Taki Magazine

Like the wife of David Frum, who blurted out the fact that her spouse had written the “axis of evil” speech for Dubya, I feel impelled to give voice to family pride. My younger son Jonathan, who has clerked for a while for Sonia Sotomayor, produced several of the speeches that this judge has delivered since going to DC, including the new Justice’s praise of a “more perfect union” given earlier in the week. Jonathan is a gifted wordsmith, who has also done well as a corporate attorney. He and I obviously do not share the same political views, but I can still feel pride for what he has accomplished—and what he has avoided.

What Jonathan has accomplished should be plain. His verbal skills have been on display repeatedly on network TV, and he has managed to turn a less than brilliant beneficiary of affirmative action into a reasonably eloquent public speaker. He has also been able to take our familial gift for language and make it available to a public of tens of millions, a destiny that was denied to his father because of the power and hatred of ideological enemies.

Equally to his credit, Jonathan did not turn into a copy of Max Boot or of the other minicon propagandists at the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. He decided to join the multicultural Left rather than to pose as a member of the phony resistance. He also found that he could not accept the unchangeable “movement conservative” dogmas about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the neoconservative call for a global democratic foreign policy. Given the scant political options offered by the establishment media and their manufactured “public opinion,” it seems that my worldly son may have made a relatively honorable choice. Once when asked what kind of position I might have taken had I joined the Left, I immediately responded “a Stalinist who would be able to go after the Trotskyists.” Unfortunately that option is no longer available for me or my son.