The Barrett Nomination Shows the GOP Are Pushing for a Christian Theocracy

 Fucking assholes.

Let me assure you. As a survivor and scholarof authoritarianism, the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation is much, much worse than you probably think, and that’s alreadyif you think it’s pretty bad. Why do I say that? The big picture is this: America has a choice before it. Either it begins to become a modern society, like Europe and Canada — it’s half a centurybehind them. Or it plunges into hardcore implosion, like Russia and Iran — becoming a true failed state.

All this at the most crucial juncture, by the way, in human history, when the fate of civilisation will be decided— but I digress.

The Republicans, who are ramming her through the confirmation process, breaking every norm and precedent, have effectively two arguments. Each is more absurd than the last.

The first is that she is a “brilliant legal mind.” The second is that she’s not the fanatic she appears to be. Think about that — it’s literally asking you not to believe what’s in front of your face.

Is she a brilliant legal mind? It’s easy enough to observe that America doesn’t really have brilliant minds at that level anymore, which is why it’s a collapsing society. It has minds ranging from mediocre — Ezra, Jake, Chris — to thoughtless, like all those alt-right “intellectuals” like Bannon, who was once hailed as Nietzsche in cargo pants. ACB is on the poorer half of that spectrum. Maybe you think that’s unkind, so let me prove it.

A truly brilliant legal mind would observe something like the following. America is a society in the latter stages of collapse. The average American has become a poor person, dying in $60,000 of debt, unable to raise a small amountfor emergencies, struggling to pay the bills. As a result, happiness, trust, meaning, and social bonds have all come undone. That despair, in turn, fuelled a vicious circleof authoritarianism.

Where didn’t all this happen? Europe and Canada.Why not? Precisely because their jurisprudence has created a vastly different set of societies — truly modern ones, where living standards are vastly higher. So why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered?

It’s a little known fact that American jurisprudence is effectively failed American economics in disguise. No, not Mom and Pop shops. The law of the artificial lowest price. The thinking goes that the lowest price is always the best — it “maximizes consumer welfare.” Who can provide the lowest price? The biggest corporations. That is why every industry in America is now what economists call “highly concentrated,” meaning dominated by a tiny number of monopolies, from banking to finance to real estate to healthcare.

Now, a good legal mind — not even a brilliant one — would ask: was that theory true?Did the law of the lowest price by way of gigantic monopolies really lead to higher living standards? The answer is: obviously not. Americans have the lowest living standardsin the rich world, approaching those of much poorer countries. They live vastly shorter, poorer, dumber, meaner, and more desperate lives than Canadians and Europeans.

A good legal mind would conclude that something went badly, badly wrong with the grand American theories of the lowest price.

ACB seems to be a staunch supporter of all the above. She’s never asked the question once: why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered? Why not?

The answer to that question reveals what she really is. A fundamentalist. ACB subscribes to a theory that’s called in America “originalism.”It means something like: no deviation from America’s founding documents should ever be possible. The constitution should be interpreted as it is, in the way it would have been intended when it was written.

In simpler language, we’d call all that fundamentalism.Because it prevents a mind like ACB’s from asking the question above, and answering it properly. If you assume the answer to every social question is always: go back to America’s founding documents!! What kind of progress can you really make? The answer is none. And in that literal and real sense, “originalism” is a euphemism for fundamentalism.

A better mind would observe that Canada and Europe prospered because they have cutting-edgeconstitutions.In them, things like healthcare, retirement, education, income, and so on, are all guaranteed as basic rights. Therefore, there have to be social-scale institutions to provide them. America’s constitution, by contrast, is two and a half centuries old. It is not fit for the 21st century, because it recognises none of the things we now consider basics as rights. Hence, Americans have to battle one another for them, in a never-ending, bitter, bruising contest for the basics, whether income or healthcare. That is what it means to be a collapsed society.

But if all you assumeis “originalism,” that America’s founding ideas are flawless, the answer to every possible question, then you can never understand any of the above. You cannot engage with the modern world at all.

America’s founding documents are deeply inadequate to build a modern society upon precisely because they were meant for a slave state.Americans may not want to hear that, but it’s true. And that brings me to the second half of ACB’s fundamentalism, the second argument Republicans make for her. “She’s not the fanatic she appears to be!” now that we’ve dismantled the foolish notion that she’s some kind of American Aristotle.