309. Green shirt

The very preposterousness of representing something as fantastically complex as human society in two dimensions is the great appeal of the right-left metaphor: any reasonable representation would be too complicated to serve the purpose of reliably identifying one's friends and enemies.  So we use the unreasonable but practical Byzantine system of Greens and Blues instead.

Our minds are so accustomed to thinking in terms of the left-right metaphor that most of our political discussion is conducted at the intellectual level of laundry sorting.  But the sorting itself is fascinating, because of course ideas don't come in colors.  How do we decide which viewpoint belongs in which basket? 

Genteel anti-Semitism - its genteelness consisted of a kind of plausible deniability (here's a modern example) - was a hallmark of the house intellectuals of the upper classes during the first half of the twentieth century.  Now the intellectuals who go in for that  kind of thing generally regard themselves as left-leaning.  So which is it, right or left?

The Progressives, such as Brandeis, were, at best, indifferent to civil rights (see post 197), while concern for racial equality has been a defining liberal position since the 1950s.  Does that mean Brandeis and the Progressives were conservative?  Or that the Civil Rights movement wasn't progressive?

Or take a look at the Socialist Party's 1912 platform.  Your average Republican today would find little to quarrel with the Socialists' demand for "a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week" for factory hands, or "forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age."  Nor would "enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits" raise many conservative hackles.  So should we conclude the GOP has gone Socialist?  Or was Eugene Debs a Republican?

George Will's column today, which sees the story of the Edsel as a metaphor for liberalism (the similarity is that he doesn't like either one), referred to "the liberal project of expanding government in the name of protecting incompetent Americans from victimization".  If that's what liberalism is all about, then certainly the enthusiastic enforcement of the criminal law is about as liberal as you can get.  What purer example exists of  protecting Americans from victimization?

And, indeed, if you ask the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal what they think of throwing People Like Us in jail for the type of crimes whose commission depends upon an ability to speak with apparent knowingness about arcane financials, you can expect a thundering denunciation of overreaching prosecutors.   Rudy Giuliani, in his U.S. Attorney days, was a frequent target.

But, of course, that's not how most people see it.  Representing the interests of the injured victim is, by and large, liberal only in civil suits.  In criminal prosecutions, the liberal position is on the side of the victimizer.  That was the whole initial premise, for instance, of Talk Left: The Politics of Crime.  (It's since developed into a more general political blog.) 

The same laundry-sorting can be seen in a Tony Mauro article from earlier this summer:

The case of Bowles v. Russell did not generate headlines at any point in its journey to the Supreme Court. And when it was decided by the high court Thursday, no justice spoke in angry dissent.

But the low-profile case offers as good a glimpse as any into the sharp conservative-liberal divide emerging this term.

Convicted Ohio murderer Keith Bowles lost the case on Thursday by a 5-4 vote, because he was two days late in filing a federal habeas appeal back in 2004.

After habeas relief had been denied and 30 days passed, federal rules of appellate procedure allowed for a 14-day extension to file an appeal. But inexplicably, the judge in the case, Donald Nugent of the Northern District of Ohio, gave Bowles 17 days to file instead of 14. Bowles appealed on the 16th day, and his appeal was rejected as untimely.

Now, I admit to feeling a passing twinge of sympathy for Mr. Bowles (a person who, according to the appellate opinion I can't find for free on the web, was too scared to fight the people he was angry at, since they were armed, so he stomped a stranger to death instead).  If a lawyer, through ignorance of the law, injures one who relies on him, why should the consequences be visited on the injured party rather than on the one committing professional malpractice?  (Because the lawyer in question is a federal judge, silly.)  

But the really interesting question is: what's so liberal about declaring a deadline non-jurisdictonal?  Think of the most liberal politician you can imagine, say, Ohio's own Dennis Kucinich.  Did he monopolize the YouTube debate with a rant about jurisdictional deadlines?  

I can see only two ways in which the opinion for the four dissenting justices was "liberal": (1) it would have permitted exceptions to a general rule, or in other words would give judges a power to nullify the law on an ad hoc basis, in the interests of justice;  and (2) it would have been a victory for a convicted murderer.  But it's difficult to see any ideological content in # 1 except insofar as it would produce # 2. 

But what, once you get down to it, is so liberal about handing a victory to a convicted murderer?  A clue is offered by Elvis Costello's put-down of a television newscaster: "She takes all the red, yellow, orange and green / And she turns them into black and white."  The very preposterousness of the equation (assisting a murderer = liberal) is the attraction (but not, for you Elvis fans, the Attraction).