Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses
“The 1988 presidential election was our first and so far only national race in which virtually all the central issues of the campaign ─ criminal rights, abortion rights, capital punishment, the required recital (by teachers) of the Pledge of Allegiance ─ were judicially generated.”
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“Since the 1960s, the ACLU has looked upon criminals as an oppressed minority whose primitive vitality was being crushed by the ogre of bourgeois morality.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 175.
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“But a judicialized politics tries to bypass public consent. Profoundly anti-democratic when it goes beyond vindicating the fundamental rights of citizenship, judicial politics alienates voters by placing public policy in the private hands of lawyers and litigants. And because rights are absolute, it polarizes by producing winner-take-all outcomes, in which the losers tend to feel embittered. The politics of rights displaces the Bill of Rights and subverts the constitutional design for self-government. In effective democratic politics, opponents must rely upon a public process of persuasion and deliberation; the politics of rights replaced that process with a judiciary whose swollen powers brought disrepute to the essential notion of rights even as it undermined public trust in government. Abraham Lincoln anticipated the plight of the 1988 voters in his first inaugural address: “If the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers [and armed revolution will follow sooner or later].” ─The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 176.
