The Winner’s Resentment
By I’ll have more to say about Corey Robin’s assessment of Scalia in The Reactionary Mind soon. In the meantime, this insight (p.25) made me think of Newt’s recent radical attacks on judicial authority:
There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.
What’s striking about Newt, then, is that he doesn’t seem to notice that the federal courts are currently bastions of conservatism, as indeed has been the most common condition of American history. And yet he’s far from the only Republican who apparently has yet to be informed of Earl Warren’s resignation four decades ago. The resentment of the powerful and the privileged is at the heart of contemporary Republicanism. Which, of course, is also very evident in the works of Nino “The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite” Scalia.