Peter Beinart: The Favor Justice Roberts Did the Right

Peter Beinart is editor in chief of Open Zion, a blog about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future at The Daily Beast. He is the author of The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books).

It’s easy to see why liberals are relieved today: the most important progressive legislation of most of our lifetimes has survived. It’s easy to see why centrists are relieved: the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has survived. Centrists understand that it’s not a good thing for an ostensibly nonpartisan institution like the Supreme Court to be at war with one of America’s two major parties. John Roberts has made sure that didn’t happen, and as a result, the court’s legitimacy is no longer in free fall.

Conservatives, by contrast, are livid. As with abortion, ostensibly conservative justices, appointed by ostensibly conservative presidents, have upheld policies that most conservatives hate. But take it from a liberal, thoughtful conservatives should be relieved too. For one thing, Roberts has proved that at least some conservatives really believed all that talk about judicial restraint. The conservative movement has been most successful when it balances its desire to repeal progressive change with a principled belief in the value of conserving things, even things right-wingers dislike. That’s what Dwight Eisenhower understood when he imposed fiscal discipline on Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman’s newly created welfare state rather than trying to repeal it. It’s what Ronald Reagan understood when he set a more traditional tone for the country rather than directly challenging the new freedoms of the 1960s. In the Tea Party era, the GOP has become too revolutionary and insufficiently conservative. It has lost the modesty that true conservatism should have at its core. From the bench, Roberts has shown how to restore that balance....

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