The Next Supreme Court Justice Will Suck

I don’t know whom George “Not as Bad as Hitler” Bush will put up for the Supreme Court, but I am sure that she will not be fit for the job. Our country does not possess an aristocracy devoted to selfless public service from whom Justices might be selected. On the contrary, the next Justice will be selected from among the striving “meritocracy”, and she will necessarily be a person who is best suited to serving self interest and the interests of the political class to whom she is beholden.

In the first instance, the next Justice will be a lawyer with experience in a prestigious firm, experience as a highly visible prosecutor, experience as a teacher in a law school, or some combination of the foregoing. She will have had this experience because she toed the establishment line. She will have been ruthlessly ambitious, and she will believe in the depths of her soul that she deserves the rewards she has won by virtue of her having “merit”. This gives her the sense that she is fit to impose her views and her will on her less “meritorious” conspecifics. She will have been trained to “think like a lawyer”, ie to reduce every issue to a set of narrow categories and to strip them of all substance. In sum, she will be an utter tool.

She will have served as a judge on the high court of a state or on the federal appellate bench. She may have been an Attorney General or some other Cabinet officer. This will mean that she is probably comfortable financially but that she is not independently wealthy and cannot easily take a stand on conscience in the public interest. This also means that she is parasite dependent on the state for her livelihood.

She will be politically connected to the GOP. Enough said on this point.

The absence of a public-spirited aristocracy means that all positions of trust in this country are held by men of dubious character who lack the courage and independence to resign in protest over wrongdoing. The military is led by careerists who need their jobs and who will not resign over a matter of honor. Judges treasure their positions over principles, and bureaucrats at every level of government depend on their government salaries too much to permit them to act in the public interest.

It will take decades to cultivate an aristocracy, and the concept of the meritocracy will have to be rooted out first. The aristocracy needs independent means (I reckon that an individual estate of $20 mm in the city or $10 mm in rural areas would be the minimum) that it did not earn and that it does not pretend to merit. It also needs to be trained in the ideals of noblesse oblige and in good character. The most important positions of trust and honor should be reserved for the aristocracy, and they should be trained to regard these as sacred civic obligations. The Supreme Court would be a very different and much improved institution if the Justices were required to come from the aristocracy.