For many women, the confirmation of new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been a shattering event. But the high-pressure confrontation may have shattered nothing as much as the myth of a monolithic female response to the charged questions of sex, power and the shifting roles of women and men. …
Since the 2016 election, scholars and political analysts alike have exhaustively studied the extent to which hostility about racial change and immigration motivated support for Trump in the primaries and general election. (The overwhelming academic consensus is: quite a lot.) But the arguments Trump and other Republicans used to rescue Kavanaugh made clear that they also view unease about shifting gender roles and growing challenges to male dominance in the workplace and beyond as a powerful motivator for what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration,” for not only its male but also its female members. …
In that way, the Kavanaugh fight is likely to reinforce a central political dynamic of the Trump era: growing GOP dominance among blue-collar, evangelical Christian and rural voters obtained at the cost of increasing resistance to the party in white-collar suburbs and intense alienation among African-American and younger voters. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN