Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is taking on water with every passing moment. Two women have accused him of sexually assaulting them in the early 1980s, while a third says she witnessed him groping women without their consent at house parties. (He denies any allegations of wrongdoing, calling them “last-minute smears, pure and simple.”) There are rumblings that a growing number of Republican senators are uneasy about supporting him, though others are signaling confidence. “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham recently said. On Wednesday, after the third accuser’s allegations surfaced, Utah’s Orrin Hatch said, “I don’t think we should put up with it, to be honest with you.”

Republicans more broadly appear to be standing by Kavanaugh even as the rest of the country moves away from him. An NPR/PBS/Marist poll released on Wednesday found that, whereas 59 percent of all Americans think he shouldn’t be confirmed if Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are true, 54 percent of Republicans think he should be confirmed even if the allegations are true.

What drives the right’s insistence on elevating Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court? Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday could imperil a four-decade effort by American conservatives to bring a majority of the Supreme Court in line with their ideological views. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement earlier this year gave the influential alliance of legal organizations, think tanks, and donors a long-awaited chance to finish the task, and it’s unclear whether anything, even credible accusations of sexual assault, will stop them now.

The conservative legal movement, like American conservatism as a whole, is not monolithic. It includes big businesses that are hostile to organized labor, social conservatives who resent the secularization of public schools and loathe abortion, libertarian-minded skeptics of federal regulations and social programs, Southern whites who opposed desegregation and civil-rights laws, and law-and-order types alarmed by the expansion of criminal defendants’ rights and protections in the 1960s. What united them was an aversion to the status quo and the Supreme Court that enshrined it.

Presidents always have used Supreme Court nominations for political and electoral purposes, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was no different. He nominated Earl Warren, California’s popular Republican governor and a key supporter in the 1952 Republican primaries, to be chief justice the following year. He later tapped William Brennan to a vacant spot in 1956 to appeal to Catholics in the Northeast during that year’s election. The two men became the nucleus of what is generally referred to as the Warren Court, which spanned from the mid-1950s until Warren retired in 1969. It was the most progressive era in the court’s history, but its victories brought a backlash from more conservative elements.