The ultimate aim of this Protecting Our Boys rhetoric became clear at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school—he at the prestigious all-male Catholic school Georgetown Prep, she at a nearby all-female prep school—triggering a wide-ranging investigation of what turned out to be a remarkably debauched 1980s adolescence. We saw how Kavanaugh’s friends had bragged—in their high school yearbooks—using code words for Quaaludes and Bacardi 151 cocktails at “Beach Week,” a tradition of unsupervised teenage partying that surely seemed bizarre to people raised in America’s relatively puritanical middle class.
If it is perfectly normal for American adolescents and young adults to experiment with drugs, alcohol, and casual sex, it’s also true that the boozing, groping—and worse—at these elite schools seems to have been institutional, tacitly condoned by any ostensible authority figures with the power to rein it in. Everything we learned about Kavanaugh’s high school days—the drinking, the apparently common date rape at packed house parties, the routine sexual humiliation of women—happened under the noses, but not under the direct supervision, of those authority figures. This arrangement was plainly designed in part to give the members of the adult world plausible deniability but also to preserve the fiction that the elite institutions they entrusted their children to were shaping future leaders of great moral character.
And when the mask was torn off, the response of Kavanaugh and his defenders was not embarrassment or shame but instead a hysterical and rabid defense of Kavanaugh and the social settings that produced him.
Some old pre-Trump playbook might well have had Kavanaugh playing at contrition, saying he’d matured, and promising to make amends. But the new strategy, borrowed from the boss himself, was to not give an inch—not to let the bastards get away with trying to stop a good American boy from getting away with something. So Kavanaugh threw a snarling, angry, self-pitying tantrum and lied about obvious things, like the crude and demeaning sexual jokes in his yearbook, and his own youthful penchant for drinking to the point of blacking out. Repeating ridiculous lies in an increasingly aggrieved fashion, knowing you were lying, knowing everyone else in the room knew you were lying, and that it simply did not matter—all this was exactly the sort of show of dominance that America needed to get back on track.
The strange thing was that, while the Kavanaugh nomination really was almost derailed by that initial credible accusation of sexual assault, his confirmation only became more certain as more details and context were reported about the incident. This was decidedly not because any of these details were in any sense exculpatory but because they should have constituted a much broader indictment.
A large part of the desperation that members of the conservative intellectual class mobilized in order to “get to yes” with Kavanaugh was because the case against him almost immediately morphed from one individual accusation of assault to a broad and very well-supported indictment of their entire class. What was revealed was not that Kavanaugh the man was individually monstrous but that he was a product of a monstrous milieu. The case against Kavanaugh was the case against the culture of Georgetown Prep, of fraternities at elite colleges, of the entire social world that produced the entire conservative elite. So the more we learned about its horrors, the more urgent it became to find Kavanaugh innocent and to join him in safeguarding the sacrosanct life chances and career achievements to which he was—and they were—entitled.
That’s why no one told Trump to ditch him and replace him with some ideologically identical Federalist Society goon who hadn’t been credibly accused of sexual assault. It’s also why Senator Lindsey Graham’s red-faced outburst at the confirmation hearing made sure to paint Kavanaugh as the victim of a historic injustice, goading him into further self-pity:
GRAHAM: Would you say you’ve been through hell?
KAVANAUGH: I— I’ve been through hell and then some.
What made all this the stuff of Dantean hyperbole was the simple, self-evident truth that Kavanaugh was “a good kid.” Good Kids are determined to be good not according to their actions, which are frequently quite bad, but by their standing. On this status-driven reckoning of the natural order of things, the worst thing imaginable is for a good kid to be denied future opportunities to wield power.
Even Senator Ben Sasse, a professional critic of the president’s temperament with a side-hustle as an author of books about how to raise your children well, took to the Senate floor to make a grand show of feeling bad about how the president spoke about the Kavanaugh accusations, and then voted for Kavanaugh’s confirmation anyway.
We could have had exactly what Sasse and the rest of the Seriousness Brigade claim to want: an honest discussion of what moral lessons parents and institutions are teaching, or failing to teach, our children. Instead we had a prolonged national meltdown on behalf of all the American teens who, because of the excesses of #MeToo, may yet miss out on the pleasures of behaving like the protagonists of Porky’s.
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Legitimizing complete irresponsibility is also exactly why the mainstream, respectable GOP eventually embraced Trumpism. It’s a force that protects the monstrously unfair world they’ve built. They want to ensure that righteous mobs don’t dismantle the institutions that crank out Jared Kushners and Brett Kavanaughs, so they go along with the big lie, aimed at their lessers, that the people who want to destroy those elite institutions are also determined to punish “your son.” A movement that is designed to preserve the privilege of teens like Brett Kavanaugh to behave poorly and still run the country is telling less-privileged white teens that it’s actually fighting for their much more meager privilege to be racist and piggish and not face consequences.
