A Foolish Thing to Do, and a Wrong-Headed One Too

Krystal Ball: "Relying on the courts as the sole focus of your political project is a very foolish thing to do." Progressives, take heed! . https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJSBHip780&t=608s . It's not just that justices won't reliably vote the way you expect them to. It's that they shouldn't do so, and it's undemocratic to try to rig the courts so that they will. And that sort of mischief has major knock-on effects: it can be held largely responsible for the escalation of the US culture wars of recent decades, because nothing gets people riled up more than the sense that their democratic choices have been nullified by unelected judges acting as legislators. That polarization has in turn played a big role in retarding the development of working-class consciousness by keeping people distracted with cultural issues. . At the ultimate root of this politicization of the courts is our archaic first-past-the-post voting system, which pushes people into just two parties, each of which inevitably sees judicial appointments as an issue it can campaign and win elections on. I don't think it's coincidental we don't hear about comparable levels of political polarization or complaints about judicial activism in the countries of continental Europe, which all employ some variety of proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections.