He’s lying: Upbringing explains why

The elite learn early that they’re special — that they won’t face consequences

Brett Kavanaugh may not be telling the whole truth. When President George W. Bush nominated him to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true.

Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in 2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that these statements were probably false.

And it cannot be possible both that the Supreme Court nominee was a well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he told Fox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, and that he was an often-drunk member of the “Keg City Club” and a “Renate Alumnius,” as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook. Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.

How could a man who appears to value honour and the integrity of the legal system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in some of US’ most storied institutions — Georgetown Prep, Yale College, Yale Law School — dissemble with such ease? The answer lies in the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common man, not the exceptional one.

The classical root of “privilege,” privus lex, means “private law.” The French aristocracy, for instance, was endowed with privileges, primarily exemption from taxation. Today’s equivalents are not aristocrats, yet they have both the sense and the experience that the rules don’t really apply to them and that they can act without much concern for the consequences.