When conservatives interpret the Constitution like progressives

Why the left should find that infamous right-wing legal manifesto awfully familiar

The Constitution.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock, Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, while most journalists and intellectuals were focused on responding to the global pandemic and looming economic depression, a significant number of writers on both the right and left were busy absorbing and formulating criticisms of what may well prove to be the most important essay written by a conservative thinker in many years.

The importance of Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule's "Common Good Constitutionalism," published by The Atlantic, is not a function of originality. Plenty of legal theorists have made similar arguments in the past. When I was an editor at the conservative religious magazine First Things back in 2003, we published an essay by an obscure academic that tentatively advanced similar claims — but we ran it paired with a stinging rebuttal by none other than Robert Bork, a legend in conservative legal circles. Seventeen years later, the views Bork eviscerated are being advanced in a far more cogent and confident way in the pages of a prominent centrist magazine by an author ensconced in one of the country's foremost elite institutions hoping to influence the dozens of judges recently appointed to the federal courts by a right-wing populist president.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.