THE POLITICS OF EMOTION
Yes, women must be heard but evidence cannot be trumped by. . .
HE’S IN. Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s man, is on his way to the Supreme Court. But this won’t be the end of the divisions, the rancour, that marked his confirmation. Ever since Chr is tine Blasey Ford sensationally alleged during Senate hearings that he sexually assaulted her 36 years ago – when he was 17 and she was 15 – the appointment of Judge Kavanaugh has turned into the apotheosis of a new kind of politics: anger politics.
And it turns out that it is young women who are best at this politics of raw emotion, better even than Donald Trump.
The Democrats have promised that if they win the congressional elections in November, they’ll call for a full hearing into the charges against Kavanaugh. But before they get there, we can expect young women opponents of Brett Kavanaugh – a proxy for t he president – to be out in force in the election campaigns.
Right now there is a gap of some 30 points between men and women college graduates in voting intentions. As political analyst David Frum observed: ‘ It’s men versus women.’
That is a generalisation – obviously there are many male feminists who oppose Kavanaugh and many women who support him – but right now the most obvious feature of US politics is how much it is about gender.
The Senate vote came to a head just in time for the first birthday of the #MeToo movement, and that was anything but an accident. In a way, the allegations are the political expression of that movement.
Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations – which struck everyone as wholly sincere – resembled that Simpsons sketch from 1994, in which Homer is accused of sexual harassment and a reporter tells his accuser when she is unable to support her charge: ‘ That’s OK. Your tears say more than real evidence ever could.’
There was no actual evidence from Dr Ford that would have passed muster in a court of law, nothing that would have justified police in bringing a criminal case against Judge Kavanaugh.
But he still found himself undergoing something like a criminal trial rather than a Senate hearing to confirm his suitability to be a Supreme Court judge.
The protests during the process tell us lots about the new politics of emotion. When Susan Collins, a wavering Republican, gave a 45-minute speech explaining that she supported him because due process mattered to her, she had to struggle to be heard because of angry protesters. When Democrat Senator Joe Manchin t ried to explain his decision to back Kavanaugh, he was drowned out by demonstrators – mostly young women – shouting: ‘Shame, shame, shame… You betrayed us! Think of your daughters!’ Police had to escort him away.
The strength of t he # MeToo movement is that it brings into the open t he experience of many women who have been harassed by powerful men. The trouble is, the weaknesses of the movement have been exposed by being harnessed to the Kavanaugh controversy: chiefly the contention that subjective experience is all you need, that a woman who accuses a man of assault must always be believed.
As a lawyer friend observed: ‘This whole thing is the apotheosis of Twitter, because on Twitter virtue is victimhood; victimhood is status and status is everything.’
No one, not even Kavanaugh, disputed that she had been assaulted; what he did dispute was that he was the assailant.
The politics of anger seen last week is the subject of a new book called Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over The World, by political scientist William Davies.
He had conservative populists in mind, like Trump supporters, but what is evident is that the primacy of personal feeling over everything else characterises the politics of gender too. The banners protesters held up during the past few days say it all: ‘Believe Her’. ‘Women Must Be Heard’.
On Thursday, demonstrators chanted: ‘Arrest sexual predators, not protesters.’ They cheered at a banner saying: ‘We Believe All Survivors.’
Many recounted their own experience of assault: one woman wore a T-shirt saying: ‘Standing up for my 12-year-old self.’
This is real, felt emotion – it just shouldn’t play a part in appointing judges. The divisions over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment are, I’d say, misplaced. As Antonin Scalia, a formidable (conservative) Supreme Court judge, once observed, judges are deciding whether particular laws are consistent with the US Constitution.
It is for democratically elected representatives to make laws about abortion or gun control, not the Supreme Court. And we should remember that Brett K is already a judge of ten years’ standing in the second most senior court in the US, where he has given umpteen judgments, perfectly reputably.
When he is sworn into the Supreme Court it won’t, then, be the end of the politics of emotion. We’ll be seeing a lot more of it, worse luck.