Most conservative elites come across as heretics, not outsiders. But on the right side of the high court, Barrett would stand out.
Can anything good come from Rhodes College?
T here’s something deeper and stranger about the opposition to Amy Coney Barrett than to other nominees. It’s not just the way she might change the ideological weight of the court, as a conservative replacing the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s not exactly her faith either, although that’s part of it. One senses that there’s an unsayable aspect to it. It’s not just her religion — she’s assumed to be a doctrinally orthodox and charismatic Catholic — though religion is a part of it.
As hearings are about to begin, we have been told, over and over again, that elected Democrats do not want to make Amy Coney Barrett’s religious beliefs or personal life the focus of her Senate confirmation hearings. Even though Kamala Harris has implied during other hearings that membership in the Knights of Columbus could be disqualifying for a judge, even though Senator Mazie Hirono has asked candidates what behaviors they consider sinful, and even though the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee complained to Barrett a few years ago that “the Dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” Democrats now insist that they don’t have an issue with any candidate’s faith. How dare you suggest otherwise! They just want to talk about how she’d rule on cases about Obamacare.
We’ll see if they can constrain themselves, safe in the knowledge that progressives in the media will play the heavy. In just a few weeks, mainstream media outlets and progressive intellectuals have already circulated claims that Amy Coney Barrett’s faith community was the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, that her adherence to common, millennia-old religious convictions about sex and marriage make her deeply suspect, and that her adoption of two Haitian children was in fact, as Ibram X. Kendi put it in a now-deleted Tweet, a form of white-supremacist theft, the real intention of which was “cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
Even the most sympathetic portrait of Barrett’s social milieu treats her religious background in People of Praise, a group of charismatic Christians who are mostly Catholic, as forbiddingly foreign. It is an “especially insular” community we’re told, even though it is ecumenical and intellectual in orientation and tied to major institutions such as the University of Notre Dame.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the peculiar opposition is to her status as an elite from outside the normal cultural and educational formation of America’s elites. She is not just a conservative. She’s something else.
Most conservative elites come across now as heretics, not outsiders. But on the right side of the high court, Barrett would stand out. Justice John Roberts is a product of Harvard undergrad and eventually the Harvard Law Review. Neil Gorsuch was a Columbia undergrad, and he went to Harvard Law. Samuel Alito: Princeton undergrad and Yale Law School. Justice Brett Kavanaugh: Yale undergrad and Yale Law School. Amy Coney Barrett went to Rhodes College, a small, Southern Presbyterian institution, before moving on to Notre Dame.
It extends to social associations as well. Brett Kavanaugh’s background as a prep-schooler and Ivy Leaguer made our leading journalists feel so comfortable in understanding him that they felt confident in convicting him of sexual assault merely by stereotyping and generalizing from their own experience. (“When I was in high school, I faced my own Brett Kavanaugh,” one writer claimed in The Atlantic, in an essay titled “I Believe Her.”) Kavanaugh and Roberts are both members of the Chevy Chase club. That too is something elite journalists can understand. Tiger Moms can safely place their ambitious cubs as his clerks. Notably, Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale understood how to undermine his confirmation hearings.
We’ve seen something of these bristling before. Justice Scalia’s social world didn’t have much overlap with the normal crowd in D.C., which doesn’t frequent the Latin Mass at St. Mary’s parish in Chinatown. When it was reported after his death that Scalia had been enrolled in The International Order of St. Hubertus, a sporting group with roots in Counter Reformation–era Austria, journalists who noticed lost their minds. Although they tried to portray it as a completely out-of-touch group of super elites belonging to “a very, very weird secret hunting society,” the Order’s resources are comparatively modest compared with America’s modern, expensive and uncontroversial golf clubs. The dues are comparatively paltry. It was only out of touch insofar as 99 out of 100 American elites probably don’t even know of the existence of such a social group.
America’s class society has a difficulty talking about itself. The English class system allows for the smooth avoidance of social conflict. Irish class differences impart enthralling personal conflict to everyday life. American class antagonisms are silent and submerged.
Amy Coney Barrett’s antagonists don’t understand her. Her success strikes them as abnormal and vaguely offensive. It always annoys people who spent so much effort following the rules that someone else did an end-run around them. Successful people, they believe, don’t go to those schools, they don’t have a family like that, and they don’t pray that way. Her ascent is a rejection of the laws of our hardening class divisions. When she sits in front of Senators Feinstein, Harris, and Hirono, Amy Coney Barrett might as well be levitating.