Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

So the successful war launched by the economic right in the 1970s and ’80s had several theaters, one of which was the law, with two main battlefronts, originalism and Law and Economics. Both were long-haul strategic campaigns effectively camouflaged as impartial philosophical movements. Originalists’ deep anger didn’t really derive from legal analytics about what Bork called “the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional rulings” of the last century. Rather, it was about the progressive particulars of what he called “the sustained radicalism of the Warren Court,” such as the rulings that guaranteed equal legal rights for blacks and women and every such “attempt to remake society.” The common mission of the originalists and of the subtler Law and Economics conservatives has been precisely what they ostensibly oppose, of course—to utterly remake our society and political economy using the legal system, to make both resemble their vision of the American good old days, before the 1960s, before the 1930s, before the twentieth century.