Brett Kavanaugh confirmation may be the midterm boost Republicans need

After the sound of fury of the Senate hearings, how much has actually changed beyond firing up the conservative base?

On Saturday afternoon the inevitable finally happened, Brett Kavanaugh was voted on to the bench of the supreme court on the basis of a partisan vote. The only exception was Joe Manchin, the nominally Democratic senator from West Virginia, who did not let his serious concerns about the accusations of sexual assault and Kavanaugh’s temperament stand in the way of supporting his lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful political institutions of the country.

As after virtually every political rollercoaster – and there are far too many these days – commentators are quick to claim that the Kavanaugh hearings have changed the country forever. On the liberal side, optimistic liberals claim that Kavanaugh accuser “Christine Blasey Ford Changed Everything”, ie that #MeToo is only beginning and enraged women will no longer stay silent. On the opposite side of the polarized political spectrum, paranoid conservatives claim the hearings have unleashed a “period of neo-McCarthyist witch-trial-style moral panic”.

Views that proclaim fundamental change are, of course, far more popular than those claiming much will remain the same. That’s why we read them on an almost daily basis. But they are also usually wrong. Politics do change, but most of the times slowly and steadily, with high-profile events being at best cathartic rather than game-changers.

I don’t even think the Kavanaugh hearings were cathartic, except perhaps in the short term. More than anything, they confirmed political processes that have been ongoing for years, sometimes decades, and have become more pronounced, and thereby more visible, during Donald Trump’s presidency.

First, and most depressingly, the Kavanaugh hearings showed that absolutely everything is a partisan issue today, even sexual assault. According to a YouGov poll, 73% of Democrats believed Dr Ford, while 74% of Republicans believed judge Kavanaugh. Independents, a growing group, believed neither – only one-third believed either. Moreover, the pollsters found that the hearings had little effect on people’s attitudes.

Second, the whole affair confirmed that the Republican party has become Trump’s party. Not that Kavanaugh was a Trumpian candidate. Like virtually every other Trump appointee, Kavanaugh is a mainstream conservative who would also have been in contention under a President Cruz or Rubio. The Trumpian aspect was not the nominee but the nomination. Rather than backing down under pressure, and replace Kavanaugh with one of the many other conservative judges who could deliver the same outcomes on the supreme court, the Republican party embraced the confrontation and defended their candidate by attacking the opposition. Even Kavanaugh himself launched a Trumpian attack on the Democrats in his defense testimony to Ford’s accusation of sexual assault.

In these attacks, crazy rightwing conspiracy theories, normally only expressed by radical right fringes of the Republican party, like Steve King and Donald Trump Jr, now became official party position. Republicans from Senator David Perdue of Georgia to the Senate judiciary committee chairman, Chuck Grassley, spoke of “paid protesters” and, parroting the rightwing media frenzy, several high-ranking Republicans, including President Trump, even embraced the antisemitic conspiracy theory that George Soros was behind it all.

Third, the Kavanaugh affair again showed that white women will not save the Democrats. The Republican senator Susan Collins once again broke the hearts of many naive liberals, by voting like a Republican rather than a Democrat. But it could also be seen in polls, which show, once again, that education and race, much more than gender, are the key variables in party support. As Lucia Graves pervasively argued in these pages, American women are not a monolith, and (married) white women have been supporting patriarchal and rightwing politics for centuries.

But even if the Kavanaugh hearings mainly confirmed the dangerous trend of polarization in America, it could have short-term political effects, most notably with regard to the midterms next month. Again, speculation is rife and highly partisan. Liberals believe Republicans will face a backlash by outraged women in November, while conservatives believe a backlash of angered “mama bears” will hurt the Democrats.

Before the Kavanaugh affair, the Democratic base, most notably women, was already fired up by months of nativist and sexist policies and rhetoric. It is doubtful they could be fired up even more. Even worse, some might have become discouraged by yet another political defeat, yet another betrayal by “moderate Republicans” and “white women”.

In sharp contrast, before the Kavanaugh hearings, Republicans were worried about a complacent base, comfortable in the Republican party’s complete control of US politics and content with its accomplishments (particularly tax reform), but uninspired by local and regional Republican candidates. The rightwing frenzy over the alleged Democratic “McCarthyism” against a “decent, white, Christian man” has reminded them what is at stake in the midterms.

On the upside, this would mean that the Kavanaugh hearings will give a boost to overall turnout in the midterm elections, itself not an unimportant outcome. But in terms of partisan boost, it will do more for conservative rage than liberal outrage. This means that the Kavanaugh nomination not only created a conservative majority in the supreme court, for several decades, but could also put an end to the Democratic dream of taking the House and Senate.

• Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist