The court undermines democracy at every turn---any benefit from it could’ve been solved via non-judicial measures

As for the struggle for women’s and gay rights, there is also no doubt the Supreme Court played a role. But the counterfactual is always: compared to what alternative method? Feminists abroad made greater strides than ever occurred in the United States without generalized recourse to judges, while there is no telling what democratic mobilization for gay rights would have gotten under its own power had not the Supreme Court intervened in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015—without allowing conservatives to pose along the way as the best friends of democratic choice, as Justice Antonin Scalia did constantly, with Chief Justice John Roberts following suit in Obergefell itself.

The objection that there may be territories in the country that would surely reject abortion (as well as gay marriage) if it were opened to a vote is a serious one. But the Supreme Court has, as with school integration before it, already acted to allow those states to eliminate abortion (though not gay marriage) de facto. And the reactionary judicial power that liberals helped conjure does not respect the boundary between red and blue America. Bush v. Gore picked a catastrophic president for the whole country. In more recent years, Citizens United converted national elections into contests pitting oligarch-funded candidates against each other. Janus v. AFSCME pounded another nail in the coffin of public unions. And if a fair verdict on juristocracy is to be reached, it is also worth recalling when an empowered judiciary undermined democracy by failing to act, with the effect of ratifying a near monopoly of executive power on issues like securing the borders against immigrants and fighting enemies endlessly beyond them.

It would be lovely to rely on juristocrats if they patrolled the procedures of the democratic process itself, making sure winners could not lock in their gains by gaming the rules in elections. Surely the judicial affirmation in the United States of basic principles—since they are absent from the Constitution itself—that everyone’s vote ought to be treated equally is worth flagging. But the judiciary has never done much to reinforce the representation of racial minorities. Its more recent track record on this subject has been particularly abysmal.

Then there is class. The drive for the moderation of economic inequality was the central explanation for the democratic victory of progressives under Roosevelt, and the success of their campaign essentially required judges to get out of the way. But even at the high tide of their political ascendancy, liberals couldn’t get the Supreme Court to commit to distributive entitlements of any kind. Neither a welfare state for the least advantaged, nor broader egalitarian justice in the country, is there for even the most creative judges to find under the Constitution’s authority—even assuming a transformed bench.

In short, progressives have little to lose and much to gain by leaving juristocracy to the enemies of democracy. Abandoning judicial politics in a kind of “unilateral disarmament” may seem like a foolish move. But liberals have already lost the race for the heavy weaponry of judicial control of democracy, and they can advocate for the people more consistently and less hypocritically if they press their policies democratically. There is simply no way to restrict judicial activism to one’s preferred causes any more than you can introduce a weapon in a fight with the guarantee that it will only hurt your enemies.