2016—Anticipating the imminent prospect of a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet encourages the Left to abandon what he somehow imagines to have been an era of “defensive-crouch liberalism.” Among his modest and genial recommendations:
The Left “should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided” and should “aggressively exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling.”
Rather than try to “accommodate the losers” in the culture wars, the Left should take a “hard line” against its fellow citizens. “Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War.” And “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
“Finally (trigger/crudeness alert), f*** Anthony Kennedy.” (Except Tushnet doesn’t use asterisks.)