Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a mistake. A few days ago, she was asked by Katie Couric what she thought about NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest during the national anthem. Ginsburg called the protest “dumb and disrespectful”, though she noted that the quarterback had done nothing illegal.
Despite Ginsburg’s long record of service, elements of the left did not hesitate to rush out pieces on how the “Notorious RBG”, the meme about Ginsburg the snarky liberal activist judge, was dead. Black website The Root attacked “the so-called liberal justice who is apparently more offended by peaceful protests than the systemic violence to which those protests respond.”
And while Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern called Ginsburg a “progressive hero”, he also chastised her for not understanding how the old, traditional protests in the style of Martin Luther King Jr. just do not work anymore and that this means that Black Lives Matter has to be disruptive to succeed.
But while these people did not hesitate to attack Ginsburg, it largely turns out that she made a mistake and talked about something which she had not paid much attention to like giving advice on reverse mortgages. Ginsburg released an apology afterwards where she admitted that she was “barely aware of the incident or its purpose.” It is not surprising to believe that an 83-year old woman may not pay too much attention to whatever is happening in the football world.
This entire incident arose from a small mistake where Ginsburg spoke before doing her research. But for far too many activists, that one mistake caused an outpouring of anger without even giving someone who has done so much for the liberal cause a chance to explain herself. This is a problem.
If you do not understand why, just look across the aisle as a certain orange presidential candidate delves into conspiracy fear-mongering. The Republican Party and the conservative cause are in the state they are in today precisely because their activists did not hesitate to tar and feather anyone who deviated the slightest step from conservative orthodoxy. This led to more and more radical candidates before culminating in Trump, who now appears poised to bring his party crashing down about his head.
But while the Republican may have gotten where it is by its relentless extremism, remember that this can happen to liberalism as well. If anything, the history of liberalism is filled with incidents where fragmentation and radicalization eventually destroyed liberal reforms. From the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the inability of British liberals in the late 1970s to unite against Thatcherism, it is normally conservatives who unite and stop liberals who fight with each other on everything and anything.
It is now as the right-wing movement is so disunited that it becomes more important than ever for the left to unite and push forward for real change in America. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a mistake. But she understood that she made a mistake and owned up to it, which makes her better than most people in politics today. Let us put this little incident behind us and move forward towards tackling the problem of racial injustice in America. There is no doubt that someone of Ginsburg’s wisdom and experience can play a role in that challenge.