Sick Fucks: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism

Law professor Adrian Vermeule thinks America would be better off without individual liberty. It’s an increasingly popular view among a faction of conservatives.

Sick Fucks: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism 70e522beeeff9b8b7ec405b4925557705f1b8239

The Atlantic, a magazine for which I once worked, recently teamed up with the National Constitution Center for a series entitled “The Battle for the Constitution.” The project draws upon a wide range of American legal scholars to discuss the Constitution’s fate in the Trump era. Past contributors range from Michael Gerhardt, Sanford Levinson, and Leah Litman to Richard Epstein, the New York University law professor and erstwhile coronavirus expert who was vaporized from orbit by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner earlier this week.

The most eyebrow-raising essay thus far comes from Adrian Vermeule, a chaired professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in administrative law. In a manifesto titled “Common-Good Constitutionalism” published on Tuesday, he called upon legal conservatives to abandon what he describes as the “defensive crouch” of originalism, the movement’s doctrinal lodestar for the last 40 years, now that they have captured the Supreme Court for at least a generation. In its place, Vermeule calls for an unabashedly authoritarian interpretation of the Constitution.

“Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being,” he wrote. “Common-good constitutionalism,” he explains, “will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy,” which will be empowered to impose a particular social and moral code upon Americans. Troublesome concepts like personal liberty and individual rights are brushed aside.

https://newrepublic.com/article/157132/emerging-right-wing-vision-constitutional-authoritarianism

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Sick Fucks: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism

Law professor Adrian Vermeule thinks America would be better off without individual liberty. It’s an increasingly popular view among a faction of conservatives.

Sick Fucks: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism

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