Every time the Supreme Court issues another appalling decision, America’s left-wing intellectual ecosystem is entangled with polemic speculation as to the motives of the right-wing justices responsible. Most hated of all is John Roberts, whose tenure as Chief Justice has, in the past several years, descended into the slow uprooting of the legal foundations of American liberal democratic republicanism as we know it. Critics speculate that he is a Jim Crow segregationist or even a neo-Schmittian fascist, motivated by an overbearing hatred of freedom and democracy. The purpose of this essay is to suggest a more grounded picture of the man who has made himself the most destructive Supreme Court justice since Roger Taney at least, and perhaps in the history of the Republic.
I am writing to bury Roberts, not to praise him, but his appalling jurisprudential descent is as much the product of his virtues as his vices. If we want to surpass the amateur Kremlinology that has passed for most SCOTUS commentary in our lifetimes and a get a good-enough picture of Roberts to understand the nature of the threat he poses, and where the limits to his collaboration with MAGA totalitarianism lie, we need to lay aside hatred as much as sympathy, in favor of a careful empathy toward him and the high-brow conservative social milieu that has molded his worldview.
The first key to understanding John Roberts is that he is an authoritarian not out of bitterness or spite, but out of a patronizing, flawed, and existentially naive form of benevolence. In his entire lifetime, he seems to have never once been noticeably done dirty by an authority figure directly above him—his parents, his Catholic school teachers and clergy, his professors at Harvard, Judge Henry Friendly, and Justice William Rehnquist all appear to have treasured him. In his subsequent pre-judicial legal career in both the Executive Branch and in biglaw, he clearly excelled at delivering for his clients. He is consistently described as a man of immense diligence, focus, and competence through this time—he is very possibly the most helpful direct subordinate any of his direct superiors have ever had, and he was fortunate enough to always be rewarded for it. From his childhood (he was born in 1955) until he reached the apex of the entire legal profession (in 2003), Roberts consistently, for half a century, benefited immensely from the personalist paternalism of his superiors. He can no doubt conceive of an abusive or incompetent superior, but his entire life before the Chief Justiceship has taught him that personal decisionmaking by wise men of authority (and occasional women) is to be highly trusted by default, presumed correct until proven otherwise.
When Roberts looks at the vast web of procedural restraints placed upon these authorities by liberal institutions, he not only perceives an intolerable insult to them, but a great disservice done to those they might help through their wise leadership. He is incapable of properly comprehending that abuse of power has been the rule rather than the exception through history, that more wise men of authority than not have committed grave, intentional acts of injustice in the sweep of human history. A lifetime of unaccountable authority lets slip far too many opportunities for wanton corruption than almost anyone can fully avoid, and Roberts realizes neither this, nor that he himself is no exception to this rule in his long tenure of effectively unsupervised judicial authority.
In a better world, Roberts would have been indoctrinated in this aspect of reality by his fellow conservative elites. But the American conservatism he grew up with, though far less degraded than that of our time, was scarcely prepared to openly, thoroughly explain this to him. Conservatism, by its nature, is far more reactive than liberalism or progressivism. While liberals and progressives tend to be animated by dreams of the future as much as by the worries of the present, conservatism develops chiefly by responding to traumatic crises: political defeats, social crises, recessions, wars, and so on. Where European conservatives of the generation of John Roberts’ parents and mentors were haunted by the trauma of Hitler, American conservatives were haunted by the trauma of losing to FDR, of having the authority of the good ol’ boys undermined (and in some matters, swept away) by the administrative state apparatus that Roosevelt built and his successors strengthened further. What was more, it was gospel among this milieu that the New Deal had nothing to do with the successful recovery from the Depression, and that Hoover had been right all along. The defeat at FDR’s hand was the result of bad luck, and his remaking of the American government, an intolerable usurpation, one that perhaps, regrettably demands an anti-FDR strongman to impose a ‘Lycurgian moment’.
And Roberts’ personality is ill-suited to seeing past his mentors on this. A man of few words, self-effacing, obedient to authority, who apparently once overworked himself into a hospital bed while attending Harvard, John Roberts is a master-class in unshakable loyalty to those he looks up to. This is not the sort of man who walks away from the ways he was brought up into, even when those ways are wrong, even when their internal contradictions descend into insanity. He is precisely the wrong person to put in charge in a situation where his ingrained habits fail and the situation requires a bold but steady hand.
Indeed, it is likely that Roberts continues to act so subordinate to a Republican-controlled Executive Branch precisely because, under stress, he defaults to the role he spent most of his career in before his lifetime appointment, a role that accords perfectly with the experiences of his childhood and young adulthood. He is diligently attempting to ensure that the executive authorities have all the power they need to solve our present problems. That he is an authority, indeed one of our Republic’s principal officers, is something he’d probably blandly acknowledge if you asked him, but he conceives of himself only as an enabler for others to play the game. That is all well and good when the game is over how high the tax rates go, but it is laughably inadequate when a wannabe tyrant is at the helm and doing all said tyrant can think of to wreck democracy for good. Roberts is just an umpire, here to help the Commissioners manage their game, not stand up to the scary team owner rallying a violent mob and a coterie of masked thugs to take the stadium.
That’s the tragedy of it all. Here is a man whose life was enabled by thick liberal and social-demcratic institutions that protected him from economic collapse, from the horrors of war, from religious and ethnic discrimination (he would not be properly ‘White’ in the US of the 1920s, after all), and from countless other threats. But he sees only a bocage of liberal meddling in the way of the ‘wise’ patriarchs who ought to be allowed to fix things up properly. And now that he and his colleagues have cut this bocage flat, and the abomination they’ve loosed into our garden turns around to face him, he has nothing to hold onto for protection. The old America he cherished is dead, he himself dealt it the deathblow in a 9-0 act of hubris, and recovering the good that was lost will require blotting out his jurisprudence and marking him out as the incurious functionary who broke the Republic because the conservative elites he has slavishly aped his whole life indirectly told him to.
