Callais, combined with today’s court ruling in Virginia, has jolted Democrats and sent commentators into bemoaning an accelerating “race to the bottom” and, to paraphrase Jeff Zeleny on CNN this afternoon, the end to norms that have organized American politics and redistricting for generations.

I’d like to offer a significantly different view of the situation. What we have seen over recent months is that Democrats have largely abandoned the mode of the last decade plus in which with one hand they fought the partisan battles of the day and with the other assume the mantle of defending the political norms Republicans have already destroyed. In other words, it was the responsibility of Democrats both to be contestants and referees. Republicans violated norms; Democrats tried to uphold them. That of course meant no partisan battle was ever on equal terms and Republicans almost always won them.

We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.

Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.