With the inquisition of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s adolescence and high school yearbook a precedent, a serious question arises:

Has the #MeToo movement ushered in an era in which the childhood foibles people appointed or elected to significant public office will be investigated?

A friend who is the graduate of another famous, elite preparatory school wrote to me, and I quote the message with permission:

The campus of Georgetown Prep resembles other elite private schools (source: Wikipedia)

I just received an email from the XXXX School's current headmaster, sent to all alumni, intending to open up a conversation about times that situations have been "unsafe" between students and inviting people to report. This is a dangerous game, and I hope he knows what he's wading in too. Extending #MeToo back in time to people’s high school interactions raises the specter of a sort of mutually-assured destruction….

I don't believe Brett Kavanaugh did the things of which he's accused. I do believe that similar things absolutely occurred among his cohort, up to and including the sort of things that Swetnick alleged. I know because I went to a similar high school and those were the sorts of rumors that were bandied about every Monday. There were always girls crying about the things that had occurred at weekend parties (to which I was never invited, having been a sort of self-selected outcast), and of course they went back to those same parties the next week.

It's hard to tease out who was a perpetrator and who was a victim from such a scenario. Most of the very well-off kids I went to school with, many of whom probably subjected each other to all sorts of casual and sometimes vicious cruelties, are now successful, prominent, and hold reams of kompromat on each other, should airing such grievances out now be considered acceptable.

Now imagine the situation that faces the DC elite, many of whom went to these schools (and have kids at those schools today), and I think you can see why this is likely not to go too much further. Entirely too many people are potentially tainted -- but the vast majority have also, well, moved on. It also doesn't help that parents were usually looking the other way, or enabling the sort of alcohol-fueled behavior that caused people to do bad things. From my experience with the set at [XXXX School] who were always implicated in these sorts of rumors, their parents were usually the ones buying the booze. And some of those parents were no less than 9 sheets to the wind any time I saw them, too.

I want people to behave better. I hope that people reflect on what this window into high school behavior has shown them, and realize that participation in boozing and teenage sex, with all its attendant complications, is optional.

Sadly, I don't think the correct lessons will be drawn, but the mututally assured destruction my friend mentions will influence behavior.