“His Leninism is admirable.” Mid-afternoon on Friday, at the outset, his message baffles me. Another one. “The right is Leninist. We are abnormal.” Now I think I’m starting to get it.
It’s been less than an hour since the United States Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion and I don’t know where my friend Pablo Muñoz is, but he’s cool. To answer I hook the last sentences of the ruling. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority to themselves. Now we overturn those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Pablo, immune to all moral hypochondria, does not allow himself to be scandalized from any superiority, but continues with the shrapnel of his political analysis to understand why an unimaginable regression has occurred. “They have been educating judges and elites to achieve this since the 1990s.” I gather he is thinking of the conservative legal movement. To continue the conversation, I start looking for information like crazy.
After the disruption of the 1970s, this ideological current emerged in Nixon’s circles, claiming the need for a legal counterrevolution. From the start, it was about reversing the attack that, from his point of view, the economic system was suffering at the hands of the liberal elite. The vault key of the reaction was the judiciary and its potential to act as the main power due to its ability to direct and control economic, political and social change. It was about implementing a Leninist strategy. They tried to embed themselves in law schools, to begin with, then multiply the list of conservative judges and, finally, gain the maximum possible influence to place themselves on the Supreme Court. A political influence that, according to Professor Steven M. Teles ―author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement― won in the Republican Party by aligning their agenda with that of religious conservatives.
The paradigmatic example of this has been the career and appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, portrayed by Margaret Talbot a few months ago in The New Yorker. Born in 1972, a brilliant graduate of Notre Dame Catholic College and a scholarship recipient of conservative legal movement platforms, in 2006 she put her signature on a manifesto that argued that it was “time to end the barbaric legacy of Roe contra Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” She was the ideal candidate for Donald Trump to fulfill one of his promises to the conservative movement: repeal Roe contra Wade. He had pointed out the way to achieve it by fixing a list of pro-life judges published by himself. During his first election campaign, this libertine supremacist did so with hundreds of thousands of reactionary votes. It was explicitly about consolidating a broad conservative majority in the court in the Leninist way, that is, occupying the institutions to subvert their mechanics and impose an alternative order outside the legislative one. A few days before the 2020 elections, in stoppage time, Barrett was appointed as a Supreme Court justice to replace (what a bitter irony!) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And abortion returned to the Supreme Court. The success of the conservative movement was precisely at stake on this issue. In an article published in the trumpist The Federalist, the nationalist activist Rachel Bovard was transparent. Democrats and Republicans would have caused a disturbing reversal of functions in the division of powers. Whenever polarization paralyzes parliamentary activity, “the judges are our politicians now”: they are the ones who legislate because they are responsible for deciding “the profound questions of our social order.” Now they could win. “We have played the long game for the last 50 years and we have finally reached the decisive moment.”
I think it’s time to read The war of the judges, by Martín Pallín so that at least, in the following one, we would not once again be left with the face of idiots before the miserable force of fanaticism.
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