I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Donald Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice based on advance knowledge of the sexual assault allegations that have come to haunt his nomination process, but doesn’t it feel crudely inevitable that this was bound to happen? That Trump, a man caught dead to rights on tape casually describing how his wealth and power allow him to grab women by the genitals, would nominate a Supreme Court justice with the same privileged and cruel sexual contempt for womankind? The Republican Party’s decision to rally around Trump in 2016 despite such accusations clarified the GOP’s adherence to an official worldview best described as paranoiacally patriarchal, in which sexual assault is swatted away as always a lie by a woman in league with other women in a conspiracy to wrongly undermine men. The fact that many Republicans privately acknowledged the likely reality of the charges against Trump suggests that the GOP’s unspoken adherence is actually to a sadistic, American-men-first view of the world, in which sexual assault is no big deal. The paranoid tale of a female conspiracy thus has a double purpose: it’s a way to discredit the accusations, but also acknowledges and counteracts a suppressed reality that women have great cause to band together to tell the truth and act against the evils committed against them.
This “conspiracy of psycho bitches” is at the heart of the GOP’s present defense of Brett Kavanaugh. To a neutral observer, Christine Blasey Ford appears to be telling the truth, and to have no good motivation to lie. Unlike Judge Kavanaugh, she has no record of being any sort of committed partisan. In fact, from her profession as a psychologist, backed up by her testimony and the cautious way in which she revealed her story to Senator Diane Feinstein, we can infer that she’s a judicious and cautious person. For the Republican Party, though, there is only one truth: that any woman claiming sexual assault against a conservative politician must not only be lying, but be part of a vast feminist-liberal conspiracy to undermine men everywhere that is positively Pynchonian in its extravagance. And so this template is absurdly applied to Dr. Ford, despite the facts of the case.
Just as the GOP’s embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 was equally an embrace of misogyny, it also showed the degree to which its desire for power overrides the most basic moral considerations. A president who would support GOP goals was worth it, no matter his personal predilection not only for pussy grabbing, but for scamming students, stiffing contractors, and running businesses into bankruptcy. Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court would exponentially increase the GOP’s hold on power in this country, by cementing a conservative majority that could potentially derail any future progressive legislation on behalf of workers, voters, and of course women.
In this way, the appeal to a feminine conspiracy is essential to an anti-democratic power play that could see future Court rulings that not only outlaw abortion, but also restrict voting, eviscerate unions, and blunt efforts to regulate and reform an economy that aggrandizes the wealthy at the expense of working Americans. Put another way: a profoundly anti-woman perspective that essentially renders them as second-class citizens — for how else do you describe a person whose claims of mistreatment are automatically discredited on the grounds of being part of a vast anti-male conspiracy? — is in turn being used to clear the path for a man who will not only work to keep men on top, but to make nearly all of us, men and women both, second-class citizens as well, unable to exercise democratic governance through majority rule.