This summer may be one of the most consequential in US democracy | Thomas Zimmer

The Long Summer of 2022 began in May, when the abortion opinion draft leaked, and continued through a series of brutal rulings and congressional hearings

American politics is about to take a summer break. The supreme court's next term won't start until October. Congress will be in recess in August. And the January 6 hearings will be on hiatus until September. Things will calm down for a little while. Or so it will seem on the surface, at least.

This supposed respite follows what historians might come to call the Long Summer of 2022. It began in early May, when Justice Samuel Alito's draft majority opinion in Dobbs v Women's Health Organization leaked - the decision that in June overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the right to abortion. This was not the start, but itself a manifestation and apotheosis of a reactionary assault on the post-1960s civil rights era that originated in Republican-led states and has been consistently enabled and actively advanced by the supreme court. The Dobbs leak, which dominated the political discourse for weeks, clearly indicated an escalation of rightwing attempts to turn the clock back by many decades.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer