Why senators claim to believe Ford — but still side with Kavanaugh

On Wednesday, the day before a hearing on sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Jeff Flake made a speech defending the right of Christine Blasey Ford, the Supreme Court nominee’s accuser, to be heard. “How many times do we have to marginalize and ignore women before we learn that important lesson?” Flake (R-Ariz.) asked, taking issue with President Trump’s questions about why Ford never reported the alleged attempted rape.

This followed a fortnight of sometimes surprising gestures from Kavanaugh’s ideological kin, who also seemed to draw on the language and concepts of the Me Too movement. Trump and his advisers initially avoided questioning Ford’s motives or attacking her personally (until the president exploded out of his box a few days later). Earlier in September, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) claimed that he wanted to give Ford “an opportunity to be heard,” and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) similarly tweeted, “I want to hear ur testimony.” Then there was the doppelganger theory advanced by conservative legal expert Ed Whelan , who argued that Ford had confused two hockey-haired Georgetown Prep students. His point (which he later recanted) was bizarre and possibly libelous, but it didn’t challenge Ford’s basic story of abuse, just her memory of the particulars.

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We are in a bizarre moment: As the strength of the year-old Me Too movement is put to its most public and crucial test yet, Republicans have the political savvy to recognize that they must pay lip service to it, even as they actively campaign against its aims. You could view these concessions as politically motivated to the point of being meaningless. But according to social science research into the complex interaction between social behaviors and privately held views, even self-interested nods at #MeToo may indicate some progress for the movement. Recent, highly publicized cases of sexual harassment and assault have rapidly created a new norm in which it’s toxic to dismiss alleged survivors. Kavanaugh’s allies are responding to that norm, even if they don’t fully agree with its principles. Over time — and with some serious caveats — norms can influence private views, suggesting that even conservative beliefs on sexual harassment are likely to be shaped at least in the long term by #MeToo.

There are many, many examples of norms shifting, sometimes quite abruptly, as institutions tip in one direction or social movements come to fruition: same-sex marriage becoming broadly acceptable after the 2015 Supreme Court decision, the bar lowering for hate speech after Trump’s election. Betsy Levy Paluck, a psychology professor at Princeton, researches “perceived norms” — people’s views about what’s acceptable and what’s not in their social groups. Because these perceptions are subjective, they can be shaped in a way that then shapes behavior, Paluck has found. By way of example, Paluck points to research that people are more likely to recycle after they learn — through an article or in conversation — that many of their peers are recyclers.

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