IT WAS “the best term for the left in at least a quarter century,” says Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court litigator and publisher of SCOTUSblog. In the dramatic final days in June, the justices refused to undermine Obamacare or undercut civil-rights protections under the Fair Housing Act. They rebuffed a plea from Republican legislators in Arizona that would have nixed a fix to partisan gerrymandering. And they decided that marriage equality for gays and lesbians is a constitutional right. There were twin consolationprizes for conservatives on the final opinion day, but Mr Goldstein counts liberal wins in eight of the ten most significant cases of the term.

The justices’ turn to the left is more likely an anomaly than an enduring trend, with the fate of affirmative action and public-sector unions looking shaky when the justices take up challenges to both in the next term. Abortion rights may also be at risk. But in the meantime, Republican presidential candidates are falling over themselves to denounce the “five unelected judges” who have conspired to thwart the will of the American people. The old critique of “judicial activism” is back with a vengeance.

Ted Cruz, who served as a clerk to William Rehnquist from 1995-1996, is the most piqued of the GOP field. He calls the Obamacare and gay-marriage rulings “an assault on democracy” and says that the justices “have become, effectively, politicians.” Mr Cruz proposes curbing the court’s politicisation with a constitutional amendment to institute retention elections for justices—an idea that would, of course, dramatically exacerbate the evil he seems keen to combat.

Foolish campaign rhetoric to one side, the question of judicial activism deserves a response. Have the liberal justices, who voted as a bloc with impressive consistency, picking off a conservative justice now and again to win 5-4 decisions in the biggest cases, “short circuit[ed] the political process” (as Marco Rubio put it) with their rulings?

The charge has come with great force from the disgruntled right-wing of the bench. Each of the four dissenters in Obergefell v Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, relied heavily on the image of the five-justice majority as a covey of usurpers who struck down state bans on same-sex marriage because they had a policy preference for gay weddings. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the decision “usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage” through the democratic process. Chief Justice John Roberts sounded the same note of incredulity that five justices would set out to redefine an institution that has remained heterosexual for millennia: “Who do we think we are?” And Justice Antonin Scalia was perhaps the most emphatic: “Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”

It’s remarkable how similar the arguments are in the four separate dissents, and how little discussion one finds in them of substantive reasons for upholding prohibitions on same-sex marriage. There is hardly any direct refutation of Justice Kennedy’s reasoning that the Constitution protects the equal dignity of gay and lesbians to wed—beyond Justice Scalia’s insulting comment that the majority opinion is reminiscent of the “mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” (I wonder if Mr Scalia actually reads his fortunes; I have yet to unwrap one that says anything about love, marriage or dignity.)

By pressing so hard on the formal point that five justices should never dictate terms to 320m Americans, the conservatives have constructed a self-defeating argument. Dictating terms to 320m Americans is exactly what the Supreme Court does and has done ever since it gave itself the power of judicial review in the Marbury v Madison decision of 1803. When a majority of the court reads the Constitution as protecting a right that a state or federal law contravenes, it strikes that law down. That is the justices’ job. Justice Elena Kagan explained as much in the Obergefell oral argument. “[W]e don't live in a pure democracy,” she said, “we live in a constitutional democracy. And the Constitution imposes limits on what people can do and this is one of those cases...where we have to decide...whether the Constitution...prevents the democratic processes from operating purely independently.”

Many of the liberal decisions this spring, including the Obamacare, gerrymandering, Confederate flag and fair-housing rulings, were not “activist” at all. In fact, they were examples of judicial restraint since they deferred to the determinations of other branches of government. But is Obergefell an example of judicial activism? Absolutely, if by “activism” we mean striking down laws that a majority of the justices construe as running afoul of the Constitution.

But it is misleading to describe this instinct as inherently or predominantly liberal. In recent years, the right wing of the court has exceeded the left in its willingness to use judicial power to counter the will of the people as expressed in state or federal legislation. Last year, in Burwell v Hobby Lobby,the conservatives voted to carve out an exception to a provision in the Affordable Care Act for certain religiously owned corporations. Two years ago in Shelby County v Holder, they struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, a law that Congress had re-approved overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote in 2006. In 2010, a provision of another bipartisan act of Congress, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, came on the conservatives’ chopping block in the highly controversial Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Again last year, in McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission, some campaign-donation limits were found to violate the First Amendment. All of these are clear and bold examples of justices exercising judicial power. Whether correctly or incorrectly decided, the rulings are, objectively, “activist”.

Critiques of judicial activism are, in the end, rarely critiques of judicial activism. They are cries of despair masked as principled stances against unelected judges deciding major questions for hundreds of millions of Americans. Everyone favours some of those decisions and objects to others. (And everyone seems to forget, when using "unelected" as a term of abuse, that judicial independence was seen by the founders as "the citadel of the public justice and the public security.") If, come next spring, affirmative-action admissions policies are found to contravene the 14th Amendment's equal-protection guarantee, or mandatory union dues are struck down as a violation of free speech, it will be the liberals’ turn to decry the court’s judicial activism while conservatives nod solemnly and announce that the Constitution has been vindicated.