It should count because people build up reliance interests on the rule. It should count because as a society grows it creates other rules and institutions and evolves based on that rule in ways you and I sometimes cannot parse out. So the safest way, sometimes, is to just continue on with the status quo. Sometimes that is more important than whether the rule meets your need for strict consistency.
It also recognizes that in legal interpretation, there usually isnt one right or wrong answer—there are a range of reasonable answers. Again, law is not math.
I think the principle of relying on stare decisis, in the face of a "wrong" decision, is based on the conservative notion of social peace that Yuval Levin talks about in this interview (here he's referring to progressive's current interest in upending the constitutional system):
Can a document unify a nation? Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute and author of American Covenant argues that the Constitution unified the United States at the founding of the country and that understanding the Constitution can help bring the country together today. Listen as Levin...
www.econtalk.org
Yuval Levin: I do, too. I think that is the one place where it is reasonable in this moment to be very alarmed about the condition of the system.
And, I actually think that that is also a reason to go back to the beginning and to remind people of why these things are here. You mentioned Chesterton's Fence before. I think it's a very useful way to think about a lot of what is in our system, which is: You have to understand why it's there before you decide it's time to get rid of it.
Now, you might still decide that, but you have to be able to explain to yourself why we have it.
And, I think that that's now the case with a lot of our Constitutional system: that we have to remind ourselves or to reacquaint ourselves or maybe to acquaint ourselves for the first time with the underlying logic here, which comes from a place of worry about democratic political culture.
The Constitution was written by people who were not sure this could work. And, we should always have somewhere in the back of our minds a concern and unsureness about whether this can work.
And that should lead us to restraint. It should lead us in really crucial moments to prefer social peace over winning the argument. To recognize that the alternative to our winning is not necessarily--that the alternative to the system we have is not our winning: the alternative to the system we have is a collapse of social peace in American life. And we take it for granted because we've always been able to count on it, or almost always. But it is not to be taken for granted. We should prioritize cohesion. We should prioritize social peace much more than we do, and recognize that pushing these boundaries runs real risks.
And, one way to see that is to help ourselves understand why the boundaries are there, why they look the way they do. So, this book is in part, certainly rooted in that concern. Not just in a sense of confidence about the American system, but in some worry about whether it can persist if we forget why it's there and why it is the way it is.