Patterns of Abuse Echo Plainly Through the Kavanaugh Hearings

[Reader Rabbit]

Patterns of Abuse Echo Plainly Through the Kavanaugh Hearings

Republican senators intend to have what they want, namely control of the Supreme Court. In order to get it, they must wrest control of the Supreme Court from the rest of us. This is a textbook act of dominance. Voices in the Senate chambers said over and over, “There is credible evidence of sexual abuse. We need a fuller investigation.” As a result, Republican senators on the committee as well as Kavanaugh himself grow increasingly angry and reactive. This same pattern is seen whether dominance plays out in public or private spaces; the assertion of dominance followed by increasing anger if there is resistance. For abusers, the performance of rage is the final card they always play. In the case of the Republican Senators, their anger is performed as indignation at what they would frame as an unfair process, but it is fueled by the same rage I always saw in my own abuser’s eyes, triggered by my refusal to just lay down and take it.

The rage exhibited by members of the committee and by Kavanaugh himself is not about fairness. It is about having their authority — their place on the alpha male pecking order of the man box — challenged. This performance of rage resonates deeply with men who support Kavanaugh. For them, it is the confirmation of men’s hard-earned man box right to dominate others they view as being beneath them, women, and marginalized people.

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The performance of rage we have seen in the Kavanaugh hearings echoes too closely what those of us who are survivors have seen in our own abusers. It goes beyond simple anger or frustration. It is an orchestrated warning of more punitive actions to come. “You won’t like me when I’m mad.” Something new is emerging here. The patterns of abuse are coming out the shadows and being deployed as a political weapon. Rage in politics should always be seen for what it is, as should the smirking, eye-rolling, and dismissing of others that often accompanies it. It is the marker of an abuser when their authority is being challenged. In public, they are intent on silencing civil public discourses. In the privacy of bedrooms and hidden places, they are signaling the physical assault that almost always comes next.

After Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) exploded angrily during the hearings, many voices affirmed his expression of rage as being powerful leadership and fully justified. In a very calculated way, Graham and Kavanaugh used displays of anger and contempt to overwhelm the news cycle, pulling focus from testimony and questions delivered by calmer more civil voices in the room. When this tactic is intentionally used by presidents and supreme court nominees, we have stepped into a whole new level of disruption and manipulation. Reliance on tactics like these is directly attributable to a culture of manhood that trains us to respect the anger and violence as the final arbiters of the authority and status for American men. The bullies on the playground tell the rest of us what to do. We are told that this is the way it works.