High on their own supply

For decades now, Republican elites have cultivated the massive voting bloc made up of residents of the fever swamps of the right wing.  Politicians and media moguls who were not themselves actually crazy were more than willing to exploit the increasingly florid paranoia and out of control rage stoked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Steve Bannon.

Now those same elites find themselves riding a tiger that threatens to tear them to pieces should they try to get off.

The election of Donald Trump is the most obvious consequence of this exploitation of the paranoid and rage-filled by the avaricious and power-hungry.

And the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is a perfect example of how perverse that exploitative relationship has become.

Without taking into account the dynamics of that relationship, the resolve with which the Republican leadership continues to pursue Kavanaugh’s nomination appears to be a species of political insanity on the march.   The nominee is now facing three separate allegations of sexual assault by three women with nothing in common other than they say they were sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh.  And the nominee continues to tell obvious, provable lies in regard to less serious matters (It’s worth pointing out that, in the Before Time, the latter fact alone would have provided more than ample grounds for withdrawing his nomination. Recall that Doug Ginsburg had to withdraw his nomination within days after it was revealed that he had smoked marijuana a couple of times at social gatherings at which a few of his law students were present).

Jon Chait thinks that this, surely, must be the end:

On what possible grounds now can Republicans maintain their current stance, which denies the need for either a renewed FBI background check into the charges or the testimony of alleged accomplice Mark Judge? All three accusers have now asked to testify before the Senate. Do Republicans deny some of them? Or do they let their planned he-said-she-said show devolve into he said-she said-she said-she said?

As the heady brew of threatened male prerogative — the principle that withdrawing Kavanaugh would expose any man to such charges — and partisan tribalism wears off, cold calculation will soon set in. The odds that many people are conspiring to lie about Kavanaugh are growing ever more slender. And the odds are growing that Kavanaugh committed to a lie, and sunk ever deeper into it, knowing that he would either have a lifetime appointment to the most prestigious legal job in America or be disgraced, and that is why he has refused to concede even an inch. That, too, is why he dodged a question from Fox News about letting his friend, Mark Judge, testify under oath. And Republicans will realize that there are always more Federalist Society–groomed conservative lawyers without his long trail of allegations.

I very much wish this were right, but I don’t think it is.  I think the Republicans are going to double down and push this thing through.  And the reason is because the internal logic of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style” in American politics absolutely requires that they do so.

Brett Kavanaugh must be the wholly innocent victim of a nefarious Democrat conspiracy, aided and abetted by the liberal media.  Everything that has happened and is happening to him makes perfect sense within that conspiratorial framework.  Indeed, as more evidence comes forth regarding his career as an at least aspiring serial rapist, the nefariousness of that conspiracy becomes only more self-evident to legions of true believers, sealed within the right-wing echo chamber.

Look at Kavanaugh’s response to Deborah Ramirez’s allegation:

“This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name—and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building—against these last-minute allegations.”

Who talks this way? How could “the people who knew [him] then know that this did not happen?”  At best, Kavanaugh’s friends at the time could say they have no recollection of having witnessed such an event, and indeed a couple have said so.  But that is a radically different thing from “knowing” that Ramirez’s story isn’t true, which is something literally no one can claim, including Kavanaugh himself, given that he was, according to many independent witnesses, severely intoxicated on many social occasions during his tenure in New Haven.

Kavanaugh’s completely over the top claims regarding the evidence for Ramirez’s story, like his equally over the top — and absurdly implausible — denials of binge drinking, of having ever had sex before he graduated from Yale, and of having an impeccable reputation for character and integrity, would greatly harm if not destroy his credibility in the eyes of anyone who does not take it as an axiomatic truth that this entire imbroglio is an immensely elaborate conspiracy to destroy the saintly Brett Kavanaugh.

But the fever swamp does accept that axiomatic truth, and its elite enablers have found they have no choice but to play along, to the extent they value their own political survival.  Indeed by now some of them have no doubt been sucked into the vortex of right wing craziness themselves.  After all, the line between grifter and mark often turns out to be far more difficult to maintain than those who started out as wise guys believed when they first launched their long con.