The Bluestocking, vol 91: American psychos

Happy Friday!

I was trying to write the book yesterday, but I couldn't stop watching the Senate hearings about Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. For newcomers to the story: the Republicans refused to confirm Obama's final nominee, Merrick Garland, in the last year of his presidency, because... reasons. They just flat-out held the nomination open in the hope that a Republican would win in 2016, and they got their wish. Their nominee was a guy called Neil Gorsuch. The Democrats were grumpy about the Garland business, but confirmed Gorsuch with relatively little pushback.

I mention this because it's tempting to see the wrangle over Brett Kavanaugh purely through a partisan lens. And sure, maybe the Democrats are using the Republican playbook in reverse - hoping to delay Kavanaugh's nomination until after the midterm elections in November, when they expect to take control of the House of Representatives (which gives them greater blocking power generally). But aside from that, there's a whiff around Kavanaugh which is specific to him.

The US is lousy with rightwinger lawyers who would be Trump partisans on the Supreme Court. So why go to the wall for this guy? The answer, to me, is partly that the Republican party sees any concession as accepting the whole premise of feminism and the #MeToo movement. If they accept this guy could be held accountable for a historic allegation, where will it end? (Also: they all endorsed a presidential candidate whom more than a dozen woman had claimed harassed them, who said "when you're a star they let you do it", and who appears to have paid off a lover while turning out the evangelical vote).

Senator Lindsay Graham was on TV yesterday saying that if Kavanaugh didn't get elected, then the Democrats should watch out because similar allegations would be flung at their nominees. It was a chilling quote, because it suggests that Graham thinks sexual harrassment and sexual assault has little need to be investigated on its merits, and only a fool would do so. No, it's only interesting when it's being used for point-scoring.

America is an extreme country, and Britain could not offer anything as stark or iconic as yesterday's hearings. The Republicans on the Senate Committee are all men, all white, and have an average age, I guess by looking at them, of around 300,000 years old. They delegated their questioning of Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh's accuser, to a woman. But when Kavanaugh himself came to testify, they ditched her and instead several made angry, mawkish speeches at him, about how his life had been ruined, how his family must be terribly upset. (One of the smarter, younger one, Sasse, at least remembered to mention that Blasey Ford must have suffered too.)

I wrote about Blasey Ford's testimony here. There is no "right" way to be a victim of such allegations: you're either too cold or too emotional, too clinical or too hysterical. She was astonishingly composed, but approval-seeking too.

Then I watched Kavanaugh. I tried to put aside my dislike for the American hard right and watch him dispassionately. (It is possible that this is a case of mistaken identity, or that Kavanaugh did commit the assault but was so drunk that he cannot remember it.) He started off angry and quickly turned tearful; a performance I found surprising in its subversion of masculine stereotypes, until someone tweeted that this is the non-stop affect of Infowars' Alex Jones, rolling between fury and self-pity, like Henry VIII on Brain Force pills.

Kavanaugh kept referring to his high school, its sports teams and elite societies, his friends there. He struck me as one of those people for whom adolescence and young adulthood was genuinely a golden time, the "best days of my life". (As a former teenage goth, I find such people suspicious.) Honestly, it felt like someone used to power and deference who didn't understand why he was being treated like this; as someone tweeted: "Brett Kavanaugh wants to speak to the manager."

I would not be at all surprised if he is confirmed anyway, although those scenes yesterday will have radicalised and galvanised thousands of Americans, both men and women. The contrasts were too stark: her and him, them and us.

Helen

PS. Just one link this week. I really do need to get on with writing this book, you know.

"This guy doesn't know anything"

Every year the Sammies – as Stier called them, in honour of his original patron – attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year, the list of achievements was mind-blowing. A guy in the energy department (Frazer Lockhart) organised the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in 60 years early and $30bn under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the US government. They just never got told.

Stier knew an astonishing number of them. He had detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

A new Michael Lewis book is always a treat (although I still haven't read The Undoing Project, which is looking at me right now from my bookshelf). The headline of this piece is about Trump's chaotic transition, but for me the interesting thing is that he only prepped AT ALL because it was a legal requirement. And all hail to the guy who made it a legal requirement.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know about my obsession with changing laws, and structures, as well as public opinion. Never rely on people's goodwill, or their word. Nail them down to a legal requirement.

Guest gif: reaching the end of the week like

See you next time...