but speaking plainly - these freaks are tricking you! don't let them trick you into believing this stuff by coating it with pseudointellectual wrapping. these are the same opinions that have been held by conservatives since the dawn of time, namely:

1. those in power have the power to criticize and control

2. those not in power do not

yesteryear the wrapper was "these people harm society". these years the wrapper is "everyone is equal". when you look at a thinktank bigwig and a migrant strawberry picker, who sees equality? who's the one getting to write the op-ed?

Capital L Liberals and capital C Conservatives abound. Their lower case cousins are much rarer. I always like to remind my Liberal friends that before Trump entered the fray, Bernie was the most vocally anti immigration of the major party candidates. That was back when immigration could be debated as an economic topic instead of a racial topic.

That's because the "philosophical sense" is the security blanket intellectuals cling to so they can stick to the letter rather than the spirit. Take this article:

She points to a 2018 dissent in which Justice Elena Kagan accused five of her colleagues of “weaponizing the First Amendment.” The majority in Janus v. Afscme held that labor-union “agency fees”—mandatory payments exacted from nonmembers in lieu of dues—violated the free-speech rights of government employees who declined to join the union. “So according to Justice Kagan, it was ‘weaponizing’ free speech, to subvert the liberal cause or the progressive cause of labor,” Ms. Strossen says. Although she’s grown inured to this sort of rhetoric, “it was disheartening to hear it from the Supreme Court.”

Here's what Kagen wrote:

There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion. The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law— and in its economic life—for over 40 years. As a result, it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about

workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory

policy.

The "decision entrenched in this nation's law and live" is "stare decisis" or "precedent." Janus vs. Afscme was the supreme court decision where the conservatives said "just because we ruled for it in the past doesn't mean we can't overrule it now, which may be familiar from certain recent supreme court outcomes. The precedent being thrown out was Pickering v. Board of Education, a groundbreaking employee protection ruling that basically allows unions to exist, and Garcetti vs. Ceballos, a groundbreaking precedent that said government employees don't have first-amendment protection when they're acting in their capacity as government employees. Kagen again:

The principal defense of Abood advanced by respondents and the dissent is based on our decision in Pickering, 391 U. S. 563, which held that a school district violated the First Amendment by firing a teacher for writing a letter critical of the school administration. Under Pickering and later cases in the same line, employee speech is largely

unprotected if it is part of what the employee is paid to do, see Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U. S. 410, 421–422 (2006), or

if it involved a matter of only private concern, see Connick, supra, at 146–149. On the other hand, when a public

employee speaks as a citizen on a matter of public concern, the employee’s speech is protected unless “ ‘the interest of the state, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees’

outweighs ‘the interests of the [employee], as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern.’ ”

This article is chinstroker fodder, an amuse bouche for the people who want to say "hmmmm the liberals are overreaching" without having to think about it very hard. You go "why yes as an intellectual I am trained to worship John Stuart Mill" and gloss over the fact that fucking nobody says "JS Mill" and by forcing the action you get shoved into the box that thinks the joke is funny, rather than the box that thinks maybe the fucking ACLU should be protecting union employees rather than union-busting corporations.

You know what Utilitarianism is? It's the Friedman Doctrine for people. You know what the Supreme Court is doing now? Arguing that corporations are people, therefore they should maximize their happiness. And you can cross your eyes and rub your belly and somehow make Elena Kagan an enemy of free speech, or you can get out of your ivory tower and recognize that originalism is bullshit no matter who deploys it.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.