Photo by Ninian Reid | CC BY 2.0
The election of Donald Trump was a catastrophe. This was clear before Election Day; it is even clearer now.
Nevertheless, his victory was not a total disaster — Hillary Clinton lost. She and her husband had done enough harm already. Three decades of Clintons is enough.
I put the point this way because with the Republicans’ success in replacing the late Antonin Scalia with Neil Gorsuch, a smoother but more reactionary jurist, the Supreme Court is on my mind.
The allusion is, of course, to an infamous remark of the much venerated – and ostensibly liberal –Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior in a ruling (Buck v. Bell, 1927) that permitted the state of Virginia to require the sterilization of an intellectually disabled woman. Holmes declared: “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
A god-awful sentiment, a fine turn of phrase, and an occasion to reflect on the plain fact that differences, such as they are, between liberals and conservatives are not always what they are cracked up to be.
The Supreme Court was the best reason to hope that a Democrat, even Hillary Clinton, would win the White House in 2016. Supreme Court Justices can do a lot of harm. A Democrat would likely pick someone less retrograde than a Republican, someone who would do less harm.
Now, that task won’t fall to a Democrat, it will fall to Trump — or, if the gods smile upon us and he quits or is impeached, it will fall to Mike Pence. Unlike…