The General US Politics Thread

Most often, Kavanaugh's potential impact has been framed in terms of whether he was “nice.” He coached girls’ basketball, they told us; he hired women at his office; he was so nice for women to be around, so many women liked him, that there was no way Brett Kavanaugh could possibly harm women, no way he could possibly want to hurt us.

Ford’s allegations are shockingly violent. She says that, when they were both in high school, Kavanaugh “pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it.” When she tried to scream, she says he put his hand over her mouth. Another boy, who was also in the room, allegedly turned up the music to drown her out. (In a statement, Kavanaugh says that “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation.”) It’s the kind of thing that makes it hard to care about neighborhood barbecues.

But, again: The question was never whether Kavanaugh would hurt women. People, mostly women, inevitably die and suffer when abortion is made illegal or inaccessible, and we have always known that Kavanaugh was being nominated on the basis of his opposition to abortion. The question has only ever been how much harm he’ll do.

Throughout Kavanaugh's hearings, women have been silenced over and over again, dragged screaming from courtrooms as they try to tell the world that Brett Kavanaugh is a threat. He didn’t personally put his hand over their mouths. He didn’t turn up the music so we couldn’t hear them. He doesn’t have to do that anymore: He’s a Supreme Court nominee, and he has professional security guards standing at the ready to drown out any female voices that disrupt his rise to power.

In the face of scandal, the GOP have fallen back on the “nice guy” line — producing a letter (apparently prepared in advance) in which 65 women who knew Brett Kavanaugh at the time of the alleged attack claim that “[for] the entire time we have known Brett Kavanaugh, he has behaved honorably and treated women with respect.” The cynicism of this has been taken apart nimbly by the Internet — for one thing, preparing a group statement just in case your guy is accused of sexual assault sure seems like something you’d do if you knew that guy had sexual assault allegations – but it’s notable in that it suggests there’s some acceptable ratio of non-victims to victims. Exactly many women does a guy have to attack before you conclude that he’s got problems with women? Every woman he knows? Every woman you know? Every woman in America?

Because, if he’s confirmed, it will be every woman in America. That’s the point. One victim is enough, but it was never going to be just one. The man who now stands to strip reproductive autonomy from every woman and AFAB trans person in America is accused of sexual assault. Say what you will, but it doesn’t exactly seem out of character.

If the past year of unrelenting sexual assault scandals has taught us anything, it’s that personal violence and political violence are inevitably intertwined; the tragedy of our sexual politics is not just that so many men prey on women, or that those men so routinely escape consequences for their actions, but that we live in a society where men who view women as fundamentally disposable and worthless are allowed to set our priorities and control our institutions. If the President of CBS sexually assaults women on a regular basis, feminist show runners are not going to get picked up by CBS. If Matt Lauer has a history of preying on his female colleagues, then NBC News is going to be quietly dissuaded from reporting stories that shine a light on sexual assault. If the most powerful men in media are sexual predators, an accused sexual predator can run for President and be given more generous treatment than his female opponent. If that accused sexual predator becomes President, he can appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Violence against women doesn’t just take place one-on-one, through individual rapes and assaults. It’s structural — it’s built into our assumptions and our institutions, inflicted from the top down. Sexual assaults or incidents of misogynist violence are not just tragic accidents, or outliers. They are the intended outcome within a culture that is built to empower men at women’s expense. The same rape culture that teaches boys to terrorize girls at parties now stands to enshrine Brett Kavanaugh into a lifetime position of authority, in which women’s civil rights and bodily autonomy will be in his hands and at his mercy. These are not two different stories; they are two different illustrations of the same fundamental disregard for women’s sovereignty over their own bodies and lives.

Both rape and forced birth are examples of a woman's sovereignty being taken away. If we see these two forms of violence as separate — if we’re shocked by the rape allegations, yet view the anti-choice stance as a mere “ideological difference” — we are missing the big picture. Maybe, all those years ago, it was Christine Blasey Ford. Tomorrow, it could be you, and every woman you know.

In the letter, Ford—she is speaking publicly only after an initial, and eminently reasonable, reluctance to come forward—alleges that Kavanaugh, when he was a 17-year-old in the early 1980s, sexually assaulted her. She was 15 at the time. She alleges further—the details of this allegation, as they will be with any such claim of sexual violence, are crucial—that Kavanaugh, “stumbling drunk” at a party, corralled Ford into a bedroom, with a friend of his, and then pinned her down onto a bed. That he groped her, grinding his body against hers. That he tried to remove her clothes, and then the bathing suit she wore underneath them. That he put his hand over her mouth, to muffle her screams.

So great was the violence of it all, Ford recalled to The Washington Post, that, at one point, she began to fear that “he might inadvertently kill me.”

Ford’s account of the event has been corroborated by her husband; by a therapist, with whom she discussed the alleged event in 2012; by the notes of a 2013 therapy session, which refer to a “rape attempt” Ford survived as a teenager; and by a polygraph test Ford took on the advice of a lawyer who knows the doubt with which the world, still, reflexively responds to the recollections of women. What the professor describes, in her letter to her Congressional representatives and again to the Post, is by no means the typical stuff of mere youthful indiscretion. What Ford is talking about—what she has been talking about, for years—is not the behavior of kids simply being kids, boys simply being boys. What she is alleging, instead, is cruelty; it is entitlement; it is violence; it is assault.

You would not know that, however, from some of the public reactions to Ford’s allegations. The White House—which of course has multidimensional interests in downplaying negative claims about Kavanaugh, particularly those involving sexual misconduct—has thus far defended its nominee in the broadest of terms, claiming its support for Kavanaugh and otherwise offering “no additional comment.” (Donald Trump’s evergreen advice on countering allegations of misconduct: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) A lawyer close to the White House, interviewed by Politico, reiterated the idea that, regardless of Ford’s claims, Kavanaugh’s nomination would not be withdrawn. On the contrary: “If anything, it’s the opposite,” the lawyer told the reporter Burgess Everett, suggesting that the White House has been, actually, galvanized by the allegations against its nominee. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

We can all be accused of something: It’s a neat rhetorical trick. It shifts the accountability from the one person to the many; it claims expansive empathy while revealing just how limited a resource, in the government of the people, empathy really is. The comment rejects the predictably partisan defense of Kavanaugh—the allegation of misconduct, The Weekly Standard summed it up last week, as “an achingly obvious attempt to libel a good man for rank political ends”—in favor of another one: the notion that, precisely because of the allegation against him, the judge deserves to be defended. (Every man.) The White House, far from treating the allegations of one of its constituents with any degree of stated concern, will apparently push even harder for its nominee—on the grounds that the nominee in question, bedeviled with “accusations,” could be anyone.

Or, rather: He could be any man. And here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)

Once again, in much of the public discussion, the empathy settles on the man accused. There but for the grace, etc.: If youthful indiscretions like that are allowed to affect the fate of a basketball-coaching, soup-kitchen-volunteering, daughter-nurturing, carpool-driving Supreme Court nominee, whose fortunes wouldn’t be affected? “We’ve now gone from ‘he did this terrible thing at 17’ to ‘he’s a man who treated a woman like that,’” the professor and author Tom Nichols tweeted on Sunday. “Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn’t.”

Nichols has since deleted the tweet; in erasing it, though, he reiterated the general point: “All of you arguing that what someone did at 17 is relevant when you’re 53 better to be [sic] ready *always* to die on that hill, because it’s going to be the new rule. Don’t complain later when the revolution eats its young.” Even in this reconsidered argument, it is not the substance of Ford’s claim that is treated as the primary outrage; it is the vintage of her claim that is. We all did terrible things when we were young, obviously; do we really want to live in a world that holds us accountable for them?

And so, this weekend, within the space of a few hours, something remarkable happened. The salient question about Ford’s allegations became, in some quarters, not whether they are true, but rather whether they count as allegations at all. The cruelties she describes—the alleged acts of dehumanization that left her traumatized, she says, as a 15-year-old and, still, as an adult—might be “terrible,” yes, but they are also … simply part of the natural order of things. Boys, figuring out how to be men. Locker-room talk, made manifest. “Drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Who wouldn’t be implicated in that? Who doesn’t see himself, in some way, in this age-old story? If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.

Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable ... or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.

Christine Blasey Ford, who knew the risk she was taking—the horrific treatment of Anita Hill, all those years ago, remains a fresh wound—came forward anyway. Preemptively dismissed, even in anonymity (as a drunk, as a liar, as a partisan stooge, and as simply mistaken), Ford made herself public to issue a warning about a person seeking concentrated power over the lives and bodies of women. Her claims have been met by some with urgency and clarity: They must be investigated, many in power have said. But those claims have also been met, revealingly, with a collective shrug by people who see themselves in him but cannot see themselves in her. They weaponize their apathy. They are all Spartacus. They defend each other. And they defend a world in which—as a point of anxiety but also, it seems, as a point of pride—they can all be accused of something.