Haavaad serves up a fresh steaming pant load. Cuz they know so much better than you. 🙄🙄🙄
-PJ
I don’t think you read the article.
Since the “switch in time that saved nine” under FDR, the Constitution has said whatever any five out of nine Supreme Court Justices want it to say at any point in time. Of course, one problem with a ruling oligarchy of Supreme Court Justices is that a different five Justices can always decide that they want the Constitution to say something else.
Another problem is that having every aspect of our lives governed by an oligarchy of Supreme Court Justices, who are never elected but instead appointed for life, is that it kind of contradicts that pesky democracy thing, but democrats are already committed to destroying democracy in order to save it.
The clever kids at the Crimson definitely need an editor, but it’s fascinating to see Carl Schmitt all of a sudden return to prominence. First it was James Lindsay calling out Matt Walsh, and now he’s mentioned in the pages of the Harvard undergraduate newspaper.
When James was droning on about Matt’s embrace of the “friend enemy distinction” I vaguely remembered something about the guy from a half-forgotten undergraduate course on the runup to the 2nd world war. Schmitt was definitely an obscure figure, but now, it’s a name on the lips of all of the elite.
What in the world is going on with these people?
Repackaged Jeremy Bentham is all this is.
Hedonist calculus for the 21st century.
The Pessimist cals it “The Tyranny of the 51%” or, maybe just it isn’t just the Pessimist.
It is the same old thing the left has been peddling for a century. Read into the Constitution anything you want It is a “living”document and if you water it properly it can grow new limbs and eyes to suit leftist sensibilities.
Every dictator and tyrant who ever existed claimed he was working for the common good.
Repackaged Jeremy Bentham is what this appears to be to me.
Hedonist calculus for the 21st century.
The Pessimist calls it “The Tyranny of the 51%” or, maybe it isn’t just the Pessimist.
Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperatives are better. Sometimes things are right, or wrong, regardless of how we feel about them, or what our culture, laws, or government says is “best” for the majority
Reminds me of the mother of the sick little girl in The Sixth Sense, who kept urging her daughter to take her medicine because it was “good for her. “
“a new reading of the Constitution which promotes “legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive” that ultimately “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.””
The article is too long and wordy. Just a lot of communist collectivist authoritarian sophistry.
If originalism had prevailed we wouldn’t be in this MNRA mess.
““and can now give way to a new confidence in authoritative rule for the common good.”
And who exactly will be this wise authority that will define and enforce “the common good”?
BUMP
Originalism is not a predecessor. It is the only way this Republic can function. The best of Enlightenment thought was distilled into the Declaration of Independance when it says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Next came the Constitution and Bill of Rights as outgrowths of that foundation.
When I was on the old twitter, I once “liked” a comment that was critical of something that Adrian V tweeted... and he immediately blocked me. Touchy, touchy.
"Subjects", eh?
"at first as coercive", eh?
Hail Vermeule!!!
HAIL VICTORY!!!
Never heard of Adrian Vermeule before, but his mother Emily Vermeule was Sather Professor at Berkeley when I was a graduate student and I went to her lectures. The only thing I remember from them is that she showed a cartoon where a man has been snatched up by a large bird and his wife is down on the ground yelling for him to drop his keys.
I was gonna say, what’s even vaguely conservative about that?