Supremely scary

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

MIAMI – The scariest thing about a Romney presidency isn’t the prospect that, like the last Republican president, he would launch another illegal, disastrous, and economically ruinous war. That, to be sure, is a frightful possibility indeed. And, given Romney’s frequent saber rattling at Iran and his close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is itching for the United States to strike Iran, it’s one that can’t be discounted altogether. But, as he showed in the last debate, even Romney realizes the American people have no stomach for another adventure in the Middle East.

Nor is the scariest part the brutal devastation that a Romney administration would wreak on the ragged remnants of the social safety. That’s the case even though, unlike the mostly empty bellicose rhetoric vis-à-vis Iran, the Romney-Ryan team can and will wage a savage class war against the middle class and the poor on behalf of the interests of the very rich.

What is truly frightening is that this one-sided war against the 99 percent will extract real blood, sweat and tears. Millions of people will lose access to health care, and tens of thousands of them will die as a result. Extreme poverty will increase, more people will go hungry, and millions of poor children will be denied adequate nutrition and millions of youths a decent education. The United States, already easily the most unequal society in the industrialized world – an unenviable distinction – will become even more unequal.

Still, as awful as the scorched-earth GOP offensive against programs that took decades to build (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and on which tens of millions of people depend on for the bare necessities of life, the scariest thing about a Romney presidency is something else.

Think Supreme Court. Of the four remaining reliably liberal justices on the Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79 and Stephen Breyer is 74. Anthony Kennedy, a moderate conservative, whose opinions have meant the difference between the merely rightist Court we have and the rabidly reactionary one we could have, is 76. Of the four conservative justices, only Antonin Scalia (76) is near the age of retirement. Thus, a President Romney likely would be able, through his Supreme Court picks, to create a reliably reactionary Court that will affect almost every aspect of American life for decades to come.

Seizing, in near perpetuity, the branch of government that has the last word on the Law, and thus on the limits of the possible across the full spectrum of societal issues, from marriage equality to abortion to abusive interrogations, would represent a triumphal culmination of the right’s long march through American institutions that began in earnest with Ronald Reagan.

But the most significant impact such a Court would have would be to set, in Constitutional stone, the basis for a society utterly and completely dominated by corporate interests to the detriment of the rights of the vast majority of citizens. If, as some psychologists believe, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, it would be a dismal future for everyone but the top 1 percent.

The current Supreme Court, sans the reactionary reinforcements Romney would provide, has already accumulated quite a pro-corporate, anti-citizen, anti-worker and anti-consumer track record. The Citizens United decision, which unleashed the vast treasuries of corporate America on the political system, is justly considered a landmark, although it is part and parcel of a much larger pattern.

Indeed, Citizens United may represent the signal accomplishment to date of the American right’s very own ongoing Manhattan Project, the splitting of the atom in the Chicago lab if not yet the mushroom cloud over the New Mexico desert or the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This may sound crazy, so let me explain. As several researchers have concluded and a recent article by William Yeomans in a special issue of The Nation (“The 1 percent Court”) reiterates, the decades-long rightward drift in the United States has not occurred by spontaneous combustion or, even less, by changes in public opinion, which in general have continued to support or move toward progressive positions.

Rather, there was a blueprint for the so-called conservative revolution. The vision is generally attributed to Lewis Powell, a future Supreme Court justice who, in 1971 when he was a business lawyer for, among others, Phillip Morris, a notorious corporate scofflaw, wrote a fateful memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In it, he basically decried what he saw as the takeover of key American institutions by elements hostile to business, ranging from the New Left to liberal clergy. More importantly, he laid out what business should do about it. This was, following the analogy, Einstein’s celebrated letter to FDR that ultimately led to the United States making the atom bomb before the Nazis and winning the war.

Powell’s plan called for “a broad response that would be funded by large corporations and coordinated by the Chamber of Commerce, big business’s main Washington lobbyist. The Supreme Court would be the centerpiece of this strategy.” Presciently, Powell wrote “that with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

The right is a good ways toward having such an “activist-minded,” read thoroughly pro-corporate, Supreme Court, as many studies of the trend in Court opinions have demonstrated. But they are just short of the mark, or Obamacare would not have survived.

Mitt Romney would be in the position to give that final, perhaps irreversible, push. As the atom bomb changed the nature of war forever, such an event could change the nature of American society for good, handing the right an unconditional victory in their class war.

The power of Powell’s “instrument for social, economic change,” which by now includes much more than just the judiciary, has been proven in multiple testing grounds, from the 2000 election to Citizens United. The ultimate target is, of course, democracy itself. Plutocracy abhors democracy. Like the two doomed cities of Japan, democracy may expire in the shock wave set off by a Supreme Court designed by the Chamber of Commerce and designated by Mitt Romney.

So, why Obama? It’s the Supreme Court, stupid.