Hill’s claims echo in allegation against Kavanaugh. Will anything be different?

In a prologue to their 1994 book, “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas,” journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote of how “unresolved the conflict” remained between Thomas, the conservative justice, and Anita Hill, the law professor who testified that he had sexually harassed her a decade earlier.

“Rather than dying down, their clash has become part of an active battlefront in America’s culture wars,” observed the journalists of the nomination battle, which elevated Thomas to the nation’s top court in 1991. “The fight has gone well beyond the individuals - who have been reduced to symbols and caricatures - to strike at the heart of American politics.”

Nearly three decades later, as the Senate prepares to vote on another Supreme Court nomination, a contest is taking shape with clear parallels to the controversy that pitted the word of Thomas against that of Hill. An allegation of sexual assault has surfaced against Brett M. Kavanaugh, a nominee put forward by President Trump, who himself stands accused of sexual misconduct. All three Republicans — Thomas, Kavanaugh, Trump, who are dissimilar in background and temperament — deny the accusations.

A year into the #MeToo movement, the dispute over Kavanaugh’s nomination could test how the culture wars have evolved and what the country has learned since 1991, whose convulsive events helped give 1992 its label as the “Year of the Woman.” The designation captured the historic number of women who rose to public office that year, in a mass political mobilization finding echoes in 2018. “I was motivated to run for the Senate after watching the truly awful way Anita Hill was treated by an all-male Judiciary Committee interrogating her about the sexual harassment she endured at the hands of now-Justice Clarence Thomas,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a member of Democratic leadership, said in a statement Sunday.

Murray asked her colleagues to “treat this survivor with empathy and humanity and make sure that the United States Senate in 2018 doesn’t send the signal it sent to millions of women in 1991 who were scared to speak up, afraid to share their stories, and watched on television as someone very much like them was attacked and maligned.”