Ginsburg herself was never actually in a position to take care of us. She came to be widely adulated only in the period in which she was in the Court’s minority; she was issuing dissents—brilliantly lacerating, yes, but still dissents—from decisions that imperiled and weakened us.

…The notion that our survival depended on her survival was always flawed, and betrayed how ravenous many were for any thread of hope for quiet and functional institutional correction, rather than for the mass uprising and furious battle this moment calls for. Part of the fantasy was that if she could hang on we could get back to “normal,” but normal is long past broken.”

It should never have come down to her, even in our collective imagination.

REBECCA TRAISTER, “It Should Never Have Come Down to Her.” The Cut, September 2020.