On Reaction—and Overreaction

The importance of keeping our heads in thinking about the high court

Wisdom Cole, NAACP, joins student loan borrowers to demand President Biden use "Plan B" to cancel student debt immediately at a rally outside of the Supreme Court of the United States on June 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for We The 45 Million)

Going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration, and recapitulated in my launch post for “Eyes on the Right,” I have talked about the importance of ideological opponents and intellectual analysts of the contemporary right making distinctions between Republican words and deeds that are normal from those that are abnormal or truly alarming.

Thinking back to Donald Trump’s time in the White House, the normal included things any Republican president would do—nominate conservative judges, support tax cuts, take executive action to roll back regulations, and break from the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord. The abnormal, meanwhile, involved policy moves connected to distinctively Trumpian policy commitments. These included everything from instituting the travel ban and the policy of family separation on the Southern border to provoking an international trade war, lobbing insults at allies, and holding chummy meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

When it comes to actions that were truly alarming during the Trump administration, the first event I noted was the new president’s visit to CIA headquarters, where he lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and insisted without evidence that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election. This pattern of outright, flagrant, self-aggrandizing lies continued throughout Trump’s presidency, reaching an unprecedented pitch in the two months following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Trump ultimately used those lies to incite a riot against the national legislature in order to keep himself in power despite his loss.  

I bring up these distinctions now because, as we head into a presidential campaign in which Trump is a frontrunner by a mile for the Republican nomination, and his most potent rival aims to outflank him even further out on the right, we’re starting to hear a familiar panic from the left. It reached an especially high pitch last week when the final decisions of the Supreme Court’s 2022 term were announced.

My point in writing this post isn’t to deny there are things worth criticizing in the series of 6-3 decisions that were handed down during the last week or so of the court’s term. My point is to put these criticisms into perspective. Even if you disagree with these decisions, I think it’s pretty clear that they are exactly what you’d expect to see from a court with a solid conservative majority. Unless we assume the United States should be a one-party state that governs uniformly from the liberal-progressive left, such an outcome should be understood as normal, or abnormal only in the sense that the court swung left in the decades following the New Deal and has been slowly moving in a rightward direction since the Reagan administration, making its current configuration a divergence from the previous era’s ideological expectations. There is certainly nothing alarming about the court’s closing decisions, and thus neither are they evidence that the Supreme Court itself is “illegitimate,” as some applause-seeking pundits have alleged.

That means there’s been a fair amount of overreaction lately. Think of this post as an effort at encouraging a more measured and thoughtful response to ordinary political disagreement.

Conservatives v. Reactionaries

The American right has long blended reactionary and conservative impulses. Some on the right react negatively and harshly to various aspects of modern life in the United States—to secularism, to multiculturalism, to the New Deal and the rise of the administrative state, to the burdens and responsibilities of being a global power. But others temper these reactionary energies with a genuinely conservative sensibility, appealing to and synthesizing high principle and prudential moderation in an effort to propose an alternative to the jurisprudence of progressive liberalism.

In my view, most of the term-ending decisions at the high court were expressions of conservatism rather than reaction.