Even Justice John Paul Stevens considers himself a conservative. And, you know, I don’t think he’s a far-lefty either, but I’m getting really sick of people identifying as “conservative” because they think it makes them sound more reasonable. Same with “progressive.” Now, I use the term “progressive” too, but I’d never argue with someone who called me a liberal. Just own it, kids. To borrow from JFK:
But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
It shouldn’t be difficult.
But back to JPS. I think Jeffrey Rosen, the author of the piece, hits it on the head here:
It may seem surprising that such a passionate leader of the court’s liberal wing bristles when he is called a liberal. But the fact that Stevens sees himself as a conservatively oriented centrist makes perfect sense given what judicial liberalism has become. There was a time, years ago in the Warren Court era, when liberal justices like Stevens’s predecessor William O. Douglas saw themselves as on a mission to recreate American society along boldly egalitarian lines by discovering newly minted constitutional rights. But for better or worse, this ambitious conception of judicial liberalism has been replaced, like much of political liberalism in America, by a more modest, conciliatory and technocratic sensibility. Even the most liberal justices today have little appetite for the old approach.
Judicial liberalism, in other words, has largely become a conservative project: an effort to preserve the legal status quo in the face of efforts by a younger generation of conservatives to uproot the precedents of the past 40 years. Stevens, who wrote or supported many of those precedents, understandably objects when he feels they are distorted or mischaracterized by justices who were in college when he was appointed to the court. At the same time, merely conserving the achievements of the past is less than what many liberals today ultimately hope for. Can Stevens provide a model for a new vision of legal liberalism in the 21st century?
I also love Stevens for comments like this:
Stevens’s final judicial theme is that the court has an obligation to protect ideals of equality and liberty in light of the nation’s entire history, rather than legalistically parsing the original understanding of the Constitution. As the court moved right during the past 20 years, Stevens increasingly saw it as his role to interpret the Constitution with fidelity to all of American history, rejecting the claim of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and Judge Robert Bork that the original understanding of the 18th-century framers is all that matters. I noticed a copy of Bork’s book “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” on Stevens’s coffee table and expressed surprise. “He and I were good friends,” Stevens said laughing, and confessing that he hadn’t read the book. But Stevens disagrees with Bork’s exclusive emphasis on original intent: “Originalism is perfectly sensible. I always try to figure out what the original intent was, but to say that’s the Bible and nothing else counts seems to me quite wrong.”