Ideology partly explains the differing reactions. But there are other highly qualified justices. Backing Kavanaugh means alienating a lot of women voters. Why the resolute support for someone so tainted?

What is hard to see, unless you see the world through the lens of a certain type of powerful man—like Trump, like McConnell—is that the picture that has emerged about Kavanaugh’s past, far from marking him as unfit, signals that he is trustworthy. It shows that Kavanaugh is there for the guys. Most of all, he knows how the world works: Ordinary rules are for ordinary people. They do not apply to the entitled elite—and he will fight to keep it that way.

One key to understanding Kavanaugh’s specific appeal is that unlike, say, Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, he stands accused of having assaulted his victims as part of a group.

As the lawyer and civil-rights advocate Nancy Erika Smith has noted, “sexual assault does not usually take place in public.” Yet none of Kavanaugh’s accusers claims that he attacked them alone. His best friend was there, or a group of drunken buddies. Christine Blasey Ford wrote: “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Mark] Judge, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state.” Deborah Ramirez recalled that Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and stuck his penis in her face during a drinking game, while their Yale classmates laughed and taunted her. Julie Swetnick’s sworn affidavit says she saw Kavanaugh and others attempt to “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.”

A striking thing about these stories is that they are variations on a theme: sexual assault as social performance.

We may never know what happened in those Washington, D.C., house parties or Yale dorm rooms. But there are some things we do know that seem to substantiate the accusers’ portrait of Kavanaugh. For one, there’s a yearbook entry—a carefully fashioned self-portrait. Kavanaugh’s contains bragging innuendo about sex and prodigious drinking. He lists one of his activities as “Renate Alumnius,” publicly insinuating a sexual history with a girl from a nearby private school. Like the alleged physical assaults, this reputational assault was performed with a group, a club of football players who also named Renate in their yearbook entry and captioned a group photo of themselves as the “Renate Alumni.”

Choosing to describe yourself as a “Renate Alumnius,” or with phrases such as “100 Kegs or Bust” and “Beach Week Ralph Club— Biggest Contributor,” or thrusting yourself on unwilling women to the amusement of your jeering friends are all ways to signal, to the intended audience, that you are part of the team, a member of the club—and a trustworthy keeper of its secrets.