The Left tends to view the legitimacy of an institution purely in terms of its current ideological character.

The Supreme Court was sacrosanct when it was leftist, it’s the enemy of all that is good and pure now that it has a conservative majority. When the Senate was conservative, then it was a figment of slavery. Now it’s the bulwark of democracy.

What’s the degree of commitment to a purely transactional view of political norms and institutional legitimacy among lefties? That’s where the difference between the long game and the immediate gains radicals arises. The former want to work through the system while the latter seek to seize power right now by any means.

A good example is the ACLU which used free speech as a ploy to empower the Left until, as one of its founders warned, the time would come when the Left was so powerful that it could safely discard free speech.

But the Supreme Court took a united stance on Dem efforts to go after Supreme Court justices with all the justices signing on to an explication of their governing codes while rejecting congressional oversight. But if there’s anyone likely to take a long view of the game, it’s justices who have lifetime appointments. Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson can see the utility of protecting the authority they intend to wield from the politics of the moment. And that may not be so far away. If Biden gets a second term, the composition of the court will likely and unfortunately change. What is now a bulwark of conservatism (at least in comparison to the other two branches which haven’t done anything conservative in at least a generation) could easily flip around.

That’s the long game.

That the Dems can’t even think of the long game testifies to the degree they’ve been radicalized into trying to collect all their winnings now and stomping on anyone who gets in their way.