The Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing: Rorschach Test or Day of Brutal Clarity?
The Kavanaugh- Ford hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27 drew over 20 million viewers, and has precipitated non-stop analysis and passionate commentary that will continue to reverberate in our fractured national consciousness for years to come.
Americans of all political persuasions will long remember what went through their minds as they followed the rancorous events before, during and after the tumultuous day when Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, faced Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s charge of sexual assault when they were both teenagers in the 1980s.
For those with longer historical memory, the day also brought back painful echoes of the 1991 hearings in which Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by lawyer Anita Hill while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the EEOC.
Have We Really Come a Long Way?
In the lead-up to the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing, much was said about how 2018 is not 1991. How national sensibilities about sexual harassment and sexual assault have evolved. How the #MeToo Movement was a sign that the tide had turned on toleration of sexual abuse and the frightened silence of victims.
Also about how the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford, if deemed credible, might be enough to derail the controversial candidacy of Judge Kavanaugh, where his record of extreme right-wing conservative political views and judicial approach might not be enough to cast doubt on his suitability for the position.
As the hearings began, the optics of the hearing itself could not help but cast doubt on this possibility.
On one side, a mild-mannered and respectful female academic, narrating in quiet but painful detail a gripping, traumatic and humiliating experience of 36 years earlier that has lived with her to this day.
On the other side, a phalanx of 21 powerful U.S. Senators, only 4 of whom (all minority Democrats) were women. And 11 of whom (the majority Republicans) had decided to cede their questioning time to an independent female prosecutor in order to falsely avoid the appearance of a bunch of men ganging up on a woman.
Then Judge Kavanaugh’s turn came to be questioned. His protracted opening statement was filled with self-righteous anger, emotional outrage, self-pitying weeping, and emphatic denial of any wrong-doing (“delivered in something close to a yell” according to CNN’s Editor-at-Large Chris Cillizza) — a performance that would have caused a woman to be called hysterical and possibly be removed from the chamber.
What followed next was an equally intense and unseemly show of raw anger on the part of Republicans on the Committee. The specifics of the charges against Judge Kavanaugh and any kind of empathy for the experience narrated by Dr. Blasey Ford were by now completely abandoned in favor of pure partisan and gender rancor.
The first prize for this male Republican display of rage goes without any doubt to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose tirade against his Democratic colleagues was truly Trumpian in its level of fury:
“This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics!”. . . “If you really wanted to know the truth, you wouldn’t do what you’ve done to this guy!. . . You’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I’ve seen in my time in politics!… I hope the American people will see through this charade!. . .”
And so, as in 1991 with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and as so often even today in cases where women take the courageous step of speaking out about sexual abuse, the story was no longer about the traumatic experience endured by the victim, but about how the alleged perpetrator has been wronged by the accusation, and is himself the victim.
Rorschach Test: How the Hearing Was Heard
Reactions to the hearing have been as reflective of the tribal politics in the U.S. as is just about every other issue of major national importance in these times of national disunion. Though more so, because the stakes involved in appointing a Justice of the Supreme Court are so high.
Watching the whole painful process unroll felt like an inexorable sequence of events that could have no ultimate result other than yet more political rancor between the Conservative/Trumpian/Republican tribe on the right and the Liberal/Progressive/Democratic tribe on the left.
Because, at this point, the political beliefs and cultural values that divide us are perceived to be irreconcilable, a blood feud. . . with or without outside help from Russian ill-wishers manipulating our discord.
It’s been a long time since Governor George Wallace, running for president as an Independent in 1968, declared that the Republican and Democratic parties were ‘like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee’ with ‘not a dime’s worth of difference between the two’.
It feels as if we are in fact engaged in a new Civil War — albeit of ideas, political maneuvering and cyber-manipulation of public opinion rather than bloody field battles — that is testing whether the democracy of our nation can long endure.
Reactions to the drama and confrontation of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing have been predictably partisan. And both sides can, with justification, claim that their base has been energized by the spectacle.
An October 1 Quinnipiac poll shows some overall national rise in opposition to confirming Judge Kavanaugh (48%, up from 41% before the hearing). Support and and opposition by party affiliation, however, continues unchanged (84% of Republicans support confirmation versus 8% of Democrats who do). Though, significantly, opposition appears to be on the rise among women as a whole (48% now opposed) and especially among college-educated women (55% now opposed).
Essentially, viewers experienced two different hearings, though only one took place.
The powerful mechanisms of confirmation bias (seeing what we want to see, hearing what we want to hear) and attribution bias (attributing positive or negative motivations to others based on our beliefs about them) have been on full display in most social and political commentary and private citizen discussions about the hearing — whether unabashedly partisan or trying for some kind of balanced objectivity.
The View from the Right: A Shameful Partisan Attempt to Destroy an Upright Man for Political Gain
Judge Kavanaugh’s and Senator Lindsey Graham’s scorched-earth shows of fury were endorsed by President Trump within minutes of the hearing:
“Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist.”
And then by his son Donald Trump, Jr.:
“I love Kavanaugh’s tone. It’s nice to see a conservative man fight for his honor and his family against a 35 year old claim with ZERO evidence and lots of holes that amounts to nothing more than a political hit job by the Dems.”
This has been the approach of much commentary since then from the Conservative/Trumpian Republican side of our political divide.
Tone-deaf to the serious social issues raised by the hearing — about gender power relations, sexual assault as a societal problem, the ‘frat boy’ behaviors and bullying norms still prevalent in elite schools and colleges where the sons of privilege are shaped.
Tone deaf to the fact that women (and others) who claim to have been victimized have the right to be heard and taken seriously.
And absolutely tone-deaf to the serious question of whether a man capable of Kavanaugh’s deportment in the hearing, so contrary to the very concept of what a judicial temperament should be, is someone who should sit on the nation’s highest court.
Steve Hilton, host of The Next Revolution on Fox News, is representative of this approach. In an extraordinarily vituperative opinion piece directed against his fellow-Americans of the opposing party, he said:
“Before Thursday, I just disagreed with the Democrats.Now I’m frightened of them. They strike me as truly cruel. Calculating. Crazed with their own self-righteousness. . . Trust in the Senate and the Supreme Court can be casually undermined — as long as the Democrats win. . . Worst of all, the fabric of our society can just be ripped to pieces, as long as Democrats hold on to the biggest piece. These divisive, dangerous Democrats must be defeated before they destroy America.”
The View from the Left: The Patriarchal Order of the Entitled Masculine Elite Was on Naked Display
Commentary from the Liberal/Progressive/Democratic side of our political divide was certainly angry as well, and full of accusations of treachery and bad faith, but with an important difference.
While the cannonade from the the right has been largely directed at the zero-sum-game political calculus of which ideology is likely to prevail in the Supreme Court for the next generation, it has paid scant attention to the searing social issues raised by Dr. Ford’s experience of sexual assault, and to how these issues are relevant to the power politics contest being fought out over Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
There has been a pervasive refusal from the supporters of Judge Kavanaugh to grant any legitimacy to the actual charge that Dr. Ford, at great cost to herself, brought forward for national scrutiny. Or to entertain even the possibility that Judge Kavanaugh may have indeed done that of which he was accused.
The experience Dr. Blasey Ford reported, and any implications to be drawn from it, should it be proved credible, have been on the whole ignored. She has been dismissed, at best, as an innocent pawn, at worst as a wily political agent.
She has not been, in any meaningful way, heard by commentators on the right.
By contrast, commentary from the mainstream media, as well as opinion further to the left, has most of the time put Dr. Ford’s reported experience at the center of its attention. What actually happened to her. The lasting pain and trauma it left her with. The experience of such violent abuse by so many other women in our society. The perverted values of masculinity that continue to condone such actions. And the need to ensure that allegations of this kind of behavior not be allowed to go unexamined by men aspiring to high office.
In a CNN roundup of diverse views (“What Happened After Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh Hearing”), Jen Psaki of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote:
“. . . as women and men across the country sat riveted, watching the hearing on Thursday, most were not calculating what this would mean for voters in swing districts, or whether Sen. Dianne Feinstein followed proper committee protocol or what it would mean for Democrats’ chances in the Senate. Most were riveted because of the prevalence of sexual assault across the country. Because whether they know it or not most everyone has a friend, a co-worker, a family member who has experienced versions of what was described by Ford, who was doubted, who was ridiculed. The question for Republicans in Congress is simple. Should an individual credibly accused of sexual assault be confirmed for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? Period.”
In The New Yorker, another roundup of opinions included an opinion piece by staff writer Alexandra Shwartz titled “Bret Kavanaugh and the Adolescent Aggression of Conservative Masculinity.” In this piece, Schwartz focused on Kavanaugh’s performance:
“. . . The initial impression was of naked emotional vulnerability, but Kavanaugh was setting a tone. Embedded in the histrionics were the unmistakable notes of fury and bullying. Kavanaugh shouted over Dianne Feinstein to complain about the “outrage” of not being allowed to testify earlier; when asked about his drinking, by Sheldon Whitehouse, he replied, “I like beer. You like beer? What do you like to drink, Senator?” with a note of aggressive petulance that is hard to square with his preferred self-image of judicious impartiality and pious Sunday churchgoing. . . If Kavanaugh is trying to convince the public that he could never have been capable, as a teen-ager, of aggression or peer pressure, this is an odd way to go about it.”
The most profound, impassioned and deeply moving examination of what was revealed at the hearing was by someone who is not one of the household- name political pundits of the left or right, or attached to any prestigious political research or policy organization.
He is Umair Haque, currently based in London as director of the global media agency Havas Media Lab, and a a rising global management thinker. He writes daily on political and social issues for the growing online Medium community of writers and readers.
On September 27, having watched the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing, he wrote a searing, at once magisterial and deeply personal essay called “The Day American Patriarchy Took Its Mask Off.”
Recounting his personal reaction to the spectacle that unfolded in the Senate Judiciary Committee chamber on that day, Haque elegantly expressed what many of us felt but could not put into words:
“. . . a Kafkaesque, Soviet political sham trial. . . a hostile prosecutor who interrogated this frightened impossibly brave woman’s tiniest motive. . .” and the accused “sneering with disdain, dripping with contempt. . . and then sobbing great, unctuous crocodile tears of self-pity.”
The fundamental problem, for Haque, is the destructive nature of American patriarchy — a system that selects and rewards men for competitiveness and ruthlessness, not for kindness, wisdom, intelligence or compassion, and encourages the kind of ‘classic malignant narcissist’ personalities found so often in men who rise to the top.
He writes from his own experience of having been for some time enrolled in an elite boy’s school similar to Judge Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Preparatory School. There, he says:
“I saw teachers and coaches and principals and parents encouraging kids to be more ruthless, competitive, domineering and cruel, prizing and cherishing the little predators among us most of all.”
There is a clear line, he proposes, from this toxic culture where the male elites are incubated to the abusive behaviors that are so widely tolerated in our society, and to the spectacle that unfolded on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Kavanaugh-Ford hearing: “. . . a group of old, decrepit men, who are still little desperate boys, fighting over who the most dominant, violent, and controlling one of them all will grow up to be. . .”
“You can have a democracy, ” he concludes, “ or you can have men competing to be the most dominant and abusive. But you can’t have both.”
So what is the significance of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing in our national story?
Is it just one more predictable twist in our current hyper-partisanship? Is it no more than a Rorschach test that enables us to confirm whatever our own confirmation and attribution biases have conditioned us to see in it? And thus just one more enervating and dispiriting step towards making our differences in political views ever more irreconcilable?
Or was it a day in which a blinding light showed us with brutal clarity something far more serious than dysfunctional party politics? Something that calls on us not only to work to re-civilize our political life, but at a deeper level, to address the deeper social sickness that enables this kind of politics?
Perhaps it’s both.
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Karine Schomer, PhD is a writer, speaker, scholar, and a political and social commentator. She writes on Medium at https://medium.com/@schomer44. In her essays, she explores the worlds of society, politics, culture, history, language, world civilizations and life lessons. You can read her writer’s philosophy in The Idea Factory. In her professional life, she earns her keep as a consultant at www.cmct.net and www.indiapractice.com.
