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It is a misunderstanding of how ideological movements advance their goals in the cultural and regulatory environment of the United States to suppose that the burden rests entirely on the Supreme Court.
I'm going to use a (mostly) fake example: supposing that conservatives decide to really go after weed. In some states, they have the political power to just straight up ban it. But they want to be able to hit it in Colorado and New York, too, so they go after insurance providers and banks on the institutional level, using public and private resources to establish a baseline of "best practices" that will apply nationwide. Suddenly your insurance premiums if you smoke week skyrocket, and weed dealers increasingly have trouble opening even personal bank accounts. Private schools and universities start screening out the children of weed-smokers under a best-practices risk paradigm and banning weed on campus. Rental car companies do the same. Palantir puts together a national list of weed-users and makes it available at trivial prices to accelerate this effort. This effort goes slowly, but after 25 years it becomes extremely pervasive.
The legal-weed movement on the libertarian left quickly realizes this is a potentially existential issue. Even if they have some ways to fight back (e.g. working with local banks that don't practice in red states and so are less concerned about the legal and reputational ramifications of banking weed providers) the pressure is quickly drying up demand for legal weed. Worse, it is making it uncool because strivers want to send their kids to private schools, and normies want affordable insurance. Weed is quickly returning to a product for losers reputationally, and financially it is rapidly returning underground.
They launch a legal battle aimed at overturning the web of private regulations that are locking weed enjoyers out of so many services. The Supreme Court rules that no, private entities have the freedom of association to do what they want, and even public entities are not required to not discriminate against drug users. This ruling only accelerates the right's momentum on the issue. Legal weed users are still a holdout, and it is still legal in many places, but the weight and momentum have shifted. Everyone in the legal-weed movement would understand that their cause had been set back tremendously and are concerned that in another 25 years, nobody will care enough about protecting weed to fight back against renewed attempts at legal bans.
But someone who wasn't aware of how these developments were all fitting together would look at the ruling in 2051 and say "so private companies can do what they want? big deal" and continue to believe that the legal weed movement had overwhelmingly won based on the fact that it was technically legal in many states.
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