The new bestseller Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America by Mark R. Levin marks a new stage in the political activity of the American religious fundamentalists.
This book, published by the ultra-right-wing publisher Regnery Publishing, is an unabashed attack on the American Judicial System and goes way beyond previous conservative attacks on "liberal activist judges." It utterly ignores the role given the judiciary in the Constitution. It has not been reviewed by any legal scholar, so it is being sold entirely based on recommendations by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other FOX News personalities.
In Slate Dalia Lithwick Lithwick describes the book thus:The book is silly. But the maddening question here is why Levin, Limbaugh, and - as of yesterday, Tom DeLay - have stopped threatening just "liberal activist" judges and have started threatening the judiciary as a whole. Levin, recall, is excoriating a court composed of seven Republican appointees. He's trashing the body that's done more to restore the primacy of states' rights, re-inject religion into public life, and limit the rights of criminal defendants than any court in decades. He seems not to have noticed that the Rehnquist court is a pretty reliably conservative entity. Reading his hysterical attacks on Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, you'd forget they are largely on his side and substantially different creatures from the court's true liberals. But Levin seems as incapable of distinguishing between jurists as he is incapable of differentiating between cases or doctrine. He's happy to decimate the court as a whole.
Consider Tom DeLay's similarly broad comments from yesterday, following the death of Terri Schiavo: "This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change," DeLay warned. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," he said. In addition to sharing Levin's unfortunate tendency to label all federal judges as "men," DeLay is now attacking all the judges involved in Schiavo Republicans, - devout Christians, and strict constructionists among them - for failing to interpret the law to suit him. This is not just an attack on some renegade liberal jurists. Levin, Limbaugh, and DeLay have subtly shifted their attack to encompass the entire judiciary.
Most secular conservatives believe in the Rule of Law. Levin and DeLay do not. Theirs is a religious fundamentalist position rather than a secular conservative one. The religious right-wing is pushing for a society in which their view of morality trumps the Rule of Law, legal procedure and the Constitution.
Economic conservatives are essentially secular modernists who are unhappy that modern post-FDR, post-Civil-Rights government is interfering with their classical liberal idea of Laissez Faire economics. Their solutions involve shrinking government, controlling social spending and preventing new social programs. Theirs is essentially a secular approach to modernity. They think that they can use modern economic functions to gain advantages over others, and they measure those advantages primarily in wealth.
The fundamentalists are people who see the world as totally controlled by Good and Evil, and they see their children slipping away to Evil. Everything that happens occurs because someone, good or evil, wants it to happen. Their effort for over a century has been to take their religion back to the fundamental inerrant word of God in the Bible to find the good. Then they want to share their vision of God as they find him. But doing this has not stopped the slide of their world into uncertainty and Evil, (See Juan Cole in Salon) Their problem is that their religious culture is still dying. Merely adopting and professing their religion has not stopped the slide of the world into Evil, so they want control of government. They won't just teach their morality. They will have the laws, police and courts enforce it.
They also think that they elected G. W. Bush, one of their own, as President. They see this as their last, desperate chance to stop the slide and to revive a righteous, religious society. Bush is one of them, and he owes them. His reelection is a sign that they are succeeding at last, so they are presenting the bill.
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