Legal Conservatives Now Want to Move Beyond Originalism

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Its kind of like the Presidency. Everyone on the right is a Whig until they take the Presidency and then they become either Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton in short order.

Likewise with the judiciary, now that they have it, the urge is to use it.

It also strikes at the heart of what I have been saying for years in terms of historical analysis. It is less important in defining historical political orientation to examine "how" a group intends to do something, as opposed to what their end goal is (broadly defined) and who they are doing it for.

For my own view this kind of a shift is not an "abandonment of conservatism" but a tactical decision to trade in one set of tools for a different one, like one switches between a flat head and a Phillips head screw driver. A similar process that took place forty, seventy or one hundred years ago (depending on the topic in question), but it in reverse.

On a similar note, it speaks to level of contrived nature to the philosophical justifications for the tactical approaches (the how referenced above). As I have routinely stated, interests determine policy, and then the philosophical justifications are contrived afterwards. You can just as easily have conservativism manifest as establishment instead of populist, as big government instead of small government, as corporatist or anti-corporatist, and as lassiez-faire or interventionist economically speaking, depending on who the dominant force is within those entities and what their relation is to the socio-political scene.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think a big mistake being made here is the assumption that it is impossible for their to be more than one "pro-state" political party at a time. We are used to such because that is the dynamic of the last several decades, but there have been times when their was a consensus about the role of government in society and it was merely a case of whose team one to determine who benefitted from the largess.

Our partisan press, extreme cultural divisions and deep tribalistic animosity between the two parties would seem to push in that direction as does the recent Republican hypocrisy when it comes to railing against state power only to expand it once in office. A new spoils system if you will.