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In Horowitz's campaign against "liberal bias" on college campuses, he likes to cite polls showing that college professors overwhelmingly hold liberal opinions on key issues, and tend to vote Democratic. I don't think this is really bias. It simply shows that when positions are subjected to the kind of critical analysis that professors get paid to do, the liberal position is almost always better. Our ideas are the right ones.
The same thing happens in the courts. When Anthony Kennedy writes that minors should not be executed, or when the Supreme Court rules that it's unconstitutional to outlaw sodomy, this is the result of a process dear to Western society for hundreds of years: logical reasoning. When a problem is put before judges who excel at critical thinking, the conclusion is often going to be different than the conclusion of a body that is elected based on political skills. On the whole, judges are better able to reason through a problem than congressmen, who to appease their constituents, make decisions based on political expediency rather than reason.
To attack the judiciary, the right wing has to attack the very idea that logical reasoning can be used to decide which among many positions is the best. In their word, everything is a battle of conservative versus liberal, and there is no objective reality. It explains why big business and fundamentalist religion are always in cahoots -- both need the masses to abandon critical thinking in order to prosper.
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