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Nearly fifty years after our nation’s last nervous breakdown, a breakthrough:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes:

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

If true, it is the most explosive thing to happen in that time.

In the meanwhile, we have this:

A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.

I had my doubts about Kavanaugh coming through on this:

But another is an unmistakable conclusion from the last fracas over his social life: Kavanaugh is a party animal.  That in turn leads one to believe that Kavanaugh will never overturn Roe v. Wade outright.  Why?  Party animals, especially preppy ones, need abortion.  At his level in society, such things are not moral issues to be decided but problems to be fixed.  Abortion may be the final option available, but for such things option it is.

But, as of now, he has.

This is going to be ugly. But I am pleasantly surprised. It’s worth noting that the justices didn’t find a right to life in our Constitution, but plan to return the matter to the people’s elected representatives, both federal and state. Those elected representative have obtained a fifty year reprieve on the subject, as was the case with contraception. Our elected representatives hate topics like this, but this is what they’re paid to do, and it’s time they do it. Much of what is wrong with this Republic stems from the way the legislative branch has been able to hand off the hard decisions to the judiciary, and this is one less they can slough off.

In its dealings with first the Chinese and later with the Soviets, one of the first things Vulcan learned was the difference between hard and soft currency. That was true both in the travel expenses and in the process of selling equipment (and later buying equipment and technology.) Let’s start with the Chinese: this notice […]

Hard Currency, Soft Currency and Dollar Hegemony — vulcanhammer.info

He told us this…

Woven through Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016, is an orthodox conservatism that places the blame for the endemic social problems from which its author escaped at his community’s own doorstep: its habit of worklessness and shirking of responsibility, among other cultural defects. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese,” writes Vance. “These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”

But now that he’s running for the U.S. Senate…

Then he gets to the part of the message with bite: “Our idiot leaders decided to do that to us. And I hate to use that term but sometimes it’s important to be direct about what’s going on… Our leaders have played a very dangerous and, I think, very ugly game with the American people. They’ve decided that they’re going to divide us against each other and distract us with constant appeals to race, to sex, to gender, to everything other than what I really think matters in this country.”

So which is right? The answer is both.

I’ve hammered on the deficiencies of the Scots-Irish for a long time, before Hillbilly Elegy came out. Vance is right on these cultural deficiencies. He should know: he had to overcome them to get anywhere in life. Getting an entire culture to get past 350+ years of deep dysfunction isn’t easy, but it’s necessary to start somewhere.

But he’s also right about the oligarchic nature of American elites and their idea of staying in power. (Just check out our Gini coefficient…) So how to square the two? A simple approach would be to take a class-based approach. But this was shut off by Scots-Irish like Forrest McDonald, who recognised the following:

Beyond that, an economic view won’t sit well with those who are left behind.  One of the major lacunae of the Beard saga is the South after the Civil War, which just about falls off of the radar screen.  Southerners had to face the hard question, “How did we get left behind?” Instead of focusing on the weaknesses of their own cultures–planter and Scots-Irish together–they changed the subject to things such as states rights, or their problems with the black people, or whatever.  Needless to say those who were on the wrong end of their way liked it even less, which is why we had the civil rights movement sixty years ago and Black Lives Matter today.

They even managed to get the Scots-Irish written out as a separate ethnic group! The left has turned this on its head and the result is that we fight over identity issues when we should be debating economic ones. (Had fellow Scots-Irish Elizabeth Warren gotten past that, the result in 2020 could have been much different.)

Personally I’ve been unenthusiastic about Vance’s candidacy. I’ve had enough of the mind games and intellectual slights of hand that the Scots-Irish excel in. The vanguard of conservatism needs to find a new home, and until that happens we’ll stumble from one fiasco to another.