So there’s a long tradition in classical liberalism of believing that political equality should take a back seat to the sanctity of property rights (listen to @mikeduncan’s 1848 podcast if you don’t like reading books) which kind of fell out of 20th century center-right politics.

The new view was that democracy was good and important, and so consequently one’s appreciation for the virtues of property had to be tempered by some sense of compromise with the views of the electorate.

You make your peace with some form of the welfare state.

I think that’s really encouraged by the Cold War dynamic in which it became important to fans of capitalism to demonstrate that “the free enterprise system” (as they said in the postwar years) did in fact deliver superior living standards to Communism.

But since 1991 or so, a lot of that has been really attenuated.

There’s been increasing willingness to say that if the typical person’s living standards aren’t rising that’s just the free market doing its thing and the problem is the losers need to up their game.

Peter Thiel writes in 2009 that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.” https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian

That’s not a *new* view but a revival of an old one.

And the growing centrality of nonsense to Republican Party politics and of the federal judiciary to conservative politics is part and parcel of that.

Back in the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court functioned as a kind of Guardian’s Council — electoral politics continued to take place and to be somewhat important, but an elite circle committed to very strong property rights had veto power.

Right now the revival of these ideas is *mostly* limited to books and Clarence Thomas concurrences.

But the people who think this stuff are not marginal or marginalized, they’re embedded in very mainstream institutions and they exert influence.

Under Trump, free market economics — an idea he never discusses or appeals to — has become this kind of odd esoteric doctrine, that drives GOP policymaking in profound ways but only quietly.

Even “socialism” exists primarily as a cultural signifier.

So that becomes the big question.

Can you use the fact that the median senate seat is R+6 to ensure long-term control of the courts, and via control of the courts entrench non-democratic governance of the economy thus securing “flourishing and prosperity” against the demos?