The way to think about the political riptides of Kavanaugh Witch Hunt is through the lens of anthropology. Imagine that we are bug-hunters observing the Noble Savages of a heretofore undiscovered tribe in the Amazon rainforest.

This is what human communal life was like before the invention of the law: life in villages where everybody knows everybody’s business and remembers everything -- or think they remember everything -- that was ever said or done for the last 20 years.

And all that matters is, my tribe against your tribe. To the death.

Some ways back, a pack of notorious patriarchs decided that this was not perhaps the best way to advance the interests of trade, and so they decreed the Common Law, which is nothing more than a bunch of lawyers deciding, in a tedious and boring process, how to soften the barbarous instincts of tribal conflict with the notion we now call “due process.”

So, in our modern Anglo-American legal system we have abandoned the old form of conflict resolution -- of my tribe versus your tribe and no holds barred -- with a new form, the trial at law featuring judge, prosecution and defense, rules of evidence, all conducted before a jury. When you can get justice from a court then you don’t need “my tribe right or wrong” anymore.

So why are we all behaving like hunter-gatherer tribesmen and tribeswomen of olden times? I explain it all with my theory of the left as the Great Reaction.

Here’s how the left got us here.

When people leave their little tribal village and migrate to the big world of the city and its marketplace for goods and for labor, it is terrifying. Sure, everyone wants to get out of the poverty and the stifling hierarchy of the village, but when they get to the city they panic and immediately hunker down into a tribal ethnic enclave and their young men form an urban gang to protect their tribal ethnic enclave. When these people go to work in a factory, what do they do? They form a labor union to “protect” themselves from the terrifying power of their employer.

But eventually people will assimilate to the culture of the city.  If not for the left.

It has been the world-historical role of the left to power the neo-tribalism of city newcomers into an almost world-conquering secular religion. Marx and Gramsci and Marcuse and Alinsky sold the frightened new arrivals in the city a fake class -- and now gender and race -- tribalism to replace the tribalism of the kindred they left behind in their ancestral village. And it hasn’t helped a bit.

This is nothing less than a world-historical tragedy. Without the left, the workers would have slowly muddled through and become competent city dwellers, much as I describe in my Road to the Middle Class. Alas, no. Instead of slowly assimilating to the bourgeois tribe, the left taught the workers to form a class tribe, led of course by lefties. And so the working class became class soldiers, drafted by the left into a global class war. What a cool idea, for the left.

What we are seeing right now with the feminists and #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen and the Kavanaugh moment is another tragedy, midwived by the left: a gender tribal war.

In the official narrative, we were to hear women roar as they stormed the citadel of male patriarchy, to demolish male supremacy, let women control their fertility, and climb up the corporate ladder. Yeah, right.

With a modicum of goodwill and good sense, women could have gently entered into the public square and given to it, in the words of German sociologist Georg Simmel, “a more feminine sensibility.” But the left doesn’t believe in that. So they launched a gender war on everything middle-class -- marriage, morality, abortion, divorce, microaggressions, safe spaces -- and what have we got?

Well, I would say we have got the rather sad case of Christine Blasey Ford. Whatever really happened to her in her teenage years we may never know. Today, and forever after, she is a victim, a draftee thrown into the meat-grinder of the left’s gender trench war.

In my view, the women believers in the left’s secular religion of feminism are being led into darkness in exactly the same way the workers were led into a box canyon of class warfare a hundred years ago.

That’s the problem with all this neo-tribal warfare, of class, of race, of gender, this “culture of activism.” When the “activists” have finished using their “little darlings” for their power games they abandon them on the side of the road, hungry and wounded, rather like Christine Blasey Ford this very minute.

My question is: how much longer are we going to allow the left to continue with its destructive tribalism of class and race and gender? We moderns are better than that.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.