Opinion
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Confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh (Day 2), Sept. 5, 2018.C-SPAN / Youtube screen grab

September 20, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – If anyone regards the drama of the Kavanaugh nomination as being a means of discerning the guilt or innocence of Judge Kavanaugh or his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, he or she should be disabused of that notion. The hearing has almost nothing to do with the actual guilt or innocence of either party.

What we are seeing played out is an ideological proxy war. It is a struggle between progressive mythos of collective guilt and the Western concept of individual guilt.

For decades, progressives have seen the dynamic of history only in terms of categories and classes of people, not in terms of individual innocence or guilt.  

In the courtroom of the progressive mind, Judge Kavanaugh is automatically guilty of oppression because he is a white male and a symbol of patriarchal oppression. Whether or not he committed the assault he is accused of is very nearly irrelevant. He is an archetype who is seen as inherently evil, as he might wind up impinging on “rights” crucial to radical feminist progressives, who automatically count themselves among the oppressed.

On the other hand, the accuser is female and thus considered indubitably the progressives’ representative of a disempowered and oppressed category of humanity. Therefore, her charges against Judge Kavanaugh automatically have merit and are assumed as already ratified, regardless of facts, evidence, or proof. The charges of assault are merely a means to disempower the oppressor, who in the progressive mind deserves to be deprived of power because of what he represents. He is to be judged as the living symbol of oppression and for the ideas he represents, not his deeds, as his ideas are deemed incompatible with progressive ideology.

We’ve seen this playbook and the script many times over. Mythological archetypes representing good or evil – archetypes representing entire categories of human beings – are the main actors. Actual people are dispensable nonentities.

Such thinking is, of course, characteristic of Marxist dialectic. But instead of classes based on economic oppression, the categories of the oppressors are defined according to sex and race. The dynamic is the same and the results are the same. Entire categories of the human race are automatically evil, regardless of individual guilt.

The Soviet purges and show trials of the 1930s are the near equivalent of what is now going on here in America, with the Kavanaugh show trial being but the tip of the iceberg. The tactics and goals of America’s progressive elite are nearly the same as they were in Soviet Russia during the 1930s, particularly the period from 1937 to 1938 known as the “Great Purge.”

As an article titled “Trotskyite Wrecker,” published by the site Global Security, points out, “The party elite, using state security agencies, conducted an unprecedented operation whose aim was to create a monolithic, tightly subordinated – organizationally, morally and politically – State. Repression covered all segments of the population.”

Progressives in America also want an ideological monolith. For them, conservatives, including religious conservatives, must be purged from the judiciary as well as from the legislature and presidency in order for the monolith to be constructed. Any tactic designed to discredit or silence other opinions is legitimate, as long as the ideological structure of progressivism is seen to prevail.

As the article “Trotskyite Wrecker” points out, proof or evidence was an immaterial consideration during the Soviet show trials. What was deemed necessary was confession of sins because of the category or class one belonged to:

“Once more were served up the delirious ravings about Trotskyism, fascism, terrorism, treason, espionage, backed up with charges of industrial sabotage and incredible intrigues aiming to provoke a war and the dismemberment of the USSR. Still there was no proof, no plausible presumption even, no tangible evidence, no witness for the defense, and no possible defense. Those accused of this new witchcraft admitted, as if with pleasure, the worst villainies and the least probable crimes. Their foreheads in the dust, they did not even spare their praises of the most genial Stalin. Thirteen of the defendants were sentenced to death, three to 10 years imprisonment and one to 8 years imprisonment.”

Show trials are what happen when a society deserts the rule of law and the concept of individual guilt or innocence in favor of collective guilt or innocence according to one’s class, race, or sex. They happen when only one way of determining guilt or innocence matters: Does a person belong to the class of oppressors or of victims?

George Orwell’s observations were never more pertinent than they are today as we observe the tactics and ideology he loathed in play during the so-called Kavanaugh hearings. As he pointed out, arguments will be heard, but the progressives who “hear” will persist in their lunacy. They will not really hear Judge Kavanaugh because of the category he has been put in by their ideological blinders.

In short, guilt as formerly understood by Western law is not the issue. Ideology is the issue; and for progressives, the empowerment of the oppressed must be rectified by crushing Kavanaugh and the category to which he belongs.

In the meantime, Justice laments as she retreats.  

But there is yet hope, as Isaiah the prophet spoke many centuries ago. Injustice will not always prevail for God is just:

“The ruthless will vanish, the mockers will disappear,
and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down—
those who with a word make someone out to be guilty,
who ensnare the defender in court
and with false testimony deprive the innocent of justice.”

Let us hope and pray that the ruthless people who have an eye for evil – and any who have with false testimony made Kavanaugh out to be guilty and who seek to ensnare him – vanish.

May true justice prevail.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. She has contributed to many online magazines, including American Thinker, CNS, National Review, Russia Insider, The Christian Post, and others.