That’s not much of a proxy. I’m relying on my subjective impressions from many reports. A more precise phrasing of my claim is that I’ve seen numerous reports of what I consider to be open contempt for the rule of law among elected officials, but judges in newsworthy cases have almost always looked like they’re trying to take the law seriously.
Some of my impressions come from a private mailing list where conservative lawyers have been expressing dismay at the Trump administration’s lack of interest in whether their actions could plausibly be defended in a court.
I would say that vibes are a much worse proxy than overall public opinion—especially if you have partisan leanings and don’t attempt to temper their effects.
Some of my impressions come from a private mailing list where conservative lawyers
Since 2016, there has been a small but very vocal contingent of neoconservatives that get trotted around as “conservative <insert profession here>”, but whose priors WRT anything Trump does are closer to the leftmost quartile of Democrats than to the median Republican, or even the median Independent. A common drinking game among news-readers is to search for articles of the format “Conservative Commentator says <thing that one would very much not expect a right-wing American to say>”, and take a swig if the unnamed conservative commentator turns out to be Erick Erickson, Bill Kristol, or David French. The three of them alone cover about seventy five percent of these articles, and you can pick another three names to cover 75 percent of the rest.
This is to say that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of believing that your views are universal because a cherrypicked set of Fox News Liberals (of either party) are serving as your model for the ‘reasonable opposition’. Hard data may not be perfect, but it’s essential in emotionally fraught domains.
That’s not much of a proxy. I’m relying on my subjective impressions from many reports. A more precise phrasing of my claim is that I’ve seen numerous reports of what I consider to be open contempt for the rule of law among elected officials, but judges in newsworthy cases have almost always looked like they’re trying to take the law seriously.
Some of my impressions come from a private mailing list where conservative lawyers have been expressing dismay at the Trump administration’s lack of interest in whether their actions could plausibly be defended in a court.
I would say that vibes are a much worse proxy than overall public opinion—especially if you have partisan leanings and don’t attempt to temper their effects.
Since 2016, there has been a small but very vocal contingent of neoconservatives that get trotted around as “conservative <insert profession here>”, but whose priors WRT anything Trump does are closer to the leftmost quartile of Democrats than to the median Republican, or even the median Independent. A common drinking game among news-readers is to search for articles of the format “Conservative Commentator says <thing that one would very much not expect a right-wing American to say>”, and take a swig if the unnamed conservative commentator turns out to be Erick Erickson, Bill Kristol, or David French. The three of them alone cover about seventy five percent of these articles, and you can pick another three names to cover 75 percent of the rest.
This is to say that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of believing that your views are universal because a cherrypicked set of Fox News Liberals (of either party) are serving as your model for the ‘reasonable opposition’. Hard data may not be perfect, but it’s essential in emotionally fraught domains.