Legal Conservatives Now Want to Move Beyond Originalism

[Aurelius]

Vermeule is like a particularly loathsome mix of William F. Buckley & Mencius Moldbug, without even the business-savvy of Buckley or the ability to code & actually make a good argument of Yarvin.

Or he's just in the middle of a decade-long performance art piece designed to show how absurd the tenure system for legal academics is... I hope.

But yeah, this dude's employment at Harvard & The Atlantic's decision to publish him should be an absolute scandal. We have plenty of radical-right Christian websites providing a venue for this kind of bigoted insanity.

Buckley would hate Vermeule.

[Aurelius]

Vermeule really needs to ground his "common good" concept in actual Scripture or else he's just going to enable non-GOP policies -- M4A, GND -- which is really the opposite of what he's looking for from a partisan label.

Whatever the hell else Vermuele is ideologically, it really doesn't seem like he's a generic Buckleyite fusionist, so I wouldn't be shocked if he actually does favor more state involvement in things like health care and industrial/energy policy than you see with textualists/originalists.

Vermuele is very pro-administrative state and has been trying to warn conservatives off of their legal challenges to agency deference for years.   

Not surprised he's wrong on that, since he's wrong on literally everything else too.

[Aurelius]

The one saving grace about Vermeule is he's completely incapable of message discipline. People like Ahmari and Hammer have spent years trying to mainstream "common good constitutionalism" and try to emphasize that their vision doesn't necessarily require subverting republican institutions and culture. Then Vermeule just went right out with that Atlantic article and told everyone that subjects must learn to obey their betters.

[Aurelius]

The central tenet of the classical legal tradition is that the purpose of the law is to promote the common good of a political community — not, as small-L liberals argue, to protect individual rights and liberties. As Vermeule defines it, the “common good” describes the supposedly objective set of political conditions that promote “the happiness and flourishing of the community” — namely “justice, peace, and abundance,” which Vermeule updates for the 21st-century context as “health, safety, and economic security.”

Uh, this actually sounds like wokeness and stuff conservatives love to deride. Could easily be used to justify things like mask mandates (even outside of Covid using Scarlet's reasoning that they would still be justifiable as well as banning crowded non-socially distanced gatherings during flu season), banning hate speech in spite of the First Amendment, etc. Oh and I really doubt that the NRA and Second Amendment-hardliners are going to like this philosophy either.

We don't like it. We hate Vermeule. I'd rather have a garden variety liberal on the court than him or one of his proteges.