The Tears of Brett Kavanaugh

By Michael Lista,

In front of the nation, and the world, he was crying. What should we make of it? “Woe awaits a country,” Sir Walter Scott wrote, “when she sees the tears of bearded men.” Since the era of the Victorian stiff upper lip, there has been a sense that it’s shameful for a man to cry, that it’s too much an advertisement of his own self-interest. This sentiment was reinforced by mid-century machos such as Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, and John Ford. But, for much of American life in the past fifty years, a counterargument has taken hold: that crying is good for a man, that his tears are the outward sign of his inward progress, the evidence and end result of his “being in touch with his feelings.” A crying man came to be regarded as an unqualified good.

But Kavanaugh’s performance last Thursday was something entirely different, distinctly contemporary. It combined the postwar attitude that men should be in touch with their feelings, to the point that they may cry, with the intrinsic American ideal of white male privilege.

His tears make a kind of sense. From a single phrase by Thomas Jefferson—that public life is about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—the fulfillment of the white American man’s atomized desires assumed the force of a fiat, and became the ultimate purpose of this country’s society. If a white man didn’t get what he wanted, it was nothing short of a constitutional crisis, in his body and his body politic both. Written into America’s founding document is the franchise for a man like Kavanaugh to weep when he isn’t fulfilled. In this, he’s less a citizen of his society than one of its disgruntled customers, who are always right. There’s an originalist argument to be made for being a crybaby.

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