It is striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”
— Omedi Ochieng, “Analytic Moral Philosophy and the Affect of Masculine Reason”
Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when — particularly when — it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded — too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”
Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it… A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules — leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative — but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”
That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence — and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility — some might say masochism — and why he warms Scalia’s heart.
— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind
I’ve long admired Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s internalized Michael Kinsley’s warning that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, taking his arguments to thought frontiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone service and sometimes barely enough air to breathe. For examples of the Williamson oeuvre, see these National Review pieces arguing against reparations, decrying the mainstreaming of transgender rights, critiquing the “white working class” and dismissing the idea of “white supremacy.”
Every Williamson article contains strong meat, which has led his detractors to dismiss him as a troll. But that’s not who he is. He’s really more of an ogre who loves to take arguments to the breaking point in hopes of shocking readers with his cold, unbound logic. Where other writers might serve 7 percent alcohol in their brew, Williamson likes to up his percentage to 20. Where other writers might stop at mean, Williamson keeps going all the way to cruel.
I never read Williamson in hopes of seeking agreement. And on that score, he has almost never failed me. He’s not interested in building consensus or in gentle persuasion. He reduces all the grays to their black-and-white components. He pushes boundaries and doesn’t stop until he’s gone too far. In a 2014 piece about transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, he dropped bombs when a sling-shot would have sufficed: “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.”
— Jack Shafer, “Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson,” Politico Magazine, April 06, 2018