Kavanaugh And A Different Kind Of New Order

Yesterday we featured a tweet by Frank Schaeffer on a class of elite, entitled, white males represented by Brett Kavanaugh: "They were the tears," he wrote, "of an entitled bully unused to getting caught. Brett Kavanaugh was as mad as a privileged white man can be at the prospect of losing a coveted seat on the US Supreme Court to a mere girl who wasn't part of his Georgetown Prep social circle." As soon as I saw the Tom Williams photo above, Frank's tweet popped right back into my mind.

And then Matt Stoller's powerful tweet storm early Saturday morning on American artistocracy! WOW! "Kavanaugh's clearly on display anger and pain was quite confusing to millions of Americans," he began. "Many saw authenticity in his voice and thus in some way believed he is telling the truth. It is time for us to wake up to what aristocracy is. Aristocracy is a moral system. Most Westerners have a hard time imagining aristocracy. The enlightenment kind of pushed the end of feudalism as a moral frame. The idea of divinely ordained social hierarchies doesn't make any sense to us. We think of aristocracy as a bunch of men in whigs and women in petticoats and corsets, a sort of black and white before color TV world. That is not what aristocracy is. Aristocracy is a belief in the moral right of elites to rule and abuse everyone else for their own good.



"There are clear moral codes," continued Stoller, "owed by aristocrats to everyone else. Military service, for instance. Stewardship. Noblesse oblige. Sometimes people are nostalgic for these, like our elites don't even have a sense of social obligation. That's nonsense. Aristocrats were monsters. Before 1775, Americans lived in an aristocracy. It wasn't just a set of states with slaves and women without rights. Almost no one had political rights. Children learned social hierarchies of rank before they learned the difference between their left and right hands. It's easy to see abuse today and just sort of say see there's always been abuse. But the aristocracy of the pre-revolutionary world was different. Because people didn't think of it as abuse, they thought of it as enforcement of moral rights. Kavanaugh was sincerely angry. But he wasn't angry that he was caught lying. He was angry that people were attacking his moral system of aristocracy. It isn't just a white male thing. It's a super-rich powerful village thing. He was angry people were criticizing Versailles."



Stoller: "I went to a boarding school similar in some ways to Georgetown Prep. A culture of brutal hazing. Noblesse oblige. Servant leadership. Massive wealth, unspoken. Sexual assault. Anorexia. Connections to insane power. It's normal in some ways, but massively unusual in others. I was sort of a weird student, a gawky Jewish kid from Miami with a group of beautiful and athletic WASP-y kids mostly from New York and New England. We went to chapel four times a week. This is a very strange world. You get trained to be comfortable with power and hypocrisy. Kavanaugh grew up in that world. He doesn't know any different. He can't imagine any different. To him all of us are just peasants and he doesn't owe any of us the truth. It is beneath contempt for us to make moral demands on him. His whole career, from being one of the most sleazy and dishonest operatives in the Kenneth Starr investigation to lying about torture, stolen emails, and wiretapping, is about manipulating the peasants. He's an aristocrat."

Matt wasn't stopping there, don't worry. "But it goes far beyond Kavanaugh to how DC has been for 40 years. This is my favorite quote from the whole insane Clinton impeachment saga. '[Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place,' says WaPost columnist David Broder, 'and it's not his place.' The total contempt for normal people has been a hallmark of Western politics for four decades. Kavanaugh is just the most obvious signpost. We are now beyond aristocrats pretending to live in a democracy. He just demands what is his. And Trump loved it. Across our culture, from Tim Geithner to Bill Clinton to Brett Kavanaugh to Mark Zuckerberg, we tolerate aristocratic abuse. This was obvious in the financial crisis. Tens of millions of people kicked out of their homes, and yet they were the ones who carried shame. My favorite Kavanaugh quote is his regret at not going to work for Facebook in its early days. 'You know,' Kavanaugh said, 'I am committed to public service, as I said, but I do spend some time reading Robert Frost, The road not taken.' It reveals how becoming a massively wealthy Silicon Valley exec and being a right-wing Federal judge are basically both legitimate positional objectives. It's such a great window into this aristocratic culture."



Why the tweet storm? Matt explained: "Anyway, I guess I'm putting this out there because we have to start understanding the genuinely privileged position of people like Kavanaugh, which is a function of elite upbringing. He was a super rich coddled DC kid. What Kavanaugh is displaying looks like the pain of an abusive white male. And all those GOP Senators look like out of touch white men. And they are. More than that they are aristocrats. This is about the morality of power. Kavanaugh is an aristocrat and disdains democracy. This may be some sort of turning point. If we want a democracy, we are going to have to take back power, starting with our own sense of self. I am inspired by all of the people talking about how they were abused and saying that was wrong. This is how we regain our society. We must end aristocracy. Aristocracy in the Obama WH was about bailouts for bankers and debts for peasants. The aristocratic pretensions of the Trump administration were on display this week. 'We must disenthrall ourselves,' said Lincoln, 'and then we shall save our country.'"

I just want to add one thing. I want to ask you to watch how the DCCC and Pelosi's SuperPAC spends its I.E. funds from now 'til Nov. 6. How much will they spend on the genuine working class candidates like Randy Bryce, Kara Eastman, Ammar Campa-Najjar, Jess King, Nate McMurray, J.D. Scholten, Jahana Hayes, Jared Golden... and how much will they spend on the faux "aristocrats" the DCCC recruited, from Kathy Manning, Dan Kohl, Joseph Kopser and Susie Lee to a clown like lottery winner Gil Cisneros who they recruited because he's a multimillionaire and have still reserved $3,000,000 in broadcast media time for. They fear and they loath working class invaders into their elite little DC world. Bryce wore work boots to a DCCC function and they're still looking down their noses at him for it. Paul Ryan's SuperPAC has already spent $1.8 running a smear campaign against Bryce. The DCCC has responded with... ZERO. They would rather have a corporate lawyer in that seat-- one of their own (albeit a Republican) than see a man who works with his hands to provide for his family join them in Congress. Yes, that's the Democrap Party today. We need to take it back from them. As Lincoln said, "We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."




UPDATE: But Will They Remember In 2020?

A new national poll indicates that a majority of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Kavanaugh, 53-44% (slightly better than Trump's 55-45%). When the question was asked "if your senator voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would that make you:

• Much more likely to re-elect- 30%
• Somewhat more likely to reelect- 7%
• Wouldn't make a difference- 13%
• Somewhat less likely to re-elect- 7%
• Much less likely to re-elect- 44%

Up for reelection this cycle are just three senators who, realistically, could be impacted-- Ted Cruz (R-TX), Dean Heller (R-NV) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). But in 2020-- if voters have long enough memories-- senators most likely to be impacted are Susan Collins (R-ME), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Doug Jones (D-AL). Did you watch Matt Damon nail Kavanaugh last night?