The Angry White Male Caucus

Donald Trump and his racist campaign tore America apart.  The hearings on spoiled rich boy - and seemingly abusive drunk - Brett Kavanaugh has only served to further inflame the animosity that Trump/Pence set loose.  But behind all of the hate and venom there is ultimately one thing: white anger over feared loss of special privilege.  While much of the anger is centered in white working class males, the same fear anger/seems to motivate a number of affluent white men - and women, some of whom are "friends" and fellow members of the yacht club I belong to.  How these women go to church each Sunday and feign piety and moral decency is dumbfounding.  The same, of course, applies to the affluent men, but at least they (other than Christofascists) have the honesty of putting on less false piety and sanctimoniousness than their wives.  A column in the New York Times looks at this white anger and rage that further dispels  the myth of economic anxiety being the motivating factor for Trump voters. Here are highlights:

When Matt Damon did his Brett Kavanaugh imitation on “Saturday Night Live,” you could tell that he nailed it before he said a word. It was all about the face — that sneering, rage-filled scowl. Kavanaugh didn’t sound like a judge at his Senate hearing last week, let alone a potential Supreme Court justice . . .

But then again, Lindsey Graham, who went through the hearing with pretty much the same expression on his face, didn’t look much like a senator, either.

There have been many studies of the forces driving Trump support, and in particular the rage that is so pervasive a feature of the MAGA movement. What Thursday’s hearing drove home, however, was that white male rage isn’t restricted to blue-collar guys in diners. It’s also present among people who’ve done very well in life’s lottery, whom you would normally consider very much part of the elite.

In other words, hatred can go along with high income, and all too often does.

At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump as people who were doing badly.

What distinguished Trump voters was, instead, racial resentment. Furthermore, this resentment was and is driven not by actual economic losses at the hands of minority groups, but by fear of losing status in a changing country, one in which the privilege of being a white man isn’t what it used to be.

And here’s the thing: It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety.

And this sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change, suffuses the modern conservative movement.

It starts, of course, at the top, with that walking, talking, golfing bundle of resentment that is Donald Trump. You might imagine that a man who lives in the White House would no longer feel the need to, for example, make false claims about his college record. But Trump still doesn’t get the respect he obviously craves.

Indeed, it seems apparent that his jihad against Barack Obama was fueled by envy: Obama was a black man who was also a class act, with all the grace and poise Trump lacks. And Trump couldn’t stand it.

As a lot of reporting shows, the angry face Kavanaugh presented to the world last week wasn’t something new, brought on by the charges of past abuse. Classmates from his Yale days describe him as a belligerent heavy drinker even then. His memo to Ken Starr as he helped harass Bill Clinton — in which he declared that “it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear” — shows rage as well as cynicism.

And Kavanaugh, like Trump, is still in the habit of embellishing his academic record after all these years, declaring that he got into Yale despite having “no connections.” In fact, he was a legacy student whose grandfather went there.  Indeed, my guess is that his privileged roots are precisely why he’s so angry.

But it’s privilege under siege. An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.

And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

So what we got last week was a view into the soul of Trumpism. It’s not about “populism” — it would be hard to find a judge as anti-worker as Brett Kavanaugh. Instead, it’s about the rage of white men, upper class as well as working class, who perceive a threat to their privileged position. And that rage may destroy America as we know it.

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for these angry whites who see minorities, gays, and women as threatening their special rights and privileges. 

Kavanaugh’s College Classmates Out Him as "Sloppy Drunk"

Many of us know the type either from high school, college or the working world: the guy who drinks far too much and then with no inhibitions shows his true self and does unacceptable things. I even had one law partner years ago who was basically a functioning alcoholic who lost his facade of civility after a few too many drinks.  On out of town trips, as the lowly associate, I'd drive rather than have him drive drunk and on legal cases, I and others would keep him focused and often write scholarly articles he claimed as his own without so much as a footnote mentioning the true authors/assistants. As a piece in New York Magazine notes, many of Brett Kavanaugh's classmates recall him as a stumbling drunk.  Do we want someone like this on the U.S. Supreme Court regardless of whether the sexual assault allegations are true?  The image and the legitimacy of the Court should count more than Kavanaugh's sense of entitlement to a position on the court.  Here are article highlights:

The two accusations of sexual misconduct facing Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh have one big thing in common—alcohol. Christine Blasey Ford says a drunken Kavanaugh attempted to her rape her in high school and Deborah Ramirez says she was drunk when Kavanaugh thrust his bare penis in her face at a college party.

Kavanaugh denies both allegations. He also denies ever drinking to the point of blacking out. In an interview Monday with Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked if there was “ever a time that you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened the night before?”

“No, that never happened,” said Kavanaugh, who insisted his focus in school was on academics, athletics, church, and “service projects.”

But that squeaky clean image does not comport with the memories of some of Kavanaugh’s college classmates. Now they’re coming forward to dispute his attempt to make himself out of be a “choir boy.”

“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling,” Liz Swisher, a college friend of Kavanaugh’s, told the Washington Post. “There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”

The New York Times spoke to “nearly a dozen people who knew him well or socialized with him” and they all said Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker at Yale.

These stories largely match with the image of Kavanaugh that his college roommate, James Roche, put forward in a statement Monday. Roche said Kavanaugh was a “notably heavy drinker” and he recalled his one-time roommate “frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk.”

Not every ex-classmate tracked down to talk about Kavanaugh remembered him as a complete sponge. Former NBA center Chris Dudley, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s at Yale, told the Post: “I went out with him all the time. He never blacked out. Never even close to blacked out.” Turns out, the former Knick might not be the most reliable source about his college years though. In 2010, while running for governor of Oregon as a Republican, he told a local paper that, despite records showing he registered as a Democrat after his freshman year of college, he had no recollection of ever belonging to the party.

Today's GOP: Pigs All the Way Down

Students, faculty members and staff members walked out of Yale University’s Sterling Law
Building on Monday to protest Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. 

Like women, gays are looked down as some form of lesser human by the macho "boys club" that rules much of the nation's political system and most of corporate America.  Of course, once one is viewed as "other" or "lesser," it becomes easy for the privileged class - in this case, heterosexual white males - to mistreat those they deem their inferiors.  For gays, we are often targeted for abuse and continued discrimination.  For women, less than equal rights and having their lives/bodies controlled by men are a consequence.  Over the years, I have experience such males in high school, the fraternity scene at the University of Virginia, and, of course, in the Virginia legal community and large law firms.   A column in the New York Times looks at this ugly reality in America and why male Senate Republicans are desperate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh if for no other reason than to reassert that they are privileged and gays, women, minorities are not.  Indeed, we are less than equal.  Here are column excerpts: 

Over the weekend, the controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination evolved in a way guaranteed to create maximum partisan bitterness and mistrust.

Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.

Let’s start with Kavanaugh’s high school, Georgetown Prep, also the alma mater of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court pick. There’s now a wealth of reporting painting the private school as a bastion of heedless male entitlement. Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge — who Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s first accuser, says was in the room when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her — has written extensively of his drunken teenage debauchery. According to The New Yorker, Judge confided in an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, about an incident where he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunken woman. (Judge denies this.)

From Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh went to Yale. There he joined the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE, which was, according to The Yale Daily News, “notorious for disrespecting women.” (Long after Kavanaugh graduated, the fraternity, once headed by George W. Bush, was banned from campus after video emerged of pledges chanting, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”) Kavanaugh was also a member of an all-male secret society called Truth and Courage, which had an obscene nickname affirming its dedication to womanizing.

It may not be fair to judge Kavanaugh by the company he kept. But it’s telling that these were the crucibles in which he and other members of our ostensible meritocracy forged their identities and connections.

A Second Kavanaugh Accuser Comes Forward

In response to my question of whether Brett Kavanaugh is unbelievably arrogant or stupid if he knew allegations of sexual misconduct might arise yet nonetheless accepted Trump's nomination, one reader may have hit the nail on the head when replying: He thought his elite prep school connections would shield him from scrutiny.  Whatever the case, The New Yorker first broke the story last evening that a second women has come forward to allege sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh, this time while he was in college and seemingly continuing the pattern of drunken misbehavior and contempt for women who it would appear he sees as sex objects to be used by men.  True to form, Kavanaugh says the event never happened and apparently wants the nation to believe that these women are motivated by purely political  agendas, something that to me sounds unbelievable.  The Trump White House, headed by a serial molester who views women as existing for his gratification, is joining the refrain that it's all a smear campaign.  Here re highlights from the piece in New Yorker: 

As Senate Republicans press for a swift vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats are investigating a new allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. The claim dates to the 1983-84 academic school year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale University.

Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote. The Democratic Senate offices reviewing the allegations believe that they merit further investigation. “This is another serious, credible, and disturbing allegation against Brett Kavanaugh. It should be fully investigated,” Senator Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii, said. An aide in one of the other Senate offices added, “These allegations seem credible, and we’re taking them very seriously. If established, they’re clearly disqualifying.”

The woman at the center of the story, Deborah Ramirez, who is fifty-three, attended Yale with Kavanaugh, where she studied sociology and psychology. Later, she spent years working for an organization that supports victims of domestic violence.

For Ramirez, the sudden attention has been unwelcome, and prompted difficult choices. She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident.

Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,” she said.

The White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec said the Administration stood by Kavanaugh. “This 35-year-old, uncorroborated claim is the latest in a coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats designed to tear down a good man.

Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”

[A]fter several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.” Ramirez said that what has stayed with her most forcefully is the memory of laughter at her expense from Kavanaugh and the other students. “It was kind of a joke,” she recalled. “And now it’s clear to me it wasn’t a joke.”

A classmate of Ramirez’s, who declined to be identified because of the partisan battle over Kavanaugh’s nomination, said that another student told him about the incident either on the night of the party or in the next day or two. The classmate said that he is “one-hundred-per-cent sure” that he was told at the time that Kavanaugh was the student who exposed himself to Ramirez. He independently recalled many of the same details offered by Ramirez, including that a male student had encouraged Kavanaugh as he exposed himself.

The story stayed with him, he said, because it was disturbing and seemed outside the bounds of typically acceptable behavior, even during heavy drinking at parties on campus. The classmate said that he had been shocked, but not necessarily surprised, because the social group to which Kavanaugh belonged often drank to excess. He recalled Kavanaugh as “relatively shy” until he drank, at which point he said that Kavanaugh could become “aggressive and even belligerent.”

Another classmate, Richard Oh, an emergency-room doctor in California, recalled overhearing, soon after the party, a female student tearfully recounting to another student an incident at a party involving a gag with a fake penis, followed by a male student exposing himself.

Mark Krasberg, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico who was also a member of Kavanaugh and Ramirez’s class at Yale, said Kavanaugh’s college behavior had become a topic of discussion among former Yale students soon after Kavanaugh’s nomination. In one e-mail that Krasberg received in September, the classmate who recalled hearing about the incident with Ramirez alluded to the allegation and wrote that it “would qualify as a sexual assault,” he speculated, “if it’s true.”

Several other classmates said that they believed Ramirez to be credible and honest, and vouched for her integrity. James Roche was roommates with Kavanaugh at the time of the alleged incident and is now the C.E.O. of a software company in San Francisco. “Debbie and I became close friends shortly after we both arrived at Yale,” he said. “She stood out as being exceptionally honest and gentle. I cannot imagine her making this up.” He said that he never witnessed Kavanaugh engage in any sexual misconduct, but did recall him being “frequently, incoherently drunk.”

We may never know the full truth, but too things are clear: (i) given the allegations, Kavanaugh does not belong on the U.S. Supreme Court ) or the DC Circuit), and (ii)  it is beyond disturbing that Senate Republicans don't care about the allegations - or women in general.

The Boys’ Club That Protects Brett Kavanaugh

At élite institutions like Georgetown Prep, where Brett Kavanaugh was a student, high
school doesn’t end when you’re eighteen; it’s a lifelong circle of mutual support.

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse, but I continue to believe that Brett Kavanaugh NOT be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court regardless of whether or not he assaulted Christine Blasey Ford as alleged.  Why?  Because he epitomizes the mindset that has fostered bigotry and discrimination for decades, if not far longer.  It is noteworthy that 1000 alumni of Blasey Ford's high school have signed a letter stating that the facts of her allegations against Kavanaugh is completely consistent with the atmosphere that they witnessed and experienced. A lengthy piece in The New Yorker looks at the system that formed Kavanaugh and it makes it clear that Kavanaugh is incapable of identifying with those not from his privileged white world.  Here are excerpts:

Ten days later, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high-school house party in Bethesda, Maryland. Ford described Kavanaugh as “stumbling drunk” at the time of the assault. He has flatly denied the accusation. His defenders point out that she dates the assault to thirty-six years ago, when Kavanaugh was only a teen-ager. But Kavanaugh has made his high-school years a very prominent part of his personal narrative. In a speech three years ago at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, Kavanaugh said, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” adding, of himself and his friends, “That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.” When he answered Kennedy in the Senate hearings, Kavanaugh mentioned that Jim Fegan, his high-school football coach, had texted him just three nights before, and that since being nominated he’s been running on the Georgetown Prep track on the weekends. Some people put high school behind them. Kavanaugh has not. 

Kavanaugh managed to avoid testifying on whether he snuck a few beers past Jesus. But, as has been widely reported, the inside jokes on his high-school yearbook page list him as the treasurer of the “Keg City Club” and a member of the “Beach Week Ralph Club,” and make reference to “100 Kegs or Bust.” Close readers of his yearbook page have debated whether “Have You Boofed Yet?” refers to the practice of anally ingesting alcohol or drugs. According to many graduates of Washington prep schools, the party culture described in yearbooks often created occasions for sexual harassment and assault. More than a thousand women who attended Holton-Arms, the girls’ school from which Ford graduated, have signed a letter that describes the alleged assault as “all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.” Now the rest of us are learning about the hierarchy of Washington private schools—about what it meant, in the eighties, to go to Georgetown Prep as opposed to Landon or Gonzaga, and about the girls’ schools Stone Ridge, Visitation, and Holton-Arms. By all appearances, the kids from these prep schools almost exclusively socialize with one another, and that social network informs their identities for the rest of their lives. As reporters have investigated Kavanaugh’s high-school years, many alumni have expressed fear about going on the record and alienating themselves from a close-knit community. “I guess you could call it a fraternity between a bunch of rich kids,” an anonymous alumnus of Georgetown Prep, who overlapped with Kavanaugh there, told the Huff Post. “All this shit happens, and then nobody really wants to talk about it, because if one person crumbles, the whole system crumbles, and everybody tells on everybody.” I spoke with another Georgetown Prep alumnus, who hated high school but still didn’t want to go on the record about what it was like there. Even for those who take less pride in the institution, what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. What Kavanaugh appears to have been taught, as a young person, is that goodness is working at a soup kitchen or volunteering on a mission to a poorer country; it’s granted to other people as an act of charity. Meanwhile, less good behavior would be tolerated, as long as it happened under the veil of drunkenness, or as a joke. The Jesuit fathers would turn a blind eye to the yearbook, and U.S. senators would chuckle at frat-boy antics. In this world, high school doesn’t end when you’re eighteen; it’s a lifelong circle of mutual support, an in-crowd that protects itself.

One quote on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page is an apparent reference to his friend Mark Judge, who Ford says was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. Judge, who says he has “no memory” of the incident and that he does not want to testify, is the author of a 1997 memoir called “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” The quote is from Benjamin Franklin ; the emphasis is Kavanaugh’s: “He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows, nor JUDGE all he sees.” The next few days will show whether Kavanaugh was right to place his faith in this system.