Suppose 2005 had fulfilled President Bush's fondest hopes. His intervention in Iraq was now successfully winding down, to reveal the first vibrant democracy in the Islamic world - vindicating the higher morality of his assault on the Old World Order that America helped create in the aftermath of World War Two. On the home front, the Republican Congress was proving equally responsive to his call to privatise Social Security - replacing tired New Deal notions of communal solidarity with a bright individualistic future in an Ownership Society. With his poll numbers returning to the stratospheric heights of 2001, the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist and the resignation of Justice O'Connor would have seemed a godsend: having established the moral bankruptcy of Social Security at home and the United Nations abroad, the time had come to repudiate the lawless decisions of the modern Supreme Court.

LRB 9 February 2006 | PDF Download