When I was in high school, I became aware that the Republicans had made a conscious decision to weaponize the courts: They were angry when the Constitution kept telling them that their legislative agenda wasn’t legal. In 1968, Nixon dusted off an old term (“strict constructionist”) and they began crafting a new theory of law around it. It claimed to be all about applying a strict reading to the Constitution; to do nothing except read literally what was on the page and apply it in the most literal way possible.

And if that’s what strict constructionism actually was, I’d be all for it. But, of course, it isn’t. “Strict constructionism” is a code word for “conservative activism”. If it was actually about a strict reading of the Constitution, then, to pick just one example, its practitioners wouldn’t have so much difficulty finding the 14th Amendment in their copies. “Equal protection of the laws,” after all, is a pretty cut-and-dry statement.

This ideology of conservative activism got a huge boost in the ’70s when the Court found a “right to privacy” in the Constitution which, if applied logically, would allow them to overturn any law they felt like at their whim. It gave the “strict constructionist” movement the red meat it needed.

Since that point, the unabashed goal of the Republican party has been to stack the Court with conservative activists. And, by and large, the progressives in America have let them do it. I still have friends who talk proudly about voting for Nader in 2000. Many of them were complicit in Trump becoming President, by either staying home or by voting for a third party candidate. And it’s not just Presidential votes, either: Apathetic progressives have repeatedly handed Republicans congressional control. The result is that only three out of twenty judges in the last 50 years have been appointed by a Democrat with a Democratic congress.

So for about twenty years I’ve watched this slow motion trainwreck happening. And now that it’s finally arrived, it’s actually worse than anything I imagined when I was eighteen. Because it’s not just a matter of reversing what the “liberal” court had achieved. It extends beyond that. Kennedy’s replacement will lock in for at least 15-20 years a conservative majority which has already demonstrated that it will:

• Prevent any form of election reform.
• Go further than that, and explicitly allow Republicans to rig the electoral system.
• Go even further than that, and allow Republicans to pass laws dismantling non-Republican political organizations.

And, yes, this conservative court will also dismantle any form of public healthcare, roll back the rights of anyone who isn’t a white, straight, Christian male, and do far more damage besides. But it is this fundamental, anti-democratic core of the new Republican ideology — an anti-democractic agenda which will now be ruthlessly enforced by the Supreme Court — which is the death knell of America.

We need to show up in 2018 and we need to show up in 2020 even more. And not just at the national level: Progressives need to win at the state level in a census year to undo a lot of the damage the Republicans have done over the last decade; and they need to continue winning at the state level consistently for many years to come to make it stick. But the truth is it may already be too late: The Republicans have waged a fifty year campaign to take the keys to the kingdom. Over the last decade, they’ve been working hard to rig the system. And now that they have the Supreme Court, they will use it to lock that rigging into place.