Hot Take: On the Long March Through the Institutions
Conservatives spent four decades taking over the American court system. There is no easy path to taking them back.
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In the spring of 1982, a bunch of right-wing assholes founded the Federalist Society, including eternal punchline Robert Bork and confirmed asshole Antonin Scalia. Four decades later, their organization has finally seen the fruit of their labor, controlling six of the nine United States Supreme Court seats with a pipeline of equally conservative vampires waiting in the wings.
Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court will crush President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation program sometime this spring. It is also likely that affirmative action will die before the court as well. And it hasn’t even been a year since Roe was overturned, despite some court nominees saying it was “settled law” and some naïve pinheads believing it. And for those who see the value of Supreme Court dissents, I have a special offer for you: that and $1.70 will get you a ride on a bus in Boston.
Easily lost in the carnage of minoritarian court decisions is how a small cadre of right-wing radicals crafted one of the most successful political insurgencies in modern Western history. Those right-wingers successfully completed what German student activist Rudi Dutschke referred to as “the long march through the institutions.” The Federalist Society’s legal, reactionary vanguard is radically changing the United States because they became a part of the state machinery—in contrast to the January 6th-ers who sought to overthrow state power.
The Federalist Society did not organize a junta or a January 6th-style coup–they created an institution to control a portion of the state machinery to manufacture agitational court decisions. Dutschke’s use of the phrase long march rhymes with Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the “war of position.” In Marxist philosophy, the war of position refers to the proletarian intellectual and cultural struggle against the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The organic values produced by the proletarians, outside of the bourgeois institutions, serve as the basis for the new society. The Federalist Society took this formula and turned it on its head, attacking bourgeois democracy using a billionaire-funded vanguard.
The success of the Federalist Society raises several questions about the present leftwing project.
How long can we expect the fight to last? Anyone who has worked as an activist or in activist circles knows that burnout is real. Well, if we start today and are as successful as the Federalist Society, we can expect to have our 6-3 Supreme Court majority sometime in 2063, when I am 68 years old. While that is not good news for burnout, it certainly underscores the need for our movement to emphasize caring for each other as a precondition for the world we wish to build.
And what is the state of the opposition party? Well, the New York Democratic Party could not be bothered to do basic opposition research on George Santos. The Florida Democratic Party, on the frontlines of fighting fascism, is combating transphobia and proposals to ban the Democratic Party by… oh wait they are not, they are focused on regulating Fido’s joyrides.
Maybe the counter-institutions to win the war of position already exist. The Democratic Socialists of America sport a membership of nearly 100,000. Or maybe the Sunrise Movement can mobilize a counterattack, like the rise of the West German Green Party and their destabilization of the Great Coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democratic Union.
But can any of these groups create organic institutions that create a true counterweight to this increasingly extreme brand of conservative capitalism?
Time will tell, and by the looks of it, we do not have much left. The road to illiberal democracy, as seen in Hungary and Turkey, is short. And if you must ask yourself if a particular moment is a “Reichstag fire” moment, it is already too late. This may seem doom and gloom (and frankly, it is) but in the immortal words of labor organizer Joe Hill, “Don't waste any time mourning. Organize!”
