Kontextmaschine

27th September 2021

Post reblogged from argumate with 199 notes

kontextmaschine:
If conservatives get a lock on the Supreme Court it would represent the culmination of multi-generational movements to undo its capture by progressivism since either 1937 (for the economic conservatives, the “switch in time that saved nine”) or the 1960s (for the sociocultural conservatives, the Warren Court)
But that does set it apart from other 2020 narratives of bills coming due or corruption through decay – the oil companies didn’t particularly want harsher weather, the law-and-order types didn’t want a backlash.
Social media companies wanted engagement thus ad revenue, not this public sphere. Unitary executive supporters wanted a civil service that acts like presidential elections mean something, not this pandemic.
But the Court, a lot of people for a long time wanted exactly this and put a lot of effort into it. Same as conservative media cultivating a more rightist electorate.
I mean, they wanted a more conservative Court, they put effort into building a judicial apparatus, they got it.
They wanted a more conservative electorate, they put effort into convincing them and they got it.
They wanted a more conservative legislature so they consolidated in the Republican Party, converted Southern Democrats, built up in statehouses, Newt Gingrich in the 80s, a Republican majority under Clinton, something like a conservative one under Obama…
Like all along, the “the current year” stuff, it’s now “it’s 2020, we can’t have a reactionary moment now!” And the response is “yeah, it’s 2020, we just finished our long march through the institutions, capturing them according to established procedures (as modified by established meta-procedures), this is exactly when we earned a reactionary moment!”
I’m still curious exactly what happens when the dog catches the car though, because either they stall and it turns out they were bluffing this whole time or they enact the Conservative Program and then what, blue states start going their own way?

The American left made a lot of policy gains through the Supreme Court in the “Warren Court” of the 1950s-60s that the right resented the hell out of and fulminated about upsetting the established order over, and a lot of that later got caveated or walked back somehow, but the country held together.

Tagged: amhist