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I think the Justices are smart enough to understand that their authority is a product of social consensus, not anything innately derivative of their position. They understand that since Conservatives approached a solid majority on the Court Blue Tribe has pivoted to attacking the court's foundational social consensus directly with calls for court packing, smearing of justices and calls for their impeachment, and so on. They appear to be attempting to balance exercise of their power with maintenance of that power. I'm skeptical that such a balance is possible, but they've certainly pushed harder toward exercise than I expected, so I imagine we'll see.
I still do not expect the Court's foundations to survive long-term; there is no reason for Reds to continue investing faith in them if they cannot deliver, and there is no way for them to deliver without Blues killing the court. This realization undermines the social consensus foundation from the Red side, and we converge on both sides admitting more or less openly that the Court is only legitimate when it delivers their specific preferred outcomes, which is isomorphic to the court having no legitimacy at all.
The entire point of a Supreme Court is to settle tribal conflict. The court can't reliably perform that purpose now, and its ability will only further diminish over time.
Except that the blue tribe controls what legitimacy means. Once they have the court making 100% Blue decisions again, it'll be "legitimate" except for a few malcontents in the dying remains of the more radical part of Red. The bulk of Red will accept the court no matter what, because they accept the legitimacy of institutions axiomatically.
Eh, I dunno about that. There's a long history of back and forth about which party is the "defender of the Constitution" and such. They both have held that mantle at different times pretty strongly in the last even 20 years only. Sure, Democrats are playing their hand pretty strong, probably too strong, recently (junk like "democracy dies in darkness" and all that, great on paper, even true on paper, horribly mangled job in practice). Democrats cry wolf about a lot of things. But not Trump. This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution which is not cool and not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots. The dude doesn't even pay lip service to checks and balances and admires dictators.
Why do you care about this, and why should anyone else care about this? The Constitution is dead, and there will be no resurrection. I do not believe that it protects me or my tribe in any meaningful way, and I do not see why I should respect claims of its protection put forward by other tribes. Constitutional claims are useful when they convince other people to drop opposition to one's values or goals. There is no reason to allow them to obstruct one's own values or goals. The constitution means whatever five justices say it means, without limit; benefits are entirely derived from controlling the mechanisms of interpretation, not the document being interpreted. If you have political and social control, you don't need the Constitution, and if you lack it, the Constitution will not help you. This is how the document observably works, and knowledge that this is how it observably works is now reasonably common across the population, and will only grow increasingly common over time as the contradictions inherent to the system continue to express themselves.
Deploying troops domestically was the correct response to the Floyd riots, and the failure to do so seriously damaged what remains of our country. The riots were the culmination of Blue Tribe's long-established strategy of employing organized, lawless political violence to secure political and social power, and they succeeded to an unbelievable degree specifically because no one was willing or able to deploy the appropriate response of overwhelming lawful force on the part of the authorities. That failure made the culture war much, much worse in a way that probably cannot be fixed.
Trump is not a unique threat. He exists because a critical mass of Red Tribe has lost faith in the existing system and wishes to coordinate meanness outside it. If he is finally destroyed that critical mass will find some other avatar or method to coordinate meanness through. They will continue to do so until either they find an effective method to obtain real address of grievances, or until society suffers a fatal rupture. The later seems, admittedly, a more likely outcome, but the former should not be underestimated. The current systems which prevent redress seem to me much more fragile than they generally appear.
Why even have a country if you don't believe in anything except exatly what you want? You are kind of that guy though, you're a boogaloo boy.
The point of a country is cooperation to secure the common good. This doesn't work if, as in our present circumstance, we collectively can't agree on the common good. It's not about getting exactly what "I" or "we" want. It's about whether or not there's a rational basis for believing cooperation is possible. With regard to the Constitution, such a belief is no longer rational, and it doesn't seem to me that it can be recovered, because the evolution of our Constitutional understanding is necessarily path-dependent. The arguments that worked before, worked because at the time we hadn't seen their long-term results. We have seen those results, so they won't work again.
If you say so. What follows?
You cannot simply say this isn't working.
What's the alternative?
Radical federalism or large-scale violence, one imagines, but we will be free of each other, one way or the other. Society requires coherent values. That can be accomplished by all the blues sorting themselves into blue areas ruled by blue laws, and all the reds sorting themselves into red areas ruled by red laws, and the two areas generally leaving each other alone. Alternatively, it can be accomplished by not having a society any more. Those seem the most likely outcomes, and I obviously prefer the sorting one. I think you should as well.
It's possible I'm wrong, of course, and time will tell. Given that this is a massively-multiplayer game, though, I'm skeptical as to how long the waiting can really last before things break one way or the other.
There is one more. The small, radical, defiant bits of Red Tribe are crushed by main force, the way the stupider parts of it were crushed on January 6. The rest is basically oppressed and shrinks away as its children defect to Blue, with the tactic or explicit approval of their parents. Any Red Triber who becomes defiant is kept in check by other Red Tribers, partially for fear they'll bring Blue's wrath upon themselves, but mostly because Red accepts Blue's legitimacy as long as they hold the institutions with the correct names (by hook or by crook, it doesn't matter).
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