Many media descriptions of Tuesday’s hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court called the event “a circus.” It is a reasonable choice of words, given that the first portion resembled an episode of Jerry Springer, minus the chair throwing.

There was real tension as raucous audience members took turns trying to drown out the Senate Judiciary Committee with angry shouts and screams. It’s a safe guess that none was shrieking in support of the nominee, who sat stoically through the rain of insults, though his young daughters reportedly were escorted out to spare them the ­ordeal.

The tension peaked as Democrats on the panel rolled out their own form of disruption, a coordinated attack on the hearing itself. They even interrupted each other to demand a recess so they could vote on whether to go forward.

They, too, were angry as they claimed to want more time to read more documents about Kavanaugh’s career, thousands of which had just been released Monday night. Yet their professed desire to be diligent about their duties seemed less than honest given that all of them already had vowed to oppose him, including three considering a presidential run in 2020.

One of the three, Kamala Harris of California, interrupted Chairman Chuck Grassley before he could finish a single opening sentence of welcome. That makes her the frontrunner!

Because the actual hearing eventually got underway and Republicans look to have the votes for confirmation, it’s easy to dismiss the theatrical hijacking as nothing more than politics as usual. But that would be a mistake because, with apologies to Shakespeare, in this case the sound and fury signify something.

It marked the moment when there was no longer a meaningful difference between the aim of elected Democrats and their unelected supporters in the audience. They were united in their determination to shut down the process because they both believe that if they can’t win, the game should be canceled.

The unholy marriage of cry­babies was blessed by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who used his turn in the spotlight to praise the rude shouters, about 20 of whom were arrested by Capitol Police. He called them “the voice of democracy,” said it was great that “people can stand up and speak” and declared that the loud interruptions “represent what we are about in this democracy.”

“We” is the operative word because his side wasn’t the target. Durbin went on to confess that Kavanaugh wasn’t really the ­issue, either.

Pointing at Kavanaugh, he said, “You are the nominee of President Donald John Trump . . . You are his man. You’re the person he wants on the ­Supreme Court.”

Well, yeah, that’s the way the system works. The winner gets to nominate his choices to fill Supreme Court vacancies. It’s been like that since George Washington.

But 20 months into Trump’s presidency, Dems, in the Senate and out on the streets, still are not ready to accept his legitimacy.

As GOP Sen. Ted Cruz noted later, the whole show is part of a relitigation of the 2016 election. The half of the country that hates Trump simply can’t abide the fact that he sits in the office that Hillary Clinton was entitled to.

They’re not pretending. They really believe that Trump shouldn’t be able to put a new nominee on the court.

No less than Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, ­recently invoked the guilty plea of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as a reason why Trump shouldn’t have the full authority of his office.

“It is unseemly for the president of the United States to be picking a Supreme Court justice who could soon be, effectively, a juror in a case involving the president himself,” he said on the Senate floor two weeks ago.

There is also the fact that the Kavanaugh nomination is extra galling because it would cement a solid majority of constitutional conservatives on the court, perhaps for decades. Trump’s first pick, Neil Gorsuch, was just as conservative but less of a flashpoint because he was replacing the late ­Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most brilliant conservative ­justice ever.

But Kavanaugh would succeed the retiring Anthony Kennedy, who became the swing vote and often sided with the four liberal justices to make a majority.

Yet, as Cruz also noted, the Supreme Court was a huge campaign issue, with both Clinton and Trump talking frequently about the kind of justices they would nominate, including in the debates. And it couldn’t have been lost on Democrats that controlling the Senate would be all important no matter who won the presidency.

So Durbin is dead wrong — the “voice of democracy” is not represented by adult snowflakes shouting at a public hearing to try to silence speech they don’t like. Nor is it represented by the attempts at character ­assassination he and some of his colleagues resorted to when they got the microphone.

That honor goes to voters, a fact their candidates should have paid more attention to.

Later in the day, there were more edifying moments. One of three people chosen to formally introduce Kavanaugh was a woman named Lisa Blatt, a lawyer who has appeared before the Supreme Court 35 times.

She identified herself as a liberal feminist who supported Hillary Clinton, but said she has no doubts that Kavanaugh will be a superb justice. Blatt echoed a piece she wrote for Politico last month, in which she said, “Sometimes a superstar is just a superstar,” and hailed ­Kavanaugh’s “dignity, intelligence, empathy and integrity.”

Another rare moment of uplift came with a rapid-fire speech by Sen. Ben Sasse, a ­Nebraska Republican. He ­decried the modern trend that relegates the Supremes into red and blue ­justices.

The problem, he said, is that the country now sees the court as a super legislature because Congress, through regulations, punts too much of its lawmaking responsibility to an unaccountable bureaucracy.

“That’s why the Supreme Court is increasingly a substitute political battleground,” Sasse said. “It is not healthy, but it is what happens and it’s something that our founders wouldn’t be able to make any sense of.”

The solution, he said, is to ­restore the proper separation of powers among the three branches. It was, at heart, a civics lesson straight out of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Naturally, Sasse was ignored. Maybe there will be time for that kind of thing after the next election.