Arnon Grunberg

Ambitious

Pugnaciousness

On anger - Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker:

‘Now, though, Alito is the embodiment of a conservative majority that is ambitious and extreme. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) With the recent additions of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Court, the conservative bloc no longer needs Roberts to get results. And Alito has taken a zealous lead in reversing the progressive gains of the sixties and early seventies—from overturning Roe v. Wade to stripping away voting rights. At a Yale Law School forum in 2014, he was asked to name a personality trait that had impeded his career. Alito responded that he’d held his tongue too often—that it “probably would have been better if I said a bit more, at various times.” He’s holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment.’

(…)

‘Alito matriculated at Princeton in 1968. The school didn’t have a particularly rebellious student body: during the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the school’s Students for a Democratic Society contingent carried signs that said “even princeton.” Nevertheless, the university saw its share of sit-ins and marches during Alito’s years there, and his already deeply held political allegiances put him at odds with the left-wing youth culture surrounding him. His cultural tastes made him an outlier, too. Alito once recalled spending New Year’s Eve, 1967, in front of the TV at home, watching a band that his parents liked: Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.’

(…)

‘Alito’s grandfather came to America from Italy in 1913. An unskilled laborer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he was employed irregularly during the Depression. His wife and infant son, Samuel, soon joined him in Trenton. Alito’s father grew up poor, but he excelled in school and became a teacher who set exacting academic standards for his own two children. At night, Alito told the interviewer for the National Italian American Foundation, his father sat with him and his sister, Rosemary, at the kitchen table, going over “every single word” of their school papers. Alito went on, “To start out, it was very painful, but I think that’s how you have to learn writing.” (Rosemary now practices employment law in New Jersey.) Their mother, Rose Fradusco Alito, whom Alito has called “a very intelligent, very determined, very strong-willed person,” was an elementary-school teacher and a principal. In 2006, she told the Washington Post that, “when the first baby came, I said, ‘Sam, our children are going to be the smartest children in Hamilton Township.’ ”’

(…)

‘At Alito’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he performed with steely equanimity. Andrew Napolitano, his former college classmate, told the Princeton Alumni Weekly that he knew Alito would maintain his composure, joking, “He doesn’t have a temper to lose.” Alito said all the things about Roe and Casey that anti-abortion jurists must say to insure confirmation. He called stare decisis a “fundamental part of our legal system.” When Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican at the time, asked him if Casey qualified as a “super-precedent,” he responded with a wan witticism: “I personally would not get into classifying precedents as super-precedents or super-duper-precedents or any sort of categorization like that. It sort of reminds me of the size of laundry detergent in the supermarket. I agree with the underlying thought that, when a precedent is reaffirmed, that strengthens the precedent.” Alito said that his Reagan-era assertion that the Constitution didn’t guarantee a right to abortion was merely “what I thought in 1985, from my vantage point in 1985.” He told the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer that if the abortion issue came before him on the Court he would first apply stare decisis. If he got “beyond that,” he would “go through the whole judicial decision-making process before reaching a conclusion.” When Schumer asked if he still doubted that a right to abortion could be derived from the Constitution, Alito deflected by protesting, “You are asking me how I would decide an issue.” Alito acknowledged that he held “traditional values,” but in the mildest terms. He said that he believed in defending “the ability to raise children the way you want” and in students’ right “to express their religious views at school.” Some of Alito’s supporters from this period now wonder how much of the tepid persona he projected back then was genuine. In 2005, Lawrence S. Lustberg, a criminal-defense and civil-rights lawyer in New Jersey, told the Times that he had known Alito professionally for more than twenty years. Although he anticipated that Alito would “move the court to the right,” he also regarded him as “totally capable, brilliant and nice.” I contacted Lustberg to ask what he felt now. He responded that, in the course of his long career, his biggest regret was having expressed optimism about Alito, whose jurisprudence “has turned out to be angry, dark, retrogressive, and historically damaging.” Lustberg had argued before Alito when Alito served on the Third Circuit, and had found him fair. But on the Supreme Court, Lustberg told me, “it’s like he has gained a sense of freedom to change the world in the image he has for it.”’

(…)

‘In the end, Alito may be angry for the same reasons that many conservatives of his demographic are angry—because they find their values increasingly contested; because they feel less culturally authoritative than they once were; because they want to exclude whom they want to exclude, and resent it when others push back. Neil Siegel told me he thought Alito was frustrated because he knows, at some level, that he is fundamentally “dissenting from American culture and where it is ineluctably heading—a society that is increasingly diverse and secular.” As Siegel put it, “The Supreme Court doesn’t really have the power to change that.” Maybe not. But Alito is clearly trying.’

Read the article here.

The hubris that you can change the world in your image is fatal, after all hubris is the favorite sin of the Gods.

Alito is on the winning side of the Supreme Court, but appears to be on the losing side of history.

And resentment is a passion, probably the biggest passion in humans. Forget love. Resentment never dies.

The results are here to see for everybody, not only on the Supreme Court.

Also, Alito seems to be a good strategist, seems, maybe he was just lucky.

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