Part of what’s visceral for me about watching the Kavanaugh circus play out over these last two weeks is that he is to me a banal social type, cut from precisely the same cloth as scores of douchebags I knew when attending an East Coast boarding school in the 1980s....
The features of this social type: moderately talented but profoundly entitled, extremely hard-working but ultimately selfish, enormously arrogant but carefully polished, and above all exquisitely sensitive to what he can and cannot get away with.
The details of Ford’s charge against Kavanaugh thus rings true to this social type: being hyperaggressive toward a young woman in the hopes of coercing her into saying Yes, but not having the temerity to actually rape her.
We will almost certainly never know for sure what exactly may have happened 35 years ago, but the details of the incident as described has plausibility to me based on the social type involved.
