This week, the Senate is holding hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court. The outcome is not in genuine doubt – barring an honest-to-God bombshell, Kavanaugh is going to be seated for the beginning of the court’s term in October. And even if he were voted down, the Trump administration would just pick someone else; when George W Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers was unsuccessful, for example, the prize for the opposition was to get Samuel Alito instead, one of the most conservative justices in the institution’s history.

There is a great deal of garment-rending happening in the Democratic party and in the left more broadly about what comes next. But it is important to distinguish between two sorts of things one might worry about, as we ponder the shape of things to come. Those two things represent, in their way, distinctive political visions for American democracy, and illustrate the cleavages in the modern American left.

The first goes something like this: Kavanaugh is skeptical of cases like Roe v Wade and Obergefell v Hodges. If he is on the court, legislatures will be able to place greater limits on abortion, treat people differently on the basis of sexual orientation, and so on. That fear envisions the court as a check on democracy, and worries that Kavanaugh will – in effect – do too little. His vision of the constitution’s protections is narrow and so the legislatures will have too free a hand.

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The second fear is more or less precisely the opposite. It goes: Kavanaugh will embrace an expansive vision of the constitution, but will do so to advance conservative ends. Last term, for example, the supreme court decided Janus v AFSCME, which embraced an aggressive vision of the first amendment’s free-speech guarantee to forbid public-sector labor unions from collecting fees from the employees it represents. Or consider Citizens United, which read the first amendment to forbid modest campaign-finance restrictions on corporate political activity. Or Shelby county, in which the court read the constitution (which part? To be honest, it’s not clear) to invalidate crucial parts of the 50-year-old Voting Rights Act.

The first fear is the fear of the American elite center-left, skeptical as it is of anything reeking of populism, legislatures most of all. It is a craving for rule by elites, but only the right elites. (It’s Obama dropping a mic on Trump’s face, forever.) Rule by a nine-member life-tenured body drawn exclusively of lawyers who went to the same sorts of schools and joined the same prosecutor’s offices that you’d like your own children to intern at? Perfect. If you’d like to have same-sex marriage but are worried about what the next demand would be if you organized a popular movement of workers with the power to get it – if you’ve remarked, at a party, that Michael Bloomberg should really run for president – then this vision of the supreme court is for you.

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The second fear is the fear of the still-nascent but ascendant American left, who believe in their bones that they can win a popular mandate – and who are eager to show you graphs with the support for (say) a jobs guarantee state by state. Their fear is that their legislative agenda will suffer the fate of the early New Deal, a popular program nonetheless invalidated by narrow majorities on a conservative supreme court. Their best hope is to just do what they love doing most: organize, leaflet, door-knock, and sing rhyming chants at rallies. If you know some of the words to Solidarity Forever, then this vision of the court is for you.

It’s quite possible, of course, that Kavanaugh might embody both fears – a Roe skeptic who thinks Janus was rightly decided. But if the left is to ever campaign on the court (which the right has done quite successfully for decades), it will be necessary to explain clearly what the problem is. Is it too much popular control of government – or too little? Are the wrong elites in charge – or should they be running things at all? Is the problem, in other words, that the supreme court ought to be dictating more agreeably on the central questions of the day, or is the problem that they are dictating so frequently to begin with?

And as to that, consider. Kavanaugh’s nomination will be covered wall to wall on every national network and will be the subject of breathless speculation in a way that no other nomination is. The secretary of defense, the chairman of the federal reserve, even arguably the selection of the vice-president – all pale in comparison to the decision of which lawyer will determine some of the most important questions in American life. No one would build this system from scratch, and Americans these days are in a radical mood. One must take the bitter with the sweet, of course – and perhaps some would take a world with Citizens United and Janus so long as they can have Roe and Obergefell too. But as the political failures of the Democratic party have left the latter two hanging by a thread anyway, it is worth considering – if only as a matter of electoral survival – whether “we should govern ourselves” is actually more appealing, all things considered, than “our ruler oughta been Merrick Garland”.