Congrats to Ketanji Brown Jackson on being confirmed as the 116th Justice of the Supreme Court.

The victory of Jackson’s confirmation today was delivered by over 2mil Georgia voters in January 2021, partly because Democrats in some other states failed to pull their own weight (or stupidly donated rage money to obvious honey-pots like Kentucky and South Carolina) in November 2020 for U.S. Senate candidates, partly because Dems failed to pull their weight in several other states throughout the 2010s.

The vote for Jackson’s confirmation would not have been this close (53-47) in a better timeline, it should not have taken this long to nominate a Black woman (let alone a public defender), and it will not change the ideological composition of the court. Hell, it would have been even better if KBJ had graduated from a public university, but the only remotely-credible candidate who had that credential is pretty bad in her judicial record.

For those who watched Jackson’s confirmation through the lens of breaking glass ceilings of representation for both women and African Americans, or a victory for the public defender community, they should celebrate.

But I can’t celebrate, because few liberals (or even progressives) in this country are willing to do the existential work of protecting ourselves and starving the stomach of the reactionary beast.

We are still living in the Reagan era’s wildest dreams, and we are about to get our human rights savaged by wild reactionary autocrats this summer and for the foreseeable future. And we have no strategy for how to protect ourselves from being sitting ducks under reactionary state legislatures.

How do we celebrate in a burning building?