CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--It's a curious observation that among the American right wing, there is a juxtaposition between financial and sexual conservatism.
You wouldn't think that these should be linked so automatically. After all, if you want to claim that you are for freedom from government control when it comes to taxes and regulations, then you might also be for freedom from government control when it comes to sexual and reproductive freedom.
There are a few such folks hiding among the libertarians, but for the most part, it isn't so. Conservatism defines itself by its antipathy towards sexuality right alongside its antipathy towards regulation of businesses. The combination is intellectually suspect, but in Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we may have an explanation.
What can you say about the Brett? Looking back on the stories now being told about him, it is obvious that he was an obnoxious drunk who was the close pal of the class bully. The two of them did their best to get girls intoxicated and, to the extent that their adolescent fantasies allowed, to take physical advantage. Whether they extended their activities to drugging girls ala Cosby, there seems little doubt that they engaged in activities in which girls were quite literally seen as sex objects.
It may be that they also had friendships among the females in their circle, but the descriptions of their conduct at house parties defines the term objectification quite accurately.
In a word, this attitude is described as patriarchal. The men see themselves as being in charge, and the women are there to do their bidding. It would be hard to find anybody to contradict this characterization, even among Kavanaugh's supporters.
The other side of the coin: untrammeled profit seeking
Kavanaugh is not being nominated to a Supreme Court seat because he is a pig. That may be a covert advantage from the standpoint of some conservatives, but it's not why the big money reached down and raised him up. He is being nominated to protect the interests of the truly wealthy. He is being nominated to make sure that unions don't get in the way of profit taking, that pesky environmental regulations don't add to the cost of factory construction, and that freedom from taxation is enshrined in American law.
This is of course no secret. The libertarian wing of the Republican Party treats it as a core principle. The center of the party accepts it as, if nothing else, the price of being a Republican.
The connection between the reproductive and the financial
In a word, the connection is entitlement. Just like a famous case from a few years ago that introduced the term affluenza, Kavanaugh comes from a background of privilege and wealth. He represents an arrogance that is so engrained that it might as well be unconscious. It's all coming to him, it belongs to him, and that's that.
And to this point, what's coming to him is not just money, it is the use and abuse of the female sex. A corollary to this attitude is (strangely enough) an attitude that men must oppose abortion. Kavanaugh's appellate court discussion of the undocumented minor who asked for an abortion while in federal custody is indicative of the underlying attitude. Women may be playthings to Kavanaugh, but they are not to be endowed with individual reproductive rights if he has anything to say about it.
The connection between business freedom and lack of reproductive freedom is all about ownership. It's the ownership that rich males hold over stocks and bonds, and the implicit ownership that rich men have over the female body. It may not go quite to the level of legal ownership of a human being, but it goes to the use and misuse of social power.
I don't think it's necessary to be a jerk to be a conservative, but there seems to be a lot of overlap. I suspect that the underlying cause is the connection I have been trying to lay out. It's just exactly what the feminists have been telling us all along, that men attempt to defend their patriarchal power.
It's legitimate to protest that men are not universally of this bent. I would take it a step further and suggest that the division lies along the axis separating American conservatism vs. American liberalism.
At some level, the conservatives are always on the trailing side of history. Racial segregation was defended by conservatives at a moment in history when they should have rejected it entirely. Conservatives are still defending the right to go bankrupt from medical bills. And conservatives are still on the wrong side of history when it comes to gender equality. There should be little or no connection between the right to gender equality and the regulation of the financial markets. Yet in our political system, the connection is direct and overt.
And when you come down to the fundamentals, conservatism as personified by Brett Kavanaugh is defined as being a jerk with an outrageous sense of personal entitlement.
A final curious corollary
I would like to think that conservatives are not all rapists and gropers, but Donald Trump has demonstrated an ability to find exactly this kind of person. When they aren't demonstrably sexual predators, they are thieves and swindlers. When they aren't demonstrably thieves and swindlers, they misuse public funds for their own enjoyment. Trump seems to surround himself with people who are contemptuous of traditional morality, be it sexual or financial. Those few with a normal sense of honor and duty have the hardest time in the Trump administration.
The deep question here is why Trump and his advisers couldn't have found a nominee with a cleaner record. Is it because American conservatism is fundamentally corrupt at this level, being defined more for its hypocrisy than for its principles? One would hope not. There is reason to believe that the majority of Supreme Court justices don't fit the Kavanaugh mold.
At another level, it is amusing to watch Donald Trump complain that his nominee is being slandered. Trump made a career out of slandering Obama's nationality and celebrated the calls to "lock her up" when it came to his presidential opponent. Since Trump relies on the use of slander as his main political tool, it's not surprising that he projects that approach onto his political opponents, even when they are telling the truth.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
