes with rot and Southern gentility.

Since it’s Friday, that would make this is a better image to leave you with:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/