I reviewed Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Jacobin. Here’s a taste: The Warren Court’s victories in taking on segregation, civil liberties restrictions, and invasive policing tactics prompted a legalistic turn in liberal political strategy. Judicial review — once regarded as a tool of reaction and a barrier to reform — became more attractive as a method for achieving political goals. The Supreme Court’s higher political profile turned judicial appointments into valuable prizes. ...

Frances Stonor Saunders’s impressive LRB piece on Eric Hobsbawm’s file at MI5 is well-worth reading, but it ends with an odd coda: The two sides in the Cold War, finding each other irresistible, ended up in a contrapuntal relationship where, as George Urban put it, ’they marched in negative step, but in step all the same.’ They had their spies, we had ours. They had their files, we had ours. True, we didn’t have gulags. But what kind of democracy is it that congratulates itself on not having gulags? Never mind the dragnet surveillance, the burglaries, the smearing of reputations, the bugging of public telephone boxes, cafés, hotels, banks, trade unions, private homes, all this legitimised by the thesis that everyone is a potential subversive until proven otherwise – the problem is that the defenders of the realm took on the symptoms of the disease they were meant to cure. ...

I have a new essay up at Jacobin on continuities of radicalism between the Civil Rights Movement and today’s struggles against racism: However devoutly liberals may wish for it, democracy cannot be depoliticized. Political change can only be pursued and maintained by political commitment and engagement. The sacralization of the Civil Rights Movement’s achievements through constitutional jurisprudence is the entombment, not the revivification, of the struggle for racial justice and equality. ...

Tune in at 12:00PM PDT to hear me talk with C.S. Soong on Against the Grain about the Supreme Court, Jacobin, and why liberal Court-worship means we can’t have nice things. Update: You can listen to the audio on Against the Grain’s website here.

“Abolish the States,” my polemic against federalism and “states’ rights,” is up at Jacobin. I’ve written before about how federalism frustrates freedom rather than promoting it. Federalism – the fragmentation of political authority and the preference for subsidiarity over national political equality – inhibits the consolidation of centralized political institutions and thwarts mass movements seeking comprehensive political change. As a sort of colloquy on the topic, here are some choice quotes on federalism. Note that they’re all from what would properly be called a progressive bourgeois perspective rather than a radically democratic one, but I don’t think that diminishes their force: ...