After spending nine months traveling throughout the United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book to reassure the French ruling class that it had nothing to fear from democracy. Tocqueville’s definition of democracy was not exactly radical by today’s standards. Its main feature was an “equality of conditions,” under which no person was considered inherently inferior by birth, law, or custom — the type of formal equality that later radicals like Karl Marx excoriated as insufficient. For the aristocrats of the July Monarchy, whose families had only barely survived the French Revolution, this limited equality was nonetheless deeply threatening.

But Tocqueville had an answer ready. In America, he wrote, the lawyers are in charge. With their love of formalistic reasoning and their desire for order, lawyers mimic the “tastes and habits of the aristocracy,” and for this reason are “eminently conservative, and will reveal themselves as antidemocratic.” They “resemble somewhat Egyptian priests . . . the sole interpreter[s] of an occult science.” And though they may use their rhetorical skills to appeal to ordinary people when it suits them, they naturally gravitate toward those in power. Lawyers, then, could be counted on to rein in the democratic majority — none more so than the justices of the Supreme Court, which, “armed with the right to declare laws unconstitutional . . . penetrates all areas of political affairs.”

As the Supreme Court is set to welcome a fifth justice nominated by a president who lost the popular vote, it seems we are living in a democracy that would be more than acceptable to Tocqueville’s aristocrats. Under chief justice John Roberts, the court has mastered the art of protecting the interests of conservative elites and the owners of capital against mass democracy. It has allowed the wealthy to spend unlimited money on influencing elections, undermined the legal framework protecting voters against disfranchisement, given states permission to gut public-sector unions, and twisted itself into knots to excuse the Trump administration’s racist immigration policies. With the addition of Amy Coney Barrett — almost certainly chosen for her opposition to popular positions on health care, abortion, and climate — we can expect it to continue on this path, only getting bolder in its defiance of the popular will.