Justice Scalia and American Political Romanticism

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/scalia-women-discrimination-constitution_n_803813.html


Let me disagree with the characterization of Marcia Greenberger in regards to the comments of Justice Scalia as ‘shocking’. There is nothing ‘shocking’, prima facie, in the comments of Scalia regarding women, women’s rights etc., they are in fact totally predictable and Ms. Greenberger doesn’t use the opportunity to speak to the intelligence of her audience but panders to level of propaganda; the stilted language of the ‘press release’. Scalia is a political romantic and his ‘philosophy’ flows from the concept of unbridled male power and its care and maintenance. ‘Originalism’ then grows out of that romanticism as simply a reification of his naturally felt and expressed superiority. What counts here is not appealing to an utterly bankrupt press but to historically verifiable actualities. Conservatism is by its very nature about the privileging of male power as beyond the appeals of reason or even the changing nature of our political/ethical world as it evolves into the future: heedless of the political or moral will of a minority of ‘thinkers’ and ‘activists judges’ who resemble King John ordering the tides to cease: this being a definition of the utter futility of the sovereign male in all his guises.     

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About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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