Bitter Tenor of Senate Reflects a Nation at Odds With Itself

… To the right and left alike, Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination appears less like a final spasm of division — a sobering trauma, followed by calm resolution — than an event that deepens the national mood of turbulence. The country is gripped by a climate of division and distrust rivaled by few other moments in the recent past. This time, historic grievances around race and gender are coming to a boil under the eye of a president who is dismissive of the concept of national unity, with a political base that passionately celebrates the combative way in which he has upended Washington. …

Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of American history at Yale University, said that since the nation’s founding there had only been “a handful of other times that have been this ugly,” including the run-up to the Civil War. “There are moments in American history where we get such extreme polarization that the government no longer functions the way it’s supposed to function,” Professor Freeman said, offering a grim diagnosis of the present: “It’s a virtually systemic abandonment of norms, to a degree that I find alarming.” …

A Gallup survey measuring perceptions of major institutions found the court afflicted by the same collapse in trust afflicting the presidency, Congress, the media, banks, schools and churches. At the start of the millennium, half the country said it had substantial confidence in the Supreme Court; this year, that fraction was 37 percent. In Gallup’s 2018 survey, the only government institutions earning powerful support from the public were the military and the police. CONT.

Alexander Burns, New York Times