Kavanaugh’s Crimes

When and if we see Dr. Blasey-Ford appear before the Senate on Thursday, where we can judge her clothes, her manner and speech, and avidly consume all the humiliating details of her assault, let’s remember that we don’t need her to tell us Judge Kavanaugh has mistreated women. It’s in the public record; the whole nation was witness to his crime.

Kavanaugh, the author of the Starr Report, turned politics into pornography with a bullied, unwilling woman forced to be his star. And was a major author of the legal strategy that helped maneuver a failed investigation into a failed Arkansas real estate deal into the televised, public humiliation of that young woman, Monica Lewinsky.

This isn’t old news, we’re still living the consequences. Which is why we need to, in ways we haven’t yet, consider those consequences.

Kavanaugh’s efforts helped launch the no-limits ever more indecent partisanship of our current politics; the politics of personal destruction with its collateral damage of innocents, that now encourages the death threats and cruelty visited on grieving parents of young school shooting victims, the exploitation of a young man’s death on the streets of DC for political purpose and profit, and endless casual public libels (often indecently sexual) and vicious conspiracies from Info Wars, Breitbart and others.

As well as the “hardball" shamelessly unethical and immoral anything-to-entirely-get-our-way tactics of McConnell that denied a democratically elected president’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing for almost a year, until there was no more time on the clock. And stymied almost every other court appointment of that president.

Not only because he was a president of the other party, but because conservatives refuse to respect the democratic rights — the legitimacy of persons and interests — of the other party’s voters.

The strategy that led to the Starr Report applied, in the process of that investigation, bullying and threat routinely to other vulnerable women, less publicized than Lewinsky, too. Women who, like Lewinsky, were seen as little more than useful political pawns in our elites’ “Culture War.” A war in which the privileged escape injury, and reap profit, while the nation suffers.

Do we have any non-partisan decency left with which to judge these developments? If we do, we know that Judge Kavanaugh doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court. And that the nation can’t afford to put him there.

Kavanaugh’s work in the Starr investigation demonstrated that he sees women’s human dignity as lesser than his own. It demonstrates an attitude of consequential carelessness toward powerless women and powerless, less privileged people in general.

Debate about the rightness or wrongness of that political moment, and the harm that was done, always centers on Bill Clinton. It shouldn't. Bill Clinton was a powerful man with the resources to ensure he’d experience no lasting harm.

In the long-running Culture War in which Kavanaugh made his career, women, working class women especially, and their families, always pay a price. A discussion of the injury to women, from that political moment, never got its due.

As a working class woman my own concern and outrage about that battle was never about Bill Clinton’s troubles; it was the price women paid and continue to pay in the Culture War. Not only the women who were the investigation’s public victims, but all of us.

Clinton won re-election; but women still lost, and are still losing, because Culture War is designed to obscure the important issues that arise, for them and their families, from more than a half century of radical economic change. It’s designed to leave those issues unaddressed, and to divide us and mute our voices.

When financial corruption proved fruitless for the purposes of the privileged lawyers on Starr’s staff, they, convinced of Clinton’s illegitimacy and, very important to finally acknowledge, the illegitimacy of the constituents who put him into office — many of them working women, often low wage, along with young people and minorities — Kavanaugh, with others, helped lead Starr in another direction.

Bill Clinton and his personal failures became an excuse. Culture War payback became the reason.

Not just “Feminists,” but ALL women — who since the 70s had been stepping up to new responsibilities in a changing economy, and demanding new respect and recognition of their value in the process — were in the cross hairs. 

Payback,not just for Democratic women, but for liberal women in the their own party; Anita Hill, who came forward only to reap humiliation, and, even more so, the women who spoke out successfully in the Packwood case; women whose truth humiliated powerful Senate Republicans, who had been calling them liars and worse, until Senator Packwood’s own diary confirmed their stories.

And the women who, as Clinton-era Republicans well knew, supported, before the Packwood scandal came to light, the victims of incumbent Democratic Senator Brock Adams in Washington State, forcing him from the senate race in 1992. And, inspiring Packwood’s victims, in neighboring Oregon, to come forward.

In the Adams case it took eight long years, the increasing agitation of local feminist groups, plus the attention of a local, Republican leaning newspaper, for the victims to be heard. But they weren’t heard outside the Northwest. The first woman who came forward to accuse Adams, 8 years earlier, had reported her rape immediately to the police in the District of Columbia. They refused to investigate. The national political media was aware of the charge against Adams, but, with the exception of a small two paragraph mention in the Washington Post, chose not to cover it.

The silence in the Brock Adams case had consequences; it allowed Republicans, in the context of the Clinton scandal, to convince many that the issue of harassment was and is purely partisan; that the new willingness of women to speak out, to demand respect in the workplace and elsewhere, was inspired entirely by Democrats, rather than by by women’s true experience, and aimed exclusively at Republicans.

The lack of working class women’s perspectives and voices in the media also, then and now, allowed conservatives to argue, absurdly, that issues of workplace harassment, fair wages, greater opportunity, reproductive rights, access to affordable child and elder care, education, and health care for all, are “elite” concerns. Issues restricted to demonized Feminist elites.

 As a working class woman in the process of retiring from a “mom and pop” business, with a national market; almost entirely male, small town and rural,I can tell you that couldn’t be further from the truth. We sell auto parts. For almost three decades I’ve been processing the credit cards of working mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends and wives whose work helps support their partner’s hobby, or business interest. Or helps a son or grandson, who, with a little energy, sweat and hopefully learned skill, is trying to restore a first car, an old car — to get him to school or a job, to opportunity for his future.

I’ve also head from men -- who tell me what “saints” their wives are; their economic partners. School teachers, nurses and secretaries, retail cashiers and production workers, and, like me, partners in the small, family business. That story of valued partnership isn’t, and can’t be, acknowledged in our Culture War dominated conversation.

30 years ago, in a mid-term election year, I was listening in my car to a radio discussion of gun rights, after a long winded angry man, using NRA talking points to complain about how the state of Washington was denying his rights finally got around to revealing that it was “just” because of his manslaughter conviction, and was hastily cut off, a woman, with an East-of-the-Mountains twang was allowed on just long enough to say, “You know those men wouldn’t have those guns, or their pickups, if their wives didn’t work.” The host’s wordless, strangled squeak and the haste with which she was cut off, made me laugh. 

I still remember that impudent voice today — and I’m not laughing. 

When ARE we going to have a real discussion about the economy most Americans live in? And women’s real lives? When are we going to acknowledge the responsibilities they’ve stepped up to; the responsibility of paid work to help maintain their families in the middle class, or achieve the herculean task, in an economy offering ever sparser and more costly to obtain opportunity, of moving themselves and those they love into the middle class? Or, the work they do to meet both their economic and care taking responsibilities — for partners, children, parents and others — in communities that offer few resources for doing so? In a country determined to demolish the few social resources older generations were able to depend on.

When are we going to talk about the resources and tools American families need to survive and prosper in our modern economy? And stop fostering Culture War resentments instead? Stop suggesting men should be ashamed? Rather than acknowledging that marriages have always been economic partnerships. 

Women have always been economic contributor; both with work outside the home and in. They also, whether from widowhood, a partner’s illness, abandonment, or macro conditions of economic insecurity or failure and loss, been sole earners for families. When we were an agricultural nation, both men and women worked in the home. In the Industrial revolution, both men and women went to work in factoriesMy Grandmother worked side by side to build a successful business with my grandfather -- while raising five children -- and then, when the Great Depression threatened that business left home to take work in another state that allowed her to send money home to help keep the doors open, and pay for the care of a youngest daughter, struck by a life-threatening illness. Even in the special circumstances of the post-war boom, when many households were able to survive on one income and women, including white working class women, were encouraged to and, with strong unions, the federal government’s significant investment in economic, technological and social infrastructure, and, thanks to wages that still growing along with productivity, were able to choose to stay home with young children, women worked outside the home. 

And, American women have always, just like men, been expected to support themselves, even when they didn’t have families to help support. What women, over the last half century of middle class economic retrenchment,  have been asking for and need isn’t different from what men ask for and need -- opportunity and fair compensation, and fair and decent workplace conditions. It’s absurd to treat those expectations as controversial. Its past time to acknowledge that they aren’t.

We also need, finally, to acknowledge that women’s hard work takes place, and has always taken place, with just as much energy and commitment in black and immigrant and other minority families and communities; as in white, rural America and suburbia. And speak out strongly against the denigration of black women that has been the Culture War’s ugliest, longest running feature.

In others words, we need to end the Culture War. End the oppression of endlessly manufactured rhetoric, by that war’s privileged authors, that smothers debate and understanding and democratic problem solving.

The Culture War effort to divide us, by gender and race and region, state and class, is holding us back; our families, our children's futures, our personal futures and that of the nation. Judge Kavanaugh has devoted too much of his career to encouraging its destructive division. Which is why he is unfit for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Conservatives are giddy at the prospect of cementing their power beyond the influence of democracy, with a Supreme Court majority of narrowly privileged, narrowly experienced men — Kavanaugh, if he prevails, will be the third alumni of Georgetown Prep on the court — who can be counted to pursue the Culture War’s war against reality from the court for decades to come.

That’s why he must withdraw, or be voted down.