Politics

Black Mirror politics is coming to America, courtesy of a new Democratic initiative called Citizen Strong. Announcing their existence in Bloomberg this week, Citizen Strong claims to have assembled an army of 17,000 amateur secret police who have spent months looking for damaging material on dozens of vulnerable Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. The information - presumably embarrassing at least, career ending at worst - will be unleashed on them just in time for the midterms. Though this kind of dirt-digging is as old as politics itself, the direction the Democrats are taking opposition research through Citizen Strong reveals how it has been re-energised and refashioned by the communications technology of the early 21st century.

Donald Trump celebrated the confirmation of the second Supreme Court justice of his presidency at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka on Saturday evening, in a typically boisterous rally meant to boost Republicans running in the state. But all is not well in the land of Oz. Kansas, thought to be a deep-red state which went for Trump in 2016 by more than 20 per cent, nonetheless is posing problems for GOP candidates running in November. The legacy of former governor Sam Brownback, one of the least popular governors in the nation, may be having an impact on the race, despite having left office in January to become Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Teachers Scotch used to run an amusing ad that read ‘In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience.’ Droll, what? But is it true? Or was T. S. Eliot’s mournful observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’ more pertinent to our situation? What happens in the aftermath of Judge — as of a few minutes ago, make that ‘Justice’ — Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre confirmation process will tell us a lot about whether we have learned anything from the horrible experience of the last weeks. When the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Kavanaugh, they drew a line under a battle that was not just bitter but insane.

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor spoke for more than an hour on Friday evening at Princeton University about the importance of neutrality for justices and the struggles women face in the workplace without once saying the name ‘Kavanaugh.’ ‘It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard, is this reputation of being fair, of being impartial, of being neutral,’ Kagan said. ‘This is a challenge.’ Both justices spoke at length about the necessity of preserving the Court’s reputation for fairness and neutrality. Kagan noted that having a swing vote, such as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, has made the court seem more balanced.

The FBI’s additional background check on Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only document regarding President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee being presented to the Senate today. On Wednesday night, the New York Times published online a letter headlined ‘The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh, Signed, 650 Law Professors.’ By Thursday, the number of signatories had jumped to more than 1,700. The letter comes as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set in motion events that will likely result in a final vote on Kavanaugh’s appointment early Saturday evening. Word had it that the FBI hadn’t found any additional evidence to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were high school students.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.

Is Kellyanne Conway proof that patriarchy has no gender? That’s what the British journalist, Suzanne Moore, says in the Guardian today. She broods over Conway’s contention that she too was sexually abused once (is there anyone out there who wasn’t?) and considers whether she deserves a bit of empathy before concluding that, because Conway is gunning for Christine Blasey Ford, empathy would be wasted on her. Actually, it’s not just that Kellyanne Conway is pro-Brett Kavanaugh. She’s Not One of Us because ‘She is anti-abortion, and though a survivor of sexual assault, works for a man accused of multiple sexual assaults.’ By which she means Donald Trump.

No one knows for sure if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty of assaulting Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. But there is one thing he is definitely guilty of: being white. It’s written all over his face. All over his Caucasian face. He has committed what social-justice warriors and race-obsessed liberals consider to be the great crime of our era: he was born white. And male too! He’s the bearer of two original sins — whiteness and maleness — and his haters will never stop reminding him, and us, of this fact. The extent to which commentators have focused on Kavanaugh’s skin colour has been extraordinary. He is representative of ‘white male anger’, said the New York Times.

Of all the things candidate Trump said, nothing outraged the Democrats more than his claim that, under him, the GOP would become a workers party. The workers! The Democrats thought they had ownership of that label. And at one time they did. But that was long ago, and by appropriating it Trump was announcing a revolution in American politics. After past economic downturns the American economy always bounced back, but after the Great Recession of 2008-09 we experienced the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, in terms of jobs and wages. That was the new normal, we were told. Those manufacturing jobs were never coming back. We also told pollsters that we no longer thought that our children would have it better than we did.

A few weeks ago in these virtual pages, I wrote that ‘In years to come, no one is going to talk about ‘kavanaughing’ a candidate.’ Boy did I get that wrong. The word deployed may not be the mouthful ‘kavanaughed.’ Maybe it will, à la Lindsey Graham, be pleonastically expressed: ‘the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics’ about fits the case. I am writing on Friday morning. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote this afternoon. Punditry is not prophecy, but I am nevertheless going to predict that Brett Kavanaugh gets an up vote from the committee and that Chuck Grassley will have learned his lesson and bring the matter to a floor vote tomorrow, Saturday, as he said he would.