What Elitism?

Goldberg and company have already responded to the charge of elitism fairly strongly over at the Corner (and, I’m sure, elsewhere), but I felt this passage in Noam Schieber’s TNR piece suggesting East Coast conservatives are distrustful of Miers out of elitism was too ludicrous to ignore.

Conservatives who populate National Review's blog retreated from the credentialist critique of Miers once the angry e-mails began pouring in. They emphasized instead that Miers lacked a coherent conservative legal philosophy--that she'd "never written seriously on constitutional issues," as National Review's Jonah Goldberg wrote. But this is really just a politically correct form of the same argument. Pretty much the only places where students are encouraged to develop a coherent "legal philosophy" are the top 20 law schools. These philosophies then get refined in the kind of academic or professional writing that only a tiny fraction of lawyers ever do.

Schieber is absolutely right in saying that only a “tiny fraction” of lawyers ever get to develop a formal, public argument for a specific judicial philosophy. What he misses is that it’s entirely reasonable for conservatives to expect a Republican president to choose only from that select few. What Schieber is implicitly calling for with this statement is an egalitarian, representative court marked by handy tokenism. But this is the Supreme Court, and if a Democrat were in the White House, he’d be suggesting no such thing.

Earlier in the piece, Schieber tries to equate what he calls elitism with credentialism – the idea that conservatives simply want a list of uppity resume items that justify a nominee’s worth. But it’s not the absence of credentials that’s worrying about Miers, it’s the absence of publicly articulated opinion. There’s a massive difference between the two, but Schieber won’t recognize it.

Instead, he’s launching a lazy attack on conservatives who want to see Supreme Court nominees picked by demonstrated merit. If that’s elitism, then count me as an elitist.