One lesson we have learned from the current president is that an effective way to defend implausible statements is to make more of them. By the time your critics have earnestly debunked one false claim you've moved on to ten more. This becomes overwhelming. People get worn down as political debates lose focus and any sense of proportion. For that matter, when the investigators and fact checkers start to scrutinize every single thing you say it can look like a conspiracy of those out to get you.
Most importantly, doubling down on implausible assertions makes clear that you are not playing a truth game. You are playing a power game. A power game is a test of will. Harnessing the sheer force of bluster and a refusal to concede any point, you are playing to win.
Supreme Court nominee, archetypal 1980s high school movie villain, and semi-sentient beer keg Brett Kavanaugh followed this playbook before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Critics have begun to list the false claims Kavanaugh made in his testimony. These include his desexualized redefinitions of "boof" or "devil's triangle," his assertion that the society of vomiting enthusiasts known as Beach Week Ralph Club was about his intolerance for spicy food, and so on.
Rather than sort through all of the lies, I want to focus on one. I was struck by Kavanaugh's explanation of the words "Renate Alumnius" in his yearbook. Several classmates identified this as a cryptic reference to a group of boys who claimed to have slept with a student named Renate. After learning about the yearbook, the woman stated: "the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue."
Kavanaugh could have apologized. He could have agreed that the insinuation was untrue, and was instead a crude secret joke among boys pretending to have sexual experiences they never had. But he didn't say this. Instead, he offered the following explanation:
One of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her name used on the yearbook page with the term ‘alumnus.’ That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us. But in this circus, the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex.Wait. What? Stop. This is absurd. To believe Kavanaugh is to go to cuckoo land. It's not just the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who did not believe this; no one did. There is no way on God's good earth that these Georgetown Prep students used their blurbs full of innuendo about sex and alcohol to express their mutual admiration for the intelligence and good manners of a friend.
Kavanaugh's explanation for Renate Alumnius was not intended to persuade anyone. Rather, it is a useful public story. Such stories are often banal conventions that allow people to save face, as when powerful men who are pushed out of leadership positions explain that they need to spend more time with their families. No one believes these stories, but they avoid an indelicate subject in public.
The stakes are much higher, of course, when the subject is Kavanaugh's willingness to lie about the kind of sexual being he was in prep school and college. But if there is one thing that Kavanaugh learned during his time in at an elite Catholic prep school, it is the extraordinary lengths that powerful people and institutions will go to keep embarrassing behavior from becoming public. This ethos is epitomized in the slogan Kavanaugh fondly quoted: "What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep." In addition to polishing his Latin, his prep school years provided an extensive education in how the mandate to protect familial and institutional respectability welcomes any story that can make embarrassing information go away.
When Kavanaugh states that "Renate Alumnius" was "clumsily intended to show affection," he knows he's lying. You know he's lying. He knows you know he's lying. But he is betting on your inability to completely prove it, and that due process will protect him.
For a time during and immediately after the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, it seemed like this protection might be teetering. You could tell that Senator Hatch, Senator Graham, and the commentators on Fox News knew that Ford was telling the truth. But after staggering for a moment, the GOP regrouped when they were steeled by Kavanaugh's dogged display of his willingness to fight for his family's "reputation."
A culture in which reputation must be protected at all costs depends upon a sense of decency that rigorously polices the line between private behavior and public decorum. What made Ford's testimony so dangerous was not that she was lying, but that she was telling a truth you are not supposed to tell. She turned what should have been a high-minded discussion of legal principle into an exploration of the seedy underbelly of the sexual habits of privileged men. This made her indecent.
What is also striking about the Renate Alumnius story is how it inverts what happened to Ford. While adult Brett denies his sinful behavior, teenage Brett pretended to do things he never did. In a televised interview, Kavanaugh cited his teenage virginity as evidence that Ford's allegations were false. But the allegations against Kavanaugh are not necessarily inconsistent with the behavior of a virgin. His classmates paint a portrait of a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality in which sober Brett appeared to be a somewhat shy, studious Catholic boy. In the company of drunken men, however, his repressed libidinal energy exploded into displays of hyper-aggressive masculinity. It was this display of aggression that left Ford traumatized for life.
Kavanaugh's portrayal of himself exclusively as a good Catholic boy shows that, even as even as a 53-year-old-man, he has never come to terms with his animal self. What this means is that sex, unless domesticated for reproduction, is a dangerous, unruly, and sinful force that requires rigorous policing by families, churches, and the state. Indeed, the rules are so strict that no one is realistically expected to follow them. Boys will be boys. What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. In this way of thinking, a boy's assault on a girl or consensual sex between two adult men are both sinful behaviors that should be kept private. For that matter, LBGTQ advocates pose a greater existential threat because they ask for public recognition and affirmation of diverse forms of sexual identification. For a conservative Catholic like Kavanaugh, his critics are indecent both because they want to change the rules of public decorum and because they want to expose the private behavior of powerful men.
This matters because what Kavanaugh thinks about sex is what the law is going to think about sex. Furthermore, Kavanaugh has based an entire legal philosophy on the principle that institutions should protect the interests of powerful men at the expense of vulnerable others. The effects of these rules will be felt far beyond the confines of Georgetown Prep.
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