has been catching flak because he says that politically, Donald Trump’s SOTU was effective, whether you think he told the truth all through it and whether you are a supporter or not. Some on the left seem to think that Cillizza has the responsibility to adhere to their ideological preferences when critiquing Trump. Some have unsubscribed from Cillizza’s Substack because of his failure to conform.
The roles of Cillizza and Coney are different, of course. But also similar. Cillizza is a political journalist who has tried to be a fair-minded analyst calling the balls and strikes as he sees them. Coney is a justice also meant, to borrow Chief Justice Roberts’s phrase, to be an umpire who calls balls and strikes fairly, irrespective of politics. In the cases of both Cillizza and Coney though, adherents of particular political ideologies seem to expect absolute conformity from them.
But that’s not how things are meant to work in a constitutional republic, a system built to accommodate varied views from which consensus and compromise can emerge.
Besides, as I commented on Cillizza’s live YouTube Q-and-A today, if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant.
Political ideology is one of the foremost idolatries of our day. Ideologies, for many, are their gods. As always happens when one becomes caught up in cults, God and life with God gets lost. So does reason.
[An AP photo of President Trump greeting Justice Amy Coney Barrett before the State of the Union message this past Tuesday.]
