Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz School of Law

In one of my first posts on this blog I argued that easterners are inclined to dismiss Midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools is ultimately not rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system that from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).

Paul C. Light on the Comptroller General of the United States

In the old days, when GAO stood for General Accounting Office, many Americans might have thought of it, to the extent that they thought of it at all, as an agency full of Bob Cratchits (see image above), with or without their green eyeshades. On Wednesday, June 29, at 6:30 in the Hall of the States, the Glenn Fellows will learn about the work of what is now called the Government Accountability Office from two staffers, OSU graduates Patrick Dynes and Jillena Roberts. The head of the GAO is the Comptroller General of the United States. Currently, that post is held by Eugene Louis Dodaro.

For a little background, here is a link to an article published in May, 2010, by Paul C. Light of New York University, one of America's leading public policy scholars. Light refers to the Comptroller General as "perhaps the most important job that most Americans do not know about."

Summer 2011 Glenn Fellows Arrive D.C.

We have had our orientation for the summer 2011 WAIP and G-WAIP fellows (see photo above, taken at the Pension Building). Mike McCandlish and I encouraged the fellows to read a daily newspaper or two, and I referred explicitly to The Washington Post. As I did so, I felt a little guilty, as I always do, about withholding an endorsement of The New York Times, which is, all things considered, the better paper.

But here in the nation’s capital, The Washington Post is our hometown rag, and that means more complete coverage of local events, reviews of museum exhibitions, local theaters and restaurants, and the like. But mainly, the Post does a better job of covering the company in what is essentially a company town. And that company is, of course, the federal government.

There is, for starters, Joe Davidson’s regular column in the Post. Today’s "Federal Diary" explores some of the reasons why the federal government seems to have such a hard time hiring and firing, and why it is so difficult for recent college graduates and MPAs to secure federal employment through USAJOBS. According to Davidson, Congress is looking into the matter, and it comes at an opportune time for us, since the fellows will be engaging in a conversation next Tuesday evening with former U.S. Senator John Glenn, an eloquent spokesman for the merits of public service. And in the following week, we’ll hear a presentation on federal hiring by Julie Saad, a thoughtful WAIP alumna who now works for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government's HR office.

Congress’s inquiry, undertaken by the Senate subcommittee on the federal workforce, chaired by Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), appears to be targeting OPM policies. Ironically, based on my experience in the executive branch, I would submit that the roots of the federal government’s hiring problems may be statutory—i.e., embedded in the fine print of legislation passed by Congress--rather than regulatory.

Whatever the cause, the fact is that for so long as the federal hiring process is deeply flawed, America’s best and brightest young people, such as those in the photo above, will be discouraged from entering the federal service. That may not constitute a national crisis--not yet, anyway--but certainly, it is a pity.

Backstage at the Tomb of the Unknowns

Yesterday the Spring 2011 Glenn Fellows tagged along with some twenty or so Glenn School Learning Community members on a trip to Arlington National Cemetery, traveling double-quick time so we could witness the changing of the guard ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Today, Washington Post reporter Sarah Kaufman scoops the WAIP bloggers with her story about the highly disciplined professional lives of the soldiers who keep watch at the Tomb. Definitely worth a read.

Liberal Education and Return on Investment

While the Washington Academic Internship Program is open to all juniors and seniors at The Ohio State University, most of the John Glenn Fellows are students majoring in fields at the core of the humanities and social sciences: political science, economics, history, international studies, the modern languages, and so on. Those of us inclined to celebrate the virtues of the liberal arts and sciences are used to making the case that while a more vocationally oriented curriculum might be useful in landing an entry-level job in business and industry, the liberal arts have staying power and are correlated with career advancement over the long run.

Now, unfortunately, there is evidence that this may no longer be true, if indeed it ever was. In today's Washington Post, Peter Whoriskey describes the results of a new survey by researchers at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. Read it and weep.

Why There Is No Socialism in America (a reposting from January 24, 2010)

In a lecture recently reprinted by The New York Review of Books, Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendants of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that, there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin with his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they get the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we harbored no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by kulaks, whose very existence refuted Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Glenn Fellows at Scarlet and Gray Congressional Breakfast

Is this a great picture or what? From left to right: Leah Tingley, President Gee, Katie Contino, Dara Doss, Archie Griffin, Jamie Clow, and Erika Dackin.