Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court tomorrow, bringing to a close one of the most appalling episodes in American political history. The Democrats’ shameful treatment of Robert Bork in 1987 has distorted our politics–not just the politics of the Supreme Court–for the last 30 years. But the slanders the Democratic Party directed toward Kavanaugh were, if anything, even more disgraceful. We will feel their impact for many years to come.

So, looking to the future, what are the notable features of our political landscape?

1) The validation of violence for political ends. This didn’t start with the Kavanaugh nomination. It has been brewing for a while. Barack Obama famously said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Antifa has been taking Obama at his word for some years.

What we are seeing today is mob action by Democratic Party activists: harassing Republicans when they go out to dinner or walk through airports; busing activists to Republicans’ homes to harass them and frighten their children; invading Republican Congressional offices with threatening mobs; and, in some cases, shooting or violently assaulting Republican office-holders. I wrote yesterday about Kellie Paul’s appeal to Cory Booker to withdraw his incitements to violence. Maxine Waters is another prominent Democrat who has endorsed immoral and potentially illegal harassment of Republicans.

Why are Democrats confident that political violence is a one-way street? Conservatives are, on average, better armed than liberals and–I think it is safe to say–more personally formidable. Yet liberals clearly have no fear that conservatives will respond to their violence and mob intimidation in kind. I think that is because they assume we are better than they are. We care about our country, we value its institutions, and we try to maintain the basic presumption of good faith that underlies our democratic system.

The Democrats are right to think that we are better than they are, but conservatives’ patience is not infinite. The potential for significant political violence is higher today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and perhaps since the Civil War. The Democrats are sowing the wind, and they may reap the whirlwind.

2) The final discrediting of the liberal media. This is nothing new, of course. But the manner in which the liberal press jumped on board with the absurd allegations against Judge Kavanaugh exposed reporters and editors, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, as nothing more than Democratic Party activists. The press publicized the most absurd fabrications about Kavanaugh as though they were news: He organized gang rapes when he was in high school!

And they solemnly declared Christine Ford to be “credible,” when the facts showed that she had massively changed (i.e., fabricated) her story in collaboration with Democratic Judiciary Committee staffers, and when every witness identified by her repudiated her account. The press elevated a transparent liar to the status of a heroine, for political purposes.

Not to mention the ridiculous hypocrisy of smearing a man with the strongest possible reputation on the basis of an unsupported 36-year-old allegation, dating to high school, while studiously ignoring the far more recent and actually true claims of sexual abuse that have been levied against a succession of Democrats. If you are a Democratic Party reporter–as virtually all of them are–any smear will do, as long as it is directed against a Republican. Otherwise, you avert your eyes.

A lot of voters who are perhaps too young to remember Rathergate learned something about the “mainstream” media in the course of the press’s crazed attacks on Judge Kavanaugh.

3) The yawning chasm between our institutions and our people. Not just the press, but America’s institutions in general disgraced themselves by endorsing the Democratic Party’s absurd smear campaign. Take the American Bar Association–please! The liberal ABA has long been a joke when it comes to politics, but to its credit, its committee on nominations unanimously acknowledged that Brett Kavanaugh is “well qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court, its highest rating. But ABA President Robert Carlson, apparently going rogue, authored an anti-Kavanaugh letter. Within the last few hours, it was reported that the ABA is “re-evaluating” its endorsement of Kavanaugh. Of course it is: the ABA is a Democratic Party tool. I know, I was a member for many years.

Then we have the universities. Again, this is nothing new, but the facts are particularly stark, given the thinness of the Democrats’ attacks on Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale and Yale Law School, and after an initial expression of support from those who had anything to do with him at Yale Law School, the worm turned. Academics, including those at Yale, pretty much universally joined the Democrats’ lynch party.

And Kavanaugh has been teaching for some years at Harvard Law School at the invitation of former law school dean and now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. This is because Kavanaugh is universally acknowledged to be a brilliant legal scholar. But 40 Harvard Law professors signed a letter opposing their colleague’s confirmation to the Court, and the law school has announced that Kavanaugh will not be returning as a teacher.

Meanwhile, polls show that most Americans want Kavanaugh to be confirmed. Most people know little about the legal issues that Supreme Court justices address, but they have a basic sense of fairness. It wasn’t hard to see that the Democrats behaved in an outrageous manner, or that Kavanaugh is a brilliant and decent man.

Professors at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School and the like think their opinions should influence the rest of us because they are exceptionally smart and knowledgeable. Does anyone buy that claim anymore? I certainly don’t, and I graduated from Harvard Law School. I agree with Bill Buckley: I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.

4) In that context, Donald Trump is the man of the hour. The incoherent Democrats are reduced to street violence, the press is discredited, our institutions are mostly pathetic. Who benefits? President Donald J. Trump. Trump truly is the man of the hour. Trump has been on to the “fake news” press from the beginning. And if there ever was any fake news, it is Christine Ford’s Democrat-engineered lie. Trump represents normal Americans who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale but have a modicum of common sense, which many professors at those institutions obviously don’t.

Trump nominated a solidly conservative justice to the Supreme Court, and steadfastly stood by him despite the Democrats’ wacko smears. I don’t think the Democrats understand how many millions of people view their smear campaign with contempt, and appreciate President Trump for standing by his nominee.

Who is about to be confirmed. This is a huge victory for those who vote for Republicans but sometimes despair as to whether it does any good. It is victory, not defeat, that motivates voters. Confirmation of a sane, brilliant, non-political justice to to the Supreme Court is a signal victory for normal Americans. And we have Donald J. Trump to thank. His approval rating is surging, as well it should.

I didn’t see this coming two years ago, but President Trump is now the standard-bearer for normal Americans who resist the encroachments of the far Left, which now owns the Democratic Party.