For Ginsburg, the law is an instrument toward political ends. When she declared in her 1993 confirmation hearing that her reading of the Constitution relied on “the climate of the age,” she was offering not an interpretive rule, but a political one. The jurist who thinks there are “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” (three cheers for Roe for helping out with that!) is really just waiting for the climate of the age to catch up with her fevered pursuit of justice. Someday we yokels will see that a good eugenics program is just what we need.

The acclaim for Ginsburg’s distinguished legal career is, then, really acclaim for her unorthodox political career. Go back to those dissents. If you read reports from left-wing media, Ginsburg is the Jon Stewart of Supreme Court opinions: her dissents are “ferocious,” “withering,” “blistering,” “barbequing,” and (my personal favorite) “disemboweling.” Justice Scalia, eat your heart out!

But Ginsburg gets her dissents made into songs not because they actually eviscerate opponents’ arguments, but because she is already an icon. The whole arrangement is backwards, to wit: She is not a feminist hero because she is (in the words of Rebecca Traister, writing at The New Republic) “bone-crushingly robust yet simultaneously appealing”; she is “bone-crushingly robust yet simultaneously appealing” because she is a feminist hero.