Legal Conservatives Now Want to Move Beyond Originalism

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Any evidence for this ludicrous claim? Like any at all? Or are you just desperately trying to avoid grappling with the fact that your preferred party attracts a lot of fascists?

This is a prediction about the future, but let me explain my reasoning. Confidence in American institutions has been declining since the Watergate scandal, and the GOP has built a base centered on those Americans who feel most alienated from institutions -- initially, the religious right, but increasingly a majority of non-educated people in the country. There is absolutely no indication that the decline in trust -- which accelerated during the Trump Administration and the COVID crisis -- is going to stop anytime soon; if anything given a projected peak in higher-education enrollment in the US in 2026 we're likely to see it expand to more educated people (unless such a peak is pushed off, or higher education manages to radically reinvent themselves). People in the US have very low confidence in government to solve problems, to the point that -- per referendums -- well more than half of Americans are willing to cut spending, and cut/refrain from raising taxes on the wealthy, as a balm to the country's problems. The likeliest future President under age 75, per current polling, is a man best known for winning wide popularity by daring to basically not fight COVID.

If these trends continue, then ideological people who wish to use the power of the state to do anything -- like Vermeule -- will need to band together in a single force; in practice every actual thing a Republican Administration does (consider Trump's judicial appointments tending to disempower bureaucrats, or the more successful state government in the 2010s funneling money to barely-accountable charter schools with diverse religious/ideological backgrounds) takes us further from a place where the government is even theoretically able to carry out the sort of reforms Vermeule would want.

(An interesting tell here is that Vermeule/Ahmari/Vance many 'populists' have converted to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, which are quite high-church, but the only growing denomination in the US is 'non-denominational', or the practice of having lots of tiny churches and congregations all competing with one another for adherents on what is basically the open market. This is extremely non-hierarchical and very different from the vision that Vermeule has; there is religious conservatism and there is religious conservatism, and these are not at all on the same pages.)

As the Democrats probably move right in response to their Senate disadvantage and cast a wider net, it seems extremely natural that they would attract people like this; the Democratic Party is already full of people who want to enforce a universal morality!

(Also note that at the very extreme end, this is already happening: consider the most prominent American neo-Nazi denouncing 'libertarian ideology' and voting for Joe Biden. Something very similar goes for David Duke. I don't think this is a horseshoe theory thing -- ultimately, everyone who doesn't want the government to shrink will probably have to be in the same party. My guess is that this sort of thing will gradually trickle from literal neo-Nazis to, eventually, higher-class populists like Vermeule; it's been observed many times that sociologically these people sure seem much more like Democratic than Republican voters.)

There's a reversal of means and ends here (that is, admittedly, common to American political attitudes; the most "respectable" version is probably the habit of treating specific trade policies as moral imperatives in and of themselves rather than recognizing that free trade, protectionism, longer or shorter supply chains, etc. etc. etc. favor or disfavor particular sectors of, and thus particular visions for, society). It does actually matter what one wants the state to be empowered to do, not just how much of it. A grand pro-state coalition would collapse the instant it tried to actually legislate anything, with the possible exception of the much stronger greenhouse gas regulations that are going to be no-brainers real soon to everyone who doesn't think the Tenth Amendment is a suicide pact.