THE ENIGMA OF CLARENCE THOMAS

By Corey Robin

CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION

By Myron Magnet

One of the most puzzling and disturbing aspects of our present crisis of populist extremism and racist revanchism is the fact that the nation’s most zealous legal reactionary is a black man: Clarence Thomas, President Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice. How could a man whose rise from the depths of Jim Crow to one of the highest and most powerful positions in the nation so relentlessly turn against the civil rights movement and liberal state that made his ascent possible? How could a cruelly mocked victim of racism and intraracial color prejudice come to hold all victims in contempt? Why would someone from the impoverished inner city become the leading defender of the carceral state and American plutocracy? How could a black man who claims to loathe the memory of Jim Crow assail all integration policies, and defend states’ rights and racially targeted gerrymandering, all while living happily with a white wife? What drives Clarence Thomas?

These two works offer very different answers to such questions. In “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,” Corey Robin, a leftist political scientist at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, warns against dismissing Thomas as a mere extremist, or making the patronizing assumption that he does not have a jurisprudence. Myron Magnet, a right-wing editor and writer, praises Thomas in “Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution” as the “Founders’ grandson” as surely as Lincoln (in the historian Richard Brookhiser’s words) was the “Founders’ son.” According to Magnet, Thomas is an intellectual heavyweight propounding the farsighted vision that “there is no government solution.” His originalist jurisprudence “has blazed a trail to liberty that future justices can follow” in the dismantlement of the “administrative state.”

The secret key to understanding Thomas, Robin writes, is race: “Thomas is a black nationalist whose conservative jurisprudence rotates around an axis of black interests and concerns.” The remarkable achievement of Robin’s thoroughly researched, cogently argued work is that it makes a compelling case for what is, initially, a startling argument. Thomas, it is well known, was a black nationalist and disciple of Malcolm X during his college years: He rejected integration and strongly believed that race and racism were immutable, that liberalism and white benevolence were emasculating forms of patronage that led to dependency, the denial of black pride and any assurance in blacks’ own achievements. All that they needed was to be left alone and guaranteed their right to be armed for self-defense.

Contrary to what Magnet and other white admirers assume, Robin shows that Thomas never gave up this deep-seated black nationalism. He systematically goes through Thomas’s copious work to show that race informs it all. Thus, Thomas rejects affirmative action not because it harms whites, as other conservatives claim, but because it harms blacks, brands them with a “badge of inferiority,” elevates whites to the status of benefactors and perpetuates white supremacy. Policies aimed at the desegregation of schools and housing are rejected because they imply that blacks are inferior and need whites to learn how to create viable communities. Thomas has declared flatly that “the whole push to assimilate simply does not make sense to me.”