On Thursday morning, Brett Kavanaugh was a dead man walking. At midday, he sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a wreck. But that evening he left the hearing again a viable nominee. The Democrats, who seemed more interested in building the case for an F.B.I. investigation than landing finishing blows with their lines of questioning, left him mostly unscathed. In a surprise move on Friday, Senator Jeff Flake announced his support for an investigation that would last no more than a week. His fellow-Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, then Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and, finally, President Trump himself followed suit.

It seems unlikely that a limited investigation will turn up anything like definitive proof of the allegations that have been levelled against Kavanaugh. And it certainly won’t reveal more about the kind of man Kavanaugh really is than did his opening remarks to the Judiciary Committee. He followed Christine Blasey Ford’s painful and painfully cautious testimony with a conspiratorial rant inflected with invective and pure bile. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” he said early on, “fuelled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

This was followed by an emotional crash that left Kavanaugh nearly sobbing as he recounted his boyhood to the committee—his platonic closeness with his female friends, how he was inspired by his father to keep detailed calendars, the fact that those calendars did not record his attendance at church on Sundays because, for young Brett Kavanaugh, “going to church on Sundays was like brushing my teeth: automatic. Still is.” The implication was that the court of public opinion is trying not Brett Kavanaugh but the very idea of the All-American boy—good-natured, mischievous, but harmless. That Brett Kavanaugh was a decent kid who may have erred here and there but only did so in good fun, and that investigating the allegations levelled by Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick in earnest would amount to marching Tom Sawyer, Opie Taylor, and the Beaver single-file to the guillotine. This was what moved Senators John Cornyn and Ben Sasse to seemingly genuine tears during Kavanaugh’s testimony. But it was Lindsey Graham who went apoplectic. “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” he shouted at Democrats during his turn for questions. “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”

“Boy, y’all want power,” he continued. “God, I hope you never get it.”

We are, obviously, far afield from the concerns that dominated the initial hearings—Kavanaugh’s support for unitary executive theory, his stance on Roe v. Wade, missing documents from the Bush White House, and so on. The Kavanaugh nomination is now, in part, a referendum on the #MeToo movement—on whether the goodness of successful men, with families and the respect of their peers, should be taken for granted, and whether the women who have suffered abuse, but who don’t possess the kind of evidence a prosecutor might find satisfying, should remain silent and invisible lest they sully sterling reputations. In truth, these confirmation fights, despite the high rhetoric offered by nominated jurists, have always been fronts in the culture wars and contests for political office. Now that the curtain has been pulled on this particular nomination, Kavanaugh—by appearing in a prime-time TV interview, and in casting the accusations, incredibly, as a conspiracy against him orchestrated by allies of the Clintons—has shown himself to be exactly the political operative he was when he was working under Ken Starr and as a hired gun for the Bush Administration. He is, backed into a corner and stripped of his robes, the quintessential Fox News man—both gladiator and perpetual victim, another “white male,” as Graham called himself on Friday, told to shut up and go away by feminists and a vindictive left. Belligerent, wounded, proud, timorous, and entitled—a man given to gaslighting and dissembling under pressure. He is a personality type well known to victimized women and familiar now to all who have followed American politics in the age of Trump. Should he be confirmed, he will have the power to color rulings from the highest court in the land with the biases and emotionality he has revealed this past week until, if he so chooses, he drops dead.

As of now, it’s possible that Kavanaugh never gets there. But, the misconduct allegations aside, Kavanaugh’s conduct at Thursday’s hearing should have raised new questions for conservatives about his temperament and judiciousness, questions that might themselves justify pulling Kavanaugh’s nomination, albeit to choose another nominee from a short list of conservative picks curated by the Administration. But the Trump Administration hasn’t signalled a willingness to withdraw, and establishment conservatives have mounted outrageous, Trumpian defenses of Kavanaugh, even as Trump himself has been uncharacteristically muted on the saga by comparison.

Conspiracy theories about Kavanaugh’s accusers—that Ramirez was an agent of George Soros, for instance, or that Kavanaugh’s mother, a district-court judge, had ruled against Ford’s parents in a foreclosure case—were offered not only by the likes of the Daily Caller and Trumpists at the site Big League Politics this week but also by the NeverTrumper Erick Erickson, who has called Ford a “partisan hack,” and a reporter for National Review. It was Ed Whelan—who heads something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is a man Washington conservatives consider “a sober-minded straight shooter,” according to Politico—who potentially defamed a Georgetown Prep alumnus with unfounded speculation about a Kavanaugh “doppelgänger,” a theory that could have originated on the right-wing message boards that birthed Pizzagate and are now fuelling QAnon. The kind of discrediting rhetoric that was deployed by supporters of Trump and Roy Moore in the wake of allegations against them—that the charges had come after too many years, that the women bear blame or should be regarded skeptically for being in situations in which abuse might take place—was let loose by respected figures like the National Review editor, Rich Lowry. “Why,” he asked, of Swetnick, on Wednesday, “would she constantly attend parties where she believed girls were being gang-raped?” And the Times’ Bari Weiss and the former Bush Administration press secretary Ari Fleischer, both on the center-right, were among those who suggested that Kavanaugh should be advanced even if the allegations levelled by Ford are true.

It is often argued by this crowd that broad criticisms of the right risk pushing sensible conservatives toward Trumpism. But the events of the past two weeks have made plain just how illusory and superficial the differences between the respectable establishment and the Trumpists really are. For at least the second time in as many years, the vast majority of the conservative movement has abandoned all pretenses to sobriety and civility on behalf of a tainted nominee. And it cannot be said now, as it was in November, 2016, that the man in question is the best or only option for those committed to conservative policy objectives. Backing Brett Kavanaugh is a choice conservatives have made over viable alternatives—qualified conservative candidates who could be spirited through the nomination process before November’s elections or in the lame-duck session by a Republican Senate that has already proved itself capable of sidestepping the required procedural hurdles. They have chosen this course because the Kavanaugh nomination has presented the movement with a golden opportunity to accomplish two things more valuable, evidently, than merely placing another conservative on the court: standing against the new culture of accountability for sexual abuse and, at least as important, thumbing their noses at an angry and despairing Democratic Party.