As you grow older, you drift politically to the left. (Well if you are a SC Judge)

Gucumatz

JS, secretly Rod Serling
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So I read an interesting article on our favorite data analysis website, 538.

There’s an old saw, often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 35, you have no brain.” A person should start left and drift right, and not the other way around, the adage suggests.1

But when it comes to Supreme Court justices, growing older appears to incite a trend in the opposite ideological direction. One prominent measure of judicial ideology — the Martin-Quinn score — illustrates this tendency. These scores, as DW-Nominate does for legislators, use the justices’ votes to quantify their position on a left-right spectrum. A more negative score means a justice is further left; a more positive score means she’s further right. The scores are based on data from the Supreme Court Database and are calculated back to 1937.

In the chart below, each series of connected points represents the career of one justice. The bold lines are the results of a simple linear regression for Republican-appointed or Democrat-appointed justices.2 Red indicates a justice nominated by a Republican president, blue a justice tapped by a Democrat.


A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.

The current nine justices haven’t been shielded from these westward winds. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who joined the court in 1988, has historically had a score solidly to the right of center, but last term he found himself slightly to the left for the first time. Justice Stephen Breyer has drifted from just left of center to solid liberal. Even Justice Antonin Scalia has liberalized somewhat from his extremely conservative positions in the late 1990s.


Why might this happen? What forces act upon a justice as he or she ages on the bench? Here are a few theories that emerged after I poked around and talked to some experts:

The Greenhouse Effect. I don’t mean the gases, I mean former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse. In order to avoid the wrath of Greenhouse and the Times, the theory goes, justices may not toe as hard a conservative line as they otherwise would have. “It seems that the primary objective of the Times’s legal reporters is to put activist heat on recently appointed Supreme Court justices,” federal judge Laurence Silberman said in a 1992 speech popularizing the theory. The more time the justices spend under this “pressure,” the more they might capitulate to it. There have been but a few references to a “Liptak Effect” — Adam Liptak took over for Greenhouse in 2008 — but it’s admittedly not as catchy a phrase.

The Cocktail Scene. Maybe the justices — human as they are, after all — want to fit in at parties. “Justices may be subject to influences by the Beltway cocktail scene and want to be perceived as reasonable and moderate,” Josh Blackman, a Supreme Court scholar at the South Texas College of Law, told me in an email. That assumes the cocktail set is liberal, what with its law professors and journalists. But that stereotype does exist in D.C. President Richard Nixon, for example, explicitly wondered if his Supreme Court nominee Harry Blackmun could “resist the Washington cocktail party circuit.”3

Science. Some sociological research has suggested that people simply get more liberal as they age, relative to their younger selves. This is measured, in this case, as an increase in “tolerance” — especially of “nontraditional” behaviors, family roles and the like. Pew Research Center has found that the relationship between age and ideology is complex — different generations age differently, ideologically, because they came of age in different political eras.

Historical Reputation. “History rarely remembers conservative justices kindly,” Maya Sen of Harvard told me in an email. “Conservatives wrote some of the most hated opinions in the canon — e.g., Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu.4 No one remembers the authoring judges kindly. By contrast, liberal opinions like Brown v. Board5 are quite celebrated.” In other words, perhaps justices move left to avoid being on what’s often referred to as “the wrong side of history.”

International Reputation. In Jeffrey Toobin’s book “The Nine,” he describes how influential international stays have been for justices, especially Kennedy’s time in Austria. A Supreme Court justice is afforded many opportunities for international travel, and foreign ideas may begin to rub off. This could liberalize opinions on issues such as the death penalty, which is all but extinct in Europe.
The Experience. “Justices develop a wider range of experiences as they age, including more exposure to gay and lesbian clerks, female clerks, young women facing family and career dynamics (their daughters perhaps), and single mothers,” Sen wrote. This may shift their ideology leftward, especially on social issues.
An Empyrean Ideal. If you squint, you can imagine all the justices’ careers converging at a Martin-Quinn score of around -1 — think Breyer. Perhaps there’s a One True SCOTUS Ideology, and it just takes a century on the court to get to it.
Martin-Quinn score co-creators Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn, along with their co-authors, have observed a similar “ideological drift” by justices. “Drift to the right or, more often, the left is the rule, not the exception,” they wrote in a 2007 journal article.

Certain justices are historical torchbearers of this liberalizing phenomenon. Justice William Brennan was nominated to the court, as a moderate, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. He went on to become the court’s liberal hero, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1993. Blackmun is another, having significantly altered his positions leftward on the death penalty, federalism and women’s rights, as Martin et al. point out.

Many on the right, including some Republican presidential candidates in the most recent debate, have expressed their dismay that Chief Justice John Roberts, too, has shifted left, citing his decisions on the Affordable Care Act. As Liptak of the Times has pointed out, however, this “buyer’s remorse” is largely unwarranted: Roberts has maintained a significantly conservative record during his decade on the bench. But even his Martin-Quinn score has drifted slightly leftward during that time.

It’s likely that the next president will get to nominate at least one Supreme Court justice. If so, that president will spend sleepless nights deliberating on the perfect nominee. The Senate will then grill that nominee in confirmation hearings. Someone will eventually be confirmed and take their seat in their big black leather chair. But they won’t be the same person for long.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/supreme-court-justices-get-more-liberal-as-they-get-older/





So what do you all think about this seeming trend over the last 70 or so years? The effect seems particularly pronounced among Republicans who shift leftward over time. Outside of the error on the Korematsu case (Hugo Black begs to differ with his categorization) I think the argument that Supreme Court justices don't want to be remembered as being on the wrong side of history is an interesting one. I think we have to also consider the fact that while the constitution is quite vague, it does bend toward to a degree of freedom which often goes in hand with cases that follow in the liberal tradition of the maintenance/expansion of civic and human rights
 
The Supreme Court is The Guardians of the Republic and guarding The Republic means being more left wing as the years go by :D
 
I think they are just following the trend of the nation as it becomes more left on social issues like civil rights, gay marriage, abortion and stuff like that. I do not think it reflects individual change caused by aging but cultural changes reflected in our supreme court.
 
Perhaps they are being secretly assaulted by cultural Marxists, social justice warriors, and other nefarious characters.
 
How many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren do these justices have?


Back when I was taking an intro Psychology class in college, I came across a study which found that almost all of us drift gradually "left" politically as we age.

However, in many people, this is more than offset by an even stronger tendency to shift rapidly to the political right every time one becomes acquainted with a new member of his or her own progeny.

Adults tend to become more conservative once they have their own children, but then grow more moderate or even liberal right up until the point they become grandparents. Extreme reactionaries usually have grandchildren already.

If the family size is small enough and the children/grand children are spaced out widely enough, then the gradual shift towards the left can overtake the rapid movements right. That does not happen in large families though.

Contrary to the stereotypes, young people tend to be relatively conservative. In our teens and early twenties, most of us still accept our parents' views of politics (which shifted right when they had us and our siblings). We become increasingly radical as we age, so long as we remain childless. The elderly who never have children are an extremely leftist demographic, whereas young couples with multiple children become very conservative.

The study claimed that it was not merely an effect of more conservative persons tending to have more children, as it tracked the same individuals through the course of their lives. Those who ended up more conservative after having kids were not any more conservative before reproducing than those who had fewer children and kept moving left.


Some hypothesize that becoming an authority figure over others who are too immature to make decisions for themselves makes us sympathize more with other authority figures rather than with those whom they boss around.

There is also a strong correlation between conservatism and fear, with everyone acting more conservative when frightened. It could be that worries about the safety of one's offspring make one cling more strongly to what is familiar.
 
How many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren do these justices have?


Back when I was taking an intro Psychology class in college, I came across a study which found that almost all of us drift gradually "left" politically as we age.

However, in many people, this is more than offset by an even stronger tendency to shift rapidly to the political right every time one becomes acquainted with a new member of his or her own progeny.

Adults tend to become more conservative once they have their own children, but then grow more moderate or even liberal right up until the point they become grandparents. Extreme reactionaries usually have grandchildren already.

If the family size is small enough and the children/grand children are spaced out widely enough, then the gradual shift towards the left can overtake the rapid movements right. That does not happen in large families though.

Contrary to the stereotypes, young people tend to be relatively conservative. In our teens and early twenties, most of us still accept our parents' views of politics (which shifted right when they had us and our siblings). We become increasingly radical as we age, so long as we remain childless. The elderly who never have children are an extremely leftist demographic, whereas young couples with multiple children become very conservative.

The study claimed that it was not merely an effect of more conservative persons tending to have more children, as it tracked the same individuals through the course of their lives. Those who ended up more conservative after having kids were not any more conservative before reproducing than those who had fewer children and kept moving left.


Some hypothesize that becoming an authority figure over others who are too immature to make decisions for themselves makes us sympathize more with other authority figures rather than with those whom they boss around.

There is also a strong correlation between conservatism and fear, with everyone acting more conservative when frightened. It could be that worries about the safety of one's offspring make one cling more strongly to what is familiar.



People hate their children and grandchildren that much? :mischief:
 
My alternative hypothesis: US politics have been moving to the right, so a judge that has been holding on to his views has apparently moved to the left.
 
To be fair, Judges can effort to be more idealistic. It is their job to deal in ideals.
Kind of a baseless assumption that left equals idealism.
 
My alternative hypothesis: US politics have been moving to the right, so a judge that has been holding on to his views has apparently moved to the left.
If I'm understanding the Martin Quinn measure they're using, it's not this. It seems like this scoring is based entirely around an individual judge's position against data about all of the judges, with no reference to external politics or society.

Can anyone clarify?
 
Contrary to the stereotypes, young people tend to be relatively conservative. In our teens and early twenties, most of us still accept our parents' views of politics (which shifted right when they had us and our siblings).

That much seems to be true for me, except for maybe what's written in the brackets (although I am not saying that part is not correct - it seems that it might be - I'm just saying I don't want to comment on it)

When I was young I agreed with my parents' politics 100%, as much as I understood them anyway. Poland was communist at the time and my parents were 100% against that and that's pretty much the extent of my exposure to their politics. There were no political parties in existence other than the evil communists (tm), so political discussions were a bit different. First of all you would not want to criticize the party in public, so everyone had to be careful when they spoke.. so there was less political talk overall. But in private they mostly supported the free market, stood against communism and collectivist principles, and stood behind ideals of freedom of movement, religion, expression, etc. Those sorts of politics are very easy to stand behind, even as an 8 year old! I could see the long lines for meat every month and I did not know anything else, but the frustration with the system my parents felt was evident.

Now they dislike far-left or even slightly-far-left parties like the NDP because "they are too close to being communist" - which I disagree with. They also usually do not vote Liberal, as they see the Liberals as a party that likes to spend, raise taxes, mismanage financial matters, etc. Which is partially true, but the disagreement here is too complex to get into. They vote Conservative, mainly because I think that party is as far as possible from "being communist" as mainstreammy possible (that's a word now, ok??) .. Plus the conservative social values appeal to them a lot - since they grew up in a very socially and religiously conservative place. Mind you I think of them as more progressive than not - but they are against homosexual marriage, even though they believe in evolution, the big bang theory, are scientifically literate, etc.

So I realize that my situation is very unique.. but.. I've seen my parents drift to the right, the older they get. An "FWD: Muslim takeover of Canada" email would for example totally engage my father, especially after 9/11, and he sees the conservatives also having an anti-Muslim-encroachment stance, so he throws his hat in their ring. It seems to me that the older you get, the easier it is for you to fall prey to those right-wing propaganda-like emails and ideas, and that's one reason I think my parents have been shifting to the right.

Why wouldn't that be true for other people though? I mean, my case is very unique, but I've always been under the impression that the older you get, the more you drift to the right. I've seen this in my parents and their friends - but mind you, again, most of their friends also grew up under a communist regime in Poland.
 
If I'm understanding the Martin Quinn measure they're using, it's not this. It seems like this scoring is based entirely around an individual judge's position against data about all of the judges, with no reference to external politics or society.

Can anyone clarify?

I am not sure I understand this correctly, but my take is this;
That it is entirely based on comparing individual judge's against each other is exactly why it cannot distinguish between the judges moving left or the entire court moving right (because of new right-wing judges joining), which would lead to the individual judges apparently moving left. If a left-wing extremist leaves and a right-wing extremist joins, a judge in the middle might find himself on the left side of the court more often, influencing his score, even if his ideals did not change at all.

I do not think this system has a fixed zero, but the zero can drift over time, which might lead to judges drifting as well.
 
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