In the latest episode of my podcast B*tch, Listen, I reflected on a problem I can’t stop thinking about: Online progressives have created the most informed progressive audience in US history, and it hasn’t translated into any form of power or institutional change. Not even close.
Anyone can explain anything to anyone now. This is new. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to understand how the Fed reshaped the federal judiciary to align with a Christofascist agenda, you needed a law degree or to browse a very specific corner of the Internet.
But now we are one nation content creators with tiny microphones that explain everything and anything under the sun. When it comes to trying to understand what the Supreme Court does, you don’t need a law degree. You only need a phone and 15 minutes.
Information is everywhere. Podcasts, newsletters, Instagram carousels breaking down Supreme Court decisions in eight slides—everywhere.
And we still lose. Badly. Across the board. Because all the education in the world is no substitute for real power.
(Hear: We did the reading. Fascism came after all)
I have been doing this job for 12 years. I have explained the jurisprudence of abortion in every form that exists. I’ve been on panels and podcasts and on Twitter.
Roe fell anyway. And voting rights have been slowly eroded, with the Supreme Court putting the final knife in the belly of the Voting Rights Act later this year, Louisiana v. Callais. The Court that is supposed to interpret the Constitution is openly pursuing a political agenda, and a significant portion of the country either doesn’t know or can’t figure out what to do about it.
I don’t think the problem is that progressives don’t learn. I think they are learning more than ever. I think the problem is that we have confused the class for the whole project. We built an incredible machinery for producing informed people and called it a movement. Somewhere along the way, awareness became a substitute for power instead of a precursor to it.
The right did not make this mistake. The Federal Society doesn’t just train lawyers – it has built a pipeline that turned legal education into judicial appointments to a supermajority of the Supreme Court.
Treat class as the beginning of something, not the end. The beginning was indoctrination in the classroom. The end was a seat on a federal appeals court. And in between were networking events where young conservative lawyers chat with the conservative Washington elite intent on molding these lawyers in the image of conservatism.
The left built it American Constitution Society in 2001 as an express response to this pipeline. ACS still exists, but it never got the funding or coordination that the Federal Corporation did. Instead, it has become a networking organization for progressive lawyers rather than an institution that can challenge the Fed’s stranglehold on the federal judiciary.
Instead of building infrastructure for power and then funding that power, consider what the left actually built. Beyond the ACS conferences, there’s Netroots Nation, where progressive activists talk to each other. Even SXSW has become a kind of left hub. These are gatherings where smart progressive people sit on panels, talk to each other about the problems, and fly home.
I have been to these conferences. I’ve been to these panels. They are valuable in the social justice movement. But it’s also, essentially, a way to get the message out to people who already agree with you—to connect progressive organizers and media with other progressive organizers and media.
But the right didn’t get to where it is by just holding meetings to talk about war. They were creating soldiers to fight it. The lawyers who came out of the Federal Society pipeline knew exactly what their mission was, which courts to target, which cases to litigate and which judges to cultivate.
Why haven’t progressives successfully done this? What needs to happen to get the blue-collar donor class on board with judicial reform? Because people already know. At least that’s it I spend my mornings at Bluesky they have taught me. People know that the Supreme Court has been captured. They know what judicial reform would require: Expansion. Term limits. Stripping jurisdiction.
There are advocacy groups like Demand Justice and Fix the Court that are pushing for judicial reform. They do real work. Important work.
But there’s a difference between organizations that support judicial reform and a constituency that creates electoral consequences for politicians who ignore it.
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The NAACP didn’t just educate people about civil rights—it made their opposition politically costly. In 1930, for example, they launched a grassroots campaign against President Herbert Hoover’s Supreme Court nominee, John J. Parker, a man known for his opposition to Black justice.
The NAACP called on its members to contact senators and directly threaten electoral consequences, not just pressure them. This killed the candidacy, according to the Walter White Projecta project documenting the work of the former NAACP leader.
No Democrats lost a primary because they refused to support court expansion. No senator fears a judicial reform constituency as much as the gun lobby or AIPAC. That must explain at least in part why Democrats won’t touch judicial reform — at least not in any meaningful way.
In 2021, Biden has convened a committee to look at judicial reformincluding the possible extension of the Supreme Court. In a 288-page report, the commission concluded that reforms that would actually strip the courts would be too partisan — as if the current state of Supreme Court cases isn’t.
Democrats are not against judicial reform. It is for reforms leave the Supreme Court just as it is. But as Elie Mystal’s The Nation pointed way back in 2020, there will be no progressive gains if the Supreme Court remains exactly as it is.
Mystal then moved on to the proposal to expand the court which would include adding 20 seats to the judiciary, arguing that this is the only way to soften the ideological grip of judges appointed by the federal society. It sounds like a challenge, but it’s not. It is a logical response to the realization that weak reforms will not lead to progressive legislation that improves people’s lives.
(Hear:The Constitution: A Scam by Rich White Men, for Rich White Men, with Elie Mystal)
Term limits sound serious until you realize that no one is referring to the six Supreme Court justices who have already gotten there through a 40-year influence peddling.
A code of ethics sounds serious until you ask what happens when Clarence Thomas ignores it. The answer is nothing. As of 2023, Thomas is bound by a code of conduct, but that the code of ethics is decorative because the Supreme Court has no way of enforcing it. And neither does Congress. Because what can happen if Thomas continues to receive benefits from his conservative donors, one of whom has a Nazi fetish?
Complaint; In your dreams.
The only Supreme Court justice ever impeached is a guy named Samuel Chase-and that was in 1804. The Senate acquitted him. Since then, lawmakers have not attempted to remove a justice.
Which brings us to what the Democrats are doing this century. The political party which ran for abortion in 2020won and then did nothing to protect reproductive rights is the same party whose president watched six unelected lawyers dismantle 50 years ago.
His answer: edition a toothless executive order which claims to “protect access to medication abortion” without measures of how this would actually happen. (Jessica Mason Pieklo and I covered this in Boom! Lawyer in 2022. We weren’t impressed.)
(Hear: Biden finally did something about abortion! Or Him?)
The people are ahead of the politicians when it comes to judicial reform. That’s nothing, but it’s also not power — not yet. And the gap between what people know should happen and what they are able to make happen is exactly what I keep coming back to.
I’ll be exploring this problem with online trainer Blair Imani on an upcoming episode of B*tch, Tune in April 23rd. (register here)
Ultra-online progressives have more microphones than ever before. (And, yes, they’re tinier than ever.) And every day, countless content creators pick them up to explain policies and politics to their audiences. One would think that all this talk would translate into some kind of power: Power to keep the government out of our private lives, out of our health care decisions.
But the truth is that we have less power than we did 50 years ago. At least in 1974 there was a legal right to abortion. Now you can go to jail for looking an abortion pill in the eye.
I don’t have a clear answer as to why more training hasn’t led to more strength. But I think it starts with being honest that training and strength are not the same thing, and that focusing on one without building the other is how you end up exactly where we are.
