What's wrong with these judges?

 The right wing beef with judges makes perfect sense. It's interwoven with their misogyny and the myth of the rugged individual. It reflects their presumed virtue.

All the way up to the US Supreme Court, the only judges they like are the ones who act as servants to the ideology that has been building steadily to the current crisis. Since that ideology promotes centralized rule by a few, the judiciary is expected to be subordinate rather than equal.

The power players sell it to their base by tapping into how many of their voters -- mostly men -- have had bad experiences on the wrong side of a court judgment, whether it's domestic violence restraining orders, divorce settlements, or criminal activity of some sort. When your brand centers violence as an expression of strength, you're going to attract people who have a record of it.

All the way back to Dirty Harry and to popular written fiction for decades before that, audiences have liked characters who express their lawfulness with direct action, cutting out the cumbersome, and often disappointing, legal process of prosecution and sentencing. In fiction, the writer can establish certainty in the reader or viewer, that the bad person is a bad person, and that the good guy is fully justified. We're free to enjoy the plot as the game plays out between these adversaries. When the bad guy gets it, the audience feels jubilant.

The hero can be a deeply flawed and unhappy character. That only makes them more sympathetic. As long as they represent the frustration that we all feel when bad guys get away with their crimes and the system seems to let them slip away, we'll forgive their rough edges. They might even have marital problems or other relatable qualities that make their extrajudicial activities more satisfying as they operate outside of the suffocating constraints of red tape and procedure.

At the elite level, where billionaires buy the government that feeds their wealth at the expense of the majority of the rest of us, they're happy to undercut the power of courts. White collar criminals are still criminals. Most of them never see the inside of a cell, but pesky fines and liability settlements drain money that could be spent on bigger yachts, private space programs, and a stunning mansion on top of El Capitan, once Yosemite is privatized and sold off for development.

As frustrating as the judicial system can be, the basis of it is sound. No human system can be made immune to human frailties. Those have to be addressed by general philosophical arguments that guide our thinking overall. We’ve been at it for thousands of years. We could have consensus any day now. In the meantime, we need to shore up the structure that we have.

The task of our government is to reconcile the desires of the majority of the electorate with the rights and needs of individuals and an expertly advised assessment of the public good. Piece of cake!