alexandria ocasio-cortez

Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learns of her victory in the Democratic primaries

Highs and lows and thrills and spills for progressives in the US at the moment. In the Democratic primaries ahead of the mid-term elections, the left swept a whole series of positions, the most high-profile being the New York state 14th district, covering Queens and the Bronx, where veteran machine Democrat Joe Crowley, lined up as next House speaker, was knocked off by a 28 year-old socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Crowley was reasonably progressive, but he was also Wall Street backed, and well out of touch with his ultra-safe district, who turfed him 57% to 42%, even though he outspent his opponent $3 million to $300,000. Elsewhere, social democrats to socialists took other nominations like the Colorado governorship race, a sign that the mood wasn’t confined to the big cities.

Further evidence that the country was about to become yet more polarized came almost immediately with the announcement by Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy that he was resigning from the court at the age of 82. It’s a measure of how desperate matters are around the court for liberals that Kennedy’s departure has been taken as a disaster.

Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, Kennedy was assumed to be a reliable conservative-oriented judge, albeit a compromise candidate after “originalist” Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate. For a time he was reliably to the right, but in the past two decades he became increasingly “constructivist” about how to interpret the constitution. With the court split 4-4 for two decades, Kennedy became the court, his vote ensuring the survival of legal abortion in 1992, striking down gun control in 2004, limiting — though not abolishing — the death penalty, and so on. By the 2010s, conservatives were dismayed by him; when he voted to ratify same-sex marriage in 2016, they were outraged. “Good riddance, Justice Kennedy” was the National Review’s measured response.

Yet it was scarcely as if Kennedy had gone to the left. Rather, it was that his jurisprudence had responded to the increasing absurdity of originalist thinking — trying to work out whether bakers could opt out of gay weddings by assessing what New Jersey meant by “Presbyterian” in 1784, etc. One of Kennedy’s last judgements was to uphold Trump’s “Muslim ban”.

Still after him, the delusions. Trump will nominate a justice in the mold of the right-wing God-judge Antonin Scalia (less an originalist, than an absurdist) and it will go to a Senate in which the Republicans have a 51-49 majority — after these midterms probably widening to 53 or 54 to 47 or 46, given the polarized nature of the electorate. The Republicans will suspend the filibuster, and a solid 5-4 right-wing court will eventuate. That, or even a 6-3 majority, could be in place for decades, given the relative youth of new appointees.

This is occurring at the same time as Trump’s appalling results in swing districts suggest the real possibility that the House will be retaken by the Democrats — with more than a few of the Ocasio-Cortez stripe. That sets the scene for an epic showdown all the way to the 2020 election, in a United States as frayed along cultural and value lines as much as it has been for decades upon decades. Whether the terrible targeted shooting at a small “liberal” Maryland newspaper was a shot in this war or a random act remains to be seen.

What are your predictions ahead of the mid-terms? Email your comments or responses to boss@crikey.com.au.