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Saturday, June 18, 2016

Clouds Over the Project of Liberal Constitutionalism? --- III

Mark Tushnet

Why might people look for "interaction" accounts of changes proposed or adopted by authoritarian populists? Here's my political/ideological account: The critics believe that the changes, while individually reasonable, are badly motivated, but are unwilling to rest their criticisms entirely on the ground of bad motivation (or, more politically, on the ground that the critics know that the proponents are proto-fascists). The reason for that reluctance is the sense that claims about motivation are too easily rejected, and that openly political claims come down to saying, "I'm right and you're wrong." The interaction accounts purport to substitute politically and analytically neutral reasons for what are (in my view) political disagreements (in which, I perhaps should make specific, I am on the side of the critics of the proposals).

Or, to revert to an older tradition ("the politics of law"), purportedly neutral accounts are actually political (and there's nothing wrong with that).

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