Trial by zeitgeist: at first, most Americans believed Clarence Thomas; now most believe Anita Hill. What changed?

THERE'S nothing like a double standard for waging ideological warfare. All those messy questions of conscience and fair play: presto! Moot, gone, vanished. What difference do they make if you are ontologically in the right? In such cases, your opponents don't deserve the same consideration that you enjoy.

This of course is the revolutionary's credo. But it has also, disturbingly, become the basic operating assumption of the left-liberal establishment. It helps constitute the climate of opinion, the moral atmosphere, on issues from abortion and homosexulity to race relations, free speech, and economic policy. Accordingly, the campaign for the conscience of America is less and less a debate about desirable goals and efficient policies--politics in the old sense--and more and more an all-out ideological battle in which the self-declared forces of fight confront the putative emissaries of darkness.

Consider the televised spectacle of Anita Hill testifying against Clarence Thomas. This was surely among the most inglorious episodes of public deliberation in recent decades. It also offered a perfect illustration of trial--and conviction--by Zeitgeist.

I happened to be in London when the hearings hotted up. I remember with patriotic embarrassment the sniggering bewilderment of the British press as an obscure law professor with a bad employment history trotted out Long Dong Silver, pubic hair in the soda pop, and all the rest. Who could credit Anita Hill's amazing stories about a man who had emerged unblemished from five FBI and Senate investigations, not to mention the prying, gossipy investigations by all of the major "news" organizations (a rigorous scrutiny that Miss Hill herself never suffered)?

By the time the Senate hearings were over, most Americans--by a factor of 2 to 1--believed that Clarence Thomas was telling the truth. Today more people believe that Anita Hill was telling the truth. What happened? No new facts have come to light. There have been no damaging revelations about Justice Thomas or extenuating discoveries about Anita Hill. Why have people changed their minds?

It boils down to this: If you repeat something often enough, it comes to have the ring of truth. Anita Hill was in the right: necessarily. Victim, heroine, scholar, brilliant jurist, and bright hope for the downtrodden everywhere. This is what we all heard from the media again and again. Never mind that her performance as a lawyer was judged by some of her peers to be "substandard" or that much of her testimony was uncorroborated. Quoth Hillary Clinton at the time: "All women who care about equality of opportunity, about integrity and morality in the workplace, are in Professor Hill's debt." Gee. And it follows--don't you see?--that supporters of Thomas must not care about equality of opportunity, that they must be indifferent to "integrity and morality in the workplace."

The Brock Case

IN THE foreword to his bestselling book The Real Anita Hill, David Brock correctly observed that "to question or criticize Anita Hill is tantamount to breaking a potent political and cultural taboo." But one wonders if even Mr. Brock realized just how potent this taboo had become. Indeed, the history of the reception of The Real Anita Hill is an object lesson in the operation of conspiracy by Zeitgeist. Bork (who had briefly been her teacher at Yale) as her "mentor and friend." And a law professor acquainted with Miss Hill remarked that "I suspect she's a card-carrying Republican. She is cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas."

But she isn't. Nor is she a Republican. Nor was Robert Bork her "mentor and friend." Nor is she "politically a conservative." In an interview on 60 Minutes, she acknowledged that she was a Democrat (to the patent surprise of Ed Bradley, her interviewer). And the Wall Street Journal, reporting her activities as an advisor to a feminist group at the Oklahoma Law School, quoted one former member who recalled that "at our meetings, if it wasn't Reagan-bashing it was Bush-bashing."

So she's a Democrat. What difference does it make? In an intelligent notice of The Real Anita Hill for The New Republic, Jean Bethke Elshtain makes fun of Mr. Brock for having pointed out that Miss Hill was not a "Reagan Republican, but a |registered Democrat' (horror!)." But Professor Elshtain's levity is misplaced. Miss Hill's political affiliation and ideological convictions became important the moment they were used as ammunition against Clarence Thomas. Miss Hill did nothing to correct the impression that she shared Mr. Thomas's political outlook-until it became a liability to her lucrative career as a feminist martyr. And the Left was happy to go along.

Did Someone Say |Facts'?

NOT THAT logic or an elementary respect for the facts have played a conspicuous part in the expostulations of the pro-Hill lobby. Indeed, much of the comment borders on the incredible. Some of it crosses the border. A handy compendium of border-crossings is contained in the attractively titled Raceing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited with an introduction by Toni Morrison.

This volume provides a veritable feverchart of the Zeitgeist on Anita Hill. It is also strong evidence that many of Miss Hill's supporters secretly know that they are on shaky ground. For instead of challenging the factual basis of Mr. Brock's account, as Misses Mayer and Abramson at least pretended to do, many of the contributors deny that "facts" have anything much to do with the case. Consider the following passage from Homi K. Bhabha's contribution to this volume. I apologize in advance to the English language.

In providing a knowledge of sexual harassment 

as a structural endemic condition

that finds its social form as affective,

even psychic reality, Hill has subtly complicated

the question of "truth." Thomas

can no longer just confirm or deny the allegations,

because the widening circle of

guilt makes that option futile, or purely

formalistic. The very system of truth and

falsity within which he operates, as part

of the common culture, is founded on the

evasion of the endemic reality of women's

exploitation. And likewise Anita Hill

must be believed not because she was

personally speaking the truth, but because

her affective language is symptomatic

of the collective sexual condition of

working women.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It also is pernicious. But this is exactly the sort of thing that passes muster as "critical theory" in the academy today. The rule is: if the facts don't accord with your politics, declare the very notion of factual truth moot. Then it is a simple matter to "construct" the truth according to your wishes. This is the bottom line, the "cash value" of "social construction" theory.

The campaign to resurrect Anita Hill as a feminist heroine has been relentless and has proceeded on many fronts. It has resulted in the unfounded discrediting of Clarence Thomas in the public eye and the unwarranted dismissal of a perspicacious work of investigative journalism. Even more damaging has been the erosion of truth--of public knowledge about what really happened in this grisly episode--and a further undermining of public confidence in the democratic process. The facts have not changed. Clarence Thomas still stands exonerated by numerous governmental and media investigations; Anita Hill still stands exposed as guilty of dubious behavior and questionable responses under oath. But the Zeitgeist has spoken. Liberals who hope to pacify everyone by announcing that there is "truth on both sides"--that in some sense Justice Thomas and Miss Hill were both telling the truth--should think about this. Is there a single piece of evidence they can adduce to impugn the substance of Thomas's testimony? I'd like to see it. The English critic William Hazlitt, writing about the sudden decline of a literary reputation, noted that nothing about the writer's achievement had changed. "Were we fools then," Hazlitt asked, "or are we dishonest now?"