Kavanaugh, to the GOP, is sort of like a collateralized debt obligation: an instrument no one really understands and no one really wants to understand. The more you think about a given CDO — the more closely you scrutinize its trash assets, the longer you contemplate the insane upside-down ziggurat of risk you’re buying into . . . Well, when you stare into the abyss it stares back into you. Kavanaugh’s material weaknesses, as an accountant might say, have always been apparent to anyone who cared to look. But by virtue of his race and gender and the education and upbringing his parents purchased for him, he entered the credibility economy with considerable wealth. And that meant others would grant him credibility, the way having money means you can borrow money. Informal transactions of belief, gentlemen’s agreements that aren’t on the books, propelled him upward as they have propelled so many of the mediocrities of the ruling class. “I never met him,” said Donald Trump on October 2, “but [I’ve] been hearing [about] this guy named Brett Kavanaugh who is, who is like a perfect person, who is destined for the Supreme Court. I’ve heard that for a long time.”

[...]

Perhaps you had thought, as I had, that women were making progress, that our credibility, relative to men’s, was rising. This is in fact occurring. But if progress is radically provisional, it’s not really progress. Another useful thing about Fricker’s “economy” formulation is that it implies the existence of a credibility precariat, to which women belong.