Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it. But reformers could not simply devolve power to state and local governments. Liberals had just seen, in the fight against Jim Crow, that you could not trust the states, much less the localities, to do what the federal government asked. And so they turned to the courts, which had, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, become newly beloved by liberals. Adversarial legalism was a way of reconciling the government we wanted with the suspicions we
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