The Education of Bret Kavanaugh (The Book)

What The New Republic's Matt Foster has called "the wound that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle left in the American body politic" remains deep and unlikely to be healed anytime soon. Certainly every 5-4 decision in which he casts the deciding vote to advance the Republican party's agenda will be a particular reminder of that long-term wound. Of course, that particular partisan outcome was to be expected no matter who was named, even someone with less personal baggage. Nor does one need to come to any conclusion concerning the allegations about youthful misbehavior in order to judge Kavanaugh to be unsuitable for the Supreme Court. His record of collaboration with Ken Starr, for example, could conceivably be cited against him, and his ill-tempered outburst during the Senate hearing was certainly sufficient in the opinion of some - including the late Justice John Paul Stevens, who had previously supported his nomination but who now declared Kavanaugh had "demonstrated a potential bias involving litigants before the court that he would not be able to perform his full responsibilities."

Putting aside the hopelessly controverted question of Justice Kavanaugh's fitness - or lack thereof - to sit on the Supreme Court, this book highlights two other aspects of this sad story that I think are at least equally worth wider attention.

The first is the problem of economic and social class privilege. (The authors themselves have a connection to Kavanaugh's privileged background. One of them was his Yale 87 classmate. The other grew up - albeit a decade later - in a similar social circle in the Washington area and was part of that same network of same-sex high schools.)

The authors do take us back to last year’s hearings, but more importantly they take us back – as the book’s title promises - back decades to the troubled world of high school. The story advances beyond high school, of course, but the privileged wealthy world it portrays never seems to advance much beyond the material vulgarity and narrowness of spirit that apparently defined high school in that preppy teen environment of country clubs and drunken parties. The “education” described was about how to star in the clubby, misogynistic playground where rich kids congregated.

The narrow-minded, soulless world we call high school, with its bully-friendly stratified social order and privileged athletic bubble, extends well beyond the boundaries of wealthy suburbs. But the life-long privilege which wealth promises adds a toxic ingredient to the high-school syndrome.

Add alcohol to that toxic stew and the concoction can become lethal. The license to indulge in drunken partying and otherwise obnoxious behavior, which seems to have been evident in certain social circles, is ultimately less likely to produce preppies in the nation’s service than in smug service to themselves and to their social class.

In this connection I think the book's telling of the Deborah Ramirez story speaks significantly. As the authors note, it highlights how different the experience of anyone from a less privileged background is at a place populated by privileged elites: "While Ramirez may have come into Yale with the determination to prove herself, her experiences there ... made her question whether she belonged." 

The second is the problem of our inquisitorial culture of ex post facto judgment of public figures based on their adolescent and/or young adult behavior. 

The authors take us through the allegations against Kavanaugh and the investigations that followed - or didn't follow. It is evident that the investigations were inadequate. That in turn highlights a serious problem about our politicized confirmation process - and ultimately about our politicized judiciary. Ideally, in a less polarized society such procedural defects could be corrected, in which case some good would come from this bad experience. But, even if the process had been better and the investigations had produced a less ambiguous conclusion, what then?

The authors themselves invite us to consider this dilemma. They conclude "that Ford and Ramirez were mistreated by Kavanaugh as a teenager, and that Kavanaugh over the next thirty-five years became a better person." As for his denials of his youthful misbehavior, they consider the possibility that he "was a blackout drinker who lost portions of his memory and simply wasn't aware of it."  They note "that our juvenile-justice system is built on the long-held belief that a young person's bad decisions shouldn't haunt them for years to come. that is why most juvenile records and many juvenile court proceedings are kept largely confidential." 

Of course, none of that settles the question of whether the adult Kavanaugh deserves a seat on the Supreme Court. Even if one came to the conclusion that Kavanugh did really seriously misbehave in high school and college, but that such misbehavior had ceased in adulthood, one might still have found very good reasons, as indicated above, to vote against his confirmation - but on other substantive grounds, not on the basis of alleged youthful misbehavior. The Senate's vote might likely have been very similar, but the experience would have been very different for all concerned.

I think this reality speaks not just to our problematic confirmation process but more generally to the increasingly judgmental and inquisitorial approach to people's past mistakes that increasingly characterizes our contemporary culture. The authors quote one of Kavanaugh's Prep classmates, who suspects Ford's account is true but said, "then perhaps Brett would have been able to render an apology to her that might have helped her heal in a real, genuine way. But as it stands in my mind, neither one was healed by the incident, because it was so politicized."

Whether that ever could or would have happened can be argued for ever. What is unarguable, however, is the real need in our society for some opportunity to experience some of the healing power of reconciliation - reconciliation between those who offend and those they have offended, as well as reconciliation within selves, between their past selves and those they have struggled to become.  

Downton Abbey (The Movie)

Rolling Stone probably got it right that Downton Abbey "is less an actual movie than a special episode" of the fantastic, six-season TV series that won over audiences, literally the world over, from 2011 to 2016 - PBS's highest rated dramatic series ever. Written by the same Tory peer Julian Fellowes and featuring most (sadly not all) of the much beloved original cast, the film exists entirely in response to its faithful audience's desire for even more of this wonderful period-piece drama of love and loss, tradition and change, set in early 20th-century Yorkshire - a fitting successor to the venerable pioneer of this genre, the 1970s series Upstairs Downstairs (set in London in roughly the same time period).

The film takes place in 1927, some two years after the series' finale, when the seemingly staid and conventional (but actually often in constant turmoil) aristocratic routines of the extended Crawley family and their army of servants are unexpectedly (indeed tumultuously) interrupted by a visit from Their Majesties the King-Emperor George V and Queen-Empress Mary - with all the wonderful things Their Majesties get to do and that others get to watch (and in various ways work to make happen).

Our favorite familiar characters behave more or less as we would expect, which is not to say stereotypically, since the the characters' behavior (both upstairs and downstairs) has always been more complex and surprising - and for that reason more interesting than the stereotypes the series suggests. 

So we get to see the staff pull off an implausible but successful coup to avoid the day off. We watch Tom Branson, one-time Irish revolutionary, provide exemplary service to the Crown.  We enjoy Andy and Daisy finally figuring it out. We see both Barrow and Branson finally find love. And we watch Lady Mary come completely into her own as the new doyenne of Downtown Abbey.

Downtown Abbey's monumental evocation of an era of bygone glamor and aristocratic order and its dutiful sensibility seems to have touched a chord in our disordered post-modern era of glamorless crassness and duty-free sensibility. In this, it may be not unlike the recent craze for the previous century's eminent author Jane Austin and her world of good language and good manners.

Of course, Downtown Abbey appeals to a certain sort of nostalgia - for a world none of its audience ever actually has lived in, but which is chronologically and culturally close enough that we can still really recognize and relate to it. However encased in cultural expectations their audience no longer shares, its characters are recognizably like us, at least enough so. And however staid and conventional the traditions according to which the characters live and understand themselves and their world (both upstairs and downstairs), their actual experience is one of constant and at times tumultuous change, accompanied by the threat of even greater change. From our historical vantage point, of course, we can see that threat of even more and greater change coming over the horizon. In human terms, we can relate to the characters ambivalence about the changes in their world from the perspective of our own comparable ambivalence a century later.

In the end, of course, it is a story of recognizably real people living in a world and system they didn't create, the benefits of which they are desperately trying to hold onto, while alternately resisting and embracing changes that are tearing apart the very fabric of their lives. Downton Abbey reprises that universal story of modernity - stunningly portrayed in a beautiful setting by excellent actors playing genuinely interesting and complicated people.

No wonder so many fell in love with the series and have so eagerly awaited this movie!

All TV's Fault?

No, of course, it is not ALL TV's fault, but Chief New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik does a great job of demonstrating the connections between TV and where we are now in his new book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. Poniewozik considers his book "a work of applied TV criticism, for a time when all of public life has become TV." His book recounts the history of how that happened to American life - and of Donald Trump's place in that story. Trump is, for Poniewozik, "possibly the most public American who has ever lived," someone who :knew that it was better to seem like New York's most successful business man than to actually be it."

He starts with Rona Barrett's 1981 interview, the first time Trump was publicly asked if he wanted to be president, when he said that someone like himself probably could not get elected because TV "favored inoffensive nice guys." He then fast forwards 35 years to Trump saying essentially the opposite on Fox & Friends.  According to Poniewozik, Trump "was not wrong either time." The book is his attempt to describe how "TV had changed, which is to say, America had."

Those of us old enough to remember TV's early years - those halcyon days of 3 TV networks that we all watched together - will resonate to his description of mid-20th-century TV as "a homogenizing force," the greatest aggregator of a simultaneous audience ever invented." and how "cable TV, the Internet, and social media" have since fragmented us "into niches," sorting us "into superfans and superpartisans, like speaking to like, affirming, exhorting, and misinforming one another." This book recounts that story of TV's transformation of American culture, into which it merges the story of Donald Trump, whose lifespan corresponds almost exactly to that history. It is also about how he embodies a certain sort of TV experience: "That life is a constant, zero-sum competition, and if you are not beating someone then someone is beating you. (The lesson of sports and game shows.) That the best response to any controversy or crisis is to heighten the conflict. (The lesson of TV news.) That people perform best when set to fight against one another for survival. (The lesson of The Apprentice.) That there is no history and no objective truth beyond your immediate situational interests, and that reality resets with every tweet or click of the remote."

So much has been said and written about Trump that even the details of his impressive mastery in using TV tells us little we didn't already know or at least intuit.  In some ways, the book's greatest accomplishment lies in its tour de force, comprehensive treatment of the transformation of TV during the last several decades - and the Trump story's parallel progression. (There are many shows I never saw that I learned a lot about from reading this book.)

Poniewozik also makes an interesting parallel between.the post-war middle class mass prosperity and the mass media TV audience "an era of common experience that had no parallel before or since." Then starting in the 1980s both dimensions of common experience ended. He also traces TVs reinforcement in the post-9/11 period of the breakdown of the traditional belief that leaders should be good people (George Washington, Disney's Davy Crockett craze in the 1950s). And, of course, there was TV's increasing glorification of greed. He describes the wedding ceremony at the end of the October 2000 TV show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? as "under a floral arch large enough to double as the funeral wreath for Western civilization."

He examines in detail TV's role (i.e., Fox News' role) in heightening the politics of cultural resentment - anticipated in Richard Hofstadter famous 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He shows how "With the fragmentation of all kinds of cultures and markets - demographics who are this, watched that, voted thus - came the idea of cultural choices as ideological markers." 

Finally he examines the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency, illustrating, for example, the change from when chaos was considered alienating, something politicians accordingly sought to avoid being identified with, to chaos as an asset in an era when "what alienates one audience strengthens the resolve of your own." 

He makes an interesting contrast between Reagan and Trump: Reagan, an actor who played other characters and so learned to understand others, Trump, a reality-TV star, who "played an amplified version of himself."

And he quotes Steve Bannon's reaction to how much TV Trump watches, "Think what your brain would be like if you did that?"

The 2020 Democratic Debates (Round 3)

As I (and many others) have said so many times, this is a terrible way to pick a president. Ever since the triumph of primaries over national conventions, the candidate selection process has become more "democratic," destroying our political parties in the process and the parties' traditional function of vetting viable and serious candidates. But this is the system we are now stuck with, and "debates" are now an integral part of it (which should not, however, preclude some serious efforts to reform our debates to make them more about the presidency and less reality TV, perhaps by diminishing the role of reporters and pundits as debate "moderator" and replacing them with other sorts of citizens.)

The one great advantage to last night's debate was that all the debaters were on the same stage for the first time. Also they had more time to speak. On the other hand, the winnowing process that produced this result remains heavily dependent on money and polls. 

But the biggest problem with these debates is the journalism/entertainment-driven tendency to focus on candidates' tactical disagreements that undermine their overall agreement on common principles. Thus, for example, the debate began with the by-now tediously repetitive (and somewhat wonky) arguments about the cost of "Medicare-for-All" and the possible elimination of private insurance, which at least some people are presumed to favor. With Elizabeth Warren, I doubt that too many people really like their insurance company! What people want is good, comprehensive coverage at a manageable cost, all of which gets easily lost in the weeds of arguments about how to pay for "Medicare for All" and whether private insurance will still play a part. (The common sense solution is probably something like Pete Buttigieg's "Medicare for All Who Want It," which adequately addresses most of those controverted issues.) Meanwhile, while the other candidates were all attacking each other's plans, Kamala Harris finally reminded everyone that Republicans want to - and are still trying to - destroy what the Affordable Care Act already has accomplished.  She should  also have reminded everyone that to make any of these things actually happen, the Democrats not only have to keep control of the House but have to win control of the Senate. Whoever the nominee is will need to keep these two realities front and center in the awareness of voters who care about comprehensive health care.

And so the night went on. It will be interesting to see how the debate is interpreted and what the post-debate polls suggest. Personally, I did not get a sense that much really changed, especially when it comes to the ostensibly top three candidates, Biden, Warren, and Sanders. Meanwhile the next debate will include Tom Steyer, whose only significance is to demonstrate the disproportionate influence money plays in our politics, and so we will probably be back to two nights again.

What the Democrats and the country need is real voters weighing in. Iowa, New Hampshire, etc., hardly the best possible system for picking a president, but way better than what these debates are doing.

A Strange Debate

Unlike conservative politicians, conservative thinkers can often be quite interesting. After all, at least one wing of contemporary conservatism traces itself intellectually back to Edmund Burke (1729-1797), whose Reflections on the Revolution in France highlighted the damage done to human society by the French Revolution in particular and totalitarian revolutionary movements in general. His writings also highlighted the importance of religion and other traditional social institutions for social cohesion and human flourishing (concerns I certainly share).

So it was with some curiosity, if not interest, that I watched the YouTube replay of the recent debate at Catholic University, "Cultural Conservatives: Two Visions Responding to the Post-Liberal Left," pitting Sohrab Ahmari (New York Post)  against David French (National Review), which can be watched in full at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cultural+Conservatives+Two+Visions 

Entertaining at times and personally confrontational at times virtually to the point of nastiness, the debate did not disappoint entirely, but for the most part the two protagonists seemed ultimately to be talking past each other, so different were their premises and priorities. It did not help either that so much of the discussion was taken up by Ahmari's obsession with something called "Drag Queen Story Hour." On the other hand, that obsession does seem to illustrate quite well the heart of the difference between the two. Living in the same society as  "Drag Queen Story Hour" is part and parcel of living in a free and tolerant society. Discomfort with freedom and tolerance has a long intellectual pedigree - not least in pre-Vatican II Catholic political theory. Making a modest peace with democratic modernity, however, was one of the accomplishments of Vatican II. French's defense of the American constitutional order and the First Amendment's "value neutrality" may never bring about a certain vision of a good society, but it does free churches and citizens to pursue and promote their vision of a good life, even at the cost of having to live alongside other competing visions which enjoy the same legal standing.

Ahmari did make one good historical point in his insistence that it was only with Constantine that the widespread diffusion of Christianity through all levels of society became seriously possible. (Actually, it was Theodosius the Great a few decades later who finally established Christianity as the imperial state religion, the familiar union of Throne and Altar that lasted until the French Revolution.)  The problem is that the Constantinian settlement, itself a product of historical change, has been undone in turn by subsequent historical change, and - whether for better or for worse - we no longer live in a Constantinian empire.

This debate has been going of for a long time, and given the inherent importance of the issues involved is likely to continue at a theoretical, philosophical, and ultimately theological level. At a practical level, however, it is increasingly irrelevant to how religious people live, inasmuch as most Americans of any religion (or none) have long ago accepted that in the modern world a society with First Amendment freedoms is ultimately more conducive to social peace, religious liberty, and human well-being than one without those protections - and that it is worth protecting those freedoms even at the cost of sharing the world with "Drag Queen Story Hour."

Not all conservatives care about tradition and religion. (Libertarianism, for example, is a very different version of what in this society is classified as " conservative.") But these two thinkers and their constituencies clearly care a lot about religion, religious freedom, and the widest possible diffusion of religious values in society. Given this preoccupation with religion, it matters that Ahmari's campaign against "civility" seems like an endorsement of a combative "populist" politics, which, in one way of thinking, may radically negate much of what Christianity purports to be about, which French suggests has more to do with "love your enemies" and "bless those who persecute you." French's most powerful rejoinder in the debate, it seems to me, comes when he says, "I'm not going to recognize them [my ideological opponents] as enemies in the way you describe them as war and enmity ... enmity is not love."

All of which brings one back to Russell Moore's famous observation back in 2016: "The Religious Right turns out to be the people the Religious Right warned us about."

So much of what passes for religion in America seems surprisingly very preoccupied with the acquisition and exercise of political power, surprisingly so when compared with Jesus’ own words and actions. And so much of what passes for religion in America sometimes seems more like apocalyptic outrage - just another part of our ambient culture of conflict and outrage - than about the kingdom of God.

I guess it all goes back to the perennial Gospel warning about trying to gain the world at the possible cost to one's soul.