Still think you can reason with or compromise with a “liberal”?
They have no intentions of listening to or compromising with us.
Mark Tushnet, 70, is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a scholar of constitutional law and legal history. Tushnet’s father was Jewish; his mother was Unitarian.
Writing on the blog Balkinization on May 6, 2016, Tushnet scolds fellow liberals that they must stop their “defensive-crouch liberalism,” wherein “with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives”:
It’s time to stop. Right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents, and – though I wasn’t able to locate up-to-date numbers – the same appears to be true of the district courts. And, those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.
The reason why liberals must stop being “defensive-crouch” is because they’ve decisively won the culture wars:
The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.) And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.).
Since conservatives have lost the culture wars, the question before liberals is how to treat them. Tushnet recommends:
For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. 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.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.
In other words, this Harvard professor says Americans who are conservative should be treated as defeated war criminals. Defeated war criminals don’t have constitutional rights or protection, which means this constitutional law professor is recommending that U.S. citizens be stripped of their rights for no reason other than that we hold different beliefs and values, e.g., pro-life.
Beneath the mask of a liberal is a Nazi.
H/t LifeNews.com
~Eowyn
