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When I first read this I thought it was a reasonably well thought-out post. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Scott didn’t mention immigration once in the entire essay. There’s a Straussian reading here where Scott personally cares more about his own social standing than HDB civilizational risks, but understands why others would not, leaving the objection open and unrefuted.
I think all the arguments that Scott is being unfair in his specific recounting of Trumps flaws are cope. I’m voting for him anyway because stopping uncontrolled immigration and keeping Rawlsians off the court really are that important.
I hadn't even conceived of framing it this way, but this is exactly right from my perspective as well. The one that pops to my mind most recently is the Grants Pass case, but really, it's the echoes of Robinson and the later dissents in Powell where I just keep thinking, "what in the world are we talking about?". The idea is that a status can't be criminalized, but an action can. The dissenters in Powell (and Grants Pass) insist that things like alcoholism and homelessness are statuses, so you can't criminalize things that are downstream of that status. What in the world are we talking about? Applying that logic consistently, absolving people of any meaningful agency, is completely unthinkable to me. Yes, even if you really, really, really want to be drunk in public, I think the police should show up and tell you that's enough for the evening. Yes, even if you don't currently have a home, I think the police should show up and escort you out of the park. More importantly when considering the case law, I cannot fathom that there is a federal right to be drunk in public or sleep in parks.
I want to point people back to my old comment on Grants Pass, because this logic has really infected tons of things. They were so successful in playing this game with sexuality (going all the way to effectively banning Christian groups from campuses) that it's almost hard to blame them for thinking that they could get away with it everywhere else, too. I don't really like to let my mind drift to partisan politics (rather than just focusing on understanding what is actually true), but it's hard to not have the thought floating around that we could easily have been two Clinton appointees in place of two Trump appointees away from this stuff metastasizing even more. Frankly, it just makes it annoyingly harder to simultaneously follow the news in the legal realm while also trying to stay personally philosophically coherent when to even explain what has happened requires constantly reminding yourself, "Of course this is complete philosophical bollocks."
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Yes, somehow Grants Pass was the most striking for me as well from this last term, in that it seemed the most tenuous and absurd. I was thinking the whole time, how did that position manage to attract three votes, when it was so transparently not what the 8th amendment is saying?
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