Ezra Klein's hollowness exposed

As I've stated here before, I often run into leftie punditry that sticks in my craw and consider taking it on myself here - and then run across a great refutation that says pretty much what I would have.

Such is the case with Charles C.W. Cooke's dismantling of Ezra Klein's argument in favor of California's new sexual-consent law.

The floor is yours, Mr. Cooke:

Ezra Klein . . . yesterday afternoon argued in no uncertain terms that we should disregard the due-process rights of accused rapists in the name of bringing about social change. California’s controversial new sexual-consent law, Klein wrote, was little short of “terrible,” and yet, because he agrees with its intentions, he has decided to “completely support it” anyhow. “If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously,” Klein explained, “it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent.” “This,” he concluded, “is the case against it and also the case for it.”

Or, rather: What is terrible about this law is, in fact, what is wonderful about it. The law’s “overreach,” Klein says, is “precisely its value,” authorities having hit upon “a necessarily extreme solution to an extreme problem.” That “cold winter” of which he writes? That’s a feature not a bug, the measure’s virtue being, in Klein’s words, that it will “create a world where men are afraid” enough of the authorities that they “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” All in all, Klein adduces, “The Yes Means Yes law could also be called the You Better Be Pretty Damn Sure law.”

That’s one option, certainly. Another modest proposal might be, “An Enabling Act for the Salem Rape Culture Trials.” 

For Klein, this matter is so urgent, legal niceties must go by the wayside:

[A]ttempts to micromanage the personal and subjective realm of private sexual behavior will inevitably end up undermining due process. Alarmingly, Klein doesn’t even bother to pretend that this will not be the case. Instead, he describes the subversion of presumed innocence as the idea’s central virtue:

Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.
Or, as he puts it somewhat eerily later on, “ugly problems don’t always have pretty solutions.”

Criticizing this approach, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noted that Klein is essentially “arguing for false convictions as a conscious strategy in order to strike fear into the innocent.” This, Chait suggested represents “a conception of justice totally removed from the liberal tradition.” Chait is correct. Indeed, this is as brazen an example of illiberalism as I have seen for a good while. And yet I’m not at all sure why we are supposed to be so taken aback by it. Even if it were the case that the average American “liberal” was a champion of individual rights and due process, it would be wholly irrelevant to this case. Why? Well, because Ezra Klein isn’t a “liberal” in any meaningful sense of that word . . . 

Of course, that word, like so many in our lexicon, has had its meaning markedly distorted over the last century:

Genuine “liberals” — those in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith, and not of Herbert Croly or Rachel Maddow — do not forsake timeless principle for last night’s orthodoxy because, for them, due process is as important today as it was at the time of Magna Carta. Ezra Klein, by contrast, appears to be something of a weathervane. Forced to choose between the universal principles of the Enlightenment and the transient pressure of this year’s moral panic, he plumped squarely for the latter. For shame.

To a significant degree, what is going on with this law, and Klein's grotesque grounds for championing it, is to stomp the last vestiges of romance out of male-female encounters.  We are to approach the formerly magical and exhilarating moment of chemistry between two people naturally (by virtue of being of opposite genders) predisposed to move closer together in a pointy-headed bureaucratic manner better suited to a Six Sigma project, where every minute development is exhaustively documented.

Much of my motivation for immersing myself in the study of jazz had to do with my fascination with the Great American Songbook - those wonderful tunes by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren - and its encapsulation of the above-mentioned magic of romance.  It's a body of artistry amassed during the peak of our culture's greatness.  In post-America, it's been reduced to a collection of museum pieces.

"Let's Fall In Love" and "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" are beyond quaint now.  In the age of dental dams and consent documentation, they are as remote to the cattle-masses as Gregorian chants.