Interesting post of the day

By Michael Bérubé.

But then a non-imaginary interlocutor said a most interesting thing.... He pointed out that the right-wing culture war against pointy-headed intellectuals does not extend to the judiciary. On the contrary, he said, it’s as if they’re willing to run a cephalopod and a bag of hammers for the executive branch (I don’t think these were his exact words), but they actually recruit and train all their intellectual firepower for the courts (those were pretty much his exact words). And, of course, he’s right: Scalia, Alito, Roberts—these are all graduates from Pointyheaded Liberal Elite Law School, Evil Genius Division, and the glaring exception, Clarence Thomas, was a Palinesque conservative-affirmative-action fuck-you payback for the rejection of Elitist Evil Genius Robert Bork.

And the right-wing noise machine got the memo, too: witness the fact that everyone on the right, even down to bottom-feeding shriekers like Michelle Malkin, duly took up their torches and pitchforks when Bush nominated Harriet Miers. I was wrong, I realize now, to have called Palin Harriet Miers 2.0. Because Harriet Miers was ridden out of town on a rail, in a matter of days, by many of the same people who are now digging in, doubling down, and rooting hard for Palin against the mocking liberal elites. When it comes to the highest court in the land, these right-wing hacks don’t put up with no second- and third-stringers.

It's a striking fact, and it goes beyond the courts. After all, one can find Republican intellectuals in any number of advisory and civil service positions throughout the government, where they can operate in secrecy and advance the conservative cause largely unnoticed. But it's not all that surprising. The Republican party didn't dominate American politics for a generation because it was run by rubes. Rather, it dominated American politics for a generation because it has been run by people who realized that figureheads can--and sometimes should--be rubes as long as they have shrewd actors working on their behalf in the background.