I have not taken the conservative split over the Miers nomination very seriously hitherto. While I think it does reveal some of the fault lines in the Republican party, it doesn't seem to me that there is any serious divergence of interests and opinions involved. I suspect that the rank and file religious right voter is inclined to support Miers. But this is as much due to their loyalty to George Bush as to Miers own identification as a born again Christian. I suspect that much the same is true of movement conservatives who support Miers. Conservative opponents of Miers are largely motivated by their desire to see a strong intellectual conservative put on the court. Thus the issue is largely one of strategy rather than principle. But arguments over strategy split the radical left many times, so there is no reason to be complacent.
The split has to be taken seriously now. George Will's column, to which my colleague Dr. Schaff refers, has drawn acrimonious response from conservative bloggers. Will does not attack Miers here. He attacks Miers's defenders.
Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers, it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders.
George Will is not happy. Nor is Powerline, my favorite blog, happy with Will. John Hinderaker:
Far be it from me to slight George Will's contributions to the conservative movement, but it's time to recognize, I think, that the torch has passed to a new generation. Tonight, somewhat ironically, it's Dafydd ab Hugh's Big Lizards that commits Will's latest polemic to the trash heap of history. (Somehow, a lot of these phrases are sounding familiar). It's ironic, in that Big Lizards is dedicated to extinct saurases, while in fact it's Dafydd's adversary who is perilously close to extinction. The topic of the debate is George Bush, Harriet Miers, and the Supreme Court.
Consider this bit from Big Lizards:
No longer can Will discriminate between one charge (sexism) and another (snobbery), or even between one man and another. Would collectivism be one of those new understandings of conservatism of which Will rises in defense? Alas, in George Will's case, this may not represent degeneracy: a man who calls himself a "Tory" can hardly claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan, or any other American conservative, can he? He rises and falls with the collectivist nature of Europeanism, where even parties on the right see people only as ordinals, never cardinals.
Any minute now someone from the Daily KOS is going to tell us that he feels our pain.
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