Philosophy.Com

revisiting populism

Ivan Krastev opens his article The populist moment at Eurozine with the phrase 'A spectre is haunting the world: populism', and then adds that it is unclear just what populism is:

On the one hand, the concept of "populism" goes back to the American farmers' protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia's narodniki around the same period. Later, the concept was used to describe the elusive nature of the political regimes in the Third World countries governed by charismatic leaders, applied above all to Latin American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. ....Clearly, populism has lost its original ideological meaning as the expression of agrarian radicalism. Populism is too eclectic to be an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are. But growing interest in populism has captured the major trend of the modern political world – the rise of democratic illiberalism

Rorty: philosophy & democracy

Richard Rorty, as is well known, argues for the irrelevance of philosophy to democracy. He does in terms of a historical argument. He says at Eurozine that:

Philosophy is a ladder that Western political thinking climbed up, and then shoved aside. Starting in the seventeenth century, philosophy played an important role in clearing the way for the establishment of democratic institutions in the West. It did so by secularizing political thinking – substituting questions about how human beings could lead happier lives for questions about how God's will might be done. Philosophers suggested that people should just put religious revelation to one side, at least for political purposes, and act as if human beings were on their own – free to shape their own laws and their own institutions to suit their felt needs, free to make a fresh start.

He adds that the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, differences between political institutions, and movements of political opinion, reflected different philosophical views. Those sympathetic to the old regime were less likely to be materialistic atheists than were the people who wanted revolutionary social change.But now that:

... Enlightenment values are pretty much taken for granted throughout the West, this is no longer the case. Nowadays politics leads the way, and philosophy tags along behind. One first decides on a political outlook and then, if one has a taste for that sort of thing, looks for philosophical backup. But such a taste is optional, and rather uncommon. Most Western intellectuals know little about philosophy, and care still less. In their eyes, thinking that political proposals reflect philosophical convictions is like thinking that the tail wags the dog.

The philosophical justification for this position is anti-foundationalism; the view that contests the claim of Enlightenment rationalism that there is something above and beyond human history that can sit in judgment on that history.

Rorty says:

anti-foundationalists like myself agree with Hegel that Kant's categorical imperative is an empty abstraction until it is filled up with the sort of concrete detail that only historical experience can provide. We say the same about Jefferson's claim about self-evident human rights. On our view, moral principles are never more than ways of summing up a certain body of experience. To call them "a priori" or "self-evident" is to persist in using Plato's utterly misleading analogy between moral certainty and mathematical certainty.

To say that a statement is self-evident is, Rorty the anti-foundationalists argues, is merely an empty rhetorical gesture. The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.

European federation

Gerard Delanty argues in Peripheries and borders in a post-western Europe that Europe is taking not just a post-national form, but also a post-western shape. The periphery can be seen as a zone of re-bordering. Delanty says:

The earlier expansion of the EU in the pre-Cold War period differed in that it was premised on the certainty offered by the Iron Curtain. While the Treaty of Rome declared that any European country could join, it was evident that there were political limits to expansion. It was primarily a western European interstate system. Moreover, it was an enlargement that was based on what was believed to be a common European political heritage. It is certain that this heritage was often a divisive one, and the southern European countries – Greece, Portugal, and Spain – joined the EU in the early 1980s only after a prolonged period of military rule. Yet, despite these caveats, prior to the current enlargement the EU was a fairly cohesive entity that underwent relatively deep socio-economic and political integration.

The EU does not have a political or cultural identity in any meaningful sense of the term, while on the other side, the identity of nation-states has been undermined partly as a result both of Europeanization and wider processes of globalization.

Arendt, The Jewish Writings

The publication of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings reconstruct in detail the historical development of Arendt's ideas on Zionism and her powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project. These writings cover the entire gamut of 20th Jewish political culture: the German Enlightenment and Emancipation, assimilation and anti-Semitism, and Zionism and the Holocaust. The two main themes that animate Arendt’s larger body of work – the centrality of the political, understood as an active human connection focused on public life, and the imperative of individual freedom and responsibility, marked by a strong aversion to mass society and culture – appear also in her Jewish writings.

In this review by Gabriel Piterberg says that:

From 1940 onwards, Arendt argued that the appropriate—non-Zionist—political solution to the Jewish Question would be a European federation, in which the Jews would be one nation among others, with representation in a common parliament: ‘our fate can only be bound up with that of other small European peoples’; a settlement in Palestine might also be feasible, but only if attached to some such European commonwealth.

By the 1930s, the bankruptcy of any assimilation strategy for European Jewry had been thrown into stark relief. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, Arendt seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 Arendt argued that statelessness was not a Jewish problem, but a recurrent 20th-century predicament of the nation-state. What happened to the Jewish people under Hitler should not be seen as exceptional but as exemplary of a certain way of managing minority populations; hence, the reduction of ‘German Jews to a non-recognised minority in Germany’, the subsequent expulsions of the Jews as ‘stateless people across the borders’, and the gathering of them ‘back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and the stateless’.

European federation means 'nations within a nation’, a structure within which the Jews could find their place as a collective without needing either to emigrate or assimilate. This continued to inform her critique of the 19th-century nation-state and of Herzl’s bourgeois-nationalist Zionism.

Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal

Michael Tomasky reviews Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal in The New York Review of Books. I came across Krugman in his 1994 book, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations, which was about the relationship between economics and politics.

In this exercise in myth-debunking he introduced the distinction between academic economists, who write mainly for other economists, and "policy entrepreneurs" who write on policy proposals for the broader public and for politicians. The entrepreneurs preach simplistic solutions to perceived, sometimes non-existent problems. Krugman takes aim at nonsense from both conservative and liberal policy entrepreneurs. His main targets are supply-side economics and strategic trade doctrine (as opposed to free trade).

I reacted negatively to the nonsense bit. Tomasky says that:

Krugman had harsh words for liberal economists such as Robert Reich and Lester Thurow, who advocated se-lective protection from foreign competition, particularly from countries in which poor workers were harshly exploited. Reviewing Peddling Prosperity in these pages.... Benjamin M. Friedman took note of Krugman's disdain for such "strategic traders" and their attempts to exert influence within the Clinton administration in favor of protectionism and subsi-dies for selected domestic industries. If you were a radical economist in those days, or a labor movement intellectual, or a left-leaning social scientist, chances are you weren't a big fan of Paul Krugman.

Krugman gunned for the policy entreprenurs who had convinced key Republicans that the cause for slowing U.S. economic growth was high taxation and excessive regulation. Big government was the problem, and the cure required tax cuts, which would 1) bring back growth, 2) raise investment, and 3) enable deficit reduction. I reacted negatively because Krugman was blasting policy advocates who deviated from orthodox, neoclassical economic analysis. That analysis was the touchstone. Political economy was beyond the pale.

In The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman chiefly sees economics through the lens of politics rather than the other way around---that economic changes drive political changes.Krugman says that:

I've become increasingly convinced that much of the causation runs the other way—that political change in the form of rising polarization has been a major cause of rising inequality. That is, I'd suggest an alternative story for the last thirty years that runs like this: Over the course of the 1970s, radicals of the right determined to roll back the achievements of the New Deal took over the Republican Party, opening a partisan gap with the Democrats.... The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers' bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks; sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.

So Krugman embraces political economy. It was the political choices made by President Roosevelt and his colleagues, and not impersonal economic forces, that lifted the US out of depression and poverty and built the middle class.

Similarly it is politics rather than economics has created our present-day inequality. And so we have the emergence of Krugman as the policy entrepreneur who advocates breathing new life to the New Deal idea that society should help its less fortunate members.

thinking about capitalism

At the end of his The Mind and the Market: Capitalism and Modern European Thought Jerry Z. Muller writes of the writes of the various “vital tensions” that shape present-day intellectual politics.

One might say that in the capitalist era, the older tension between this world and the next has been replaced (or, for some, overlaid) with a new set of inner-worldly tensions. The tension between choices and purpose, between cultivating individuality while preserving the sense of attachment that gives life meaning, between independence and solidarity, between collective particularity and cosmopolitan interests, between productivity and equality — these are the characteristic tensions of the capitalist epoch, tensions with which we will continue to live.

As seen from the perspective of market liberalism that makes the market the centre of society. The Enlightenment dubbed it "commercial society" and we, after Marx, call it capitalism. Muller shows that European intellectuals-----Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek. plus Voltaire, Hegel, Justus Möser, Edmund Burke, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, Georg Lukás, Hans Freyer, and Herbert Marcuse----grappling with the meaning of capitalism shaped their ideas on politics, philosophy, literature, culture, and society.

From Muller's long view the current antiglobalization movement's concerns need to be understood and addressed not as the consequences of recent policies or conditions but rather as inherent in the dynamics of capitalism itself.

Xmas day

An Xmas post:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Stain glass window, Block Arcade, Melbourne, 2007

Enjoy.

Minnie Pwerle

A visual work by Minnie Pwerle, who began painting on canvas in 1999. Previously her principal cultural expression was ceremonial body painting.

Minnie Pwerle, Awelye Atnwengerrp series

Awelye Atnwengerrp means ‘women’s ceremony from the Atnwengerrp’, a place north of Utopia near the Sandover River in the Northern Territory. Awelye-Atnwengerrp is depicted by a series of lines painted in different widths, patterns and colours. This pattern represents the designs painted on the top half of women's bodies during ceremonies in their country of Atnwengerrp.

Julian Tudor Hart on Health care

In his recent Political Economy of Health Care: A Clinical Perspective Julian Tudor Hart warns of the creeping commercialization of the health service - the privatization of a growing number of spheres and the application of market economics to procurement, delivery and management. Hart, now a retired family doctor working occasionally as a research Fellow at the new Medical School in Swansea, Wales, has spent a life applying Marxist philosophy to primary health care.

In the forementioned text Hart explores how health care in the UK might be reconstituted as a humane service for all, rather than a profitable one for the few, and a civilizing influence on society as a whole. Hart is referring to the NHS in the UK. and he tells a story with a past, present and a future—where the NHS has come from, what ithas achieved, the threats to its future, and what that future might be.

In Australia we have both a health market medical and non-medical health professions, public health care (hospitals) and the application of market economics to procurement, delivery and management of public health care. Tudor Hart's central thesis is that rational and effective health care cannot follow a pattern of market competition.He is best known for his formulation
of the “inverse care law” in 1971, in which he showed how patients with the greatest need tend to receive the poorest healthcare, particularly in areas where market forces operate. He makers a good point when he says:

I don’t think primary care is yet taken really seriously by government. They think primary care is cheaper than secondary care so they want to expand it and shift work from secondary to primary care. It’s
better, but not cheaper

Hart argues that at its heart, the NHS produces social value, as a result of encounters between patients and professionals, to which both make an essential contribution. The market can hive off the profitable parts of care, based on a cruder business model of consumers and providers, but in doing so, threatens the service at its philosophical and practical core. Hart understands NHS as a gift economy and argues that while this is at odds with prevailing political views about the NHS, it is part of most people’s experience, allows expression for their core values.

The public health care system is under attack, and, by all accounts, it will not be saved by simple sentimentalism or superficial ideas about inequality.

An Xmas card

This was the image that I used for my electronic Xmas card:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Block Arcade, Melbourne, 2007

Seasons greetings everyone.

virtues and communities

This is part of the Preface Alasdair MacIntyre wrote to the Polish edition of his After Virtue:

The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place with the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good. And it is when goods are ordered in terms of an adequate conception of human good that the virtues genuinely flourish. “Politics” is the Aristotelian name for the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the ­community.

Let's accept the argument that the flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place with the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Do such small scale communities exist any more? I can only think of small country towns.

The Internet as the fifth estate?

The media are often seen as central to democratic processes: a 'fourth estate ' independent of government and other powerful institutions. Today, however, the Internet and Web are creating a new space for networking people, information and other resources. Does this network of networks have the potential to become an equally important 'fifth estate' which could support greater accountability in politics and the media. Is this plausible? How does this develop the idea of a public sphere? How is the fifth estate different from the fourth estate?

I have come as far as seeing that the Internet is a new kind of space and one that is different from that of the traditional mass media, even when they (News Corp, ABC, Fairfax) step into this space to support their traditional activities. But what kind of space is this new space? In his inaugral lecture as Director of the Oxford Internet Institute William H Dutton develops the idea of the internet as fifth estate. That's a novel idea as it builds on the capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues.

If society is governed by the predicts: judiciary, executive and parliament, then as Edmund Burke, observed by pointing to the press gallery in British Parliament and exclaiming "and this is the Fourth Estate". Ever since, the term 'Fourth Estate' has represented the media's role as a watchdog of the bureucracy and government by exposing corruption and unfair dealings with complete transparency. Is this what Dutton has in mind when he refers to the fitth estate?

He says:

Some have argued that the Internet is essentially a new medium similar to the traditional media. This has led to a view of the Internet as an adjunct of an evolving Fourth Estate. Others see elements of the Internet – such as the citizen journalist or the blogger – as composing a kind of Fifth Estate. However, both conceptions are tied to an overly limited notion of new digital media as being just a complementary form of news publishing. The Internet is far more than a blogosphere or online digital add-on to the mass media.

Rightly said. Just think of Flickr or Facebook, downloading music or video, or the way people use the Internet to make new friends and, thereby, reconfigure their social networks. This is no passing blogging fad.

Dutton says that internet-enabled, networked individuals often break from existing organizational and institutional networks that are themselves being transformed in Internet space. A good example is internet-enabled, networked individuals breaking away from the walled universities. Dutton adds:

The ability the Internet affords individuals to network within and beyond various institutional arenas in ways that can enhance and reinforce the ‘communicative power’ of ‘networked individuals’ is key. The interplay of change within and between such individual and institutional ‘networks of networks’ lies at the heart of what I am arguing is a distinctive and significant new Fifth Estate.

By enabling a huge range of people across the globe to reconfigure their access to information, people, services and technologies, the Internet and related ICTs have the potential to reshape the communicative power of individuals and groups in numerous ways. But how does this become a fifth estate?

Dutton's argument for this is that people are using the internet for information, have found ways to trust that information through experience (eg. Wikipedia), and that the Internet is crucially enabling individuals to network in new ways that reconfigure and enhance their communicative power. He mentions the media, politics, government online, the workplace and the business firm (eg., Internet-enabled networks that come together to solve a problem) education and research. From this Dutton infers that:

the Internet is becoming not only a new source of information, but also a platform for networking individuals in new Internet-enabled groups that can challenge the influence of other, more established, bases of institutional authority. Moreover, it is robust. As discussed, it can flourish despite a digital divide in access. And it can be a significant force even though only a minority of users are actively producing material for the Internet, as opposed to simply using it.

Duttn acknowledges that the role of the Internet – and of networked individuals – is not uniformly positive, since the open gates of the Internet, which allow in those aspects of the outside world of benefit to the user, also allow those causing harm by intent or accident, including spammers, fraudsters, pornographers, bullies, terrorists, and more.

Dutton's conceptualization of the Fifth Estate turns away from Edmund Burke to Manuel Castells to develop the fifth estate as creating a space of flows, in contrast to a space of places. When you ‘go to’ the Internet, you enter this new space of flows that connects with people and places. This is dramatically different from a physical place, such as this hall. Both are important. Both serve major social roles in shaping the quality of our information environment and they complement one another. Dutton adds:

This space of flows enables a multitude of actors to reconfigure access to information, people, services and technologies.....A key implication of this for society at large is that the Internet can be used to increase the accountability of the other Estates, for instance by being used as a check on the press. It can also be deployed as an alternative source of authority and as a check on other established positions of authority, such as politicians, doctors and academics, by offering alternative sources of information, analysis and opinion to citizens, patients, and students.

Thus through the space of flows, the network of networks, the Internet is enabling the development of a Fifth Estate that is enhancing the accountability of many sectors across all societies is the argument.

a note on economics

Neoclassical economics dominates political life and public policy. The school of law and economics tries to hide its own conservative norms and larger political agenda behind a mask of positivism and so-called objectivity. It presupposes the sovereign, autonomous, individual, white male agent and dichotomizes the human agent into a "separatist" self (based on the self-interested, profit-maximizing, autonomous individual in the market) and a "soluble" self (who is completely altruistic, empathetic, selfless, and connected with the family). Its politics is one of the rolling back of social welfare programs in the name of "efficiency" (a key goal of neoclassical economics) and is inherently political as it involves the withering away of the welfare state.

Despite these kinds of philosophical critiques neo-classical economics remains hegemonic.

a window on power

Paul Kelly had an interesting column in the Weekend Australian that opens up a window into the inner sanctum of political power in Canberra that we citizens rarely see. What we saw courtesy of Kelly was the strange tensions within the Cabinet of John Howard around him being a problem for the return of the Coalition to power. Kelly says

Howard offered the cabinet the chance to obtain his resignation. Howard's position was that he preferred to stay and fight the election but he would offer the cabinet an alternative. He was prepared to resign the next week with no partyroom ballot and no political bloodletting subject to conditions. Howard's terms were authentic but daunting. Ultimately they proved too difficult for the Liberal Party in the most intense leadership crisis of Howard's 11 years of power.....The core condition for Howard's resignation was vesting the political responsibility in the cabinet, not himself. It was one of the most remarkable conclusions about his survival reached by an Australian prime minister. But it was flawed: Howard was saying he would resign, but he wanted the cabinet to carry the responsibility. If it came, it would be a resignation without conviction.

Howard knew that the Coalition would lose the election and that he would lose his seat of Bennelong. Kelly says that Howard felt obliged to offer his political head, but his ministers had to become the executioners. The truth is that Howard still didn't believe in a transition; he didn't think Costello was the party's saviour, but if the cabinet really wanted Costello, then it could have him.

The cabinet wasn't willing to accept Howard's condition of the cabinet taking full public responsibility for his departure. As we know the majority of the ministers held that the best outcome for the Coailtion was for Howard to resign of his own volition. However, they were adamant that Howard must volunteer his resignation, removed from any impression that he had been tapped on the shoulder or was being forced out.

What was interesting is that though nearly all ministers felt the people had stopped listening to Howard they could not do anything to effect change to try and save themselves. They were willing to go down with the ship.

violent democracies

In Democracy's Violent Heart a review of Daniel Ross' Violent Democracy in Borderlands Mathew Sharpe says that Ross brings to contemporary Australian political debates:

resources from traditions in continental European thinking that are usually disregarded—when they are not dismissed—in the Australian public sphere. By doing so, Ross' book invites a wider, non-philosophical audience to raise far-reaching and deeper questions about the nature of politics. In particular, as Violent Democracy 's title suggests, Ross's concern is with how and why our political life always seemingly involves violence, whether this is inevitable, and what can and ought to be done about it....The argument of Violent Democracy challenges from the start any benign ideas we might have inherited that modern democracy is "the solution to the violence of tyranny and chaos".... Ross does not accept the story that liberal democracy is that political system which, historically as today, secures the peace by separating state and public life from people's private passions and religious convictions. For him, all democracies —as political systems that wrest sovereignty from the few and reassign it to 'the people' —have a "violent heart".

Sharpe adds that Violent Democracy runs two arguments about democracy's "violent heart". The first argument is that "the origin and heart of democracy is essentially violent". There is no democracy without the beheading of the King, or the 'taming' of the frontiers. The book's second contention is that "the violence of democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries". Doesn't any political regime—whether tyrannical or democratic or oligarchic, etc.—depend upon a violent founding act, wherein the new rulers oust the old ones and lay claim to being the people's champion and spokesperson?

The second argument is the one I'm more interested in. Ross argues that since 9/11 it is

not so much war that has changed, but the way in which democracy imagines itself. 'Democracy' seems to be rethinking itself, no longer on the ground of transcendent law based in the sovereignty of a people. Law is reconfigured on the basis that there is an enemy, internal and external, against which it is necessary to act rather than react.

Sharpe says that Ross reads the changes being undertaken by Western democracies in response to the 'war on terror' as highlighting a key tension in the constitution of any democratic polity, between the necessary institutions of "military rule", grounded in the executive authority of the Head of State and "the Law", enforced by the police, and in liberal democracies (since Locke at least) conceived as a means of protecting the people itself "even against" the executive fiat of its leaders.

History since 9/11 would seem to reeinforce Agamben against Foucault: contemporary biopolitics is not superseding or undermining the power of the sovereign. Rather, it is increasingly the corollary of conscious attempts by elements within the liberal democracies of the US, UK and America to re-institute sovereign executive power in the face of changing contemporary circumstances.

morality +politics

In a response to Paul Kelly's cover story in the October Australian Literary Review, 'The Lucky Country (but not why you think)', where Kelly argued that Australia's second-rate public intellectuals failed the country, particularly during the Howard years, Riamond Giata says that:

The truth, though, is that it is misleading to talk about the relations between morality and politics. There are different and seriously competing conceptions of politics that deliver different conclusions about the nature and extent of the conflict between them and even about whether there is conflict. Throughout my Quarterly Essay I argued for an understanding of politics as a distinctive realm of value, importantly connected with moral value but not reducible to it, nor reducible to anything like running an enterprise (or a country conceived as such) to further interests that could be described independently of distinctively political values.

He adds:

Putting it simply, I advanced a conception of politics as sui generis. In this respect it is a conception shared by thinkers as diverse as conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the left-leaning Hannah Arendt. It sometimes finds expression in the renewed concern for the values of civil society; civil in a sense that connects with civility and also with the civitas, a realm constituted by people's mindfulness of the fact that some of their obligations to one another derive not from their relations as individuals or as fellow human beings but from their understanding of what it means to be a citizen. It lies behind the calls for an apology to indigenous people.

interpreting constitutions

A review of a book on Clarence Thomas---Kevin Merida + Michael Fletcher's Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. Thomas is frequently confused with the diminutive, Sicilian shin-kicker Justice Antonin Scalia, in that both are aggressive proponents of “originalism”, the idea that the Constitution should be read in the light of its original meaning, or according to the original intent of its draftsmen.

Originalism is often conflated with other so-called “conservative” approaches to constitutional interpretation, such as the “strict constructionist” school or the judicial minimalist stance. Originalism, however, is a singular phenomenon with a specific historical lineage. Whereas strict constructionism and the minimalist approach have their roots in a structural regard for the integrity of the broader federal system or in a pragmatic antipathy towards judicial intervention in certain sensitive policy areas, these are not quite the same as originalism as articulated by Robert Bork, Scalia, Michael McConnell or Thomas.

While originalists trumpet their approach as an objective corrective to the hysterica passio of the Warren Court, this philosophy is just a euphemism for an old conservative agenda, embracing states’s rights, right to life, school prayer, school vouchers and jail time for pornographers (Thomas, J. dissenting from this last part). Originalism in their hands is actually a conservative policy platform, not a simple method of statutory or constitutional adjudication.