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As should be clear, the issue here is not inter-presonal ethics (showing respect despite fundamental disagreement). But rather the nature of liberal institutional commitments under conditions of deep disagreement https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-26/amy-coney-barrett-deserves-to-be-on-the-supreme-court
Should the anti-majoritarian Senate be abolished? Should the juristocratic counter-majoirtarian court be abolished or packed? Should the electoral college be abolished? If yes (even if cannot politically) then why are they still treated as legitimate?
The liberal answer is no to most of these structural changes because, as Feldman made clear in a previous op-ed, liberals too want the counter-majoritarian system, even if Trump is president, Senate is Republican, and SCOTUS is far-right https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-25/democrats-already-tried-packing-the-supreme-court-it-failed
What more than Trump does "political liberalism" and "liberal legalism" need in order to rethink their institutional commitments to constitutional legitimacy? Liberal legitimacy legitimates the very injustice that liberal justice condemns https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol67/iss3/18/
Political liberals allow that injustice can be the product of acceptable procedures, acceptable institutions, and acceptable forms of reasoning that were envisaged by political liberalism itself
This may be the reason for praising Barrett as a kind reason-giver: Trump/McConnell may be a naked-power duo but at least their appointee Barrett will advance her very conservative agenda via our respected (though manipulable) canons and shared (though empty) abstract ideals
No matter how loudly political liberalism protests injustice, it has little grounds to object to the deployment of the state’s coercive power to advance anti-egalitarian policies. This is because it lends the unjust state the stamp of normative acceptability.
