"not according to their actions, which are frequently quite bad, but by their standing"

Alex Pareene wins the internets for this week, at least:

"What made all this the stuff of Dantean hyperbole was the simple, self-evident truth that Kavanaugh was 'a good kid.' Good Kids are determined to be good not according to their actions, which are frequently quite bad, but by their standing. On this status-driven reckoning of the natural order of things, the worst thing imaginable is for a good kid to be denied future opportunities to wield power.

Even Senator Ben Sasse, a professional critic of the president’s temperament with a side-hustle as an author of books about how to raise your children well, took to the Senate floor to make a grand show of feeling bad about how the president spoke about the Kavanaugh accusations, and then voted for Kavanaugh’s confirmation anyway.

We could have had exactly what Sasse and the rest of the Seriousness Brigade claim to want: an honest discussion of what moral lessons parents and institutions are teaching, or failing to teach, our children. Instead we had a prolonged national meltdown on behalf of all the American teens who, because of the excesses of #MeToo, may yet miss out on the pleasures of behaving like the protagonists of Porky’s."

In some ways the era of Trumpolini really is incredibly easy to understand -- the 2020 election will find the American people rejecting or accepting, probably forever, the hegemony of White Male Identity Politics.

This is only one great point among many, so read the whole thing.