WHEN he ran for president the second time almost half a century ago, Richard M. Nixon made Earl Warren’s Supreme Court a target of his campaign. It was a brilliant move. His accusation that the court had tilted “too far in weakening the peace forces against the criminal forces,” as he put it in a widely noticed 1967 Reader’s Digest article, resonated with a public that had seen the crime rate double since 1960. It was no longer acceptable, at least in polite circles outside the South, to denounce the Supreme Court explicitly on race, so Nixon’s dark warnings about a breakdown in public order (the article was entitled “What Has Happened to America?”) served double duty. Fear was in the air, fear that Nixon and his henchmen (Patrick J. Buchanan was the article’s ghost writer) knew how to exploit.

I thought of Nixon last week as I watched the parade of Republican would-be presidents outdoing one another in denouncing the “lawless” and “brazen” Supreme Court. With its “hubris and thirst for power,” the court threatens “the very foundations of our representative form of government,” the most Nixonian of them all, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, warned.

Senator Cruz, attacking the court for its rulings on both the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, is calling for a constitutional amendment that would strip the justices of their life tenure by making them subject to retention elections. Senator Cruz (like Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.) once clerked for William H. Rehnquist, a fierce defender of judicial independence even when he disagreed with a particular judge. While Senator Cruz wrote in National Review that he had “no doubt that Rehnquist would be heartbroken at what has befallen our highest court,” I think it much more likely that the late chief justice is turning over in his grave at his former law clerk’s antics.

Not that any of the Republicans have asked me for advice, but I’ll give them some anyway: Fomenting backlash is not a winning strategy. Just as fire needs oxygen, stoking public anger against the Supreme Court can’t succeed in a vacuum. Backlash needs to be fed and sustained by fear: fear of crime; fear of a threat to “our Southern way of life”; fear, in the case of abortion, of a revolution in women’s traditional role in the family and in society.