A Harvard law professor has proposed dealing with what he calls conservative "losers in the culture wars" with a hard line similar to what was done to Germany and Japan after World War II.
His suggestion comes in a blog post at
Balkanization outlining what he says should be an abrupt change in mindset of liberal thinkers to finally abandon "defensive-crouch constitutionalism" in a desire to shape the courts and their rulings.
Prof. Mark Tushnet says now that the courts are dominated by those appointed by Democratic presidents, it is time for judges to stop worrying about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.
In the blog post, Tushnet, one of the more controversial figures in constitutional theory, writes:
"For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars... My own judgment is that taking a hard line ("You lost, live with it") is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who — remember — defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all.
"Trying to be nice to the losers didn't work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945)."
Conservative critics were quick to fight back.
The Daily Signal's Ryan T. Anderson said Tushnet's comparison to defeated Germany was an attempt to make the government treat conservative Christians with views and beliefs different than his, like Nazis and thus not deserving of consideration.
Anderson added it was sheer gall to claim that liberals had been defensive up to now, saying that even when the Left lost elections, "liberals aggressively sought in the courts an unlimited abortion license, a redefinition of marriage, and now for transgender bathroom policies throughout the nation."
Thomas Williams writes in
Breitbart that Tushnet's views "ring of desperation rather than victory. As much as he crows of having won, his words betray the insecurity of someone who knows he will die before he ever really sees the complete liberal triumph that he dreams of."
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