As the Left’s ability to bully American institutions into submission diminishes, its desperation is growing.
As the Left’s ability to bully American institutions into submission diminishes, its desperation is growing.
T he most famous scene in Peter Weir’s hit movie, The Truman Show, depicts Truman Burbank’s wife, Meryl — who, unbeknownst to him, is an actress — growing alarmed by her husband’s behavior, breaking the fourth wall in a panic, and shouting, “Do something!” to the producers of the titular show, who are hidden off-set. Obliging her request, the producers immediately dispatch a neighbor — also an actor — to show up at Truman’s front door, deus-ex-machina–style, and defuse the situation. “Who were you talking to?” Truman asks Meryl before the neighbor arrives.
“Who,” indeed.
For more than seven decades now, America’s boundary-pushing progressives have chosen to behave like Meryl: Whenever things have gone south, they’ve cried, “Do something!” And, sure enough, the powers-that-be have usually sent someone over to fix the problem.
At long last, in 2022, this pattern may be changing.
Reflecting upon the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the economist Noah Smith observed last week that he “viscerally did not realize, just how much of America’s liberalism over the last half century depended on the single institution of the Supreme Court.” Smith was on to something. Since the early 1950s, the American Left has been in the bad habit of seeking from the federal judiciary what it cannot gain via democratic means. Sometimes, as in the cases of NAACP v. Alabama, Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, Brandenburg v. Ohio, Texas v. Johnson, and others, its requests have been legitimate; by design, the Constitution contains some important counter-majoritarian provisions, and there is no shame whatsoever in using them. Mostly, however, they have been illegitimate. In cases such as Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, Lemon v. Kurtzman, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Griswold v. Connecticut, Lee v. Weisman, Tex. Dep’t of Hous. & Cmty. Affairs v. Inclusive Cmtys. Project, Inc, and Kennedy v. Louisiana, progressives have treated the Court as if it were an ersatz legislature whose job it was to start with a given outcome in mind and find the path to that outcome that it could most easily sell with a straight face.
Even now — even as that judicial avenue is being blocked off to them for a while — many of the key institutions of American progressivism remain unable to grasp why their behavior has been such a problem. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the New York Times wrote yesterday, “Senate Republicans did not have to take the politically risky step of banning abortions; the court took care of the issue for them.” But, of course, “the court” did no such thing. Having determined correctly that the Constitution is silent on the question of abortion, the Court returned the United States to its pre-Roe status quo, which left the matter entirely up to each state. To compare Roe, which inserted the Supreme Court into a matter over which it has no authority, with Dobbs, which undid that usurpation of power, is akin to comparing the man who robs a bank to the man who captures him and returns the money on the basis that both have been handling cash. It is ridiculous.
Over time, progressivism’s “do something” attitude evolved beyond the Court, and into other institutions that the American Left had announced it intended to colonize. In colleges, students who disliked hearing opinions with which they disagreed began to shout “do something” at administrators, and administrators began to silence those opinions as a result. In corporations, hysterical employees began to shout “do something” at HR flacks when their co-workers displeased them, and HR flacks began to reprimand those co-workers. Advocacy groups began to demand that journalists “do something” — in particular, that journalists adopt their woke language, euphemisms, framing, and choice of villains — and to have their demands met without delay. In states and cities that they controlled from top to bottom, the makers of elite opinion began to ask prosecutors to ignore any law they disliked, and to watch as their requests were honored. Depending on the institution in question, the exact nature of the appeal to authority would change slightly, but in all cases the expectation was the same: that somewhere, lurking in the shadows, was a powerful figure who could make the unwanted development go away.
Those who are wondering why progressives seem so utterly unhinged at present would do well to understand that the emotion they are feeling is one of the most potent within the entire human condition: loss. If pushed, contemporary progressives will insist that their opposition to the current Supreme Court is the result of a particular stare decisis analysis, or of the popular-vote totals in the last few American elections; that their frustration at the backlash to cancel culture is the product of their desire for “accountability”; that their preference for controlling the narrative in the press is borne of a distaste for “disinformation.” But this is all after-the-fact rationalization. There was no doubt as to the size or validity of the political victories enjoyed by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Newt Gingrich, and yet, while the power that flowed from them was being exercised, they had no effect whatsoever on progressives’ willingness to entreat the nation’s courts to step and in and invent progressive-friendly laws and doctrines. Nor are progressives much interested in accountability or veracity when their own side is implicated in the breach. Today, as in 1962, the aim remains the same: to take hold of any institution that might serve as “a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes,” and cling to it for dear life.
The story of the last six or seven years has been the story of that grip’s slow loosening. For the first time in a century, a majority on the current Supreme Court is more interested in the law than in political freelancing, and, better still, it seems to be uncowed by activist pressure. Having reached a fever pitch of wokeness during the presidency of Donald Trump, America’s corporations are now slowly learning to stand up to internal and external agitators. Exhausted by the neo-Puritans that are destroying them from within, a growing number of universities and media outlets are rediscovering their spines. Rogue prosecutors are being recalled. Referenda are being honored. Executive overreach is being reversed. At Netflix, at the University of Chicago, and even in the city of San Francisco, the progressive movement’s calls to “do something” are starting to fall on deaf — or indifferent — ears. For a while, this will yield disbelief, chatter about “illegitimacy,” and more than a few tears on the left. And then, when the realization has fully sunk in, it will prompt the sensible there to do the slow and hard work from which they have been shielded for so long.