Charles de Gaulle once said that he always had “a certain idea of France.”Now we learn that from her prominent perch as a Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan has a certain idea of democracy. De Gaulle’s idea was better for France than the Justice’s idea is for American self-government.

Justice Kagan has to her credit mostly resisted the vitriolic criticisms that her liberal colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, have leveled against the Court’s conservatives. Still young at age 66, perhaps she’s awaiting the inevitable day when the liberals are back in the majority and doesn’t want to undermine the Court’s legitimacy when they’ll need it to overturn precedents.

But this week, in the heat of the midterm election, she couldn’t resist taking the majority to task. “The court has . . . blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” Justice Kagan said during a discussion at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C.

As a result, she added, the decisions have created “a democracy that does not work as well as it should,” with both parties “engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders.”Justice Kagan is exercised by the Court’s rulings on election-related issues, especially gerrymanders and voting rights. She’s been in the minority in these cases, and we can understand if she’s frustrated. But she’s wrong on the democratic merits.

The Court’s 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) took federal courts out of the business of policing state decisions on drawing their own legislative maps. It’s true that politicians have since gone to extremes on partisan gerrymanders, which is unfortunate. But that is democracy in action and has been since the constitutional founding.

Justice Kagan’s alternative is to put judges in charge of drawing maps. Her implicit assumption is that judges will be less partisan, but that is not what we have observed over time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s interventions to help Democrats in that state are Exhibit A, B and C, and state courts can still meddle. But the Supreme Court also mucked around in redistricting before Rucho. Why are unelected judges better democratic arbiters than elected officials?

Justice Kagan also said in her remarks that the Court’s recent decision to limit the use of race in drawing district lines discounted the damage to the districts of black Democrats in the South. “The court kind of said, ‘Oh well,’” Justice Kagan said.

No, it didn’t. The majority properly explained that carving up districts by race is a sordid business that violates the Constitution. It’s hard to see how guaranteeing a seat by race is democratic. It’s closer to John C. Calhoun’s pre-Civil War concept of proportional representation. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 1994 in a powerful concurrence in Holder v. Hall, forcing both major parties to compete for minority voters is healthier for democracy than cabining black or Hispanic voters into essentially one-party seats.

Justice Kagan is right that partisan gerrymanders at the current political moment are reducing the number of competitive elections and “driving people away from the center, toward the wings, toward the extremes,” as she put it. But that dishonor belongs to the political classes, not to the Justices.

The constitutional solution rests with Congress and state legislatures, and ultimately the voters, who have remedies such as independent commissions if they want to pursue them. If the Court really wants to increase political competition, we’d recommend revisiting its mistaken 5-4 1995 ruling against Congressional term limits. That’s a good democratic idea.