An unsung aspect of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been the subtle sense of dejection that prevails among many of Barack Obama’s biggest fans. Beneath their excitement over the racial and sociological perfection of the pick, disappointment lingers.

The nub of the uneasiness is that Sotomayor is not the lion the Left was hoping for. This much was suggested by her pre-nomination profile from The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen, who somewhat backhandedly called her intelligence and temperament into question. This set off a mini-storm of controversy, as some interpreted Rosen’s piece as an attempt at pre-emptive sabotage, motivated perhaps by sympathy with those calling for Obama to pick a more vociferous nominee.

Now, most on the left acknowledge that Sotomayor is a fine choice, safe and confirmable, and a reliable liberal vote — some uncertainty about her stance on abortion notwithstanding. No one can deny her career has been impressive, if somewhat workmanlike. But she’s not the firebrand, the agitator, the towering hero they wanted. She will not galvanize future generations of law students to man the barricades in a new revolution of liberal jurisprudence. Her appeals-court opinions are on file for the world to see, and they do not inspire. They lack panache, crackle, vigor, verve — all the signs that will herald the champion who is prophesied to come, at last, to drive the Scalia wing from the field and restore the chambers of justice to their rightful place at the core of progressive politics.

The mundanity of Sotomayor’s nomination rankles many liberals, especially legal-elite types, for a very deep reason: It intensifies the impression that President Obama has turned his back on the celebrated liberal legacy of the judiciary-as-engine-of-social-change. In a sense, his entire career has flowed from a sort of anti-legalism: After serving as president of the law review at Harvard, he taught for a while but ultimately rejected a tenured post at one of the country’s most elite law schools. Rather than pursuing a cerebral career as an appellate litigator or a law professor, he dove into the rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics. This was where he thought he could make a difference, and where he began his all-too-consequential work of rendering harmless communities into organs of purposeful action to serve the ends he prescribed.

The arc of Obama’s career betrays a conviction that courts are simply not the most effective vehicle for changing society — that they are a “Hollow Hope” for progressives, essentially constrained by popular political pressures. This conviction likely stems not from a principled belief in judicial restraint, but rather from a prudential maxim of political action. Obama suggested as much in a radio interview in 2001, where he remarked, “I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused,” he said. “I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.”

If you really want to reform a nation in a radical way, in this view, you have to do it at the grassroots, at the common level of hearts and minds and ballot boxes. You have to clear the political path and create space for legal institutions to change. Judges are not the cavalry in this model but the rear guard, sweeping in after the battle of social change has been won. Their job is to mop up the broken and wounded resistance and consolidate political gains by systematizing the triumphant paradigm into a coherent, stable, lasting body of law.

If this is Obama’s view of the judicial role, subordinated rather than exalted in the political scheme, then it is no surprise that he has chosen a nominee who, while perhaps somewhat flat jurisprudentially, will bolster his political capital more than spend it. The demographic aspect of the Sotomayor nomination puts Republicans in a bind for the same reason that its helps Democrats shore up support among Hispanics. The nomination of the first Latina to the Court plays to the affinities of group identity, and it makes her opponents vulnerable to charges of racial basis, even when they are motivated by no such thing — especially then, in fact, as non-racists are acutely sensitive to accusations of bias. This will obscure the important debate over Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, making it subservient to Obama’s larger goal of political coalition-building.

Conservatives should see Obama’s attitude about the Court as both welcome and terrifying. Welcome because it might lead (over time) to some abatement in constitutional debauchery, as liberals begin to feel less constantly compelled to distort the document’s meaning to serve their parochial visions of justice. Terrifying because it might mean that Obama really is making the Left more tactically wise. As things stand now, an enormous amount of liberal energy and intelligence is funneled into our nation’s courts and law schools, where the destructive effects are muted, as in an underground blast chamber. If this force were to be unleashed on the public, unfettered by the institutional constraints of legalism, it could become death for conservatives, and the destroyer of worlds.

– Anthony Dick is a student at Stanford Law School, where he is the president of the Federalist Society chapter.