Chinese authorities who fret about a cold war with the US might also want to analyse – unemotionally – another possible threat to domestic tranquility: a kind of brewing “cold” war between the genders – at home, upfront and personal. One vista of future shock was available to Beijing last week if it bothered to watch the
televised US Senate hearing on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court – a lifetime appointment no less.
Opponents as well as supporters almost came apart emotionally; the national psyche was revealed to be more than mildly disturbed. The stormy vetting process of the seemingly blue-chip Kavanaugh with his Yale Law School background was triggered, initially, by a sexual assault allegation, and
testimony by the alleged victim was taken by liberal opponents of the politically conservative Kavanaugh as positively probative – and by conservative supporters as positively partisan.
Even so, Kavanaugh squeezed through and has been
sworn into office. But around half the country feels squeezed out – and yearns for revenge. Call it a sequel to the infamous 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Senate Judiciary Committee hearing drama that still haunts the US today. A showdown could come next month, when biennial midterm elections will determine whether the Trumpian Republican Party is to retain its reign on America’s powerful bicameral national legislature.
The mistreatment of women by men – or, in the elevated terminology of modern feminist sociology, the ethical structure of patriarchal society – was the emotional doppelgänger, as it were, for the ambushed Kavanaugh. It’s simple: just as Marx insisted that capitalism was a toothpick house of inherent contradictions that would eventually collapse, so today’s feminists view patriarchy as a doll’s house of inherent injustices and unsustainable normative conformities that no longer make sense. Patriarchy inevitably metastasises into misogyny, then hardens into sexist authoritarianism.
Watch: Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testify in US Senate
