With Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court we have to live though a plethora of opinion pieces trying to define this nominee on the political spectrum. The same questions come up each time, are they liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, left or right.
As a libertarian, I’m all too very familiar with the annoyance of having others summing up my views as either left or right. Watching Supreme Court nominees go through the process always brings out empathy for the nominee because labeling is something libertarians constantly deal with.
There is no absolute mutually agreed upon scale to sum up political views. Labeling the political philosophy of others is relative to the philosophy of the one offering the opinion.
Bill Ayers sees President Obama as a moderate and Ann Coulter sees John McCain as left-wing. Europeans see most of American politicians as being conservative and the reverse is true that Americans see European politicians as liberals.
Summing up all a person’s views as either being left or right isn’t very informative. From what’s floating around the blogs, Elena Kagan is not liberal enough for endorsing the Bush administration’s category of ‘enemy combatant’ and too liberal for kicking military recruiters off a college campus.
Not that my opinion of the next person on the Supreme Court matters, but instead of applying a label to their views, please list the view in question and then explain the view relative to well known politicians views and spare me the labels.
