Count Kevin Williamson of National Review Online among those who like the U.S. Supreme Court’s forced conversion to remote online operations.
Each item on that indictment is worth considering, but one is of particular interest: the charge that the procedures put in place to allow the justices to work remotely — the traditional open format has been supplanted by a system in which the justices ask their questions one at a time in order of seniority — “looks amateurish.” …
… Part of our political debate is over relatively straightforward things such as who gets taxed how much and what the money is used for. Some of our political discourse is simply the noise generated by the intellectual violence of complex issues being forcibly oversimplified. But much of our disagreement is about things we rarely speak to directly, including the cultural character of the state, what it looks like and feels like, how it sounds when it talks, what its manners are like. Among the many great fault lines in American life is the one that runs between small-r republicans such as myself who, for example, see the State of the Union address as a contemptible pseudo-monarchical spectacle unworthy of a free people, and those on the other side, including members of both parties, who desire majesty in government, who can’t imagine a free people managing their own affairs without a great deal of “oo ee oo aa aa, ting, tang, walla walla bing bang.” …
… The Supreme Court’s appearance of amateurism diminishes its carefully cultivated sense of mystery — it functions as a Greco-Roman mystery cult, complete with ceremonial robes and occult knowledge available only to initiates — and that thins the awe it inspires in the American people.
Without that awe, certain previously unthinkable thoughts become thinkable.
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