october 1985

Senate Republicans were always going to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Conservative voters wanted it, and the party united around the concept. Republicans “believe voting on this justice is a constitutional duty. The nomination happened. There was time to get it done. So they got it done,” Steven Duffield, a Republican former senior Senate aide, told me. Even the highest-ranking Republican leaders aren’t shy about admitting that this may be the party’s last gasp before losing political power for a while. “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said during a speech yesterday. The Democrats “won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

During her confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett argued that the judicial philosophy known as “originalism” should guide judges in their interpretation and application of constitutional principles. Most famously associated with the late Justice Antonin Scalia (for whom Judge Barrett clerked), this idea sounds simple and sensible: In determining what the Constitution permits, a judge must first look to the plain meaning of the text, and if that isn’t clear, then apply what was in the minds of the 55 men who wrote it in 1787. Period. Anything else is “judicial lawmaking.”

In some cases, interpreting the Constitution with an originalist lens is pretty easy; for example, the Constitution says that the president must be at least 35 years old (“35” means, well, 35), that each state has two senators (not three and not one), and that Congress is authorized to establish and support an Army and a Navy. But wait a minute. What about the Air Force? Is it mentioned in the text? Nope. Is there any ambiguity in the text? Again, no. It doesn’t say “armed forces”; it explicitly says “Army” and “Navy.” Did the Framers have in mind the Air Force 115 years before the Wright brothers? Not likely.

A number of influential commentators who firmly opposed Donald Trump in 2016 recently announced their intention to vote for him in 2020. Nearly all of them, including James Lindsay, Danielle Pletka, and Ben Shapiro, blamed illiberalism on the left. As Shapiro said on his popular show, he is planning to vote for Trump because “Democrats have lost their fucking minds.”

Concerns about illiberal tendencies on the left are not made up out of thin air. Many Democratic politicians have not been as full-throated in their opposition to left-wing political violence as they should be. Parts of the left now seek far-reaching censorship in social media, advocate for employees to be fired for expressing conservative opinions, and are openly hostile to free speech. The likely future mayor of Portland, Oregon, has appeared to glorify mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong on the campaign trail.

Last year, before the pandemic, I stood on the front porch of a house near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, while the homeowner, a former military man, heaved pro-Trump talking points at me. His anger was palpable. He was upset about the state of health care. He blamed immigrants. With a clipboard in my hand, I listened carefully to everything he had to say.

I am the director of People’s Action, an organization of working-class and low-income people. I was in Pennsylvania as part of deep-canvass efforts targeting rural and small-town voters, testing whether patient, nonjudgmental conversations about race, immigration, health care, and the economy can help people reexamine their views, and perhaps even lead them to vote for Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump.

Kami West had been dating her current boyfriend for a few weeks when she told him that he was outranked by her best friend. West knew her boyfriend had caught snatches of her daily calls with Kate Tillotson, which she often placed on speaker mode. But she figured that he, like the men she’d dated before, didn’t quite grasp the nature of their friendship. West explained to him, “I need you to know that she’s not going anywhere. She is my No. 1.” Tillotson was there before him, and, West told him, “she will be there after you. And if you think at any point that this isn’t going to be my No. 1, you’re wrong.”

If West’s comments sound blunt, it’s because she was determined not to repeat a distressing experience from her mid-20s. Her boyfriend at that time had sensed that he wasn’t her top priority. In what West saw as an attempt to keep her away from her friend, he disparaged Tillotson, calling her a slut and a bad influence. After the relationship ended, West, 31, vowed to never let another man strain her friendship. She decided that any future romantic partners would have to adapt to her friendship with Tillotson, rather than the other way around.