A conservative Republican president, Ronald Reagan, selected Kennedy. Yet the distance between his appointment and Kavanaugh’s reveals how far the conservative movement has traveled in law and in politics. Unlike Kennedy, Kavanaugh was preapproved by the Federalist Society, founded in 1982 to strengthen the conservative movement’s presence in law schools and the judiciary. The organization has groomed prospective judges and nurtured theories like originalism, which supply a method of constitutional interpretation that has led conservative judges largely to positions they ideologically favor. Last year, the Federalist Society helped Trump triumph with two parts of his base, evangelicals and big business, by contributing to a list of judges presented to him that included Neil Gorsuch, whom the president picked for Antonin Scalia’s empty seat — and who began fulfilling the base’s hopes over the course of his first term.

While Kennedy supplied the fifth vote for many conservative victories, he also participated in some of its big steps to the left, specifically in embracing marriage equality and reducing the scope of the death penalty. On abortion, he was a moderating force when conservative colleagues moved to gut Roe v. Wade. And by influencing the reasoning of conservative opinions he joined, Kennedy kept doors open that his colleagues would have closed. Though Kennedy ruled in June against Latino and African-American voters who challenged redistricting plans for congressional and state elections in Texas as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, he did not say that the law’s protections for minority voters should never apply to drawing electoral maps, the position taken by Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Since the 1930s, justices who served as swing voters or drifted ideologically have made it possible to think about the court in nonpartisan terms. Kavanaugh’s confirmation will probably break this long tradition. He represents the fulfillment of the dearest political wish for two generations of the conservative movement. Kavanaugh is a D.C. insider who has taken conservative positions as an appellate judge, and he has been a member of the Federalist Society since 1988, participating, for example, by hosting a dinner for admitted Yale law students in April. Barring a late-breaking surprise, the fifth and decisive brick of a conservative Supreme Court wall is about to be put into place. In the controversial cases that shape the public’s perception of the court, we can expect to see a full-blown partisan divide, with the conservative bloc, all Republican appointees, facing off against four liberal-moderates chosen by Democratic presidents.

Assuming Kavanaugh votes as his record suggests, the court will move to the right on several important fronts, even as the country’s demographics predict a shift of the electorate to the left, with more young voters and voters of color. Several priorities of the conservative legal movement already conflict with public opinion. The movement’s biggest target is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified access to abortion as a constitutional right, Yet a poll in July by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed an all-time high in public support for the decision, with 71 percent saying that Roe should not be overturned. The conservative wing of the court has also focused on upholding voting restrictions, gerrymanders and purges of the registration rolls. In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the same justices opened the door to a massive amount of spending to influence elections. Polls show, however, that more than 70 percent of Americans don’t like extreme partisan gerrymandering and want to overturn Citizens United.

The conservative justices have also tipped the balance of power toward corporations and away from employees and consumers. In a series of decisions beginning in 2011, they made it harder for consumers and employees to sue companies collectively (by upholding the fine print in contracts that forces disputes into private, case-by-case arbitration, in the face of state and federal laws that would otherwise make such contractual provisions unenforceable). This is an unpopular development, too. In a 2015 national survey, Pew found that in a dispute with a bank, an overwhelming number of people — 95 percent — want the right to bring the dispute to a judge or a jury and 89 percent want the right to participate in a collective (or class-action) lawsuit. Finally, if the court continues down a path to deregulation by second-guessing rather than deferring to the decisions of federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, it will be at odds with polls showing that about 60 percent of Americans would like to see environmental regulations preserved or strengthened and think they are worth the cost.