"When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings" (New York Magazine).

A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. Such a distinction was anathema in old-school monarchies when the king could arbitrarily arrest, jail, or execute you at will, for private behavior or thoughts...The Iranian and Saudi governments — like the early modern monarchies — seek not only to control your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that everyone has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy people....

The Founders... carved out a private space that was sacrosanct and a public space which insisted on a strict presumption of innocence, until a speedy and fair trial. Whether you were a good husband or son or wife or daughter, whether you had a temper, or could be cruel, or had various sexual fantasies, whether you were a believer, or a sinner: this kind of thing was rendered off-limits in the public world....

[In totalitarian societies], the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public. Spies are everywhere, monitoring the slightest of offenses. Friends betray you, as do lovers. Family members denounce their own mothers and fathers and siblings and sons and daughters. The cause, which is usually a permanently revolutionary one, always matters more than any individual’s possible innocence. You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.

On the subject of family members denouncing each other, remember that ad we were just talking about, with 6 siblings telling people not to vote for their brother. "I couldn't be quiet any longer," one sister said with emotive intensity. I predict that the day is coming when a Supreme Court nominee's own children come forward and report random sexist microaggressions heard over the dinner table.

I remember long ago when I was a young law professor sitting next to a federal judge who wanted to tell me how to become a federal judge. (Weirdly, the Judge was Alex Kozinski.) I told him I didn't want to be a judge, because it's better to be a law professor: You have more freedom of speech and behavior — freedom to be an individual. You don't have to continually present yourself as sober and conventional for years and years and years. Who wants to live like that? But now, a quarter century later, the standard of how constrained you need to be is unfathomably strict. Who will be left to aspire to such a cold, lifeless prize? And we, the people, are the losers, because these Justices of the Future will have little to do with the rest of us fallible humans. How will they understand what is at stake?! Why would they value freedom of speech, when they let theirs go when they were 10?

I'm reminded of President Nixon's nomination of G. Harrold Carswell. There were a few reasons why this was a bad nomination, but what was so memorable about it was one Senator's effort to defend him against the charge that he was "mediocre":

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.

We don't need a mediocrity on the Court, of course. We don't want the representation of mediocrity, but we do want flesh and blood people, not nine abstemious, over-careful, controlled strivers who've excluded all daring and fun from their lives going back to the age of 10.

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"Brett Kavanaugh said Monday he was a virgin in high school and college..."

The full Kavanaugh interview will air at 7 Eastern on Fox News.

And, I'm listening to Fox News now and hearing Brit Hume saying something very close to what I said this morning. I said:

The new allegations — from Avenatti and The New Yorker — are, I think, helping Kavanaugh's case.... After all the careful work creating credence and empathy for Christine Blasey Ford, we now have an onslaught, a piling on, and it's making Kavanaugh into a sort of hero, who must stand his ground. 

There was a problem when there was only Blasey's accusation, and it did seem that you'd need multiple accusations to take down Kavanaugh. Multiple accusations were needed to take down Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Alex Kozinski, etc. But this new material doesn't seem like more Blasey-like allegations, but something different and much more questionable and more noticeably unfair.

There's a real contrast to the carefully built up Blasey incident, and while the conflict with Blasey seemed to be too much of an unresolvable he said/she said, to say he said/she said was to elevate Blasey to equal status: her word against his. There was dignity in that, and Kavanaugh supporters were being circumspect and allowing that dramatic confrontation to unfold. Now, Kavanaugh antagonists have escalated the attack and seem willing — some of them, anyway — to use anything. I think more sober Kavanaugh antagonists — such as the NYT — rue this development.

ADDED: If the allegations are not true, Kavanaugh must stand his ground. If this effort to take him down works — if the allegations are not true — the same strategy will be used against the next nominee and the one after that. It will never end. If the allegations are true, he should have done something long ago. Either he should have have withdrawn, or he should have conceded his past wrongdoing, apologized sincerely, and said tactfully what he could to minimize the relevance of the incident to the question of his qualification to serve on the Court.

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