Election 2016, The Primary Diary, Part Two

Read Part I

By Rick Moody

While my notes about the presidential elections past, in 2008 and 2012, confined themselves in large measure to the Republican fields, where the drama was, this year has proven to feature an exceedingly fractious and divisive Democratic primary. The ensuing situation has been slightly awkward for me, because in the process of getting it all down I have unavoidably needed to speak about my own voting habits. In general I’m more passionate about observation than about politicking. I don’t think I know more than anyone else, I just have been around, paying attention, for some decades. My admissions about my choice in the Democratic primary, therefore, are more about human emotions than about ideological crusading. In fact, my political position is exactly opposed to ideological crusading, as it is about using cautious evaluation and humanism for political discernment. My ultimate goal is to prevent anyone in the Republican field from becoming president of the United States, and any ephemeral outrage about my Democratic brothers and sisters should appear fleeting and subject to change.

February 23, 2016

As I have remarked before, the Antonin Scalia judicial phenomenon is not only about remarkable partisanship, partisanship above all other things, and the perversion of justice until justice is merely an enforcement mechanism for plutocracy. It’s not only about that. It’s also about reading. Scalia is Bill Gates in the following way. Like Bill Gates, who parlayed an incredibly clever argument about code as a copyright issue into a massive empire, Scalia’s particular genius was for an incredibly clever legal argument, which could be abbreviated thus: let’s get back to the original constitution. This idea is clever, because immediately it sets about the task of declaring originalism to inhere in a particular way of reading the document, namely literally. The intent of originalism is borrowed from biblical literalism, it seems, in that it declares that there could be a way of declaring the words on the page to be interpretation-proof. It’s plain as day! Right there on the page! 

Literalism is an incredibly popular style of reading, across the globe, because it requires the least effort. For those who are afraid of ambiguities, polyphonies, ironies, and differences in cultural context, literalism gives the veneer of certainty, though down below the certainty a surplus of anxiety threatens to bubble forth. Islam has its literalists, and certainly Christianity has its literalists. It’s the mark of the sophistication of Judaism and Taoism, perhaps, that their interpretations shift over the centuries. For those faiths, multiplicities are welcomed.

Scalia’s idea that we could somehow divine the intent of the framers of the constitution is...