But Travis Weber, FRC’s vice president of policy, is not feeling particularly buoyed. “The law will never provide a bulwark against a culture that ultimately disintegrates in terms of its foundational philosophical principles,” he said in an interview. Despite recent policy wins, “I’m not totally optimistic.” Many Americans hope for the “banishment” of religion from the public square, he claimed, and “unless that changes, things are not going to be good, long term, in the United States in a lot of ways.”

While liberal activist groups paint President Donald Trump’s Washington as an unmitigated forward march of conservative victories, conservative activist groups—including Weber’s—don’t necessarily perceive things the same way. Rather, some of these groups see the next few years under Trump as a brief window of opportunity to create defenses against a culture that is moving away from them. In parts of the conservative movement, the long-game strategy is to defend their position by devolving power away from the federal government and the Supreme Court, using the momentum of the Trump years to batten down the hatches against the inevitable cultural storms ahead.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Kavanaugh’s nomination has revealed certain differences in posture among conservatives. When Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the high court, groups from all neighborhoods of the conservative movement cheered the move. Social conservatives rejoiced and immediately began predicting the end of legal abortion. The administration reportedly asked business trade groups to tout Kavanaugh’s business-friendly record, and they apparently obliged. Libertarian-leaning groups like Americans for Prosperity pledged more than $1 million dollars to support the judge’s nomination.

The coming battle to overturn Roe v. Wade

But these organizations are drawn to Kavanaugh for different reasons. “People talk about conservatives being a monolithic entity, which they’re totally not,” said Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver. “Kavanaugh is a nod to the Christian right, but he’s not of them.” Trump has picked nominees, Wilson said, who “can straddle the divisions within the conservative coalition.”

This has been evident in the split messaging around Kavanaugh’s nomination. Some groups have argued explicitly that the confirmation battle is really a fight to overturn Roe v. Wade, the original 1973 decision that legalized abortion across the United States, or the case that later refined that decision, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Other groups, however, have studiously avoided making this fight about abortion, claiming that Kavanaugh is an “originalist” or “constitutionalist” who will merely stick to the text of America’s founding documents. While that might lead to a decision that restricts abortion, they say, that’s not the goal of the nomination. Carrie Severino—the head of the Judicial Crisis Network, one of the major advocacy groups working to confirm Kavanaugh—told NPR that talk of the end of Roe, especially on the left, “is a lot of scaremongering … I just think that that is very premature to assume that anything like that … [is] around the corner.”