How Conservatives Won the Law A liberal political scientist recounts the rise of the Federalist Society—and explains his sympathy for some of its ideas. By Jason Willick
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-conservatives-won-the-law-1532126300
STEVEN TELES IS A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY….
When I was a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, the College Republicans announced plans to hold an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale.” The idea was to offer minorities and women discounts on cupcakes while white males would pay full price. This led to an emergency meeting of the student government and widespread calls to defund the group or shut down the event. For its organizers, that alone made it a wild success.
“Affirmative-action bake sale conservatism,” as Steven Teles calls it, has an intellectual legacy dating back to the 1960s. Influenced by the counterculture left, activists aim to provoke a crackdown on conservatives, thereby exposing elite education as a coercive “hegemonic project” that represses disfavored ideas. A more familiar term for this, he says, is “trolling.”
Mr. Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is more sympathetic to a different model of conservative campus activism, epitomized by the Federalist Society. Instead of seeking to embarrass liberal institutions, the goal is to build conservative ones with social and intellectual resources sufficient to compete directly. In his 2008 book, “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” Mr. Teles chronicles how a coalition of right-leaning law students in debating societies managed, over a few decades, to dethrone liberalism from its dominant position in legal thought. Assuming Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, judges influenced by this project will soon constitute a majority on the Supreme Court.
Liberals, as they defend their domain, insist that the conservative legal movement is the product of a deep-pocketed conspiracy and that its ideas are fronts for power and greed. Mr. Teles, although a liberal Democrat, wrote his book partly to challenge these preconceptions. “Liberals have this myth of diabolical conservative competence,” he tells me. They imagine their own side as “bumbling . . . but benevolent” and the right as “evil” but “totally farsighted and competent.”
The main achievement of the conservative legal movement, Mr. Teles says, hasn’t been fundraising but education, study and debate. The Federalist Society’s premise is that “we’re going to be smarter than the liberals,” he adds. “We’re going to be more bookish. We’re going to be more intellectual.” Conservative law students would “go down to first principles” to show that liberal students “can’t even describe why they’re in favor of what they’re in favor of.” Many of the early Federalist Society members were former liberals; their goal was to “draw people in” as they had been drawn in, by demonstrating “how thoughtful and how intellectual that project is.”
Assisting presidents with judicial appointments is a tiny fraction of the group’s activities. “If you add up all of the hours of everyone who works in the Federalist Society, overwhelmingly, it’s running debates and speakers,” Mr. Teles says. While it has a robust fundraising operation, “most of the Federalist Society is basically done by pro bono contributions” from “people who are running chapters all over the country” for students, faculty and lawyers. The fundraising is merely “a multiplier force for all of the stuff people are doing that’s really voluntary activity.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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