Georgetown Alumnius

 By Finbarr Curtis

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.

Moore Values

By Finbarr Curtis 

In a recent twitter exchange, the former judge, current senate candidate, and perpetual sexual predator Roy Moore accused Jimmy Kimmel of mocking "Christian values." In response to Moore's challenge to come to Alabama and settle things "man to man," Kimmel said: "Sounds great Roy - let me know when you get some Christian values and I'll be there."

In the language of the internet, Kimmel's response is generally referred to as an "own." The ownage was only further compounded when Kimmel noted that he would make the trip but leave his daughters at home. 

In the politics of resentment that drives Moore and his supporters, however, this brief exchange was only further evidence of "Hollywood elites' bigotry toward southerners." By inviting Kimmel's condescension in order to stoke a feud between Hollywood and the South, Moore performed the rhetorical alchemy that transforms the content of all political criticism into nothing other than an assault on white Christian identity. 

The reason that Moore's brand of white identity politics needs the Kimmels of the world is that there is nothing about Moore that is indigenous to Alabama. As a former Alabama voter myself, I can attest that Alabamans do not routinely attend formal political events dressed in cowboy costumes while waving a gun. Rather, Moore is a coastal liberal's caricature of Alabama. He has spent a lifetime imagining all of the things that liberals hate, and then crafted himself in this image. This negative identification gives Moore's political performances their hyperbolic, over-the-top quality. The more he offends liberal civility, the more he triggers the sort of condescension that validates his image of a spokesman for victimized white southern Christians railing against a shadowy establishment comprised of economic, political, media, and educational elites.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, a remarkable number of commentators took these self-identifications of white victimhood at face value. This resulted in an array of stories that portrayed Trump supporters as fueled by "economic anxiety." But a lawyer and judge like Moore is hardly poor or powerless. Like many vociferous Trump supporters, Moore is best described as a local elite. Local elites are the district attorneys, small business owners, and insurance salesmen who make a comfortable living in places like Gadsden, Alabama.