We’ve heard a lot from Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters in recent weeks about whether he’s being treated with justice by his opponents, but not so much about whether Kavanaugh is the sort of person who ought to sit as a Supreme Court justice dispensing justice for the next few decades.

“Justice” seems to the most important word here, yet there’s been little overt discussion of what it means to us.

When asked by a senator if he had ever consumed so much alcohol that he lost control or lost all memory of what he had done, Kavanaugh raged that it was impossible that such a monster could be lurking beneath his Catholic schoolboy demeanor. After all, he said, he had gone to Yale Law School! Do you think Yale allows monsters to matriculate?

How dare you accuse me — the accomplished Dr. Jekyll — of secretly being Mr. Hyde! It is inconceivable! I worked my butt off! I went to church! I lifted weights! I never lose control!

It did not escape the notice of the more discerning among us that, although it appeared to be Kavanaugh who was sitting at the witness table, it was Mr. Hyde’s voice that was speaking. And so we concluded that, whether Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth or not about Kavanaugh attacking her, it would not be prudent to give Mr. Hyde a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh’s defense rested on the core conservative belief that a just society is divided into a small number of winners (guess which side he’s on) and a large number of losers. Those who have a lot of wealth, power, fame and success obviously deserve it. If they didn’t deserve all they have, they wouldn’t have it, you see. They are entitled to it. (They worked their butts off and got into Yale Law School). And with that entitlement comes certain privileges. It is God’s will.

It’s an age-old philosophy perhaps expressed most eloquently by Donald Trump, who said: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”

It is the same philosophy that argued in the 19th century that if you are a white man, you may own other humans. Slavery is God’s will.

In a more moderate form, this theory of justice is still widely believed in America. It’s the belief that you get what you deserve. It’s the American Dream that all you need is hard work, talent and persistence. Success is earned, but so is failure. As a society, we accept large disparities in wealth, income and political power because we believe that people earn their successes, failures, happiness and disappointments. You reap what you sow.

‘Behind every fortune is a crime’

There is, however, another way of looking at it. “Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” Mario Puzo wrote in “The Godfather,” paraphrasing Balzac.

Surely it is hyperbole to suggest that every fortune is illegitimate, but there is a lot of truth to Puzo’s cynical aphorism. Our continent, for instance, was largely built in the first instance on land taken from Native Americans, watered liberally and literally with the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved Africans. The slaves were ultimately freed, but the wealth that was ripped from their bodies stayed where it was.

Home ownership, the greatest source of wealth for today’s white middle class, was systematically denied to blacks. Even today, disadvantaged people of all kinds — poor people, disabled people, women, LGBTQ, people of color and immigrants — don’t have full access to jobs, housing, banking, credit, education and other sources of wealth creation.

In a just world, everyone would have an equal opportunity to succeed. You don’t have to believe in unicorns to think that would be a better world.

The rapacious class deserves its success

Much of the jurisprudence and political philosophy over the past 250 years (or should I say the last 2,500 years) has been an effort to justify an unjust system, to make it seem as if the rapacious class deserved its success. By and large, this version of history has been accepted as gospel by too many. It’s certainly the prevailing belief among the rapacious class.

The stories of Horatio Alger animate the American dream, even though, as Leonard Cohen says in his sharpest lyric, “everybody knows the dice are loaded” and “the fight is fixed,” which is why “the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.”

“That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”

Everybody also knows that rich, powerful men sometimes prey on women. Everybody knows that young black men are sometimes targeted unjustly by law enforcement. The bodies of women, and gays, and blacks, and immigrants are still available to be grabbed, used, abused and discarded by anyone with power. These low creatures are even told how and when to kneel before power.

The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements must be marginalized because they challenge the system where your rights, your opportunities, your very life depend on where you rank in the long hierarchy of privilege. Anyone above you may do anything they like to you, just as you may do anything you like to those below you. Your boss may rape you, but you may kick your dog.

That is someone’s idea of justice, and it explains, perhaps, why the forgotten white working class accepts this injustice: No matter how far above them the Trumps and the Kavanaughs and the Weinsteins are, there is still someone worse off. Their status isn’t much, but it’s all they have. Even the thought of an egalitarian society threatens their privilege, no matter how meager it may be.

It’s why, when the Billion-Dollar Fraud comes to town, they happily chant “Lock her up.”

He earned every penny

The flip side to the belief that you get what you deserve is that you deserve what you get.

This is why Donald Trump speaks so frequently about how great he is. He talks about what a stable genius he is, how big his brain and hands are, how much the people love him, how big the crowds are, and how big a landslide he won. His success cannot be a fluke, or the result of collusion or unethical and criminal behavior, or the consequence of unjust institutions and laws. It’s inconceivable that he doesn’t deserve everything he has, from the gold toilets and the glamorous wife to the “Hail to the Chief” pomp.

The reality, of course, is that Trump’s fortune is criminal through and through: His grandfather was a entrepreneurial pimp in the Klondike who developed a kind of alchemy that used prostitutes and fresh oysters to separate gold from gold miners. His descendants maintained and expanded that fortune by stiffing workers and subcontractors, bribing public officials, refusing to rent to blacks, leaving creditors in the lurch, laundering money, committing fraud at an unimaginable level, evading taxes, and selling favors and access to his high office.

Rigged system

On Monday, the Census Bureau published a very interesting interactive mapping tool that illustrates just how fixed the fight really is. Rather than earning our success and failures solely by dint of hard work, the tool shows that success in America is partially predetermined (to a disturbing degree) by where you grow up.

People who grow up in tree-lined neighborhoods, with good schools, decent housing and plenty of networking opportunities tend to be more successful later in life than people who grow up in slums, the research shows. Everybody knows the dice are loaded, but this tool maps it down to the block.

Think, for instance, of Montgomery County, Md., where Brett Kavanaugh was raised and still lives. It’s one of the richest counties in America. It’s Ground Zero of the Swamp, the home of the lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, high priests, court jesters, judges and ass-kissers who maintain the status quo of entitlement and privilege. It’s hard work, but it’s well-rewarded.

The Census Bureau map shows that people who grew up in the exclusive neighborhoods of Washington — such as Potomac, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Georgetown, Great Falls and McLean — have a head start in life.

Perhaps the most unintentionally honest thing Kavanaugh said in his confirmation hearings was that he had grown up in an area that was plagued by crime.

Of course, Bethesda never had the murder and violent crime of the desolated sections of the city just 10 miles away. But if you’re looking for the epicenter of white-collar crime in America, you wouldn’t be off target by starting with places like Bethesda, Greenwich, Palm Beach, Mountain View and Manhattan, the places where Jack the Ripper sits at head of the Chamber of Commerce.

The gangs of Bethesda rob you with a law degree, not a gun. It’s more lucrative.

Trump, Kavanaugh

Like Trump, Kavanaugh spends an inordinate amount of time justifying his privilege, suggesting that he’s entitled to a lifetime sinecure because he earned it all by himself.

By all accounts he worked hard in high school (and partied hard too), but his admission to Yale was greased by attending Georgetown Prep, a pipeline to the Ivies, and by having a grandfather who was a Yale man. Yet he testified that he had “no connections” to help him.

A kid who “worked his tail off” at the public Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda would have had a tougher time getting in the door at Yale Law. A hard-working kid at Anacostia High School would have almost no shot, especially if he had “youthful indiscretions” to overcome.

In Anacostia, they throw your ass in jail, but in Bethesda, boys will be boys, especially one who is the prosecutor’s son. That is the America that Kavanaugh has devoted his career to protecting.

Indeed, Kavanaugh owes his nomination to the Supreme Court directly to his privilege. He got the nod because he is a graduate of Yale Law School, and not, say, the Washington School of Law where his mom worked her butt off to get her law degree. Trump rejected many other qualified contenders from other schools, insisting on a Yale Law grad.

It’s not a coincidence that everyone on the Supreme Court graduated from an elite school. Standards, don’t you know?

Of course, you don’t have to be a middle-aged preppy white bro to be privileged in today’s world. Just this weekend, Kathryn Mayorga accused soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo of raping her in Las Vegas in 2009 and then buying her silence.

Mayorga told Der Spiegel that Ronaldo became remorseful after he was finished using her. His lust temporarily satiated, Mr. Hyde instantly vanished, and Ronaldo was himself again. “Ninety-nine percent of me is a good guy,” he told her through his tears. “I just don’t know about the other 1%.”

It’s that 1% we all need to worry about.

Rex Nutting is a commentary editor and writer at MarketWatch.