The Future of Conservative Constitutionalism

The ambitious project of constitutional restoration that has occupied a portion of the American Right for generations now finds itself at a peculiar crossroads.

On the one hand, the effort to transform the courts, which has been at the center of this project for half a century, has reached an impressive high-water mark. Launched in response to the pernicious overreach of the Warren and Burger courts, this effort sought nothing less than to recover an understanding of the proper role of the judge, which had been utterly lost, and to put it into practice.

In a sense, that project was one of several efforts on the right to respond to the calamities the Left had unleashed on the country by the end of the Great Society era. The other monsters tamed for a time by conservative political and policy work in the 1970s and ’80s — crime, stagflation, welfare dependence, a kind of semi-socialist regulatory economics — were all beaten back more quickly than progressive judicial activism. Indeed, they were beaten back long enough ago that they now threaten to resurge, and some younger conservatives (young enough perhaps to still expect permanent victories in this vale of tears) can be found genuinely wondering what conservatism has ever conserved.