Jackbooted Paste Eaters

it's illegal for you to notice that i pick my nose, you fascist, so you have to go to prison

Endorsed:

The current unifying theme among a set of people who regard themselves as progressive, liberal, mainstream, respectable, and so on, is a spectacular punishment fetish. Arrest them arrest them arrest them arrest them, they helpfully explain about people who disagree with them about anything, ever. See, for an easy example of the discipline fetish, this quite popular reader-generated “diary” post from a few days ago at Daily Kos, arguing that Tulsi Gabbard’s “Quiet Skies” designation is a proper use of the state security apparatus against a domestic enemy:

It seems to this reader that our intelligence services are merely doing their jobs on this one. Given all of the terrorist horror that Putin has unleashed on the world, if Homeland Security wasn’t keeping an eye on people who meet Gabbard’s profile, I’d be deeply confused and worried. In any case, it seems that in Gabbard finally becoming a part of Trump’s team, the Kremlin is starting to put all of their rotten eggs in one basket and that should make things a bit easier for Homeland Security to do their jobs.

Underlying the teeth-grinding lust for a good firm application of the belt and the rounding up of domestic enemies is an attitude about authority that presumes the correctness of obedience and the proper absence of checks and balances. As Matt Taibbi noted yesterday, the Washington Post has just run a tech policy analysis arguing that social media executives have “thumbed their noses at authorities” — but the authorities are working to “bring tech giants to heel.”

Nearly every paragraph of this Washington Post thing contains extremely telling language, like the description of the brave judge Alexandre de Moraes fighting for democracy in Brazil by repressing platforms that tolerate the evil of dangerously unmediated speech, or the Eastern Bloc-flavored description of social media figures like Elon Musk as “impudent.” Note that, while social media leaders are being “brought to heel,” they’re also being “reined in.”

So the tolerant liberals are both yanking the leash and jerking on the reins, bringing the animals into submission. To protect democracy.

But to see the most striking feature of this fetish for unrestricted power, dig into this extraordinary essay at Salon:

While the wonderfully progressive dean of the law school at UC Berkeley proposes the elimination of the United States Constitution to protect democracy, Salon explains that other progressive law professors are just working on a plan to make sure the Constitution is always interpreted…correctly:

It’s one thing for Democrats to win power in November, and quite another to wield that power without being blocked by arbitrary, unelected MAGA courts — up to and including Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues. Even if Congress can pass the Women's Health Protection Act to undo the damage of Dobbs, there’s nothing to stop the Supreme Court from ruling it unconstitutional, based on whatever made-up theory the right-wing justices like. 

Well, nothing except for the Constitution, that is: to be precise, Article III, Section 2, Clause 2, which explicitly empowers Congress to make “exceptions” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction, as the court itself has acknowledged. In fact, the No Kings Act, introduced in early August to counteract the Trump v. U.S. decision, includes just such exception: if the law is challenged, such challenge will be heard in the federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., with no further appeal possible. 

The Supreme Court is deciding cases incorrectly, so Congress should make the D.C. circuit the court of final appeal in matters it doesn’t wish for the Supreme Court to interfere with. We’d still have a Supreme Court, you see, but it just wouldn’t be able to get in the way anymore. The article uses the phrase “disempowering reforms,” and means it as a positive: progressive reforms to disempower the Supreme Court.

The Salon essay describes a pro-jurisdiction-stripping argument from Harvard Law professor Nicholas Bowie, a former Supreme Court law clerk, who frames the Supreme Court as an institution that mostly destroys individual rights: “Bowie recounts how it continued to attack civil rights protections in a manner strikingly similar to the ways conservatives have undermined civil rights and voting rights protections in the modern era. He also notes how the Supreme Court’s attacks on Black people’s rights facilitated violent, even deadly attacks on Black bodies. The court was, in effect, an enabler of racist terrorism, undermining democracy in the South and elsewhere.”

This is, in academia, the same pivot that Erwin Chemerinsky is making on the Constitution: When the Supreme Court made the right decisions — Griswold, Obergfell, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas — it was a good institution. But then it decided Dobbs LIKE STUPID FASCISTS, so. Now the Supreme Court is very, very, very, very bad. It’s an outcomes argument posing as a structure argument, and good liberals are suddenly very concerned that the Supreme Court doesn’t uphold the will of the majority. What would a Supreme Court that upholds the will of the majority mean for, say as an example, California’s Prop 8? Weirdly, not discussed.

Now, read this closely, because this is how the Salon piece begins:

“When we fight, we win!” Kamala Harris has made that the clarion call of her campaign. But if Democrats are to deliver on their promises once elected, they’ll have to fight judicial tyranny head on. It’s a fight they’ve avoided for decades, and we’ve almost lost our democracy as a result. 

The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. U.S., granting unlimited king-like powers to the president in the process of protecting Trump from prosecution, is a striking signpost, two years after the loss of reproductive freedom with the Dobbs decision made it vividly personal. But those are just two out of a, array of decisions in which unelected judges have overruled the will of the people or restricted the power of their elected representatives. Perhaps the biggest fight of all — to save future generations from the worst effects of the climate crisis — could easily be lost in the same way, as the Loper Bright decision has stripped the EPA of regulatory power and given judges the last word. 

Lord give me strength, the stupidity. We’ve failed for decades to fight judicial tyranny! So…you…should have fought against Roe v. Wade, you’re saying? On what exact date did American liberals discover that they’ve been victims of judicial tyranny for decades? They’re really angry about Gideon v. Wainwright, and want to get rid of public defenders? What does that opening paragraph mean?

It gets worse from there, like the decision in which the Supreme Court was “granting unlimited king-like powers to the president” by describing a tiered structure of immunity for plainly official and plainly unofficial acts, and then sending the case back to the trial court for a detailed analysis of the defendant’s claims of immunity. Or consider the middle-school-essay fuzzy-lying of “has stripped the EPA of regulatory power and given judges the last word.” Has given courts the last word on what, you idiot?

Over and over again, the progressive doctor names the medicine with great confidence, after showing you in the plainest possible terms that he doesn’t have the most basic understanding of the illness he’s supposedly diagnosing. I always prescribe Thorazine for ingrown toenails, he says proudly, flaunting his white coat.

People who keep telling you about the radical steps we need to take to solve the problem keep showing you that they have no orientation to reality at all, and can’t begin to distinguish real-world problems from a a rock, or a hole in the ground, or their own hairy behinds. The EPA doesn’t have any regulatory power anymore, because of the Supreme Court says so and now judges are the only boss of pollution, so we have to disempower the Supreme Court so the weather doesn’t change. Good call!

Via Trish Wood, I’ve just discovered a two-year-old satiric depiction of the Freedom Convoy from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

I assume that the people who made this horrible thing have to wear helmets when they venture out of their group home. It’s so crushingly banal and tedious, so full of pathetic, witless strawmen that I….

…am reminded that my mother texts me to say PEOPLE AT MY CHURCH READ YOUR SUBSTACK. I am rendered mute on “Willy Tonka” and the CBC, because I can’t use the words I would normally use. A warm hello the parishioners at Sacred Heart, and please say hi to mom.

The capacious cart of progressive authoritarian sentiment, loaded with a yearning for punishment and repression and a desperation for a removal of structural rules and boundaries, is yoked to the horse of banality and ignorance. Again, I return to things Christopher Lasch was saying more than twenty years ago:

We’re there. We need to strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to make them not say that Donald Trump is the unlimited king of America anymore! Endless daily argument about…nothing. Nothing. But leading toward authoritarianism and repression. It’s an empty sheet of music, but you’ll hate the way it sounds when the band starts to play it.