The Atlantic, a magazine for which I once worked, recently teamed up with the National Constitution Center for a series entitled “The Battle for the Constitution.” The project draws upon a wide range of American legal scholars to discuss the Constitution’s fate in the Trump era. Past contributors range from Michael Gerhardt, Sanford Levinson, and Leah Litman to Richard Epstein, the New York University law professor and erstwhile coronavirus expert who was vaporized from orbit by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner earlier this week.

The most eyebrow-raising essay thus far comes from Adrian Vermeule, a chaired professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in administrative law. In a manifesto titled “Common-Good Constitutionalism” published on Tuesday, he called upon legal conservatives to abandon what he describes as the “defensive crouch” of originalism, the movement’s doctrinal lodestar for the last 40 years, now that they have captured the Supreme Court for at least a generation. In its place, Vermeule calls for an unabashedly authoritarian interpretation of the Constitution.

“Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being,” he wrote. “Common-good constitutionalism,” he explains, “will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy,” which will be empowered to impose a particular social and moral code upon Americans. Troublesome concepts like personal liberty and individual rights are brushed aside.

On social media, Vermeule’s autocratic vision for American life received a negative reception, to say the least. Legal academics across the political spectrum veered between mockery and horror. Some observers called him a fascist. Others sharply criticized The Atlantic for publishing his arguments in the first place. I, for one, consider it a public service. Though right-wing illiberalism is in vogue these days, its adherents tend to dance around exactly what they wish to impose upon the rest of us. Vermeule’s honesty is as refreshing as it is disturbing.

Though Vermeule himself is not an originalist, he argues that this strain of legal scholarship effectively existed only to give the conservative legal movement the intellectual cachet to join mainstream American legal thinking. “This approach served legal conservatives well in the hostile environment in which originalism was first developed, and for some time afterward,” Vermeule wrote. “But originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.”