Our sealed bubbles
by digby
Jeffrey Toobin’s scathing assessment of Antonin Scalia’s legacy is worth reading in its entirety. But I’ll just excerpt this one little observation to make a different point:
Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama’s climate-change regulations. Scalia’s reputation, like the Supreme Court’s, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was “Get over it.”
Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought.
This is important because it’s a problem not just as it pertains to Scalia and the court (although it’s deadly for a Supreme Court justice to be so narrowly influenced that he literally has no idea what’s going on in the world beyond his own little clique.) This is a problem for a lot of people these days although I’d guess it actually affects politicians less than the rest of us. They deal with actual humans in their districts and states and cannot just “block” them or “unfriend” them if they don’t like what they’re hearing.
In many ways they are a lot more in touch with the American public than those of us who throw so much shade on them all the time because they can’t simply pick and choose who they want to hear from among their constituents. I think we lose at least a little perspective by simply assuming every last person in the political system is so compromised they have nothing to say that might be of value. Or perhaps, more to the point, that if they say something that differs from the understanding in our own silos it can’t possibly be of value.
I’m guilty of this myself. I have to force myself to read things that make me angry and watch the whole spectrum of the political system so that I know what everyone is saying. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s stressful. And I do fail at it, I’m sure. But if I were running for office I would have no choice but to listen to all these people with their different views and even if I disagreed with them, I’d at least be aware of them. Political candidates have to do that and it’s worth something.
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