11/2/24

“The Power Broker” in perspective

November 2024
by

Myron Magnet
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Robert Moses biography.

Robert Moses was a titan—the Napoleon of city building—and Robert A. Caro’s classic biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and still sells forty thousand copies annually, is almost as titanic.1 In the three-quarter-million words that crowd the book’s 1,200 pages, Caro depicts in encyclopedic detail what Moses achieved in shaping Gotham and its environs in his forty-four years in office, and he brilliantly illuminates the political legerdemain needed to accomplish that. But with half a century’s perspective, Caro’s judgments look less sure-footed. Notwithstanding the book’s subtitle, New York did not fall, however badly it stumbled in the 1970s, when The Power Broker appeared, and later developments have advanced our understanding of what makes cities thrive. As for Moses himself, while time hasn’t shrunk his giant imprint on Gotham, it has made his faults, which Caro excoriates with the zeal of an inquisitor, seem merely human. Continue reading →

10/12/24

Page One, Autumn 1994

[Editor’s note: It was thirty years ago that I wrote this introductory column to the first issue of City Journal that I edited. As it seems remarkably pertinent three decades later, I thought I’d mark the anniversary by reposting it.]

An amazing coincidence, I thought, as I read Vincent Scully’s analysis of an obscure Renaissance painting in his absorbing critique of urban modernism on page 75. For years I’ve had a print of that picture hanging over my desk. Showing a walled Italian city bustling with cosmopolitan activity—from merchants and bankers doing business, to a lecturer addressing an audience, to construction workers building, to girls dancing in the square—it is a representation of the urban ideal, setting forth what makes cities special today no less than six-and-a-half centuries ago, when Ambrogio Lorenzetti first laid out his then-unfaded colors on the Siena city hall wall.

City Journal articles typically focus on urban problems, exploring their origins and their solutions. But it’s also important to make explicit that behind the criticism lies just such a passionately held positive ideal of what a city is all about. The ideal is simply this: cities are hothouses of humanity, cultivating human potential to its fullest development of excellence and variety.

That’s because cities, at their best, are arenas of opportunity and ambition and achievement. Their sophisticated economies allow individuals to fulfill their talents as anything from artists or attorneys to zoning consultants or zookeepers. The collaboration and competition that spring from large concentrations of people push skills to the greatest possible refinement, fostering the best singing, neurosurgery, or dealmaking of which mankind is capable. And because of the opportunities they generate, cities endlessly renew themselves by drawing in the talented, energetic young from everywhere else.

They draw in a revivifying stream of people and from the world’s far-off places, to which they are linked by an international web of trade, represented in Lorenzetti’s painting by the merchants coming and going with their pack animals. That connectedness makes cities temperamentally hospitable to newcomers, even foreigners, willing to let them put their energies and abilities to use.

Above all, cities are realms of freedom—freedom from the narrow constraints of rural and small-town life; freedom to invent and dramatize yourself, to choose your friends, to direct your life, to better yourself, to enjoy privacy and anonymity, to think new and dangerous thoughts—which is what makes cities engines of invention and progress. Cities offer freedom, too, from the merely utilitarian facts of life: because of their wealth, they allow people to create a world that embodies the highest aspirations of what human life can be, in art and culture, in splendid buildings, in public works, in the work of art that is the city itself.

Lorenzetti’s painting, which takes up a whole wall in Siena’s city hall, is titled The Effects of Good Government. On another wall is its companion, The Effects of Bad Government, in which justice is dethroned, violence and murder reign in the streets, people cower in their homes, buildings decay, nothing good flourishes. It’s an important message for those who inhabit city halls and other seats of authority. Cities are man-made constructs; and the character of the manmade order that prevails shapes the kind of life individuals can live there. People concentrated so closely together can produce discord and squalor no less than harmony and splendor.

That order-shaping government operates in many ways. It molds the character of citizens and their collective life through the administration of justice, as Clarence Thomas’s article (page 41) explains; through the maintenance of public order, as Heather Mac Donald shows (page 30); through the administration of institutions like the foster care system, discussed by Rita Kramer on page 63; through the way taxation fosters or blights business activity and job creation, as Rob Norton analyzes on page 10; even through the ways the reigning culture encourages people to think about their lives, as Kay Hymowitz outlines on page 19 or Theodore Dalrymple discusses on page 92, in the first of what will be a regular column in City Journal. Informing all these stories, and all that City Journal does, is a vision of urban life as it might be shaped, a life in which all citizens participate in the humane community that the Italian painter envisioned three centuries before New York was born.

12/28/23

The Obama Tragedy

Embracing “authentic” blackness, the president created an Era of Ill Feelings and damaged America.

Autumn 2016

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” declared Barack Obama in the 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech that made him famous. “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” Who, listening to the young, graceful African-American senator, whether sharing his politics or not, could not have felt uplifted by the thought that perhaps the half-century struggle for civil rights had finally succeeded? And when the same senator, four years later and still very young, won election as president, even those who despised his politics couldn’t suppress a thrill that Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a republic based on the proposition that all men are created equal had finally become reality with no asterisk, no reservation. Almost a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, with 620,000 young Americans dead in the war to make men free, the longed-for post-racial America seemed to have arrived.

Vain hope. Obama drove the races apart, reversing some of the progress that so many earnest civil rights supporters had won, some even at the cost of their lives. Instead of uniting the country, Obama divided it almost to the point of fracture, pitting group against group with a self-righteous certitude that he alone could see the right as God gives us to see the right, and that all who disagreed with him deserved withering scorn. Unlike the Era of Good Feelings that James Madison bequeathed to the country when he left the White House, Obama has already ushered in the Era of Ill Feelings, fanning every low, intolerant, and ignorant impulse in the American heart. Whether history will judge that his reversal of racial progress and the divisiveness he has inflamed make him the worst of our presidents we can’t yet know. But it is worth looking back to ask what made him so overbearing, so contemptuous of the spirit of our Constitution, and so dismissive of the idea of American exceptionalism that he pretended to embrace in 2004.

These questions are easier to answer with him than with most presidents, for, mystified about exactly who he was, he couldn’t stop talking about himself or his beliefs. Two thick books record his musings—an interesting autobiography, Dreams from My Father of 1995, and a 2006 policy tract, The Audacity of Hope, so numbingly dull that critics have doubted that both bestsellers flowed from the same pen. Perhaps more buyers wished to applaud the charismatic, meteorically rising black politician than to read him. Still, both books are deeply revealing, often despite themselves, and the picture you can piece out from them enlightens. Continue reading →

12/21/23

A stately setting

January 2024

A stately setting
by Myron Magnet

On America’s Collection: The Art & Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State by Virginia B. Hart.

Don’t mistake the sumptuously produced, lavishly illustrated America’s Collection: The Art & Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State for just one more coffee-table bagatelle.1 It’s an important reminder that architecture is as much about the interior as the exterior of buildings, that its role is to adorn and enhance the activity it houses as well as to present a gracious face to the public world. Chief among the landmarks of architectural history, after all, are Michelangelo’s muscular staircase hall in the Laurentian Library, for instance, or Robert Adam’s neoclassical rooms built into the Elizabethan Syon House, or the interiors of the great cathedrals in Christendom. Like those additions to the Laurentian and Syon, the forty-two splendid, classical State Department rooms are built within an earlier building, a bland, modern behemoth, to which these rooms stand as a corrective, even a mild reproach. We can and should build like this, these interiors seem to whisper.

Just such an impulse brought the rooms into being, as several of this book’s dozen engaging essays, under the direction of the State Department curator Virginia B. Hart, recount. When the Truman Building, the State Department’s limestone-clad headquarters, opened in 1961 in Washington’s Foggy Bottom district, Secretary of State Christian Herter’s wife, Mary, toured her husband’s new domain with dismay. Decorated in late-1950s motel style, writes the contributor Carolyn Vaughan, it had the charm and dignity of an airport—and the Queen of Greece was just about to arrive for a dinner there. Couldn’t something be done? Continue reading →

07/10/20

On Thomas Jefferson

He trusted to the advance of the Enlightenment to end
slavery
JULY 27, 2020, ISSUE

Nobody embodies the paradox at the heart of the American
founding more vividly than Thomas Jefferson, the slave
owner who penned the American creed of liberty in the
Declaration of Independence and who, with a slave as his
concubine, would “dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms,”
as Irish poet Tom Moore jeered during Jefferson’s second
presidential term. As young vandals torch our national heritage,
in an infectious delusion that America was conceived in slavery,
not in liberty, take a good look at our third president, warts and
all. You’ll find, despite his undeniable flaws, one of history’s
great men who helped build history’s greatest nation. He is
especially relevant now, when the qualities he placed at the
center of our culture are at once so beleaguered and so
essential. Continue reading →

06/22/20

Will the Real Justice Gorsuch Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Justice Gorsuch Please Stand Up?
Has a great judge been body-snatched?
Myron Magnet
June 21, 2020

The logic of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mid-June majority opinion for the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, outlawing employment discrimination against homosexuals and transgendered individuals, is so at odds with his previous jurisprudence and his character that the editors of the Wall Street Journal wonder if he’s been body-snatched by aliens. Or perhaps the noxious emanations and penumbras of Warren Court activism have seeped up from the Supreme Court’s crypt and addled what was once the most judicious of judges. Before hazarding a tentative diagnosis, though, let’s recall who the justice was before this seizure occurred. Continue reading →

04/11/20

Keep Coronavirus in Human Perspective

Death tolls don’t capture the scale of the suffering.
By
Myron Magnet
April 10, 2020

I have claustrophobia, a trait I share with George Washington. The former president was so afraid of being buried alive, he insisted on lying in state at Mount Vernon for three days before being entombed. A sailing man, I’ve pictured myself tripping overboard unseen and sinking after a fruitless struggle. I am not at all like Melville’s shipwrecked seamen, resolutely facing the inevitable by swimming down to their watery graves.
Nobody wants to die, but I sure don’t want to die of Wuhan coronavirus. I don’t want to drown as fluid builds up in my lungs. I don’t want the air sacs in my lungs to turn to stone, leaving them unable to inflate and me, therefore, unable to breathe.
Looking only at the numbers, weighing various national death rates against “normal” rates and calculating whether the cost of mitigation is worth the benefit, it’s possible to miss this simple human reality: Covid-19 is a horrible disease. That’s true for those who survive it as well as for those it kills. Continue reading →

03/16/20

About Those Self-Evident Truths. . . .

What are we without them?
Winter 2020

America’s unique gift to the world is the idea of a democratic republic, in which citizens live under laws that they themselves have made through their elected representatives. We are not ruled. Our 1787 Constitution, perfected by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, details the mechanism for such a republic, but it is inert machinery until animated by a culture of independence, a spirit of liberty, that brings it to life. George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, made this point repeatedly. No constitution, however wisely designed, he warned—prophetically, it now seems—can protect a people against tyranny or conquest if it weakens itself by unchecked “corruption of morals, profligacy of manners, and listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind.”

Manners, morals, and beliefs: you couldn’t find a more succinct definition of “culture” than this. It is our inherited reservoir of assumptions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, proper and improper—our largely unexamined ideas and habits, absorbed from our families and communities, that we so take for granted that they seem to come to us by instinct or intuition. They spring from the accumulated wisdom and experience of the human race, refined in America by the Western tradition and by our own exceptional history. This inherited cluster of beliefs and feelings, this moral imagination, forms the glue of society, the oil that smooths the friction of the social machinery, the rules of the road for self-government at the individual level, essential to a self-governing nation.

Washington, a quirky and unorthodox believer in a Providence that specially protected him, thought religion indispensable to the culture of liberty, if only for the utilitarian reason that people will do such improper things as tell lies in court if they don’t fear divine retribution. As the Revolutionary War loomed, the English philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, Washington’s contemporary, stressed the deep historical link between the colonists’ religion and the fact that the “fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.” Americans are mostly Protestants, he said in Parliament, and, especially in the northern colonies, Protestants from sects that broke away from the established Church of England. “All protestantism,” he noted, warning his fellow legislators not to push America into revolt, “is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the protestant religion.” Its various sects agree in “nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty,” a spirit “adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.”

Today, when only half those polled belong to a church or synagogue, nearly half don’t believe in God, a mere 35 percent consider themselves Protestants, and three-quarters think that religion is losing its influence in American life, where do the rest of us get our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad? And what has become of the spirit of liberty? Continue reading →

03/5/20

Mr. Sammler’s City

Saul Bellow’s prophetic 1970 novel captured New York’s unraveling and remains a cautionary tale.
Myron Magnet
Spring 2008

Fear was a New Yorker’s constant companion in the 1970s and ’80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown. Nearing our building entrances, we held our keys at the ready and looked over our shoulders, as police and street-smart lore advised; our hearts pounded as we tried to shove the heavy doors open and slam them shut before some mugger could push in behind us, standard mugging procedure. Only once was I too slow and lost my money. A neighbor, who worked at a midtown bank, lost his life.
So to read Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet when it came out in 1970 was like a jolt of electricity. Just when New York had begun to spin out of control—steadily worsening for over two decades until murders numbered over 2,200 a year, one every four hours—Bellow’s novel described the unraveling with brilliant precision and explained unflinchingly why it was happening. His account shocked readers: some thought it racist and reactionary; others feared it was true but too offensive for a decent person to say. In those days, I felt I should cover my copy with a plain brown wrapper on the subway to veil the obscenity of its political incorrectness.
The book was true, prophetically so. And now that we live in New York’s second golden age—the age of reborn neighborhoods in every borough, of safe streets bustling with tourists, of $40 million apartments, of filled-to-overflowing private schools and colleges, of urban glamour; the age when the New York Times runs stories that explain how once upon a time there was THE AGE OF THE MUGGER and that ask, IS NEW YORK LOSING ITS STREET SMARTS?—it’s important to recall that today’s peace and prosperity mustn’t be taken for granted. Hip young residents of the revived Lower East Side or Williamsburg need to know that it’s possible to kill a city, that the streets they walk daily were once no-go zones, that within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. That’s why it’s worth looking back at Mr. Sammler to understand why that decline occurred: we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Continue reading →

02/7/20

Drain the Swamp of Ugly Architecture

Drain the Swamp of Ugly Architecture
Trump plans a welcome executive order requiring federal buildings to be built in the classical style.
By Myron Magnet
Feb. 6, 2020

“Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” a new executive order planned by the Trump administration, would thrill lifelong amateur architects George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. These Founders—who designed Mount Vernon, Monticello and the Virginia State Capitol—wanted the new nation’s public buildings to embody its ideals of self-governance, rooted in Greek democracy and Roman republicanism. They would surely applaud President Trump’s proposed order to build new federal buildings in the classical style.

Architectural classicism is a living language, not an antiquarian straitjacket. Its grammar of columns and capitals, pediments and proportions allows a wide range of expression. Just look at the original genius with which Michelangelo marshaled that language in his era or Christopher Wren in his. It’s a language that constantly updated itself in America’s federal city, from the handsome 1790s White House to John Russell Pope’s sublime 1940s Jefferson Memorial and National Gallery of Art. In the language of classicism, buildings relate civilly to each other, forming harmonious cities—Venice or pre-World War II London—in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts, however beautiful some may be. A bad classical building may be awkward or uninspired; it is never hideous. And all is based on human proportions and human scale.

Not so for the modernism that the proposed executive order discourages. Though modernism is an odd word for a style that’s now almost a century old, it began with an explicit European rejection of American architecture and a thoroughly 20th-century impulse toward central planning and state control. Modernism brought housing projects so bare and standardized that no worker wanted to live in them.

Even when you look at a supposed masterpiece of that style—Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York, say—you see one identical office piled on top of another, with the same curtains and furniture arrangement, as if every inmate were an interchangeable cog in some vast machine that utterly dwarfs him. It is an architecture that belittles rather than exalts the individual, exactly the opposite sensation of the exhilaration you feel in the Capitol rotunda or Grand Central Terminal. Modernist buildings, the expression of a mechanical, anonymous vision of a social leviathan that individuals are born to serve, might as well be designed by machines. In this computer age, they largely are.

What’s more, they are ugly. The Pritzker Prize in architecture, like the Nobel Peace Prize, almost guarantees the honoree will be the Yasser Arafat of architecture, the very opposite of what the prize claims to honor. Consider Pritzker winner Thom Mayne’s contribution to America’s national patrimony. His Orwellian San Francisco Federal Building resembles a cyclops mated with a prison. The building is so hideously antisocial that, like Boston’s brutalist concrete City Hall, the homeless camp there permanently.

Of course the modernist establishment has already slammed the proposed executive order, which overturns the General Services Administration’s design excellence program, long a full-employment scheme for modernist architects. The debate now, says an arts critic in the Guardian, is between “those who trust architects and professionals to design whatever they think is best, and those who seek to control what they do.”

That’s precisely right. Most Americans don’t like the buildings that architecture’s mandarins have crammed down their throats. Ordinary people choose traditional values over the wisdom of self-proclaimed experts every time. In fact, that is Trumpism’s hallmark.

02/1/20

Clarence Thomas: the Movie

Clarence Thomas: the Movie
Don’t miss this new documentary.
Myron Magnet
January 31, 2020

From a kerosene-lit shanty in a Georgia swamp to the Supreme Court bench is almost as meteoric a rise as from a log cabin to the White House, and if you add in overcoming segregation in the days when the KKK marched openly down Savannah’s main street, it’s closer still. Michael Pack’s riveting documentary on Justice Clarence Thomas, Created Equal—opening in theaters this week and airing on PBS in May—movingly captures the uncompromising ethic that propelled the justice’s career past so many obstacles as it distills 30 hours of interviews with Thomas and his wife, Virginia, into what feels not only like the exemplary life story of an underappreciated hero but also like a laser-focused, two-hour account of our nation’s race relations over the last 70 years. Yes, we overcame, but at a cost—of which Justice Thomas paid more than his fair share.

The film is purely biographical—Thomas’s brilliant jurisprudence plays no role here—and the justice’s somberly eloquent, slightly melancholy recounting of his saga as he faces the camera directly, dark-suited, with starched white shirt and monochromatic necktie, closely follows the style of his bestselling memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. But as Thomas tells his story, Pack shows us haunting images, over a nostalgically evocative American musical score—bluegrass guitars and banjos, jazz, and Louis Armstrong longingly singing “Moon River” (with lyrics by Savannah-born Johnny Mercer, Thomas reminds us)—that bring it all even more vividly to life than the excellent memoir does. The film clips of the mazy creeks around Thomas’s birthplace, the coastal Georgia hamlet of Pin Point—founded by freed slaves just after the Civil War—sometimes seen from above, as in the iconic shot toward the end of The African Queen, and sometimes seen as we travel along them in one of the little “bateaux” that the oystermen and crab fishers of that lush and remote outpost on the very edge of America still use, bring home how “far removed in time and space” it was from modern, urban America, as Thomas puts it.

It was a completely different world—a tiny, poor, all black community of jumbled shacks around the cinderblock workshop where the women picked the crabs and shucked the oysters that the men caught and raked. The still photos Pack found from the 1940s show you a preindustrial world so vanished that it could just as easily be the nineteenth century as the twentieth. Descended from West Africans, Thomas and his neighbors spoke a dialect called Gullah or Geechee, incomprehensible to outsiders; but when Pack shows us a film clip of a woman singing that patois as she feeds her chickens, we grasp viscerally from the creole lilt how this corner of America was a link in Britain’s triangle trade, with ships bringing enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and southern colonies, carrying the sugar north for distillation into rum, and returning to Britain to sell it.

For Thomas and his playfellows, this was a Mark Twain world of improvised games in the woods and swamps, with no such thing as a store-bought toy—until the heartbreakingly tiny, jerrybuilt shack where he lived with his mother, older sister, and little brother burned down. He came home to “just ashes and twisted tin,” he says. “Everything that you ever knew in life is just there—I mean, it’s smoldering.” Continue reading →

01/17/20

What City Journal Wrought

An editor looks back

Autumn 2015

The “Lights Out Club” used to meet for monthly lunches in the early 1990s, my late friend Lorian Marlantes, then chief of Rockefeller Center, told me. Why the name? Because Marlantes’s fellow members—the CEOs of Consolidated Edison, a couple of big Gotham banks, and a few other firms whose core business chained them to New York—thought that soon one of them would be the man who’d turn the lights out forever on a city that was dying before their eyes, killing their companies along with it.

In those days, you didn’t need to be Nostradamus to make such a dire prediction. The evidence was everywhere—on the graffiti-scrawled buildings and mailboxes, the potholed streets, the squalor of the panhandlers, the dustbowl that had been Olmsted and Vaux’s sublime Central Park, and the pervasive stench of urine, thanks to the bums who were turning the capital of the twentieth century into a giant pissoir, with the carriage drive of Grand Central Station the urinal of the universe.

In 1983, the Mobil Oil Corporation, to show Mayor Edward Koch why it was contemplating leaving New York, videotaped the sordidness around its 42nd Street headquarters, near Grand Central. The camera caught the rotting trash, the pee-filled potholes, the degradation of the homeless hordes—some crazy and some shiftless—through which Mobil employees had to pick their way into the then-shabby, billboard-plastered station to catch trains home to their orderly suburbs, fragrant with new-mown grass. After shots of corporate headquarters located in similarly bucolic suburbs, the wordless video closed with the written question: “What do we tell our employees?”

Mobil’s answer, in 1987, was to move to Fairfax, Virginia. More than 100 of some 140 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Gotham in the 1950s asked the same question and reached the same conclusion, pulling out their tax dollars and leading their well-paid workers into greener pastures in those pre–Rudolph Giuliani decades. They were among the million New Yorkers, many of them the elderly rich and the well-educated young, who fled Gotham in the 1970s and 1980s.

The squalor was only one problem. Another was crime. Of course, much of the disorder—the open dope-dealing, the public drinking, the streetwalkers serving every almost-unthinkable taste, the three-card-monte cardsharpers and their pickpocket confederates preying on the crowds they drew, the window-rattling boombox radios—was itself against the law. But these minor crimes deepened as a coastal shelf into burglary, car theft, armed robbery, assault, rape, and murder—one killing every four hours every day of the annus horribilis 1990.

Those New Yorkers who could afford it tried to insulate themselves with doormen and limo services, as in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities; those who couldn’t, like the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s 1970 Mr. Sammler’s Planet, envied the guarded doors, the trustworthy drivers, the hushed private clubs—islands of civility in a sea of chaos—as they held on to the strap of the lurching, graffiti-fouled bus, watching the pickpocket ply his craft, or walked down their own dark streets, adrenaline rushing at the sound of every footfall.

Just as the crack of a jungle twig cocks every ear, tenses every muscle, and sends birds screaming indignantly into the sky, apprehension was as characteristic a New York feeling as was ambition in those days. If we didn’t quite live in “continuall feare, and danger of violent death,” as in Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, “where every man is Enemy to every man,” we were sufficiently on edge. And no wonder. One friend, robbed at gunpoint on Broadway of his wallet, which the thief searched for his address, was then marched to his apartment, forced to unlock it, and tied up, while the gunman coolly stuffed everything of value into my friend’s bedsheets and carted it off. For the sheer thrill, a gang of teen girls swarming up from Morningside Park stomped the girlfriend of a fellow graduate student unconscious and blood-drenched in front of the Columbia University president’s mansion one afternoon. A neighbor, pushed into his lobby as he unlocked his building’s unattended front door after a very long day’s work—the typical thief’s M.O. in that era—was not only robbed but also killed. Another friend, raped at knifepoint on a filthy hallway floor in a neighborhood where she had gone for a purpose she never mentioned, had her satisfied assailant ask her for another “date,” a proposal she declined. But in a way, on the street, in the subway, in the parks, we all felt continually violated and continually asked to go through it again. That people were leaving town all around us came as no surprise.

What to do? A Manhattan Institute seminar on Gotham school reform I attended in the late 1980s, as Koch’s 12-year mayoralty drew to a sadly sordid close, caught the temper of the times. Its chairmen were wily national teachers’ union chief Albert Shanker and New York Board of Education president Robert F. Wagner III, a long-valued friend. Maybe we could try X, a panelist suggested. No: union work rules forbade. How about Y? No: the state legislature . . . the budget. . . . And so on for two hours. The profoundly depressing expert consensus: the more you knew about New York, the more you knew that there was nothing nothing nothing we could do to fix a calamitous mess. After all, wasn’t this the “ungovernable city”? Continue reading →

01/6/20

The Last Victorian Sage

Gertrude Himmelfarb, 1922–2019
Myron Magnet
January 2, 2020

Gertrude Himmelfarb, our foremost historian of ideas and one of the nation’s greatest historians of any stamp, died Monday at 97. Though a Washingtonian for the last decades of her long and productive life, the Brooklyn-born Himmelfarb was among the last of a storied band of New York Jewish intellectuals—the “Family,” they called themselves—who joined scholarly erudition to wide-ranging social, political, cultural, and ethical concerns far transcending the merely academic. They wrote for an educated general audience eager for the acuity with which they brought the wisdom and experience of the past to bear on the problems of present-day life. Through much reflection and debate, they’d mostly thought their way through the Trotskyist political correctness that prevailed in their student days to arrive at a liberal Americanism that, in time, metamorphosed into their own brand of conservativism. Now, with wonks and pundits, pedants and ideologues, taking their places, and with the “educated general reader” going extinct, today’s intellectuals seem shallow and dull by contrast.

Acerbic in her impatience with foolishness, Himmelfarb particularly scorned the Marxoid view that people’s beliefs and ideals have no independent reality but are just reflections of the material conditions around them. She rejected social-policy theories that give short shrift to cultural life, ignoring what goes on in people’s minds and hearts as a mere reflection of the real reality—the economic reality that should be the focus of our attention. According to this viewpoint, what people think can’t possibly alter the large forces that shape their lives. What determines individual behavior is the environment, not the content of the mind and spirit of the individual—as in, for example, the belief that crime springs from a lack of opportunity. She wasn’t much more sympathetic to social-policy thinkers who consider individuals the authors of their own actions and fates only to the extent that they choose rationally among various economic incentives—a welfare check versus a minimum-wage job, say. To her, this was just another way of saying that individuals merely respond mechanically to the environment: they don’t shape it. Continue reading →

01/6/20

‘Hate Crime’ Is Only a Step Away From Thoughtcrime

Punishing people, even criminals, for ideas is inimical to the American tradition of free speech.
By
Myron Magnet
Jan. 1, 2020

Does it make sense that a person can burn an American flag with impunity but not a gay-pride flag? Earlier this month, a judge in Story County, Iowa, sentenced Adolfo Martinez to a preposterous 16 years in prison for swiping the rainbow flag from a nearby church and burning it in front of a strip club.
Mr. Martinez, 30, has a long criminal history, which partly explains the long sentence. He had two felony convictions, and Iowa law deems any three-time felon an “habitual offender,” subject to enhanced sentencing. But a jury convicted Mr. Martinez of three misdemeanors—third-degree arson, for which the maximum penalty is two years in prison, along with third-degree harassment and the reckless use of fire, each subject to a maximum one-year term.
Mr. Martinez complicated his own defense by telling a local TV station that he had torched the flag because he didn’t like gay people and had “burned down their pride, plain and simple.” In response, the judge increased the misdemeanor arson charge to a hate-crime charge—a felony, normally carrying a maximum of five years in prison. So what seemed on its face to be a minor infraction suddenly became Mr. Martinez’s strike three, inflating his five-year maximum to 15, plus an extra year for the reckless use of fire.
The absurdity of the sentence points up the larger absurdity of hate crimes as a class of criminal offense. Burning an American flag, the Supreme Court says, is free speech. The First Amendment allows you to register disapproval of the government in whatever expressive way you choose, though watch out for the arson laws. Calling the cops “pigs” or singing “F— da Police”? Also no problem, legally speaking. Unlike Canada, Europe and American colleges, the U.S. doesn’t have “hate speech” laws.
The idea that free speech means free speech is a jewel of American exceptionalism. It’s odious and moronic to deny the Holocaust, but it isn’t—and shouldn’t be—a crime. The New York Times didn’t clutch its pearls when Hillary Clinton dismissed Donald Trump’s supporters as a “deplorables” who are “irredeemable” and “not America.” Nor did the guardians of correct opinion blanch when Barack Obama disparaged a large number of Americans as troglodytes clinging to their guns and religion. Rep. Ilhan Omar is entirely at liberty to explain away support for Israel as being “all about the Benjamins, baby.” Robert De Niro is similarly free to give the finger to Mr. Trump and his supporters. All this is as American as apple pie, if less appetizing.
Designating an offense as a hate crime criminalizes not the action but the idea that supposedly impelled it. Here we are but a step away from the “thoughtcrime” George Orwell described in “1984.”
Properly, the law should ask only two questions about your state of mind. First, do you have the faculty of reason that allows you to distinguish right from wrong? Second, did you intend to do the crime you committed? Beyond that, as James Madison repeatedly insisted, you have freedom of conscience. You can believe whatever you want, however politically incorrect—especially since today’s political correctness may be deemed tyranny in retrospect. In a far-flung republic composed of various subgroups, multiple viewpoints and interests are bound to proliferate. Under such circumstances, toleration is required.
The New York area has experienced a rash of what Gov. Andrew Cuomo denounces as “hate crimes.” Swastikas have been scrawled in largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. Adolescent thugs have assaulted Hasidim on the streets. In mid-December three customers and a cop were murdered in an attack on a Jersey City, N.J., kosher market. On Saturday, a madman stabbed five people at the home of a rabbi in Monsey, N.Y., north of the city.
I abhor these offenses, but I don’t see what is gained by Mr. Cuomo’s apoplectic imprecations. These outrages don’t presage pogroms, and it seems a fair bet that the perpetrators don’t know what the Holocaust was. Did it matter to the victims whether their assailants attacked them to steal their money, express their hostility, or take advantage of their vulnerability? Surely the solution isn’t relabeling but rather energetic and activist policing of the kind that discouraged violent acts by ill-socialized adolescents and street-dwelling crazies in New York for 20 golden years. Proactive policing also largely rid the streets of graffiti, offensive symbols included.
Let cops vigorously enforce existing laws against assault, harassment, vandalism, arson and the like. If the harassment amounts to an organized campaign of repression rather than random acts of delinquents or lunatics, then it’s time to dust off the Reconstruction Era’s antiterrorism laws. No group, whether Klansmen or members of an antifa mob, should be allowed to threaten or brutalize people.
It’s a sad reflection on the failure of New York’s current political culture, with its recent soft-on-crime legislation and abhorrence of common-sense policing, that ordinary people must think hard about the less appealing alternative of pressing for more teeth in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, upholding citizens’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

11/8/19

The Court Moves Right

The Court Moves Right
But judges have a lot of unlearning to do.
Myron Magnet
Autumn 2019

Less than a decade ago, surveying the shambles that half a century’s judicial activism and judicial abdication had made of the Framers’ original Constitution, such insightful commentators as Philip Howard and Mark Levin feared that only a new constitutional convention could fix the mess. Not a full replay of the 1787 drama, but something almost as drastic—the amending convention that the Constitution’s Article V outlines. Its terms allow two-thirds of state legislatures to name a council empowered to frame a balanced-budget or income-tax-limit amendment, say, or—most important—to repeal unconstitutional laws, regulations, and Supreme Court decisions. Three-quarters of the legislatures would then need to ratify such measures.

Now, though, the advent of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh has reshaped the Supreme Court enough to stop such despondent talk. While the decisions announced at the end of the Court’s term in June, marking the first year with both new justices on the bench, don’t amount to a stampede toward the Right, they display a wholesome focus on what the Constitution and statutes actually say. The Nine are “redirecting the judge’s interpretive task back to its roots, away from open-ended policy appeals and speculation about legislative intentions and toward the traditional tools of interpretation that judges have employed for centuries to elucidate the law’s original public meaning,” Gorsuch explained in a June opinion. “Today, it is even said that we judges are, to one degree or another, ‘all textualists now.’ ” And that’s already a quiet revolution. Continue reading →

10/1/19

Imprimis

Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution
September 2019 • Volume 48, Number 9 • Myron Magnet
Myron Magnet
Author, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on September 17, 2019, at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day Celebration in Washington, D.C.

Clarence Thomas is our era’s most consequential jurist, as radical as he is brave. During his almost three decades on the bench, he has been laying out a blueprint for remaking Supreme Court jurisprudence. His template is the Constitution as the Framers wrote it during that hot summer in Philadelphia 232 years ago, when they aimed to design “good government from reflection and choice,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in the first Federalist, rather than settle for a regime formed, as are most in history, by “accident and force.” In Thomas’s view, what the Framers achieved remains as modern and up-to-date—as avant-garde, even—as it was in 1787.

What the Framers envisioned was a self-governing republic. Citizens would no longer be ruled. Under laws made by their elected representatives, they would be free to work out their own happiness in their own way, in their families and local communities. But since those elected representatives are born with the same selfish impulses as everyone else—the same all-too-human nature that makes government necessary in the first place—the Framers took care to limit their powers and to hedge them with checks and balances, to prevent the servants of the sovereign people from becoming their masters. The Framers strove to avoid at all costs what they called an “elective despotism,” understanding that elections alone don’t ensure liberty.

Did they achieve their goal perfectly, even with the first ten amendments that form the Bill of Rights? No—and they recognized that. It took the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—following a fearsome war—to end the evil of slavery that marred the Framers’ creation, but that they couldn’t abolish summarily if they wanted to get the document adopted. Thereafter, it took the Nineteenth Amendment to give women the vote, a measure that followed inexorably from the principles of the American Revolution.

During the ratification debates, one gloomy critic prophesied that if citizens ratified the Constitution, “the forms of republican government” would soon exist “in appearance only” in America, as had occurred in ancient Rome. American republicanism would indeed eventually decline, but the decline took a century to begin and unfolded with much less malice than it did at the end of the Roman Republic. Nor was it due to some defect in the Constitution, but rather to repeated undermining by the Supreme Court, the president, and the Congress.

The result today is a crisis of legitimacy, fueling the anger with which Americans now glare at one another. Half of us believe we live under the old Constitution, with its guarantee of liberty and its expectation of self-reliance. The other half believe in a “living constitution”—a regime that empowers the Supreme Court to sit as a permanent constitutional convention, issuing decrees that keep our government evolving with modernity’s changing conditions. The living constitution also permits countless supposedly expert administrative agencies, like the SEC and the EPA, to make rules like a legislature, administer them like an executive, and adjudicate and punish infractions of them like a judiciary.

To the Old Constitutionalists, this government of decrees issued by bureaucrats and judges is not democratic self-government but something more like tyranny—hard or soft, depending on whether or not you are caught in the unelected rulers’ clutches. To the Living Constitutionalists, on the other hand, government by agency experts and Ivy League-trained judges—making rules for a progressive society (to use their language) and guided by enlightened principles of social justice that favor the “disadvantaged” and other victim groups—constitutes real democracy. So today we have the Freedom Party versus the Fairness Party, with unelected bureaucrats and judges saying what fairness is.

This is the constitutional deformation that Justice Thomas, an Old Constitutionalist in capital letters, has striven to repair. If the Framers had wanted a constitution that evolved by judicial ruling, Thomas says, they could have stuck with the unwritten British constitution that governed the American colonists in just that way for 150 years before the Revolution. But Americans chose a written constitution, whose meaning, as the Framers and the state ratifying conventions understood it, does not change—and whose purpose remains, as the Preamble states, to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

In Thomas’s view, there is no nobler or more just purpose for any government. If the Framers failed to realize that ideal fully because of slavery, the Civil War amendments proved that their design was, in Thomas’s word, “perfectible.” Similarly, if later developments fell away from that ideal, it is still perfectible, and Thomas takes it as his job—his calling, he says—to perfect it. And that can mean that where earlier Supreme Court decisions have deviated from what the document and its amendments say, it is the duty of today’s justices to overrule them. Consequently, while the hallowed doctrine of stare decisis—the rule that judges are bound to respect precedent—certainly applies to the lower courts, Supreme Court justices owe fidelity to the Constitution alone, and if their predecessors have construed it erroneously, today’s justices must say so and overturn their decisions. Continue reading →

09/30/19

Misjudging Clarence Thomas

Misjudging Clarence Thomas
Corey Robin’s assessment of the Supreme Court justice is lost in left field.
Myron Magnet
September 29, 2019 Arts and CulturePolitics and law
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, by Corey Robin (Metropolitan Books, 320 pp., $27)

What deliciously ironic wit the New Yorker’s first art editor, Rea Irvin, deployed in his iconic drawing of Eustace Tilley, the Regency dandy quizzically inspecting a butterfly through a monocle on the magazine’s inaugural cover nearly a century ago. Ah yes, we Gotham cosmopolites view the rest of America as exotic insects worth a moment’s gaze as they hatch from the basket of deplorables and flit by for their 24 hours in the sun. But, Irvin hinted, what an affected fop is Eustace himself—as showy as the bright creature catching his glance but oh, how much more contrived in his top hat and impossibly high neckcloth. I can’t help wishing that Corey Robin, a Brooklyn College professor who has made a career of turning a supercilious monocle on conservatives and explaining their curious, “reactionary” ideas to his fellow enlightened “progressives,” had shown a scintilla of Irvin’s wry self-knowledge in his new book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, an excerpt of which the New Yorker coincidentally has just published. But since Robin’s assessment of the Supreme Court justice lacks a single self-questioning moment, let’s look back at him through his monocle and take our own measure of the author before we consider his account of our era’s greatest jurist.

How fashions have changed! Despite a modish dash of race, class, and gender, today’s New Yorker of refined sensibility, if Robin is a representative specimen, presents himself in his book as a conventional socialist, an admirer of the French rather than the American Revolution, and still mooning with nostalgia for that imaginary 1960s “revolution” that Bernie Sanders has dreamt of since his long-ago youth. In Robin’s vision, politics centers on the “power the state will have to involve itself in the affairs of the citizens,” making “rules for a more just and humane economy.” It is a realm of “democratic transformation, where men and women act deliberatively and collectively to alter their estate,” led by the “heroic action of an elite few,” masters of “the arts of persuasion, the mobilization and transformation of popular belief”—though Robin’s evocation of the Robespierres and Lenins of the world is bound to make one wonder just how democratic his vision of the popular will really is. What were the editors of the publication for which he writes a column thinking when they called it Jacobin, after a political elite that wrought its social transformation by removing the heads of those of the wrong class or opinion?

For Robin, capitalism is a system of “overwhelming, anti-democratic constraint” that takes “the great questions of society—justice, equality, freedom, distribution—off the table of public deliberation,” shielding them from “the conscious and collective interference of citizens acting through their government.” In this collectivist vein, he casts a cold eye on Madison’s classic formulation of American constitutionalism in Federalist 10. The Constitution protects life, liberty, and property, Madison writes, and since individual citizens have a boundless variety of talents, ambitions, and energies, the liberty the Constitution safeguards will result in different and unequal outcomes, including economic inequality. The danger in the democratic republic that the Constitution frames, Madison wrote, is that the unpropertied majority could use their voting numbers to expropriate the wealth of the rich few, trampling the Constitution’s protection of property. Such an expropriation is what Madison meant by the tyranny of the majority, and a key goal of the Constitution’s checks and balances is to forestall just that. When Robin holds up Justice Thomas’s citation of Madison’s argument as a mere ploy “to moralize moneymaking, to lend the market a legitimacy it had been denied by New Deal liberalism, to shield money and the market from political critique,” he seems to be looking at the Constitution through the wrong end of a telescope, seeing FDR and the New Deal’s tyranny of the majority, rather than James Madison and the protection of individual liberty, as the nation’s real Founding Father. Of the individual citizen whose liberty the Constitution is meant to shield, we hear nary a word until a third of the way through the book, and then only once or twice thereafter. Everyone is simply an atom dissolved in the mass of race, class, or gender.

The lens through which Robin views Thomas is even more distorting—not surprising, given that he “reject[s] virtually all of Thomas’s views” and moreover believes that the justice, during his confirmation hearings, “lied to the Judiciary Committee when he stated that he never sexually harassed Anita Hill,” an allegation that’s now the stock, and thus increasingly incredible, gambit for opponents of conservative judicial nominees. In the justice’s opinions, what Robin sees, as anyone who spends even an hour or two reading them must see, is Thomas’s striking concern with race, a subject that he raises repeatedly, even in cases seemingly far from the question. Upon this observation, Robin erects a wildly far-fetched account of the justice’s worldview and jurisprudence, one that imperiously sweeps away Thomas’s own careful exposition of his intellectual journey in his speeches and memoir as if he must be incapable of understanding his own mind and heart. But of course, this concern springs not just from Thomas’s personal history but also from the belief, central to his jurisprudence, that it’s precisely on race matters that the Court has made so many fateful wrong turns that need correction. Continue reading →

09/11/19

Clarence Thomas, the Repairer of Our Constitution

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019|
Justice Clarence Thomas, Myron Magnet

Clarence Thomas, the Repairer of Our Constitution
by RALPH ROSSUM|

During the 28 years that Clarence Thomas has served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, he has written approximately 560 majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions. Myron Magnet has undertaken an insightful analysis of Thomas’s major opinions and his many speeches and addresses. The historian and editor-at-large of City Journal convincingly demonstrates that in those opinions and speeches, Thomas has articulated a clear and consistent jurisprudence of constitutional restoration that seeks to retrieve the original meaning of the Constitution—what the author calls “the lost Constitution.”

Pursuing an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, Thomas has been unswayed by the claims of precedent—by the gradual build-up of interpretations that, over time, can obscure the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question and encourage activist justices to reach results-oriented and consequentialist decisions. As with too many layers of paint on a delicately carved piece of furniture, precedent based on precedent—focusing on what the Court has, in past cases, said the Constitution means as opposed to focusing on what the 1787 document actually means—hides the constitutional nuance and detail that Thomas would restore.

He is unquestionably the justice who is most willing to reject this build-up, this excrescence, and to call on his colleagues to join him in scraping away past precedent and getting back to bare wood: to what the Constitution originally meant. Just how willing Thomas is to toss precedent aside is apparent in Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel (1998), in which he indicated that the 200-year-old precedent of Calder v. Bull (1798) incorrectly interpreted the ex post facto clauses of Article I, Sections 9 and 10 to apply only to criminal matters and not civil matters.

His Grandfather’s Son

Magnet describes himself as “not a constitutional law professor but a writer.” And a fine writer he is! Moreover, his knowledge of the political thought of the Founding generation and his clear grasp of case law rival that of the best constitutional law professors. He has written “a life-and-works book in which life and works mutually illuminate each other to a greater than usual degree.” Thus he offers a thorough biographical sketch of his subject, one that concisely summarizes Thomas’s 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son.

The biographical chapter will prompt many to want to read the memoir in its entirety (or listen to the audio book that Thomas himself narrates). In it Magnet brings out how the justice’s hardscrabble early life in Pinpoint, Georgia; his upbringing by his stern but loving grandfather in segregated Savannah, Georgia; his seminary, Holy Cross, and Yale Law experiences; his public service in the Missouri Attorney General’s office and federal agencies (the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission); and, his bruising Senate confirmation, all contributed to his views once on the Court, on such matters as equality and race, affirmative action, property rights, the right to keep and bear arms, and freedom of speech and the press.

The book then turns to how the Constitution came to be “lost.” Magnet calls this chapter “Who Killed the Constitution?” but here he overstates the matter. For he will later describe the Constitution as not dead but “vandali[zed],” and he has no doubt that “it is vandalism” that Thomas and other originalist justices following his lead can repair.

For Magnet, the original Constitution established a “small government of limited and enumerated powers” that has been lost to us for “nearly a century” because of 1) the post-Civil War Supreme Court’s “subversion” of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, 2) the late-New Deal Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause jurisprudence and its acceptance of the administrative state with independent agencies “acting as a fourth branch of government,” and 3) the Warren Court’s embrace of the doctrine of the “living constitution,” making it, in effect, “a permanent constitutional convention, continually making and remaking the law, to adapt, in a kind of Darwinian evolution to changing circumstances.”

Originalism in Action

Next comes “Originalism in Action,” and with that, we enter the “works” part of the “life-and-works” structure of Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution. Here we read of Thomas’ major opinions (mostly concurrences and dissents) and get an idea of what he has done to save what was lost and repair what has been vandalized. With admirable concision and clarity, this 47-page chapter keeps the justice’s arguments front and center.

Magnet addresses, at considerable length, Thomas’ attempt to overturn the post-Civil War Court’s evisceration of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), a five-member majority incorporated the Second Amendment, which secures an individual right to keep and bear arms, to apply to the states.

In a rather mechanistic application of substantive due process, Justice Samuel Alito held for four justices that the right to keep and bear arms was a liberty interest protected from state interference by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thomas supplied the fifth vote, but as a son of the segregated American South, he relied instead on the Privileges or Immunities Clause, arguing that the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment was a privilege and immunity of citizens of the United States that no state can abridge.

The majority in Slaughter-House had argued to the contrary; it claimed that the “Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States” were few in number and limited to such matters as free access to the nation’s seaports, protection on the high seas, and use of the navigable waters of the United States. Most assuredly, they did not include those rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights.

Slaughter-House led inexorably to United States v. Cruikshank (1876), in which the Court failed to vindicate the rights of the freedmen of the state of Louisiana.

On Easter Sunday 1873, approximately 150 black Republicans were killed in Colfax, Louisiana, for exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble” in what Eric Foner has called “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction Era.” When the state failed to prosecute the perpetrators, federal authorities indicted their leaders for violating the 1870 Enforcement Act making it a crime for individuals to interfere with U.S. citizens exercising their privileges and immunities under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Cruikshank, however, a unanimous Court, relying on Slaughter-House, denied that First Amendment rights were privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States and concluded that the Enforcement Act could not be used to prosecute those responsible for what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre. If First Amendment rights were not privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, neither was the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment. Without federal enforcement of the freedmen’s right to keep and bear arms, Thomas observed, the Ku Klux Klan was able to “subjugate these newly freed slaves and their descendants through a wave of private violence designed to drive blacks from the voting booth and force them into peonage, an effective return to slavery.”

For Justice Thomas, Cruikshank was “not a precedent entitled to any respect,” and neither was Slaughter-House.

Magnet calls Thomas’s concurrence in McDonald his “magnum opus to date,” a “textbook demonstration of his method of judging. Here, with characteristic skepticism toward stare decisis, he utterly repudiates the Supreme Court’s most tragically wrong and history-changing decisions of all that strangled Reconstruction in its cradle and licensed the generations-long grip of Jim Crow on black Southerners.”

It should be noted that McDonald was Thomas’s first opportunity after his elevation to the Supreme Court to vote on the incorporation of a Bill of Rights provision to apply to the states. He had a second occasion earlier this year, when he voted in Timbs v. Indiana to incorporate the excessive fines provision of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment to apply to the states. Even though the issue had nothing to do with race or the right to keep and bear arms, Thomas again wrote separately to indicate that the provision should be incorporated not because of substantive due process but because the protection against excessive fines is a privilege and immunity of citizens of the United States. (The case goes unmentioned by Magnet because his book was already in production when it was decided.)

Magnet also takes up how Thomas has gone to work repairing the constitutional vandalism inflicted, this time, by the late-New Deal Supreme Court in its Commerce Clause jurisprudence. Thomas, he argues, has consistently sought to overturn the Court’s longstanding “substantial effect on commerce” test, for two reasons.

First, as Thomas declared in his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez (1995), the test renders “wholly superfluous” many of “Congress’ other enumerated powers under Article I, Section 8.” As he pointed out, the powers to tax and borrow, coin money, establish post offices and post roads, grant copyrights and patents, enact bankruptcy laws, declare war, and raise and support an army and navy—all have a substantial effect on commerce and are therefore rendered superfluous. In his mind, any interpretation of the Commerce Clause that does so “cannot be correct.”

Second, Thomas argues that the “substantial effects” test strikes a serious blow at federalism by giving Congress a police power over all aspects of American life. Since it effectively converts the federal government from one of delegated powers to one of reserved powers, it makes the rise of the administrative state even more pernicious and threatening to liberty. Congress delegates to independent agencies the power to enact, enforce, and adjudicate rules (itself a major violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers) on matters only reachable by the federal government because of the “substantial effects” test.

Thomas has sought to overturn Court precedents that require courts to defer to an executive branch agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous language in a statute it is charged with executing, and even to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous regulations that it has itself promulgated.

Magnet carefully takes the reader through Thomas’s concurring opinions in two relevant cases from 2015: Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association and Michigan v. EPA. He quotes from Thomas in Michigan: Deference forces judges “to abandon what they believe is the ‘best reading of an ambiguous statute’ in favor of an agency’s construction. It thus wrests from Courts the ultimate interpretive authority to ‘say what the law is.’”

Roberts Challenges His Colleagues

Finally, Magnet takes up what Thomas has done to challenge the doctrine of the living Constitution. Examples abound. One is Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s contention in Grutter v. Bolinger (2003) that diversity is a compelling state interest for the University of Michigan Law School to accept students on the basis of race—but that, 25 years hence, it will not be. Thomas dissented, declaring that “the Law School’s current use of race violates the Equal Protection Clause” and insisting “that the Constitution means the same thing as it will in 300 months.”

Then there was Justice John Paul Stevens’ opinion in Kelo v. New London (2005), which had the effect of reading “public use” out of the Takings Clause, prompting Thomas to declare: “Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not. I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution.”

Still another example is Chief Justice John Roberts’ claim in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that the Court-invented notion (from a concurring opinion by Justice Harlan in the 1968 case of Katz v. United States) of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” required the FBI to obtain a search warrant before it obtained cell-tower location information from cell phone companies’ business records. As Thomas pointed out, the Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ right to be secure in their “persons, homes, properties, and effects,” which means that individuals do not “have Fourth Amendment rights in someone else’s property.” Additionally, he noted, the “Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional ‘right to privacy.’”

Other instances mentioned by Magnet of Thomas’s rejection of the “living Constitution” include the Court’s abortion jurisprudence and its early campaign-finance reform decisions. His summation: “These opinions, Thomas’s best, add up to a sweeping critique of what the Court, sitting as a permanent constitutional convention and legislating from the bench with ample audacity, over seven decades, has wrought.”

The book’s concluding chapter is somewhat of a disappointment. It recapitulates neither Thomas’s life nor his works, offering instead a summary of Alexis de Tocqueville’s concern in Democracy of America about what we call today the administrative state. While Thomas would no doubt agree with the great French thinker, Magnet provides no supporting quotations from him. Then, too, the concluding comparison of the individual responsibility themes of My Grandfather’s Son to the victimology themes of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope does not add much to what is, over all, a splendid book about Clarence Thomas, an inspiring man and inspiring jurist.

Ralph Rossum
Ralph Rossum is the Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy & American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Antonin Scalia’s Jurisprudence: Text and Tradition (University Press of Kansas, 2006).

08/25/19

Life, liberty and Justice Thomas

by Michael Goodwin, New York Post, August 25, 2019

There is no shortage of smart books about the rise of the administrative state. But it’s hard to imagine a more creative approach than juxtaposing this disturbing development against the life and judicial opinions of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In “Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution,” author Myron Magnet weaves together two distinct worlds. One is Thomas’ coming of age in segregated Georgia and the hard-knock lessons he learned from his grandfather.

We also see Thomas’ brief descent into youthful rage and his evolving embrace of the patriotic liberty enshrined in America’s founding documents.

The other world is the vast expansion of the liberty-crushing federal agencies that effectively make laws without the bother of legislation and enforce them without the bother of federal courts. The progressive visions of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR claim center stage, aided by a Congress that even now cedes too much power to unaccountable bureaucrats.

These two worlds collide when Thomas joins the court. In an efficient 168 hardcover pages, Magnet, a friend, demonstrates how Thomas, through his opinions, speeches and writings, wages war against this unholy power grab with the aim of restoring the Founders’ idea of limited government.

My first impression was that the book was too ambitious, but Magnet is in complete command of his material and has produced a very readable gem.

The feat is all the more remarkable because he did not interview Thomas. Instead, Magnet uses available biographical material to show how Thomas arrived at his understanding of the Constitution, one shaped by the unique abuses inflicted on African-Americans by excessive government power.

With Thomas now one of five conservative justices on the court, there is a chance to limit the bureaucrats’ reach. Whatever the outcome, this book is a brilliant road map

08/25/19

The Education of Clarence Thomas

by Peter Wood

Clarence Thomas graduated cum laude from the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts in 1971 and received a J.D. from Yale University in 1974. His memoir, My Grandfather’s Son (2007), testifies to a much deeper educational journey—one that began under the determined watch of his maternal grandfather in Jim Crow Savannah and that culminated in his ordeal during the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In between came his appointments as head of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

What he learned in those positions was significant, but not transformational. The transformational moment, we learn in Myron Magnet’s new book, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution, came in 1980, “after he read through [Thomas] Sowell’s works, registered as a Republican, and voted for Ronald Reagan.” He was drawn by Reagan’s “promise to end racial social engineering.” Thomas had had a bellyful of that at Yale and had concluded that “blacks would be better off if they were left alone” instead of being conscripted into the utopian schemes of liberal politicians.

Needless to say, this wasn’t an idea he picked up from his teachers at Holy Cross or Yale, though it did owe something to his grandfather. Moreover, it prepared him for the opportunity he had at the EEOC when “he hired as special assistants Ken Masugi and John Marini, students of political philosopher Harry Jaffa.” Masugi and Marini introduced Thomas to texts that deepened his knowledge of the American founding.

Magnet’s book devotes a chapter to “The Making of a Justice,” which rightly reaches its climax with the attack led by Senator Joe Biden that riveted the nation during the October 1991 confirmation hearings. It was, of course, a trial by ordeal. How much vitriol and character assassination can a man stand? What had happened to the civility and decorum of the world’s greatest deliberative body?

Part of what Thomas took from the Anita Hill accusation-fest was a new determination to uphold the real Constitution of the republic, rather than the patchwork of extra-Constitutional shortcuts, “emanations,” inventions, and betrayals that progressives had cobbled together over the years. This haystack of judicial law-making is ferociously defended, and not just by the progressives who built it. Americans have become accustomed to rule by a high Court of unelected judges who can have what amounts to the final say on any issue they choose.

Thomas reached his seat on that Court with a disposition to dispute what most regarded as “settled law”—settled in the sense that the Court had spoken in cases that had become “binding precedents.” How binding a precedent might actually be, however, was always an open question. The Supreme Court now and then overturned previous decisions, though it usually tried to explain this by citing still other precedents.

Asignificant stretch of Magnet’s short book is a chapter—“Who Killed the Constitution?”—that provides deep background on how the U.S. Supreme Court, step by step, shifted from interpreting the Constitution to what we laymen might call making stuff up. No doubt it is more complicated than that. Making stuff up usually involves a lot of dignified chin pulling and circumnavigation of common sense. And making stuff up isn’t some newly discovered human faculty that emerged on Woodrow Wilson’s birthday or when Justice Owen Roberts weighed FDR’s Court-packing plan and decided he liked the extra-Constitutional New Deal just fine. Making stuff up is what powerful, self-interested people always do when they can. Absent a strict division of legislative, executive, and judicial powers and a system of checks and balances, rule by fiat is inevitable.

Magnet takes us back to the post-Civil War era during which the Supreme Court eviscerated the Fourteenth Amendment in its Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and Cruikshank decision (1876). The Slaughter-House Cases stripped Southern blacks of most of the civil rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. It did so by “interpreting” their rights as citizens to be only their rights under federal law, and excluding their rights under state law. The individuals who brought the case lived in New Orleans, which allowed Louisiana to return its black citizens to a position of peonage. In the Cruikshank case the Supreme Court allowed the perpetrators of a racial mass murder (the Colfax Massacre) to walk away scot free because the Court interpreted the Bill of Rights as only guaranteeing that the U.S. Congress wouldn’t abridge those rights. But if Louisiana wished to abridge them, so be it.

Step by step, the Supreme Court created the tools that allowed the South to unwind the Constitutional protections created by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, thus bringing Reconstruction to an end. Magnet doesn’t allow indignation to get in the way of his building out the story of the Court’s transgressions. His prose is mercifully free of the muse of crankdom that dooms so many attempts to explain the errant ways of the Court from the New Deal through the Warren years. A cool head makes this chapter a perfect set-up to explain Thomas’s unusual jurisprudence.

How unusual is underscored by the efforts of the liberal media to paint Thomas as “wacky”—that’s the word Nina Totenberg on NPR used in her report on Thomas entering his twenty-ninth term in fall 2019. She is echoing Yale professor Akhil Reed Amar. A professor of political science at Brooklyn College, Corey Robin, who specializes in explaining to the left what he thinks conservatives are all about, depicts Thomas in his forthcoming The Enigma of Clarence Thomas as a “black nationalist.” University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Eppsdepicts Thomas as a “megalomaniac.” Epps tells Totenberg, “Thomas alone knows the original meaning of these provisions and even Madison who wrote them can be disregarded. Now that takes a level of confidence or megalomania that I find really breathtaking.”

Such caricatures float on Thomas’s unflinching willingness to dissent from both the jurisprudence of let-sleeping-dogs-lie on the “rights” the court has invented in the past variety and also with that of the let’s-venture-where-no-law-has gone-before variety. As for the latter, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his gay-marriage opinion (Obergefell, 2015) that the Constitution is “a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning” [emphasis added], he opened the door to “we-the-Supreme-Court” reading whatever it wants into the Constitution. Thomas dissented: “The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built … [T]he majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect.”

NPR follows in the tracks of the New York Times, which has for years on end run stories derogating Thomas, often in the spirit of satirizing him. A recent article by Adam Liptak ran under the headline “Precedent, Meet Clarence Thomas. You May Not Get Along.” Thomas has for close to three decades been the target of liberal ire. Most observers back in 1991 generally concluded that Anita Hill perjured herself in her attacks on Thomas, but in the course of time incessant repetition of Hill’s accusations without mention of the evidence that she lied has turned Hill into a liberal monument of truthfulness and Thomas into a sexist scoundrel for those unwilling to consult the historical facts.

Magnet makes brisk work of the false accusations. His real quarry in this book is his chapter, “Originalism in Action,” in which he paces out Thomas’s opinions over the years showing the Justice’s growing readiness to cast precedent aside in favor of the literal meaning of the Constitution. Magnet touches down for instance on a Thomas dissent in 1999 in the case Chicago v. Morales, in which the Court “struck down a democratically enacted city ordinance imposing small fines or short jail terms on criminal street gang members loitering in public places.” The Court decided this was a “vague and arbitrary” restriction on the personal liberties of thugs. In Supreme Court–speak this was a matter of “substantive due process,” but as Thomas saw it, “police power” is meant to maintain order and prevent crime. The Court’s action rested on a precedent, for sure, but an awful one (Papchristou v. City of Jackson, 1972) in which the court rescued some thieves and drug dealers from loitering charges. Thomas will have none of this. His dissent in Morales hit hard at the Court’s willingness to abandon “our most vulnerable citizens” to the depredations of street criminals. And it was one more step towards Thomas’s disenchantment with the Court’s reliance on precedent.

Magnet’s account of how Thomas’s disenchantment matured is a tour-de-force and in some ways a prediction for what lies ahead. Thomas’s intellectual authority is growing not just with the public but with his colleagues on the Court. It is little wonder that he causes such ire among progressives. He threatens the very core of their larger project, which has always depended on judge-made and administrative-agency–made law. In a final chapter, “A Free Man,” Magnet recounts Thomas’s rejection by the Civil Rights establishment and his reciprocating disdain for those who elevate victimhood as their perpetual calling. “A free man” is an apt label. Thomas may be one of the freest men in America, a man free to pursue justice, unencumbered by the ideological straitjackets that others cheerfully squeeze themselves into.

The education of Clarence Thomas is not just the education he received but the education he now gives Americans on what our freedom should look like and how we can rescue it from those who are determined to take it away. What Thomas teaches is the rule of law as our Founders conceived it—laws that we make for ourselves through our representatives, rather than those imposed by our black-robed judicial betters.

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.

Myron Magnet

Author of Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

Author: Myron Magnet

“The Power Broker” in perspective

Page One, Autumn 1994

The Obama Tragedy

A stately setting

On Thomas Jefferson

Will the Real Justice Gorsuch Please Stand Up?

Keep Coronavirus in Human Perspective

About Those Self-Evident Truths. . . .

Mr. Sammler’s City

Drain the Swamp of Ugly Architecture

Clarence Thomas: the Movie

What City Journal Wrought

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‘Hate Crime’ Is Only a Step Away From Thoughtcrime

The Court Moves Right

Imprimis

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Clarence Thomas, the Repairer of Our Constitution

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The Education of Clarence Thomas