By itself, The Next Twenty-Five Years: The New Supreme Court and What it Means for Americans, by well-known trial lawyer Martin Garbus, isn't quite the book we need.
If you first read American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, and place Garbus's conclusions into the frame of Hedges's broader argument, you'll go a long way to understanding the historically unique, urgent, and dangerous moment we're in right now.
The strengths of the Garbus book (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007) are many.
Garbus makes one central argument: that a decided and continuing rightward shift in U.S. law, as made in the courts, comes from an intentional strategy by well-organized archconservative jurists and legal academics.
The right-wing intelligentsia, on the bench and in the academy, want to drag American jurisprudence back to its state before FDR, the New Deal, and the Warren Court.
The argument is well-made.
But the clearer and more concrete Garbus makes his arguments, the more a reader asks, Why, why, why?
Why the reactionary trend? Garbus’s argument is circular: Archconservative intellectuals in the legal academy and on the bench push a right wing agenda.
That’s why you should check out Chris Hedges first.
The Why? is simply this: The right is better organized, and the right must be understood, not merely as really, really darn conservative, but as a fascist movement.
This is no sloppy name-calling. Hedges argues, as clearly and concretely, and in English just as plain as Garbus’s, that the Christian Right has, at its very ideological core, a group of strategically-minded organizers whose beliefs and goals are neutrally and factually described as fascist:
*Privileging property rights over voting rights;
*Concentrating power in the hands of the Executive;
*Intentionally misusing language (“big government,” “small government,” “state’s rights,” “individual rights,” “national security”) to make reasoned debate impossible;
*Declaring war on the intellectual and cultural institutions of liberal society;
*Working to abolish the church-state separation.

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