You’re seeing a lot of progressives looking for ways to blunt or reverse the direction of the Supreme Court. It really has come as a shock to them.
Intellectually I knew, but 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.
Loving, Roe, Bakke, Lawrence, Obergefell, etc. etc.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) June 22, 2022
There’s really no better way to understand what political power is than to be on the wrong side of it.
Progressives are obsessed with talking about the Right’s supposed threat to democracy. But what they really fear is the dismantling of their monopoly over powerful non-democratic institutions; namely, the judiciary, academia, and the media. Whenever they talk about what’s wrong with Hungarian democracy, it is the status of progressive journalists and jurists that they chiefly have in mind. Social media allowed conservatives to speak to each other and build powerful media platforms of their own, and progressives now want to use their influence on the non-democratic but powerful corporate boards of those companies to silence them. Similarly, the court was a major bulwark of their power, and just shifting that power back to voters is a major threat. You’re going to see the Left descend into paranoia and conspiracy theories about voter restriction even when all the evidence shows that states like Georgia have more liberal voting laws than blue states like New York.