For most of American history, all sides in most major fights about the nation’s political economy agreed about one thing: the questions they were fighting about were constitutional in nature. In other words, they were fighting about constitutional political economy. This point is central to a book project that Willy Forbath and I have been working on for a few years, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (forthcoming January 2022). We tell a story about rival visions of constitutional political economy stretching back to the Founding Era and how advocates of these visions fought out their differences both through politics and in court at different moments in American history. We are especially interested in what we call the “democracy of opportunity” tradition, which runs from the founding through the New Deal, whose (varied) advocates contended, by and large, that the Constitution required that we enact laws to disperse economic and political power, rather than letting it get concentrated in too few hands. We also explore various rival traditions, from the distinctive constitutional political economy arguments of the defenders of slavery to the anti-redistributive constitutional political economy arguments that crystallized a century ago into what we now call Lochnerism.
You’ll notice I said “through politics and in court.” A central theme of the book is that for most of American history there has not been much separation (if any) between the constitutional political economy arguments advocates make in the courtroom, in the legislative hearing room, at a protest rally, or on the stump as candidates for office. And yet there does seem to be a noticeable pattern, which is my topic in this blog post. For advocates of the democracy of opportunity tradition—the tradition holding that the Constitution required (among other things) crushing the landed Southern oligarchy of the Slave Power; breaking up the trusts and monopolies; taxing the incomes of the rich; distributing land, education, and opportunity to ordinary Americans; and enforcing workers’ rights to organize and strike—courts have generally been the least hospitable of the three branches of government.
The pattern is pretty striking. Painting with a bit of a broad brush—this is a blog post—it seems fair to say that American courts have, much more often than not, taken a particular side in fights about constitutional political economy. Courts have taken the side of holding that the Constitution protects the rights of aristocracy and oligarchy to maintain their outsized economic and political power. Many Americans have argued that the Constitution requires just the opposite, but they have found a more receptive audience, on the whole, in the democratically elected branches than in the courts. Over the course of American history, the elected branches have built a considerably more open and democratic political economy than the courts generally have wanted to allow. Today, as courts eviscerate voting rights and campaign finance laws, and take whacks at public employee unions and social safety net programs such as the Affordable Care Act, this particular alignment of the branches of government is with us again. But why? Why this alignment, so much more often than the reverse?
The pattern began in earnest with Reconstruction. To the Radical Republicans, it was obvious that racial inclusion was impossible without destroying the planter oligarchy and building a mass, multi-racial middle class in the South. As Thaddeus Stevens put it, “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed . . . [i]f the South is ever to be made a safe republic.” There can be no “republican institutions . . . in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs.” But as violent white supremacists undid Reconstruction, the Court abetted them by finding ways to eviscerate the Reconstruction Amendments, striking down key parts of the core civil rights statutes that Congress had enacted to enforce the Amendments. The Court’s gutting of those statutes left Black citizens unprotected from most discrimination, disenfranchisement, and even massacre by white terrorist mobs. However, the same Court was receptive to claims that the Reconstruction Amendments protected corporations and their freedom from various forms of government regulation.
The Supreme Court during this period—which was a long period, spanning much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—managed to surprise almost everyone by striking down an income tax on the highest earners as unconstitutional (a decision eventually overturned by constitutional amendment). Frequently, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, found ways to weaken the antitrust laws that Congress enacted. Courts attacked efforts to organize labor unions with sweeping injunctions, court-sanctioned state violence, and jail terms aimed at protecting employers’ rights to an uninterrupted flow of non-union workers. (These are just a few highlights; there are many more in the book.) When you read some of these decisions today, they barely read like what we recognize as law—the class politics is so raw and right on the surface. But the views of those judges were predictable. The early-twentieth-century Republican Party that dominated American politics and judicial appointments in that era was the party of big business; the federal courts were stacked with elite lawyers from the emerging corporate bar, whose jobs before they joined the bench mostly involved serving the railroads and the trusts and their owners, the oligarchs of the Gilded Age. It would have been surprising if these judges had not beenactivists bent on finding ways to thwart the democratic branches’ efforts to rein in oligarchy.
So what about when American politics turned? After President Franklin Roosevelt’s dramatic confrontation with the Lochner Court, the Court retreated and upheld the New Deal, ushering in a new constitutional regime. The Court reconceived its role, especially after World War II, as the nation’s protector of civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. The Court upheld many laws parallel to the ones it had struck down after Reconstruction, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But that was the most important thing it did in its brief period of mid-20th-century liberalism: step out of the way. The Warren Court has a reputation for activism, and many of its decisions—Brown v. Board of Education, the criminal procedure revolution, one-person-one-vote—were indeed activist holdings. But when it came to economic inequality, the Warren Court was operating during the period of American history when inequality was at its most muted (the “great compression”). Restraining oligarchy, or building up the middle class as a bulwark of Republican government, was not on the Court’s docket. Some observers expected the Court to do more—to enlist the Constitution in the War on Poverty, set constitutional minimum welfare guarantees, or equalize school funding—but in the end, it didn’t. And then the Court took a long right turn, and now we are once again in a Gilded Age, with the Court playing the familiar role it played a century before, as the branch where efforts to build a democracy of opportunity can most readily expect to be crushed.
There is a lot of contingency in American history, perhaps especially when it comes to courts. But it seems to me non-coincidental that the Court has so consistently been the least dangerous branch to aristocrats and oligarchs and their efforts to concentrate economic and political power. The simplest reason is this: efforts to restrain concentrations of private power—whether it’s the landed aristocrats Jefferson worried about at the founding, their Slave Power successors, or the monopolist robber barons of the Gilded Age—require the exercise of public power in the form of legislation. There are supporting roles to be played here by executives executing legislation and by courts interpreting it. But fundamentally, courts are not equipped to initiate or lead the work—the constitutionally necessary work—of laws like the Sherman Antitrust Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, or the Affordable Care Act (to name a few!). Courts can interpret these statutes in ways that further the statutes’ goals, or courts can try to thwart them. But courts are not equipped to move first or take the lead in advancing these statutes’ goals. On the other hand, courts are better equipped to recognize the anti-redistributive, so-called libertarian claims of property, contract, and so on that some of these statutes might be viewed as threatening. Those claims are of a form that we still teach in the first year of law school: an individual claimant, standing on old common law-ish rights, against the redistributive machinations of the progressive state.
Conservatives have long understood this point. They have placed their hopes in courts for over a century. As we explain in the book, conservatives never accepted the “New Deal Settlement” that exists in the wishful thinking of liberals. Instead they have continued ever since the 1930s to find ways to enlist the courts in their struggles to build a less redistributive constitutional political economy, one more tolerant of concentrations of economic and political power. Liberals and progressives cannot similarly place their hopes in courts—and not only because currently, contingently, the courts are far more conservative than the country as a whole. And yet liberals and progressives cannot ignore courts, which still have the power to thwart almost any intervention in our constitutional political economy. Nor should liberals and progressives argue seriously for an end to judicial review: we do actually need the courts to police violations of civil liberties and civil rights.
That leaves liberals and progressives in a tricky spot. We need the courts, but we also need to understand that the courts are not our friends—and are unlikely ever to be. We need to understand the role of courts in our constitutional politics: rather than umpires sitting outside of politics, judges are a special kind of political actor, engaged quite directly in their own form of constitutional politics. If history is any guide, the long-term solution when the courts are aligned against liberal and progressive causes is not to “reform” the politics out of the courts, but, rather, to confront the courts through politics itself. It has worked before.
