They were already doing so. The Occupy movement — an effort by the economic Have-Nots to put pressure on the Haves — was clearly inspired by the radicalism of the 1960s. But so were the tea party protests that were happening at about the same time. This wasn’t a cohesive, deliberate application of a national strategy, but it was (and is) driven by the same spirit. The Haves that the tea party Have-Nots are protesting aren’t the wealthy, or aren’t only the wealthy. As in Alinsky’s writing, the Haves are the institutions of power: the presidency and the government. Conservative Americans — looking in from the outside after eight years and, we have to add, reeling from the slow recovery from the recession — were suddenly the Have-Nots. They are the new radicals.
The idea of judicial activism, meanwhile, has always been as much of a cudgel as a critique. When Newt Gingrich in late 2011 threatened to arrest judges who insisted that students not include a benediction in their high school graduation, he was tapping into a conservative narrative on behalf of his stumbling presidential campaign, as much as trying to make legal point. When Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court came before Senate Republicans, some worried that her activism would be in defense of government, instead of the general presentation of activist judges as undermining the will of elected legislatures. (Incidentally, Warren was not a high-water mark for anti-legislative activism. Late last year, the New York Times evaluated the relative activism of the past five Supreme Courts, finding that Warren’s court trailed successors’ on two metrics.)
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