Our collective descent into ignorance is alarming enough on its own, but when you combine it with a reinvigorated sense of political correctness, the result is a level of outrage that seems to neatly correlate with general stupidity. And so it was when Jeff Sessions spoke to the National Sheriffs’ Association in Washington on February 12 and said the following: “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”
For people with room-temperature IQs, this was the damning proof they had been waiting for. Sessions either outed himself as a racist by using the term “Anglo-American” or was cynically appealing to racists and white supremacists who keep their dental fillings tuned to the frequency he was broadcasting on.
As it happens, the American legal system is directly descended from the English common law. The Scrapbook is old enough to remember being taught in junior high that the book young Abe Lincoln stayed up late reading by candlelight was William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. This was not mere self-improvement; it was an indispensable part of his legal education—on the American frontier. And Sessions is indisputably correct that the office of sheriff is part of this inheritance as well. (“Sheriff of Nottingham” ring any bells?)
While many of these p.c. controversies are tempests in a social media teapot, this one spilled over into politics in astonishing ways. Here is what Senator Brian Schatz, Hawaii Democrat, had to say about Sessions’s remark: “Do you know anyone who says ‘Anglo-American heritage’ in a sentence? What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling.”
What’s really appalling here is that Schatz, who is one of only a hundred citizens in this country with the awesome responsibility of confirming federal judges, is wholly ignorant of the most basic terminology and facts underpinning our legal system. The ACLU’s Twitter account similarly expressed alarm: “Yes, our Attorney General just said this. Out loud.”
Oddly enough, when another prominent and well-known politician referred to habeas corpus as a “writ that has been in place in the Anglo-American legal system for over 700 years” there was no such outrage. We can safely assume that former constitutional law professor Barack Obama knows how to use the phrase correctly—he did so multiple times, out loud, over the course of his political career—and no one said boo. And when Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall referred to our “Anglo-American heritage” in the concurring opinion of Thompson v. Oklahoma, an important death penalty case, we can safely assume this was not a racist dog whistle.
At the risk of being accused of pitting Americans against each other, we would observe that America is increasingly divided, though not necessarily along moral or class or racial lines. There are those who are literate enough to responsibly discuss politics and those who aren’t. And it seems the latter group is getting bigger and louder all the time.
