The powerful like Brett Kavanaugh can’t whitewash their pasts

Gandhi and Churchill had pasts like Brett Kavanaugh.

Besides the red face, and the shouting, and the hurt indignation, and the mad howls about still liking beer, one thing was very obvious last week about the US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. With a litany of legal achievements behind him, this was not a man who had expected, at 53, to be answering for his behaviour as a teenager.

This appears true whether or not that behaviour included the allegations made against him in moving testimony by the Palo Alto psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford. She has accused him of attempting to rape her when she was 15. Kavanaugh, then 17, denies this. He also denies numerous other allegations of his presence at parties in which rowdy boys took turns to have sex with girls so drunk they could barely stand, and so on. Not so surprisingly he has also had to deny drinking so much he had blackouts. Although the thing with blackouts, I believe, is that you might not remember.

Even if Ford’s accusations remain unproven, Kavanaugh’s mere presence in this gross, fratboy milieu ought to be enough to bar him from spending the rest of his life as a wise elder of America. For him, you can tell this seems an astonishing, even violating development. Since when were these the rules? Think of Prince Hal and his cry of “this loose behaviour, I throw off” on becoming a man. “I have been a good judge,” he said, sounding bewildered. “A lifetime of high-profile public service . . .” Doesn’t that count for anything?

In a word, no. A few weeks ago the British novelist Zadie Smith published a short story called Now More Than Ever in The New Yorker. Rarely have I seen modern online political piety so effectively skewered. Her protagonist, a middle-aged New York academic, strikes up a baffled, defensive friendship with a censorious younger colleague called Scout, who is “on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth person”. According to Scout, she writes, “the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present”.

The idea, explains Scout, is that you should understand the past “in the exact manner in which you understand things presently”. Should you fail to do this, you will become “beyond the pale” and a social outcast, which is inevitably to be this older academic’s fate. Smith intends all this as a satire on our new age of intolerance, and it works. Or at least it does right up until you consider something like the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford.

US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill last week.

Have you noticed how many political fights ignore any difference between the past and present? We sometimes talk as if it had been prime minister-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn who liked that mural and laid that wreath, whereas actually it was minor backbencher and hard-left fratboy Jeremy Corbyn, from whom expected standards of behaviour were quite different. All his mates were doing it and they probably high-fived afterwards. Likewise, we expect President Donald Trump to answer for the crotch-grabbing boasts of the TV star Donald Trump a decade and a half ago, back when the mere idea of him getting into the White House was considered ludicrous, maybe even by him.

Or think of the smaller recent scandals of Toby Young (flung from a university body) or Jared O’Mara (an already forgotten Labour MP): two political careers sunk before they had begun. Think also, even if it feels like a leap, of students who wish to pull down statues of Cecil Rhodes, or the campaign to move Oliver Cromwell from Parliament Square. In all these cases the idea of current standards not being applicable to earlier acts feels not only like a bad argument but like an immoral one. Make it, at least publicly, and you may be beyond the pale.

Or think of [Oxford University’s] Bullingdon Club. Perhaps, like the circles of Kavanaugh, this was an institution that rested on the assumption that the wild pasts of the future powerful would be forgotten. Seen from one direction the Cameron, Osborne, Johnson generation was the first of the British establishment to be truly beleaguered by this sort of past. Seen from another they may be the last generation that this sort of past doesn’t wholly ruin. In matters far more serious than smashing restaurants, Winston Churchill had a past that Twitter would not have liked much before he became the man history remembers, as did Mahatma Gandhi. They didn’t have to disown them, or apologise for them. They just moved on.

Clearly Kavanaugh thought he had moved on, too. Ford is a reminder that his version of his past is not the only one that exists, even if he and everybody around him have spent a lifetime behaving as if it were. In a sense the entire MeToo movement has been a fight against the ability of powerful men to do just that: to unilaterally dictate their histories and to ignore the alternate histories of women they have slapped, groped, raped or bought off into silence.

Smith is quite right about the relentlessness and mercilessness of the new revisionism. Particularly, she is right about the exhausted feeling even the merest glance at left-wing political social media now leaves you with that, eventually, you too will be beyond the pale. Watching the Kavanaugh hearings, though, I’m reminded that the same trends are sometimes changing the world for the better. We really should stop and think afresh about whose version of the past it is that we are so used to hearing. Kavanaugh has spent a lifetime blithely assuming it would always be his. Not any more. Time’s up, as they say.

THE TIMES