The US Supreme Court declares independence. By Gerard Baker.

It is clear now that we are in the throes of a full-scale American cultural counter-revolution, propelled by rising popular opposition to the coercive orthodoxies of a hegemonic left and enforced by a string of impeccable decisions from a Supreme Court intent on reviving the spirit of 1776. …

The popular rebellion against the cultural left that has seized so many of the institutions of American life has enjoyed mixed success at the political level. But since that hegemony was established in large part through half a century of grotesque judicial overreach, it was likely to be truly overturned only by a judiciary that would finally move to substitute restraint for activism. …

In the three cases — respectively over the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation plan, racial preferences in college applications, and free-speech protections in commercial interactions — the judgments rescinded the usurpation by an expansive executive of the power of the purse, restored the principle of merit over group membership as a key determinant of individual opportunity, and reaffirmed a citizen’s right not to be compelled to endorse ideas with which she disagrees.

Note the common prefix in the principal verb in each of those subclauses, “re-.” One meaning is “back” or “backward.” But this is no reactionary backlash to the inevitable march of modernity, as most of the media, with predictable and prejudicial alarmism, calls it. These decisions, along with other critical rulings in this and the preceding court term, represent the necessary undoing of successive judicially authorised derogations of the most defining American principles — fairness, equality, freedom, the proper exercise and distribution of government powers.

The left always keeps reaching until it is hurt. It takes pushback to stop them, because they don’t stop on their own.

hat-tip Stephen Neil