There are many reasons that George H.W. Bush chose to nominate Thomas, but one of them is almost surely that Thomas is black. The seat Thomas was nominated to fill was the one left by Thurgood Marshall, who retired in declining health.
Justice Thurgood Marshall was a consistent liberal vote and a strong proponent of civil rights protections. Before becoming a Justice himself, Marshall argued dozens of civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall’s “sliding-scale” situation-informed style would seem to be in direct conflict with Thomas’s unyielding “textual originalism.”
I was in my early 20s that summer when the Clarence Thomas confirmation, and Anita Hill’s testimony, were everywhere on the news. I even remember it in an episode of the sitcom Designing Women, albeit in a plausibly deniable “bothsides” kind of way. The story raged because of its high stakes and titillating content, but it also prompted some frank. worthwhile discussion about some uncomfortable topics.
And then Thomas publicly complained that the sexual harassment complaints against him amounted to a “high-tech lynching.” And then, slowly but surely, we all came to understand it was pretty much over.
“He played the race card,” his detractors complained. But his supporters answered, weren’t those detractors playing the race card too? What if the real racist is the person who automatically assumes the word “lynching” was intended to be taken in a race-related context in the first place?
It went back and forth like that for a while, as the public spotlight on the story faded out. But we weren’t talking about Anita Hill’s testimony anymore. We weren’t even talking about Thomas’s suitability as a Supreme Court Justice anymore. It was pretty much all “race card” stuff from there on out.
There are many, many reasons that GHWB nominated Thomas. At least one of them is that Thomas is black, and that it would have been a bad look (politically and otherwise) to nominate someone who was not black to replace Marshall.
Thomas is black. That gives him the right to “play the race card,” as far as I’m concerned. But fair play calls for laying your cards on the table, for everyone to see. Thomas has always cared more about the cards he keeps up his sleeve.
What does that mean though, “anti-war party,” “anti-war politician”?
Did your “anti-war party” stop being so because they’d ended the war we were in? And if so, wasn’t that a good thing, for those with an “anti-war” outlook?
Back in the late 1930s, I’m pretty sure America’s “anti-war party” was mostly isolationists and some Nazi sympathizers. It was FDR, one of the most progressive Democrats ever elected to the office, who led the country to war back then.
If your entire political belief system is based on avoiding war at all costs, you deny yourself any real-world context in exchange for that purist ideology.
Those who are anti-war above all else lose everything they have and everything they stand for, the first time someone (anyone!) else decides to threaten them with war. The first time that someone sneak-attacks their Pearl Harbor, or crashes planes into their Twin Towers, or whatever else.
Maybe war is like abortion (in this singularly metaphorical political sense). Nobody ever really wants it to happen, and most people do their best to try to avoid it for themselves and others. Yet sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, it ends up being the safest and healthiest way, sometimes the only way, out of an untenable situation not completely of our own making.
I’m not arguing that World War II was a “good” war and that W. Bush’s Iraq was a “bad” war. That may comport with my personal beliefs, but my real point is that everyone has their own personal beliefs. Everyone has something that is most important to them.
If you say that war is never justified for any reason, then you are also saying that your call for pacifism is more important than whatever the reason for the war may be. Not just more important for you, but for everyone else too.