Senate debacle showed how civil society is falling apart

ODavid Brooks

ver the past few years, thousands of people (myself included) have mobilized to reduce political polarization, encourage civil dialogue and heal national divisions.

The first test case for our movement was the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh. It’s clear that at least so far our work is a complete failure. Sixty-nine percent of Americans in one poll called the hearings a “national disgrace,” and the only shocking thing is that 31 percent don’t agree.

What we saw in these hearings was the unvarnished tribalization of national life. At the heart of the hearings were two dueling narratives, one from Christine Blasey Ford and one from Kavanaugh. These narratives were about what did or did not happen at a party 36 years ago. There was nothing particularly ideological about the narratives, nothing that touched on capitalism, immigration or any of the other great disputes of national life.

And yet reactions to the narratives have been determined almost entirely by partisan affiliation. Among the commentators I’ve seen and read, those who support Democrats embrace Blasey’s narrative and dismissed Kavanaugh’s. Those who support Republicans side with Kavanaugh’s narrative and see holes in Blasey’s. I can think of few exceptions.

Some may have acknowledged uncertainty for about 2.5 seconds, but then they took sides. With tribal warfare all around, uncertainty is the one state you are not permitted to be in.

This, of course, led to an upsurge in base mobilization. Persuasion is no longer an important part of public conversation. Public statements are meant to mobilize your mob. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., can’t just sort through the evidence. He has to get Spartacus-like histrionic in order to whip Democrats toward his presidential candidacy. Kavanaugh can’t just dispassionately try to disprove the allegations made against him. Instead, he gets furious and stokes up culture-war rage to fire up the Republican base.

This leads to an epidemic of bigotry — creating a stereotype about a disfavored group and then applying that stereotype to an individual you’ve never met. It was bigotry against Jews that got Alfred Dreyfus convicted in 1894. It was bigotry against young black males that got the Central Park Five convicted in 1990. It was bigotry against preppy lacrosse players that led to the bogus Duke lacrosse scandal.

This past month we’ve seen thousands of people convinced that they know how Kavanaugh behaved because they know how “privileged” people behave. We’ve seen thousands of people lining up behind Kavanaugh because they know that there’s this vicious thing called “the left,” which hates them.

The core problem behind all of this is a complete breakdown in the legitimacy of our public institutions. The Supreme Court is no longer a place where justices dispassionately rule on the constitution. It’s a place where they cast predictable party-line votes. Therefore, senators no longer deliberate on nominees. They cast predictable party-line votes. The members of the public no longer reason with one another. They fall into predictable party-line formation and then invent post-hoc, bad-faith rationalizations to give cover to their ideologically driven positions. (Drank too much! Bad temperament! Bad yearbook entry!)

It’s clear that we need a new sort of environmental movement — to police our civic environment.

It’s also clear we have to set up more forums for personal encounters between different kinds of people. You detoxify disputes when you personalize them. People who don’t have regular contact with people they disagree with become intellectually dishonest quickly.

Finally, the good trends have to be fenced off from poisonous politics. American society is taking concrete action to make sexual assault intolerable. But this movement will not succeed if it becomes a pinball in the partisan politics of personal destruction.

The Kavanaugh hearings were a look in the mirror, and a vivid display of how ugly things have become. What are we going to do about it?

David Brooks writes for The New York Times. newsservice@nytimes.com