Recent events have presented Minnesotans with a special opportunity to take their own political temperatures — and to self-diagnose the severity of their individual cases of partisan tribal fever.
The Ellison-Kavanaugh Consistency Test should prove highly predictive as to whether a voter has much hope of recovering normal reasoning powers and leading a healthy ideological life again someday.
The nation's genuinely scary epidemic of tribal fever in the Age of Trump leaves most Americans far less equipped to judge how extensively they've been infected.
Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh was a bitterly polarizing political figure the moment President Donald Trump nominated him to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat of the now-retired Anthony Kennedy, whose "moderate" decisions on a few issues (above all, abortion rights and gay rights), made the prospect of his replacement by a more consistent conservative nothing less than an existential threat to some of modern progressivism's most-prized cultural advances — and thus a thrilling opportunity for the American right.
It's evident that a great many politically aware Americans knew exactly where they stood on Kavanaugh's nomination long before decades-old and late-breaking allegations of sexual assault produced perhaps the ugliest confirmation battle finale in modern history.
Kavanaugh's approval in public polls had started slipping during his contentious initial confirmation hearings — and fell only a few points more after the allegations surfaced.
So it seems clear that relatively few Americans who favored Kavanaugh before the allegations surfaced were convinced by the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford — or at least sufficiently convinced to turn against the nominee.
And that means that many of those who were persuaded by Ford's version of long-ago events — or at least sufficiently persuaded to argue that the charges in themselves should disqualify Kavanaugh — had opposed his nomination earlier on other grounds.