Vote. Confirm.

Well, the FBI report is in. Unsurprisingly, it contains nothing new. (If it had contained any damaging evidence against Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats would have leaked it. If, on the other hand, it had contained some exculpatory evidence — which, given the lack of any specifics in the Ford allegation as regards time and place, and the lack of any corroborating witnesses to provide such details, would have been almost impossible to produce, or even to imagine — I suppose the Republicans would have leaked it.)

Meanwhile all of my liberal friends are sticking to their guns. I was talking about the affair with one of my closest friends today, and pointed out that no matter what happens to the Kavanaugh confirmation, we will descend more deeply into total political war. He said that he thought the best hope for calming the waters would be for Kavanaugh to withdraw himself; to which I replied that, leaving aside that such a thing would be a wholly immoral capitulation to the vilest sort of character assassination, it would be total victory for the Democrats, and a humiliating defeat for the Republicans, and would hardly have a tranquilizing effect. (I, for one, would be furious, as would scores of millions of other Americans.)

He then went on to say that he thought Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because he had shown bad character by not owning up to all the creepy things he was tarred with in the Thursday hearing; that he thought Kavanaugh should have been honest about “boofing” and “Devil’s Triangle” and “FFFFFFF”. I (rather warmly by this point) began to demand that my friend explain how he knew what the truth was about any of those things, and he at that point suggested that we just stop, which I agreed to do. (I’m pretty good about stopping short of letting politics wreck friendships.)

Not long after, I had a similar conversation, over the telephone, with my 97-year-old mother-in-law, a woman of exceptional intelligence. Unfortunately she is now blind, and so gets all her news from the TV and radio; with only that to draw on, she thought it had been solidly established that Brett Kavanaugh was a cad and a belligerent drunkard at best, and quite plausibly a violent sexual predator. Such is the power of a coordinated and culturally ubiquitous propaganda machine.

What is most disturbing of all, however, is the extent to which women in particular (including some, if not most, of the women closest to me) have latched onto Mr. Kavanaugh as a proxy for every man who ever wronged a woman, and indeed for all the sins of the “patriarchy”, under whose iron boot-heel even modern-day American women still groan and suffer. (The fact that women in America in the 21st century have more freedom, better health, more power, more wealth, and more life options than women have ever had anywhere on Earth at any time in history makes not a dent in any of this.) Women having been crushed by men always and everywhere, finally they have one in the dock for it, and that’s all that matters — not the abandonment of due process and the presumption of innocence, not the merciless collateral destruction of a very-possibly-innocent man of spotless reputation and towering judiciary credentials in a naked struggle for power, not the complete breakdown of the civil and political norms that are the only thing that holds this nation, and this civilization, together. None of it.

When they look at Brett Kavanaugh, they don’t see a father of two girls, a devoted husband, a reliable friend, a benefactor of women and minorities trying to get ahead in law careers, a coach of a girl’s basketball team, a pre-eminent legal scholar who was first in his class throughout his long education and who has served with distinction at the highest levels of the judicial system, who has written over three hundred legal opinions from the bench and who has earned from his peers a shining and stainless reputation for brilliance, temperament, and for the keenness of his intellect. No, what they see, it seems, is nothing more than a Privileged White Male, and a chance to get their thumb in his eye. They are perfectly happy, it seems, to see him dragged though the mud, broken, humiliated, beggared and disgraced — just to get even with his sex, his race, and his class.

If they win, we all lose. Do these women really think that a collapsing society — which is exactly what they are going to get if they keep this up, and sooner rather than later — is really going to be a safer or better place for them? If they think men behave badly toward them now, what do they imagine it will be like when the rule of law decays into ruin, and, soon afterwards, all the fragile veneering of civilization — everything that holds our darkest urges in check — falls away?

We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.

There may not be much we can do about any of this; dark clouds are gathering, and the hour is late. But I know that we can still, at least, do one honorable thing, one right thing: confirm Brett Kavanaugh.

9 Comments

  1. JK says

    I listened to Erick Erickson’s podcast earlier this evening (Ricochet) and where that “boofing” is concerned somebody of Erick’s acquaintance discovered a fellow of two years prior to Kav’s graduating used the same term.

    Except that the guy in his yearbook piece defined it exactly as it was presented as evidence in the Judiciary hearing.

    Roundabouts the 26 minute mark:

    https://ricochet.com/podcast/erick-erickson-show/10-04-18/

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 12:27 am | Permalink
  2. Whitewall says

    Our ‘liberal friends’ segregated themselves from us and others the day B. Hussein Obama was elected. They were oh so smug and virtous. It took several years of Him for them to see what they had done and had fallen for. A couple are now ‘re acquainted’ with us to a degree. The others are lost and good riddance. This Judge K thing is retesting the Obama induced stupidity.

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 8:06 am | Permalink
  3. JK says

    https://townhall.com/columnists/erickerickson/2018/10/05/trump-2020-n2525506

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 9:14 am | Permalink
  4. Whitewall says

    JK, Bill Kristol hardest hit? Vichy Republican. We can’t wait for the perfect President.

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 9:57 am | Permalink
  5. Jason says

    In some ways I think this brouhaha relates to your earlier threads from a few months ago, about natural law and democracy. To very pithily paraphrase the gist of them, can rights be based simply on moral intuitions, or must they derive their existence from God? In the past, it seems to me, it was drummed into Americans that people are presumed innocent, that as the African-American judge character says in Scott Turrow’s breakthrough novel about a defendent to prospective jurors: “There sits an innocent man.” The accused doesn’t have to demonstrate a damn thing; it’s up the prosecution to maintain the burden of proof, to conclusively show with evidence that the individual committed wrong. And it’s quite well that this default assumption has existed in American (and Western) jurisprudence, not to mention in a more general cultural sense. For who among us would escape opprobium without it, flawed and sinful creatures that we are who are certainly “capable” of doing anything?

    The problem is that this paridigm is quite abstract, a Platonic form if you will that perhaps requires some form of faith. Yet without the supernatural, I’m not sure such “belief” in an essential component of the American Creed is sustainable, at least in a practical sense in our post-modern, post-Christian society. Other natural instincts, not necessarily totally wrong or illegitimate, will crowd it out.

    And there’s also simply the lethargy of tying to endlessly combat other’s more base intuitions. Just last night at dinner my mom and step-father, good old-fashioned liberals to the point almost of parody, asked me what I thought about Kavanaugh. Knowing that they were against him for the sort of reasons you yourself mentioned Malcolm regarding your friend and mother-in-law, I was tempted to briefly pontificate on the quintessential American habit-of-the-heart of assumed innocence and why it’s so vital to affirm it, irrespective of other issues like whatever truth-shading Kavanaugh – might – have enaged in during his testimony. Yet having already issued such a challenge to them in connection to the Latin American refugee dilemma at another dinner a few months ago – “there’s a lot more where they came from,” was my basic point – I just didn’t want to bother.

    “Oh, the fight over the nomination is boring me. Let’s talk about something else.”

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 12:50 pm | Permalink
  6. Jacques says

    I’m tempted to be a little optimistic. The right is unifying. Even the “Never Trump” idiots and shills are getting behind Trump: everyone is starting to understand the options are stark, and the stakes are very high. The left is revealing itself very fast. Even normies are having a hard time rationalizing the statements and behavior of the supposedly _moderate_ leftists and democrats.

    Someone predicted that whether K is confirmed or not, the right will be energized. That seems likely to me.

    The left and media and establishment are radicalizing right wingers and Republicans and surely a lot of middle-of-the-road apolitical people who have a few shreds of reason and decency left. It is clear to all these people that the System is operated by utterly cynical psychopaths and bitter lunatics.

    I hope and cautiously predict that we’ll see a more radical aggressive angry Right emerging from this. Trump is teaching them how to fight, reminding them the goal is to win not lose politely, revealing to them the bottomless hatred of America and normality and Western civilization that powers the System.

    Then again, you can’t over-estimate the gullibility and complacency of the masses :)

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 2:27 pm | Permalink
  7. Malcolm says

    Thanks for that excellent comment, Jason. I share your concerns. (And you remind me that, having finished T.G. West’s book about natural rights and the Founding, I should return to the topic here.)

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 11:21 pm | Permalink
  8. Malcolm says

    Jacques,

    Yes, this has been a unifying moment for the right, and that is gratifying. We must hang together, or we surely will hang separately!

    There’s rough weather ahead for this nation, though, I fear. The Devil will not be cast out quietly.

    Posted October 5, 2018 at 11:22 pm | Permalink
  9. Whitewall says

    “Beware the fury of a patient man” John Dryden.

    Posted October 6, 2018 at 8:02 am | Permalink

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