Post by aj2hall on Jul 12, 2024 22:05:26 GMT
There are so many reasons to be angry with conservatives on the Supreme Court. The Dobbs decision, the decisions to limit the power of federal agencies, rolling back gun safety laws, the immunity case, flying flags upside down, bribery etc. The author of this opinion makes a convincing case to add gaslighting to the list.
www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/opinion/supreme-court-psychological-manipulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6k0.f10X.OYEMhRgzr-zO&smid=url-share
At the close of one of the most consequential and least constitutional terms in the Supreme Court’s history, it’s hard to ignore one particularly offensive trend: the right-wing justices’ repeated and patronizing attempts to minimize the importance of their unprecedented decisions.
There’s nothing to see here, they regularly seem to say; everyone who is upset at their decisions is being hysterical and should just calm down. Take a few recent examples:
In his majority opinion in the case about presidential immunity, Chief Justice John Roberts mocked the three liberal dissenters for striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.” (Reality check: The immunity ruling — which gave presidents carte blanche to break most criminal laws when carrying out their official duties — is not grounded in any clause of the Constitution. It went far beyond what even the most pessimistic court observers expected; the dissenters, if anything, responded with restraint.)
During oral arguments in a case that pitted Idaho’s near-total abortion ban against the federally guaranteed right of a woman to end her pregnancy if necessary to stabilize a dire medical crisis, Justice Samuel Alito dismissed the government’s concerns. “Nobody’s suggesting that the woman is not an individual and she doesn’t — she doesn’t deserve stabilization,” the justice who wrote the opinion striking down Roe v. Wade said with his trademark irritation. “Nobody’s suggesting that.” (Reality check: That is precisely what Idaho was suggesting, by arguing that federal law doesn’t pre-empt the state ban.)
Or take the chief justice again, writing for the court in upholding a federal law that prohibits domestic abusers from possessing guns. A federal appeals court had struck down the law as unconstitutional. “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” the chief justice wrote, explaining why the lower court had been wrong. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” (Reality check: The lower court was following the letter of a Supreme Court ruling from two years ago, which held that any gun law without an almost exact analogue from the founding era — like laws that apply to domestic abusers — is unconstitutional.)
Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.
“The court is trying to distance itself from the monsters it created,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution,” told me. “They’re trying to say, ‘We don’t know where you got these crazy ideas from!’ But of course we do know where they got them from.”
Ms. Franks calls it “victim-claiming” — when privileged, powerful people take on the mantle of victimhood, displacing genuine victims, whether pregnant women without treatment or homeless people without a bed. The effect, she said, is to “replace actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.”
That may be the most insidious gaslight of all: trying to sell Americans the right-wing fantasy of how the world was, or should be again, in place of how it really is.
www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/opinion/supreme-court-psychological-manipulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6k0.f10X.OYEMhRgzr-zO&smid=url-share
At the close of one of the most consequential and least constitutional terms in the Supreme Court’s history, it’s hard to ignore one particularly offensive trend: the right-wing justices’ repeated and patronizing attempts to minimize the importance of their unprecedented decisions.
There’s nothing to see here, they regularly seem to say; everyone who is upset at their decisions is being hysterical and should just calm down. Take a few recent examples:
In his majority opinion in the case about presidential immunity, Chief Justice John Roberts mocked the three liberal dissenters for striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.” (Reality check: The immunity ruling — which gave presidents carte blanche to break most criminal laws when carrying out their official duties — is not grounded in any clause of the Constitution. It went far beyond what even the most pessimistic court observers expected; the dissenters, if anything, responded with restraint.)
During oral arguments in a case that pitted Idaho’s near-total abortion ban against the federally guaranteed right of a woman to end her pregnancy if necessary to stabilize a dire medical crisis, Justice Samuel Alito dismissed the government’s concerns. “Nobody’s suggesting that the woman is not an individual and she doesn’t — she doesn’t deserve stabilization,” the justice who wrote the opinion striking down Roe v. Wade said with his trademark irritation. “Nobody’s suggesting that.” (Reality check: That is precisely what Idaho was suggesting, by arguing that federal law doesn’t pre-empt the state ban.)
Or take the chief justice again, writing for the court in upholding a federal law that prohibits domestic abusers from possessing guns. A federal appeals court had struck down the law as unconstitutional. “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” the chief justice wrote, explaining why the lower court had been wrong. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” (Reality check: The lower court was following the letter of a Supreme Court ruling from two years ago, which held that any gun law without an almost exact analogue from the founding era — like laws that apply to domestic abusers — is unconstitutional.)
Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.
“The court is trying to distance itself from the monsters it created,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution,” told me. “They’re trying to say, ‘We don’t know where you got these crazy ideas from!’ But of course we do know where they got them from.”
Ms. Franks calls it “victim-claiming” — when privileged, powerful people take on the mantle of victimhood, displacing genuine victims, whether pregnant women without treatment or homeless people without a bed. The effect, she said, is to “replace actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.”
That may be the most insidious gaslight of all: trying to sell Americans the right-wing fantasy of how the world was, or should be again, in place of how it really is.
