How the interaction between Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome and leftist jackbootery plays out in Supreme Court nominee hearings

Andrew McCarthy is a national treasure. You can't beat him for incisiveness, depth or exquisite phrasing.

His latest for NRO is a must-read. He establishes what is going to be the compositional contour of the piece at the outset, recounting a conversation between two other giants:

Judge Robert Bork used to tell a prescient and darkly humorous story about watching Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings — etched in pre-hashtag history as the “Thomas–Hill hearings,” in homage to Anita Hill’s role as the Left’s heroic accuser.

At the time, Thomas was a judge of the same eminent D.C. Circuit federal appeals court on which Bork had served. As he viewed Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” in horror, Bork recalled, a friend of his, the iconic Irving Kristol, approached and asked him what was happening.

“The end of civilization,” the judge sadly quipped.

“Of course it is,” Kristol deadpanned. “But it’ll take a long time. Meanwhile, it’s still possible to live well.”

He takes his time setting the table for his main point, looking at the lives and careers of Judge Bork and the person who thwarted Bork's SCOTUS nomination, Ted Kennedy, as well as pertinent (Bill) Clinton-era developments.

Then he zeroes in on the crux of what he's discussing:

Not that long after Clarence Thomas’s nomination was very nearly defeated, and within easy memory of Bork’s character assassination, President Bill Clinton got to nominate two Supreme Court justices. How did Republicans react? They couldn’t leap on the confirmation bandwagon fast enough. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were confirmed by the lopsided margins of 96–3 and 87–9, respectively.
See how this works?

Justices Ginsburg and Breyer were well qualified. But, of course, so had been Bork and Thomas. Because they were Democrats, however, Ginsburg and Breyer sailed through. The two things Democrats and Republicans have in common are 1) abiding respect for the personal integrity and legal acumen of Democratic judicial nominees and 2) effective acceptance of the Democrats’ claimed prerogative to “Bork” any Republican court nominee, no matter how impeccably credentialed, no matter their obvious integrity.

Republicans have defeated Democratic nominees, but they never Bork them. They never demagogue Democratic nominees as sex offenders, racists, or homophobes. There are no “Spartacus” moments.

Even when Republicans are put off by a Democratic nominee’s progressive activism, they seem apologetic, quick to concede that the progressive in question adheres to a mainstream constitutional philosophy — one that is championed by leading American law schools and bar associations because it effectively rewrites the Constitution to promote progressive pieties. Old GOP hands then typically vote “aye” while mumbling something about bipartisanship and some “presumption” that the president is entitled to have his nominees confirmed (a grant of deference that Democrats do not reciprocate, and that actually applies only to offices in the executive branch that exercise the president’s own power, not to slots in the independent judicial branch). 

And if you're thinking "It's this kind of dweeby deference that got us the Very Stable Genius," that has occurred to McCarthy, too:

President Trump says a lot of things that are not true and says a lot of other things that are foolish and unsavory. But his supporters are drawn to him, in large part, because he is willing to get into the muck with Democrats, fight them on their own demagogic terms — especially on things he cares about, like his nominees. They are tired of Republicans’ being caught flat-footed, continually underestimating how low Democrats are willing to go, how much they are willing to destroy reputations, institutions, and traditions in order to win.

And Irving Kristol would have to conclude differently about current circumstances:

We’re beyond the time when it’s still possible to live well.

The one thing Trump tribalists are correct about is that the Left is waging war on our civilization with a savagery that anyone underestimates at his own peril.

In fact, that is the front-and-center issue right now. It's not that the White House chaos Bob Woodward et al described isn't a real thing. It is. But that's a secondary concern as the Democrats claw out our nation's entrails.