The Supreme Court , which is often denounced as the handmaiden of Republicans and conservatives, gave the Democratic Party and its legal allies a big victory this week.

Justices ruled 6-3 in Moore v. Harper that state courts may overrule state legislatures on congressional redistricting, even though the U.S. Constitution mandates legislatures to control the “times, places, and manner” of federal elections.

Many conservatives are up in arms, partly on constitutional principle but also, clearly, because the Supreme Court has cemented in place a congressional map North Carolina’s Democrat-dominated high court drew up, and which produced three fewer Republican seats in the 2020 election than were expected with a GOP map the judges swept aside.

The court’s Democratic majority claimed the right to intervene, saying the GOP gerrymander broke constitutional guarantees of free elections, equal protection, and other good things.

Gerrymandering has an ignoble history in America, which reflects the fact that political tribes have long been willing to sacrifice basic fairness to make one person’s vote weigh more than another. Both parties take dishonorable advantage of temporary ascendancy to undermine the voting strength of the other side’s supporters. So no one could argue that the Republican map at issue in Moore was impeccable.

But the grubby and sometimes shameful tradition from which it sprang had the merit of being long accepted. Under Moore, one pretext after another will be used to mount disingenuous challenges to the flawed but workable system stipulated in our founding documents.

Legal challenges to local control, for example, will now surely proliferate and, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent, emergency reviews brought opportunistically on the eve of federal elections will defer to state court decisions. Thus, the authority of legislatures to determine the times, places, and manner of the elections, as intended, will be greatly eroded.

It is worth pondering why this will be. It is not just for the obvious reason that political parties retain wily attorneys to mount such challenges. It is also because, more broadly, our culture nourishes and encourages palpably dishonest claims that can be used to mount disingenuous arguments, in court if desired.

For the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that although state courts have a part to play, it should not be so extensive as to negate the proper role of legislatures. But where is the dividing line? What constitutes impermissible interference, and what, on the contrary, is legitimate and permissible intervention? What does “proper” even mean today? Or, to echo Roberts’s phrase, what are “ordinary bounds,” and aren’t they being expanded all the time? His Solomonic ruling depends on vague words with disputed meanings.

It presents an insurmountable problem. Our culture no longer has a clue what is ordinary, usual, proper, or appropriate. How can one judge what is proper and ordinary in a culture where the ascendant ideology insists that our society is itself irredeemably evil and structurally racist, where teachers claim the right to nudge children along a transgender path without their parents’ knowledge, and where those who resist fashionable orthodoxies are denounced as fascists and terrorists, where the religion that brought the first pilgrims to these shores is now subjected to scorn — “hate” in modern parlance — from swaths of corporate America?

On many issues, there simply is no common ground. It is why so many people feel the country is coming apart. Whatever a state legislature decides is proper in the times, places, and manner of an election will be challenged as improper by an interested party.

There have always been bitter political and moral disagreements, but a Venn diagram of society’s many group opinions would once have revealed substantial areas of overlap on some subjects. There was a common culture and shared understanding of various limits of behavior.

Not a shred of that is left. The Venn diagram now is of hermetically sealed circles that don’t touch each other, let alone overlap. It is a picture of bubbles floating freely — or lost and being blown apart — in the swirling ideological winds.

The absence of shared standards by which political claims can be judged is undoing the good work of generations. It is a process that keeps power flowing to federal micromanagers in the central government. It makes me recall the words of a colleague who, years ago, reacted to a proposal for intrusive legislation, saying, “We wouldn’t need all these new laws if people would only learn to behave.”

He was right. The fractured nature of our culture means more and more local or individual decisions that require shared assumptions are being ceded to central authority. Which is the way the Left wants it.