The populism and identity politics of the moment have some odd and confusing contours.
The white working class recently took over a party from a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Connecticut dynasty with CIA roots. They took over by electing a billionaire real estate heir who lives in a golden mansion with his immigrant wife atop a tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. That populist hero just picked, for the world’s most powerful appointment, a Georgetown Prep grad who has spent his career in the Bush Republican Party and now lives in the Village of Chevy Chase with his wife and two daughters.
Tangled up with these weirdly drawn lines of identity is another odd phenomenon: Some religious conservatives feel let down by President Trump’s pick of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, and indeed feel a vague distrust. This is about identity politics, because all politics are to some extent identity politics. Identity politics aren’t just about race, sexuality, and ethnicity — they are about who is one of us, and who is them, in both cases ideas that don’t easily fit into anyone’s construction of reality.
To certain subsets of conservatives, especially some scattered tribes of Christian conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh isn’t one of us. Amy Coney Barrett is; Raymond Kethledge and Thomas Hardiman might be. These inchoate feelings are worth articulating because we’ve had them before, when George W. Bush chose John Roberts as chief justice.
These feelings — who is us and who is them — don’t make obvious sense. Like me, Roberts is from New York state, ended up in Montgomery County, Md., is a Catholic dad and a conservative. In fact, he’s from humbler origins, having been born in Buffalo and raised in Indiana. In what way was he not one of us?
By 2001, Roberts was deep inside elite Republican circles: a former administration official, a Bush lawyer in Florida’s 2000 recount, and a former K Street lawyer living in Bethesda with his wife and two daughters.
We conservatives had grown up with judicial heroes of a different stripe. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were clearly — on the surface — different. Both Catholic and thus unfashionable from the outset, one was an ethnic from a big family in Trenton, the other a conservative black guy.
They came in as outsiders, and that’s how they stayed on the bench. In elite judicial circles, Scalia and Thomas were not part of the dominant culture — they were two of us. Those Waspy chambers all had noddingly signed onto polite lies like stare decisis and Roe v. Wade. Scalia and Thomas came at them with fresh, outsider eyes, and rudely called these lies by their name.
So when Bush gave us Roberts, it seemed like he was picking a team player — not one of us for us, but someone the old guard could call “one of us.”
Before Trump’s announcement, I expressed my unease with Kavanaugh, which echoed my unease with Roberts. That Roberts unease that left me unsurprised when Roberts took the don’t-rock-the-boat stance on Obamacare. My boss responded to my Kavanaugh-skepticism by suggesting I wanted a nominee to show up with “a chip on his shoulder.”
That’s closer to correct. It’s telling that Scalia’s lasting legacy will be his dissents, invariably described as “scathing.” But it’s not really just about a chip on the shoulder. Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t seem to carry a chip. She seems a happy warrior. There was some other difference here — not class, not religion, not demeanor — between us and them.
It was in fact my common ground with Kavanaugh that made me see the dividing line more clearly. One picture circulating shows him with the girls’ basketball team he coached at Blessed Sacrament, his parish. Kavanaugh spoke warmly of his parish as a place where he serves the poor — it’s the institution through which he carries out his duties to his fellow men, women, and children.
Kavanaugh and I see our respective parishes the same way: institutions we are eager to serve, and which we see as tools for the good. There’s no difference there. Here’s the difference: That’s also how Kavanaugh sees national politics and the Republican Party.
Some of us come at national politics for the fight. We approach the Republican Party, and the administration — whether it be Reagan, Bush, or Trump — at most with a friendly tension, but often with antagonism. The party we prefer may come to power, but we never come to power. For the tribe of Bush, Roberts, and Kavanaugh, it’s different. For them, a Republican majority means their people are in power.
America needs people like that — people ready to consider themselves the ruling class. It’s all the better if, like Roberts and Kavanaugh, they are also men or women of faith. But those people are those people. We are not, in some ways of them, and one of them is not, alas, one of us.
