Many years ago - when I still paid attention to him - George Will said that progressivism worked like a ratchet. He said that, once enacted, leftist policies never retreat. This idea has re-occurred to me many times over the years of our progressive descent towards collapse.
Now, we are seeing it in all its ignominy, where lefty judges - carefully shopped for by the usual “activist” (Marxist) suspects - torture such matters as standing, jurisdiction and the Constitution, to stop Trump’s executive orders. These represent the most meaningful effort at resistance to leftist tyranny we have ever seen. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental, unarticulated imbalance at work in the ratchet mechanism.
To begin with, there is an inherent difference between today’s right and left. We on the right are inclined to ‘live and let live’ policies. We generally neither seek to control, coerce, or mind-f&$*k others. The left requires not only toleration of every imaginable deviation in human behavior, but its active approval and public celebration. They have enacted a series of laws and regulations (with the full force of law), incrementally, over decades, with little resistance. Certainly, there has been zero judicial resistance, even as the Bill of Rights has been largely redacted, little by little.
Now, to add insult to injury, chief justice (sic) John Roberts chides the President for calling for a richly-deserved impeachment of an Obama district court judge who has warped law beyond all reason. This must be OK with our leading jurist, despite knowing that the jurisdiction of all federal courts is determined by Congress. It is ever subject to change by Congress.
Congress may add or subtract court jurisdiction for any or for no reason. That goes for federal courts at any level, including SCOTUS. In other words, the remedy for judicial overreach (or nonfeasance) is political! And, in calling for impeachment, a political remedy, Mr. Roberts objects. Hmmm. Where has he been all the years as, chip by chip, agencies and judges have sculpted a far greater state and much lesser individual liberty? Has he ever said such gratuitous words?
The practical problem underlying our present plight, I submit, is the inherent imbalance in the wish to control others between those on the left and those on the right. The left is ever active in its aggressive, controlling pursuit. We, on the right merely work hard and ‘play nicely’ with others; we do not spend our lives confronting others with their error “du jour”. Make a list of leftist outrages of the past 50 years and calculate the half-life of each. Their duration is directly proportional to their potential ability to control behavior (of how many for how long). The higher the control potential, the longer they last; e.g. “global warming” is the longest-lasting.
Again, inherently, it is easier - practically, politically - to enact tyranny incrementally, slowly, as has been done as the state ballooned with leftists manning the deep state (now emboldened by success to admit actual Marxist beliefs) than to undo it. That is largely because to do so, now requires massive effort to undo years of entrenched - become structural and banal - tyranny. Intentionally, by appointment of Biden/Obama/Clinton judges, severe roadblocks and minefields have been placed, again over many years. That, as best I can tell, is what’s happening. I’m not at all sure how it will turn out.