In the last few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have shown a new hostility toward laws that regulate the economy and try to limit the effects of economic power. They have declared a series of laws unconstitutional, most famously limits on corporate campaign spending (the Supreme Court) and a key part of Congress’s 2010 health-care reform act (among others the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta; the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the coming year). The Supreme Court has also held that Vermont cannot restrict drug companies; access to the prescription records that they use to target their sales pitches, and struck down other state laws that try to constrain the effect of wealth on elections. These decisions don’t just trim around the edges of regulation: They go to the heart of whether government can act to balance out private economic power in an era of growing economic inequality and insecurity. These decisions chime with some of the more troubling themes of the time. They fit well with the economics-minded idea that most of life is best seen as a marketplace, and with the right-wing mistrust of government that has metastasized into Tea Party contempt and anger.

Liberals have denounced many of these decisions, but they have not yet spelled out the larger pattern. What’s missing from the criticism is a picture of what these cases add up to: an identity for the Roberts Court as the judicial voice of the idea that nearly everything works best on market logic, that economic models of behavior capture most of what matters, and political, civic, and moral distinctions mostly amount to obscurantism and special pleading.

The Supreme Court went down a similar road in the Gilded Age and afterward, defending laissez-faire economic principles against minimum wages, maximum hours, and other Progressive and New Deal regulation. The new cases have different doctrinal logic, and the economy has changed vastly, but the bottom lines are eerily alike: giving constitutional protection to unequal economic power in the name of personal liberty. The Supreme Court’s last go-round with economic libertarianism is often called the Lochner era, after the 1905 namesake case, Lochner v. New York, in which the Court invalidated a state law that set maximum daily and weekly hours for bakers. The Court ruled that the law violated constitutionally protected “liberty of contract,” the freedom of both employees and employers to make whatever agreements they saw fit. Minimum-wage laws were another prime target of Lochner reasoning because they limited the “freedom” to accept low pay. The Court also invalidated laws guaranteeing the right to join a union, struck down price regulations, and, more sympathetically, overturned barriers to entry in some trades and struck down a residential segregation law as a violation of the white owner’s right to sell his property to whomever he liked. Overall, between the 1880s and the 1930s, the Supreme Court struck down more than 200 pieces of state and federal legislation as violations of “economic liberty.”

If Chief Justice John Roberts’s Court develops the new cluster of anti-regulatory cases into a clear agenda, then the Roberts Court will be the twenty-first century’s answer to the courts of the Lochner era. The most extreme scenario would begin with invalidating the 2010 Affordable Care Act, but, win or lose, the mere fact that there is a viable constitutional argument against the law is a sign of how far the new economic libertarianism has gone. With or without that victory, such a jurisprudence would mean the end of regulation of campaign spending, virtually complete constitutional protection for advertising, and aggressive review of regulation in data markets or nearly any industry whose inputs or products are information. In other words, it would call into question whether government can regulate the basic engines of the new economy, just as Lochner jurisprudence did in the Industrial Age.

Information Age Laissez-Faire

For decades, progressive commentators denounced Lochner-style decisions (generally ignoring the anti-segregation holding) as willfully blind to the reality of unequal economic power between capitalists and workers. The Supreme Court, they said, was protecting the interests of employers under the disingenuous claim of preserving everyone’s liberty equally. In 1937, under political pressure from Franklin D. Roosevelt, economic pressure from the Great Depression, and intellectual pressure from critics outside and dissenters within, the Supreme Court abandoned Lochner jurisprudence and closed an era with cases such as West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, where the Court upheld a minimum-wage law against a freedom-of-contract challenge, remarking, “The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract.” Lochner and “freedom of contract” became bywords for illegitimate judicial activism without roots in the text of the Constitution. Ever since, justices of all political persuasions have merrily accused one another of reviving Lochner. Conservatives see personal liberties such as abortion rights and protection for same-sex intimacy as invented for political purposes, while liberals invoke Lochner when the Court gets in the way of economic regulation, as it did in a set of cases compensating property owners for economic losses from environmental laws in the 1990s.

So, Court-watchers across the political spectrum have cried wolf before; but this time the paw prints are very large indeed. This is more than the usual name-calling because the new jurisprudence shares some special features with the old—in particular, a meshing of constitutional principle with economic libertarianism that calls into question the authority of democratic government to shape markets and, above all, check economic power. The Lochner era matters today because the Supreme Court back then did more than find a way to invalidate some laws that were inconvenient for employers. It gave constitutional expression to Gilded Age economic ideas that stood in the way of essential reforms. Lochner-era cases gave constitutional weight to an ideological view of the economy: that the market was a realm of individual freedom that should be kept separate from government interference, which would corrupt the virtuous effects of private bargaining. Its decisions chimed with the laissez-faire theory that celebrated unfettered industrial capitalism as the greatest triumph of progress and freedom that humanity had ever produced.

If today’s courts go that far, they will be armed with new constitutional tools for a new era of capitalism. A free-market jurisprudence for an economy built on information and consumption looks different from a classically laissez-faire theory suited to industrial capitalism. Ironically enough, its most important tool looks to be that icon of liberal constitutional faith, the First Amendment.

Expensive Free Speech

The principle that Congress “shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” is perhaps the most familiar phrase in the Constitution and a liberal touchstone. Recently, though, it has become a linchpin in the Supreme Court’s anti-regulatory cases. Constitutional protection of speech increasingly means protection of spending, advertising, and even markets in the data that advertisers use to craft their messages. In the name of free speech, the Court has overturned regulation in each of these areas. Lurking behind these doctrinal changes is an image of a world in which politics and argument are pretty much the same as pursuing one’s preferences through spending and seeking profit by advertising—a view that levels traditional speech down to the same plane as spending, marketing, and data-mining. Ironically, the result is to elevate spending, marketing, and data-mining to the constitutional protection traditionally given to speech. By passing through this looking glass, the Court has made the First Amendment a new anti-regulatory hammer.

In the instantly infamous 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy applied these principles in full-throated fashion to strike down a ban on certain corporate spending in elections. Limits on spending count as limits on speech, he wrote, so the power to write a million-dollar check for a wave of last-minute advertising has about the same constitutional status as the right to post a blog entry making the case for your candidate. The principle that spending equals speech was not new, only amplified: It dated back to a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, which overturned limits on individual spending as unconstitutional speech restrictions. The new part of Citizens United was the principle that corporations’ political speech (read: spending) enjoys the same constitutional protection as individuals’ speech. Taken together, these principles implied that Congress could not limit corporate spending to offset the enormous economic power of big companies; doing so was just as unconstitutional as banning a flesh-and-blood person from arguing for or against health-care reform. Kennedy’s language was dire: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.” He warned, quoting an earlier opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, that the government “has muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” The decision’s effect on campaigns was immediate and dramatic: The advocacy group Public Citizen reports that in the 2010 elections, spending by newly constitutionally empowered outside groups rose by more than 400 percent over the 2006 midterms.

Just a year later, Kennedy wrote the Court’s opinion in Sorrell v. IMS Health, the Vermont pharmaceutical decision. The backdrop of the case was the enormous amount that drug companies spend marketing their products to doctors and consumers—estimated at more than $30 billion annually in a 2008 study, which put marketing ahead of research and development as a share of industry spending. Pharmacies and data-miners serve drug marketers by selling them doctors’ prescription records, which the marketers use to target their sales efforts. Vermont had barred the sale (or giveaway) of prescription information and its use in marketing, except where physicians gave permission for their records to be used. The policy was meant to protect doctors’ and patients’ privacy, and also to offset some of the market power of the big drug companies, in the hope that more doctors would prescribe less-expensive generic medicines instead.

Kennedy wrote that the law was unconstitutional because it burdened speech—i.e., marketing—based on the identity of the speaker (patent-holding pharmaceutical companies) and the content of their message (advertising of drugs). Kennedy described the issue as follows: “The State may not burden the speech of others in order to tilt public debate in a preferred direction. ‘The commercial marketplace, like other spheres of our social and cultural life, provides a forum where ideas and information flourish.’” There is, of course, something otherworldly about describing as “public debate” companies’ targeted pitches to physicians. This constitutional peculiarity has two sources, one very much in line with Citizens United, the other even stranger and more innovative.

The one that is in line with Citizens United is the Court’s growing protection for business’s commercial speech. For more than three decades, the Supreme Court has moved toward treating advertising as strongly protected constitutional speech. While the Court wrote in 1942 that “purely commercial advertising” did not enjoy the First Amendment’s shield, in 1976 (the year of Buckley v. Valeo) the justices reversed themselves in Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Consumer Council, striking down a state law that forbade pharmacists to advertise drug prices, which was supposed to protect professionalism and discourage race-to-the-bottom competition. The decision established that purely economic speech, such as announcing low prices to potential customers, enjoyed the protection of the First Amendment. The Court reasoned that advertising conveyed useful information to consumers, which made their decisions more efficient, and observed that a listener’s interest in the price of medicine might be “as keen, if not keener by far, than his interest in the day’s most urgent political debate.” There was something reasonable in the idea: The plaintiffs were consumers, not marketers, and the Court observed that, with advertising forbidden, drug prices varied widely around the state.

In the decades since, although the Court has tenuously maintained the formula that commercial speech receives lower protection than “core” political speech, it has struck down limits on advertising for legal services, liquor stores, and tobacco products (in the last instance, invalidating a law that forbade tobacco advertising near schools). A certain amount of the everything-for-sale quality of our public spaces owes directly to the Court’s protection of commercial speech. The justices have never said, though, that advertising deserves the same very strict protection as political debate. Sorrell v. IMS, the Vermont case, comes as close as any to dissolving all distinction between advertising and argument.

The stranger and more innovative aspect of Sorrell is that the case extended First Amendment protection beyond anything recognizable as speech. Campaign spending purchases speech, and advertising “propose[s] a commercial transaction,” in the Court’s phrase, but most of what the Vermont decision protects is not verbal expression or even political spending but simply the sale of data. Sorrell moves toward constitutionalizing an open market in information, at least where the data will inform marketing decisions and the regulation has different effects on different market actors. As the right to speak implied the right to spend and the right to argue implied a right to advertise, now spending and advertising imply a right to buy and sell the information that will go into marketing (which is itself robustly protected as speech). So there is now a constitutionally protected interest in exchanging information on the same terms as everyone else in the market. Any limit on information markets, Kennedy reasoned, would tilt the playing field in favor of those who had more access to data—in Vermont’s case, generic drug companies and public-health agencies.

As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out in dissent, regulators control the form and content of information transfer all the time—for instance, in guidelines for public and shareholders’ communications by energy and financial companies, restrictions on the uses pharmaceutical companies may recommend for their drugs, and various controls on disclosure of patient information by doctors and hospitals. Many of these regulations are specific to the content of the speech and identity of the speaker, which was the constitutional problem with the Vermont law. It would be simplistic to say that those regulations are on the chopping block, but the reasoning of Sorrell puts their constitutionality in doubt. If nothing else, that reasoning creates a powerful and flexible tool for limiting the regulation of information markets, and further amplifies the Court’s solicitude for marketing as a core constitutional concern. For instance, post-2008 financial regulations requiring disclosure of standard-form information for certain financial products and services, or limiting the kinds of claims hedge funds or mortgage providers can make to clients, could be subject to constitutional attack.

These changes in the First Amendment’s meaning track larger changes in the political and intellectual tone of the time. They put new intellectual premises to work in constitutional law, premises that themselves form no part of the Constitution. For one, this neo-Lochner-ism takes plausibility from the background idea that the distinction between politics and markets, or principles and interests, is spurious: A democratically adopted policy is just the aggregation of some people’s interests, and a company’s economic interests make as worthy a basis for political argument as any principle. For another, there is no publicly acceptable measure of value except what people say they want and are willing to pay for: preferences, that is, backed by cash. Any attempt to establish an independent standard, such as fairness or cultural excellence, is elitist, parochial, or a try at petty tyranny. For a third, markets are the best way by far of capturing and maximizing this uniquely valid type of value: Therefore, elections and other institutions should come to resemble markets as much as possible. The one incontrovertibly valuable kind of freedom, then, is freedom that makes markets work. It is in this market-fixated climate that courts can declare that spending is speech, advertisement is argument, and the transfer of marketing data is a core concern of the First Amendment.

These ideas are to our time what classical laissez-faire and social Darwinism were to the age of Lochner. As the rise of industrial capitalism and a vast population of wage laborers made freedom of contract pervasively relevant at the turn of the last century, today an economy built on consumption and information makes the First Amendment a natural vehicle to constitutionalize transactions at the core of the market. Much of what happens in the American economy is, after all, some hybrid of marketing and information transfer. Products, images, information, ideas, and advertising are increasingly aspects of a single economic process.

For all these reasons, the First Amendment has helped the Supreme Court do for the consumer capitalism of the Information Age what freedom of contract did for the Industrial Age: constitutionally protect certain transactions that lie at the core of the economy. This makes unequal economic power much harder for democratic lawmaking to reach, because there are only a few ways to reduce the effects of economic inequality: redistribute wealth, guarantee certain goods (such as education or health care) regardless of wealth, and limit what the wealthy can do with their money. Constitutional protection of marketing and spending takes the last option off the table at a time when the other two are politically embattled. Whether in elections or in marketing and the vast data economy behind it, the market itself, with all its inequality, is ever more thoroughly constitutionalized as a realm of freedom.

This development is a milestone in the Court’s march away from a principle that it accepted with the New Deal: Buying and selling enjoy no special constitutional status, and legislatures can regulate markets and businesses to make life more equitable, safe, or healthful. When these policy decisions are opened to constitutional attack, the wealthy interests burdened by legislation can appeal from the political process to the Supreme Court. If they win, they send lawmakers back to square one, and, win or lose, they delay regulation and raise its costs. Moreover, these cases give wealthy interests a rhetorical leg up: They can denounce regulation as “censorship” with the Supreme Court and the Constitution behind them.

Health-Care Reform and Nanny-State Hysteria

Nominally, the courts that have found some or all of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional are ruling on the limits of Congress’s authority to regulate the economy. Near the heart of these opinions, though, is the idea that the Constitution must protect, even indirectly, the autonomy of the consumer deciding how to spend her money. Although this is a very weak constitutional argument, it is revealing: It shows that the judiciary’s turn against a law that would have been uncontroversial not long ago is part of the intellectual taste for a laissez-faire consumer capitalism.

The federal courts’ sharply divided judgments on the constitutionality of health-care reform, and the dawning realization that the Supreme Court will likely take the constitutional challenge seriously, make this a strange moment, and one that might be momentous. The argument against the ACA that two federal district courts and one appeals court have accepted at the time of writing is that Congress lacks power to require individuals to buy insurance—the so-called “individual mandate” that is designed to put young and old, healthy and sick alike into the insurance pool. The Constitution assigns Congress a limited set of powers, and, in theory, it cannot act outside those. Therefore, Congress always faces two sets of constraints. It cannot do some things because those things are forbidden by rights-protecting language like the First Amendment, and others because, although they are not prohibited, they are not authorized by the Constitution’s list of Congress’s powers. The ACA’s opponents argue that the individual mandate violates the latter principle.

Congress’s go-to power for 70 years, since the Supreme Court embraced the New Deal, has been the power “to regulate commerce&#8230among the several states,” generally just called the Commerce Clause. Although the bare language would seem to support a narrow reading of the power, the Court has interpreted it to authorize nearly any legislation that touches on economic activity, even very tenuously, such as the federal ban on home production of medical marijuana for personal use (in 2007’s Raich v. Gonzales). But on the ACA, three federal courts have pleased conservative activists by holding that Congress cannot require people to buy insurance. The general principle of these cases is that the Commerce power does not authorize Congress to require people to make purchases, or perhaps to take any affirmative act at all, in a field of economic life that they have not already voluntarily joined. Become a farmer, the argument goes, and you may be subject to all kinds of regulations, quotas, and so forth. The initial choice to enter the field means taking on its regulatory burdens. But a passive citizen, just by being, has done nothing to subject herself to the insurance mandate. Once she enters the field of health-care consumption, courts have conceded, she could be required to buy insurance; but as long as, like Winnie-the-Pooh, she just is, Congress cannot reach her.

This argument is strange, notwithstanding that federal judges have signed on to it. Strictly speaking, it addresses the limits of federal power. Nonetheless, its rhetorical force comes from appeals to the autonomy of the consumer and warnings that a runaway Congress might violate that autonomy. Courts overturning the individual mandate invariably invoke dark fantasies of a paternalistic government requiring citizens to buy American cars, health-club memberships, or vegetables. What’s strange about this parade of nanny-state specters is that, because the Commerce Clause concerns the powers of Congress, not the rights of individuals, a ruling that invalidates the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause simply means that only state governments, not the federal government, can pass such a law. Famously, Massachusetts has already done just that.

There is really no such thing as a constitutionally protected personal liberty that a state can violate but the federal government cannot, or vice versa. The Constitution protects individual rights against all government action, regardless of the source (with a handful of minor exceptions that are not relevant here). The Commerce Clause governs federal but not state power because it is not a rights-protecting clause. The odd thing about the anti-ACA cases is that they proceed as if they were vindicating a constitutional right of consumer liberty, but the Constitution has not been interpreted as securing economic rights since the Supreme Court rejected Lochner. Opponents’ Commerce Clause arguments are displaced Lochner-ism.

That the constitutional case against the ACA is eccentric doesn’t mean that it is silly or sure to fail. In fact, the Lochner era had its own restrictive vision of the Commerce Clause, which the Supreme Court used to strike down federal laws regulating workplace conditions (such as bans on child labor). Like today’s anti-ACA courts warning against mandatory vegetable-buying, courts applying this older view of the Commerce Clause showed their real motives by remarking, for instance, that if Congress could regulate child labor, “all freedom of commerce will be at an end.” But where Lochner jurisprudence embraced a picture of economic liberty that centered on the autonomous producer (the worker bargaining with his employer), today’s emerging theory concentrates on the autonomous consumer. As with much of the new First Amendment doctrine, the basic protected act is the decision about how to spend one’s own money.

There is, too, a trace of Tea Party paranoia in the anti-ACA opinions’ image of a Congress that barely passed the ACA after decades of failed attempts, and cannot bring itself to raise taxes in a time of fiscal crisis, suddenly deciding that micromanaging its constituents’ grocery lists is a good idea. Laws requiring the purchase of broccoli might be bad, but they would also be unpopular, and that is all the protection we need against them. Looking in the Constitution for a guarantee against every silly or pernicious law a person can dream up distorts the document. The less one trusts the political process, though, the greater the tendency to look to the Constitution for protection by a higher law. The political right’s assault on government and caricature of Washington as a tyrannical power lend force to extravagant constitutional theories aimed at staving off a ravening Congress—an especially grim irony at a time when Tea Party representatives hold Congress hostage. This blend of doctrinal mutation and political unreality is where the laissez-faire intellectual climate of neo-Lochner-ism and the political climate of enraged populism come together.

A Hollow Freedom

Viewed broadly, the anti-ACA interpretation of Congress’s power has the same logic as the new First Amendment cases and the original Lochner doctrine. On the one hand, it celebrates individual freedom. On the other hand, by “protecting” individual freedom from government interference, it helps to guarantee that the inequality of the private marketplace will persist. Ironically, this often means that the individual freedom at stake—consumer choice, campaign spending, liberty of contract—is less worth having. Up close, the individual choice—buy, sell, hold—is unburdened by regulation; but pull back the camera, and you realize that the free choice is among a set of options that regulation helps to define—or does not, if the Constitution prevents it. In 1905, the unregulated choice to work more than ten hours a day in a bakery might have been free up close, but in a broader focus labor-market regulation was aimed at giving workers more attractive choices. Today, the uninsured face miserable, often impossible choices on the health-care market—just what the ACA is designed to change—which makes the courts’ invocation of consumer autonomy in striking down the ACA a particularly bitter irony. The freedom to spend money in a political campaign with Exxon on the other side may not feel so inspiring to those citizens who live elsewhere than on the pages of the Supreme Court’s opinions. Of course, the choice to spend or not spend is a form of freedom, and regulation burdens that freedom; but until recently the American understanding has been that this is not a constitutional freedom, because legislatures’ power to regulate markets and compensate for economic inequality is too important to subject to probing judicial review. A constitutional right to spend what you do not have or to decline to buy what you cannot afford recalls Anatole France’s mordant remark that the law, in its majesty, equally forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges and steal bread for their dinner.

If the anti-ACA argument succeeds at the Supreme Court, it will be a sharp departure from the Court’s practice in the twentieth century. It is nearly unimaginable that any Court between the New Deal and now would have invalidated a national program of economic regulation, aimed at securing basic social benefits to all, that violates no constitutionally recognized individual rights. What is less clear is whether such an opinion would be a sea change, the start of a libertarian-inflected approach to the Commerce Clause, or just an important (and highly political) aberration. On one level, it doesn’t matter much: It took decades and much of the Obama Administration’s political lifeblood to pass the ACA, and nothing comparable seems likely to happen soon. But like Bush v. Gore, the shameful case in which the Supreme Court effectively settled the 2000 presidential election, the stakes in health-care reform are big enough that a one-time-only theory would have enormous consequences for the country. A one-off opinion setting aside the ACA would reflect the political and judicial mood of the time. The idea that consumer sovereignty is a constitutionally protected value, that purchasing decisions are sacrosanct, involves the leveling of personal and political life into market decisions. That this idea infuses the anti-ACA opinions and gives them their rhetorical and (to their supporters) moral force shows how central it has become to the libertarian strain of legal reasoning.

There is acute irony in the way the new anti-regulatory cases interact with the Republican agenda in Congress. No one doubts that health-care reform would be constitutional on a single-payer, Medicare-like model, with the government simply providing tax-funded insurance. Such traditional liberal programs, though, have been driven off the field by decades of right-wing success. The ACA is an intellectual compromise with market thinking and a political compromise with the big insurance companies. That is why, instead of just providing insurance as a public benefit the way many developed countries do, it requires individuals to purchase it from the company of their choice, keeping markets and established corporate players in the game. And that, in turn, is why it is constitutionally vulnerable. The ACA’s opponents call the individual mandate an unprecedented exercise of government power. It may be that, but not because it is a triumph of American “socialism”: It is novel because Democrats used to be able to pass public benefits that were straightforwardly public, rather than channeled through markets regulated favorably to big companies.

The Supreme Court’s several-pronged attack on the regulation of spending, selling, and buying reinforces one of the most persistent and pernicious intellectual mistakes of the time, one that we share with the Lochner era: the idea that markets are natural phenomena, arising from their own organic principles and free human action, while politics and lawmaking are artificial interferences with this natural activity. In fact, as sophisticated economists, lawyers, and others have always understood, markets are the products of law, which defines and enforces the ownership and exchanges that set the market in motion. A laissez-faire market arises from one kind of law, a more social-democratic market from another. There are things to say for and against both kinds of markets, and any real-life economy has complex blends of both elements—for instance, minimum-wage laws, bans on racial discrimination and prostitution, speed and weight limits for long-haul truckers, and so forth are all straightforward limits on laissez-faire market freedom. It is obscurantist to suggest that some version of the laissez-faire market is a natural baseline, and anything that departs from it needs special justification. That is the spirit of the new cases. Taken to their limit, they would set aside the intellectual and political gains of decades of struggle in the twentieth century: the New Deal recognition that the country must take responsibility for shaping its own economy, and the decision to remove the old American romance with economic libertarianism from constitutional judging. It is the revival of that bad romance that makes the memory of Lochner relevant now.

What is happening here is deeper than cynical partisanship—these cases are not Bush v. Gore. The original Lochner era did not consist merely of corporate toadying or crudely ideological applications of laissez-faire theory. The justices of that time were interpreting long struggles for constitutional freedom. Jacksonian attacks on monopolies for the privileged few, the abolition of slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s new promise of equal citizenship for all Americans formed the backdrop to Lochner. In effect, the Court decided that constitutional doctrines that blocked some economic regulations were the best way to define a new version of American citizenship that made everyone equally free for the first time. The problem was not that they were insincere or inane, but that they were wrong: Everyone wasn’t equally free.

Like the old Lochner-ism, today’s new anti-regulatory doctrines are rooted in ideas: that personal freedom has an economic dimension that the Constitution protects, and that government efforts to equalize or otherwise direct economic power are pernicious and constitutionally suspect. Like the old cases, the new ones end up protecting economic power as a form of freedom, which ties the hands of government and leaves lots of people less free.

What will become of all this depends, at the crudest level, on the outcome of the next presidential election and the next few Supreme Court appointments. In a more complex way, it depends on the quality of our politics and public life. The Constitution is what Americans make of it. Constitutional law is unlikely to produce a better version of its core principles, freedom and equality, than America’s social movements and political leaders confidently voice and pursue. For a few decades in the twentieth century, regulating the economy to enhance personal freedom and security was a goal shared between Democrats and Republicans, big business and labor. Earlier, however, it was a fraught idea, denounced as socialism or fascism, and it became consensual only after the crisis of the Depression and the decades-long efforts of the labor movement and progressive critics of laissez-faire. If Americans do not re-establish ideals of equality and personal liberty that take account of vast social and economic inequality and give government a strong role in addressing it, we will get the Constitution, and the country, we have earned.