“Oh Fuck!” Senator Coons reportedly said when he learned last Friday morning his friend Jeff Flake would vote to send Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate for a final confirmation vote. Senator Coons knew Flake remained “steeped in doubt” about Dr. Ford’s charge that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her so Coons was brought up short by his friend’s apparent abdication yet he tried not to trash him: “We each make choices for our own reason. I’m struggling, sorry…” His restraint turned out to be wise as Flake seems to have already been in the process of enabling Coons and his fellow Democrats to achieve their limited goal of reopening an FBI background check. As the morning went on, Coons and Senator Klobuchar would be Flake’s wingers as he searched for a compromise that would allow for “a better process.” If Coons had unloaded on his friend, who knows what would’ve happened…
The highest dramas of American democracy tend to occur in open spaces where political animals find something new and human. Those spaces are often disdained by “hard” leftists and rightists. But when democracy works, in-between is the place of sublation—where you go for little leaps forward. I’m thinking of what jumped off on Thursday, when Q&A clarified the content of Kavanaugh’s piggish character—underscoring his unjudicial temperament. And then there was Friday’s adventure, when Flake and friends forced Republicans to flip.
A day before the hearing, as I was doing clerk work at a grad school in NYC, I listened in on a reading group of students who touched on the idea of dialectics as they were pushing through a pretty deadly explication of Marx’s economic theory. They didn’t spend much time trying to get the hang of that method. Couldn’t blame them since their master-text wasn’t a bright model of dialectical imagination and it gave no compelling reason to mull over uses of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. But it occurs to me what went down at the hearing last week could’ve have helped those students grasp what it means to think through a dialectical shock in real time. And, it might even have given them a hint of what’s permanently radical—if not revolutionary—about their own country’s democratic processes.
That would require them, though, to overcome their received refusal of American exceptionalism. I’m reminded on this score of the attitude of an intelligent and charming Canadian grad student whom I worked with last Thursday in a Department office. She remarked on the live feed of the hearings on my monitor, though she didn’t ask me to turn up the volume. She wasn’t neutral—Dr. Ford had her blessing—but she wasn’t about to get invested in the hearings. To her credit, though, she picked up on the contrast between her own disengagement and the attentiveness of a building custodian she’d seen as she was coming down the corridor to our office. That other working woman had hidden herself in a corner nook, where she was watching the hearings on her phone. The Canadian grad student’s failure to join in this country’s public movements of mind seemed worth a second thought when I learned she plans to stay in America after she gets her Ph.D. (though she doubts she could stomach living anywhere in her adopted country except New York City). No doubt Trump’s Canada-bashing has amped up her sense she’s stuck in an alien nation—a conviction that may be reinforced by native Americans in her surround who tend to avoid the civic fray. I’m flashing on her Department Chair who had no time for the hearings either. Everyone has their own reason, of course, but he seems to have been one of those “progressive” academics on whom demos is lost. Sniffish about patriotism and “always-already” current events, they tend to stay above the dailiness of public life, which means they miss wonders that occur once their fellow Americans choose to do their “civic duty” (to use Dr. Ford’s phrase). Not-knowing leftist profs could learn from citizens—like that attentive woman of color in the corridor—who clean up their messes. Academics on the left and right tend to assume politics is about positions—but where you stand isn’t all that counts. What matters more is where you end up. (“I’m struggling here…”)
That’s not to imply, btw, s’all good now the FBI is back on the case. The compromise on process seems to have been compromised since White House Counsel McGhan means to prevent the FBI from pursuing certain leads. And of course there isn’t much time. Still, with feds and reporters following up, there’s a chance investigators may help corroborate Dr. Ford’s story. (The FBI will surely focus on Kavanaugh’s little lies since “[t]hey know,” per James Comey’s Times op ed, “that obvious lies by the nominee about the meaning of words in a yearbook are a flashing signal to dig deeper.”)
I believe Ms. Ford was assaulted by Kavanaugh but I hope we don’t have to settle for what Cory Booker (and one of Ford’s friends) call “her truth.” That dicey phrase and its variants (“your truth” etc.) have gone pop recently but they’ve been in Oprah Winfrey’s lexicon for years. Conor Friedersdorf has zeroed in on what’s iffy about Oprah’s go-to phrase (even as he acknowledged her “hugely impressive rise illustrates the constructive possibilities of her mantra”). The problem with its relativism isn’t just notional. Friedersdorf links Oprah’s a priori faith in “her/your truth” as opposed to “the truth” with low moments on her show. He invokes her defense of quackery promoted by celebs like Suzanne Sommer (who talked up an anti-aging therapy dismissed by scientists) and anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy—Playboy model and actress who blamed her son’s autism on “the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination he received as a baby.” Per Friedersdorf: “McCarthy was sharing ‘her truth.’”—one that bred mindlessness in “enclaves where so many parents are declining to vaccinate their children that ‘herd immunity’ against devastating diseases is at risk.”
Which brings us to our president (who’s given anti-vaxxers play too). “Her/your truth” comes too near Trump and his minions’ tricky biz.
If you doubt that, just listen to how GOP operative Suzette Martinez handled the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing in an interview that came with a subhead: “Republican strategist says she believes both Ford and Kavanaugh”:
I believe that’s her truth. And I believe her story, and I have a lot of compassion for what she went through. And I could see it on her face that that is her truth
But I could also see it on Judge Kavanaugh’s face that that is his truth.
When her interviewer asked: “There has to be one truth in the end, though, doesn’t there?” The “strategist” slipped the question:
It is two sides and then the truth, right?
Martinez wasn’t making an argument for complexity or the need for synthesis. She wasn’t down with those who were calling for an FBI investigation to find more facts. She was marking out her own beamish territory in that spin zone where Trump and Rudy–“truth isn’t truth”—and, now, Kavanaugh live out loud.
All Americans should thank Senator Flake and his Democrat friends for trying to give us a chance to choose facticity over Trumpery. But let’s also uphold the democratic lift that made Flake’s deal possible. I’m referring to Doug Jones’ victory over Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election last December which gave Flake the clout he needed to sway his GOP colleagues. If a Republican had won that senate seat, Mitch McConnell wouldn’t have needed Flake’s vote.
Flake himself made a symbolic contribution to Jones’ campaign, sending a $100 check with a note: “Country over Party.” But the patriots most responsible for reviving the, ah, free state of Jones were black voters—and black women in particular. (Soul sisters of that woman worker of color who did her civic duty in the corridors of the Academy last week.) Without them, we’d be lost in a fact-free state—a teen kingdom where white power-mongers who started on third base whine about how they once worked their butts off when citizens dare to stop them from sliding home.