The battle over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is only the most recent—if perhaps one of the more disturbing—examples of how important control of the law has become in the ongoing, never-quite-dead culture wars. In a sense, the merits of this particular candidate did not matter much. Liberals and progressives were going to oppose any pick for the Court—remember the left-wing group that accidentally issued a prewritten opposition to Trump’s pick with the name of the candidate blank? The opposition was so fierce because what was at stake was not only a Court seat, but a vision of the nation itself.

That vision is one in which judges, and in particular five justices of the Supreme Court, lead us all into a promised land. Russell Kirk called this vision “archonocracy,” or rule by judges. Before the election, liberal elites openly defended the idea of the Supreme Court as an agent of social change. In 2016, for example, the liberal law professor Mark Tushnet famously argued that liberals should abandon a “defensive” liberalism and instead use the courts aggressively to advance their causes. Those who opposed such social engineering should realize, according to Tushnet, that conservatives lost the culture wars, and the victorious liberals should treat them as a defeated enemy. Even earlier, in a book called Making Our Democracy Work(2010), Justice Stephen Breyer characterized the acceptance of judicial supremacy as a “habit” that has developed in the American people. This habit not