Scotus Who Will Control The Narrative - Road to the Middle Class

WITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT by Sandra Day O´Connor of her resignation from the U.S. Supreme Court after 24 years on the bench the battle is on to confirm her successor. And you couldn´t have set up the battlefield better. Could the wily Karl Rove, master strategist, have asked for a better setup to the Big Push than the scandalous decisions on eminent domain and the Ten Commandments just reached?

Ever since the Bork nomination of 1987, which opened the Supreme Court front in the culture war, liberals have been able to get their narrative out front in the battle. In the Bork fight and in the Clarence Thomas fight, the liberals got to define reality, even though the elder Bush managed to get Thomas onto the bench.

And as the postmodernists tell us, defining reality, getting your narrative out in the public square and intimidating other narratives, is what it´s all about. Establish your narrative and you can win the battle and win money, power, and the love of beautiful women, although postmodernists seem only interested in power.

That was then. This is now. In the good old days before talk radio and blogs and Fox News our liberal friends could flood the zone and there was little the conservatives could do about it. But now things are different.

Can conservatives dominate the political fight over O´Connor´s replacement? Can we get through to the American people and ask them just what makes an “extremist?” A pro-life position, limiting the slaughter of the innocents? Or perhaps a pro-developer position, favoring rich developers over ordinary American homeowners? A “drive religion out of the public square” position or a hands-off position, allowing the First Amendment to flourish in the spirit of the free exercise of religion? We shall see.

Let the ruling liberals tremble at a conservative Supreme Court. The conservatives have nothing to lose but penumbras. They have a world to win.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.