Believe it or not, what really counts in our gender-based battles is not the deeply fraught matter of “believing the woman,” but exactly how far each political party will go in defense of its own man.
In all of these contests, the answer is “very,” and all of these battles are fierce. In 1991, there was no chance in hell the Republican Party would give up Clarence Thomas, whose choice to replace civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall as the Supreme Court’s black justice had driven the left wing insane.
Since 1964, when Barry Goldwater voted against the civil rights bills of that era, the Republican, black voter had been a rare species, and the party had labored under the labels of racism or insensitivity as segregationists Democrats fled their own party and Lyndon B. Johnson for the welcoming arms of the Right.
Thomas’s nomination by President George H.W. Bush was the party’s first move to contest this impression, just as the Democrats’ defense of his accuser was their bid to assure it hit home. Republicans stood by their man, Democrats by their claim of believing in women. Political activists had discovered a new kind of weapon, and we had a new kind of war.
In 1998, Bill Clinton had been reelected, and his second term was half-gone; Al Gore, his vice president, was groomed to succeed him. His wife and first lady was an icon in her own right. There was no chance that Democrats would give up on Clinton, who in 1992 had broken 12 dire years of Republican dominance and returned them to power again.
This time, it was the Republicans who “believed the woman,” the Democrats who dismissed the accusers as nuts, sluts, and liars. Clinton, impeached in the House by its Republican members, was saved in the Senate on a party-line vote. Both sides, it seemed, “believed in the women” only when she said things they found helpful. That theme was destined to recur.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran for president against Donald Trump, a Clintonian lecher, if ever there was one. Flawed as he was, there was no chance the Republican Party would turn on the one man who stood between them and the woman they had fought with and hated for years.
Trump won and, in 2018, nominated to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh — an altar boy, jock, and beer drinker. There was no chance in hell that the Left wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth to destroy him and the Right not move heaven and earth in defense.
Christine Blasey Ford couldn’t remember the time or the place of the attack that she swore had happened, but that hardly mattered to the accuser’s supporters. They sent death threats to the judge’s defenders, filled the halls of Congress with unruly supporters, and made it unsafe for Republicans who would vote on the matter even to appear in the street.
This year, Tara Reade has arrived. The ex-Biden staffer says that the presumed nominee sexually assaulted her in his Senate office in 1993. As in most cases, it was his word and hers. But this time, it was different. A fairly large number of feminists said they believed her, but they would support the man they believed to be her attacker because he was their choice against Trump.
It turns out that no one had ever “believed in the woman” when it was not convenient. But no one ever said it out loud until now.
