Amy Coney Barrett and the Right’s Elite-Building Problem

Opinion|Amy Coney Barrett and the Right’s Elite-Building Problem

This week Amy Coney Barrett joined John Roberts and the three liberal Supreme Court justices to leave in place a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid reimbursements for contracts that had already been fulfilled and that the White House sought to cancel. This prompted anti-Barrett outrage among some conservative influencers, complete with epithets like “D.E.I. hire” and “D.E.I. judge.”

Anti-Barrett sentiment has been building for a while on the populist right; she’s been a conservative vote on the biggest cases of the last few years, from abortion to affirmative action, but she’s broken with the other conservatives on smaller issues in a way that’s consistent enough to constitute a pattern. (Though the data suggests that she’s overall still slightly less of a swing vote than Brett Kavanaugh.)

In this particular case, as the Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith suggests, the ruling constitutes more of a temporizing response than a strict rebuke of the Trump administration. But it still yielded a provisional defeat for the White House, and a warning shot for higher-stakes cases. And D.E.I. aspersions aside, I don’t think it’s crazy for Barrett’s critics to suspect that her vote was connected to her personal identity, not just her jurisprudential philosophy — that the mom of seven with kids adopted from Haiti and connections to charismatic Catholicism might take a dimmer view of the president’s cuts to foreign aid than other conservative justices.

But if you take that suspicion seriously, then Barrett’s foreign aid ruling is a useful case study in a point I made two weeks ago, about how the Trump administration might squander America’s rightward “vibe shift” by directly alienating people who should be part of a potential right-of-center elite.

The Trump cuts to foreign aid are not a threat to his broad electoral coalition: No mass constituency has a fighting-AIDS-in-Africa litmus test, and (not least because Americans generally overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid) slashing the aid bureaucracy is popular.

However, foreign aid does matter to some of the elite factions that are connected to the right without being full MAGA. It probably matters to some of the erstwhile liberals who moved rightward in response to anti-Americanism on the left, and who still want to believe in America as an exceptional nation exercising a fundamentally benevolent form of hegemony. And it definitely matters to Catholic and evangelical intellectuals and activists for whom pro-life activism at home is part of a continuum with aid and missionary work abroad, and who took pride in the kind of charitable partnerships with government that an earlier, George W. Bush style of conservatism championed.