Brett Kavanaugh is no longer a mere Supreme Court nominee. His name is now a veritable conservative cause — one that has united the right for the first time since the 2016 primary sent Republicans quarreling over Trump and Never Trump.
Whatever the outcome of the immediate contest, it’s increasingly clear that Democrats and the media establishment made an enormous miscalculation by waging total war against Kavanaugh and his family.
Liberals set out to cast the federal judge — amiable, well-credentialed, mildly conservative — as a demon. In the process, they have reminded GOP voters and all but the most stubborn Never Trump intellectuals that there are worse things than Donald Trump’s outbursts and the ineptitude of congressional Republicans.
Whatever disputes we have on our own side, the thinking on the right now goes,
we have to set them aside and stop a politics of personal destruction, fueled by a moral panic and an uncritical mainstream media that sees itself as an adjunct of the anti-Trump resistance.
These forces have combined to turn Kavanaugh into a folk hero, a stand-in for every American who has found himself falsely accused, or railroaded by malicious hearsay, or facing an unfeeling bureaucracy that treats juvenile missteps as unforgivable sins.
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