In it for the Long Haul
We're not going anywhere
I know some of you have been fretting about the future lately. Are we on the road to fascism? Will there be a 2028 Presidential Election? Are we getting a MAGA antipope in Pope Leo’s brother? Are all my friends moving abroad? Has everyone forgotten how to read? Will the Bannerlord expansion really drop in June? Where will you keep getting all of your incisive commentary on American law, politics, and constitutional thought?
Well folks, let me put your minds at ease: I’m not going anywhere. I am pleased to announce that despite my, and I presume yours, and many former supervisors and colleagues’ best efforts over the last five months, I will remain totally, 100%, entirely unemployed for the 2025-26 Substack Season. I’m all Seditious Conspiracy, all the time. That means more content. More memes. I’m talking more deep dives into the dark niches of political thought you didn’t know you wanted. More shitposting about reactionary freaks in legal academia. More bombastic plans to fix America. More Lincoln. And, of course, what you’re all here for, more Harry Jaffa.
Look, I know it’s been a slow and halting start this year. I had to move last summer. Then I went dark to organize several years of thoughts into a book proposal so I could apply for grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities—remember when we thought that stuff would still exist? Money’s got to come from somewhere though. So I spent the last five months applying for jobs, hoping to jump back on the horse of regional tier legal academia with a hot new research agenda and aggressive publishing plan. Okay, okay. It was always a fool’s errand. That’s on me.
The American legal establishment—having proven itself perennially incapable of providing for the American people’s basic material needs, securing racial and gender equality, guaranteeing the right to vote, refraining from engaging in genocide either foriegn or domestic, and now wholly incapable of preventing a fascistic, twice-impeached felon who is both textually and spiritually ineligible from returning to the Presidency—has not only failed, it’s the entire reason we’re in this mess. With a modicum of hindsight, only an idiot would put much hope into such a system suddenly changing it’s raison d’etre. Hope is always a little irrational though, isn’t it? Though while putting in that idiot’s labor, I denied you all dozens more posts. Mea culpa.
But things are settling. The book has an outline and a goal. The less I think about it, the more I wind up writing it. I’ve got lots to read this year, including several old Civil War histories and accumulated works of Lincoln liberated from musty antique malls out here in the woods.
I may (will) go dark this summer both to take some time off and just read. But this fall, we are so back. We’ll finish off the series on the “colorblind” Constitution and probably take a detour to see how reactionaries’ anti-classification notion runs headlong into the judicial doctrine of standing. We’ll take a spin through the origin and consequences and (hopefully) point of judicial review in the American system. What does the obscure Eleventh Amendment actually mean? (Hint, whatever the Fourteenth says.) Does the government owe us anything, or are we just shit out of luck when others assail us within the territorial jurisdiciton of a sovereign who supposedly possesses and must therefore maintain the monopoly on the legitimate use of force? And why is American law so damn punitive and selfish and why is it John Calvin’s fault?
It’s Seditious Conspiracy Season 2. Sophomore Slump. Back to our roots. 2 Houses, 2 Divided. Tell your friends! Tell your mom, your dad, your aunts (probably not your uncle). Shout it on the mountaintops. And to all four of you reading, thank you.