Alex Aronson
speaker
168 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Alex Aronson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
that had produced a whole bunch of stuff that these interests really did not like by the time that the Powell memo was conceived in 1971.
We had seen, and this was a bipartisan push towards broad consumer worker rights, social and economic progress, the civil rights movement.
These were all the products of mostly congressional democratic action.
And they recognized that if they could concentrate and hold power within the less democratic features of our Constitution, such as the judiciary, they would be able to choke off that progress, take us backwards, and foreclose future progress.
So that was the sort of structural design of the Federalist Society right-wing legal project that did really begin in earnest with the Powell memo.
But you could trace it back earlier to the reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and racial integration, right?
This was actually, I think...
the true origins of political originalism, which was offered as a more palatable alternative to just straight-up racist nullification of Supreme Court orders as the court was ordering schools to be integrated.
And so right-wing thinkers like William F. Buckley in the National Review actually started developing originalism
as a way to reach the same outcomes, but under the pretext of neutrality.
And the Powell Memo really brought in right-wing industrial and corporate money to infuse this into a whole movement.
And it took power.
And I think we have spent a lot, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with much of the story of the investment
and of the organization and coordination by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society toward the installment of these justices with folks like Roberts and Alito in the George W.
Bush administration.
But I think what we spend less time thinking about, which is just as important, perhaps more important than something we can actually do something about, is the way that the liberal left, the Democratic Party, the media treated this incursion on our Constitution, treated this
court capture scheme, right?
Because I think the main mistake we collectively have made for all of these decades is to think of the courts, first and foremost, as the place to go for democracy and justice and equal rights.
And then to mistake what originalism was as sort of a good faith intellectual adversary across the aisle, you know, in terms of this jurisprudence to go back to original intent.
We took it at face value and engaged with it directly rather than acknowledging it as a pretextual vehicle for an authoritarian political project.
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