Must the particular always conform to the general?

Yes, for ideologues -- even in the Depp-Heard case

Alger Hiss was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Clarence Thomas was accused of making sex-related comments to a subordinate. Bret Kavanaugh was accused of having assaulted a girl decades earlier when both were teenagers.

Any hope of rationally deciding whether these claims were true required an exploration of the particular, highly individualized facts of the cases. Ideologically-based views about how the world works, or should, might help one form an initial impression about the truthfulness of the allegations, but their usefulness ended there.

Yet, in all three controversies, conclusions conformed to ideology. Conservatives were nearly unanimous in deciding that Hess was guilty of spying and that Thomas and Kavanaugh were innocent of sexual misconduct. Nearly all on the left, with the exception of some staunchly anti-communist liberals in the Hiss case, reached the opposite conclusions.

Now, we can add such another controversy to the list — Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard.

“‘Men Always Win’: Survivors ‘Sickened’ by the Amber Heard Verdict” reads a headline in Rolling Stone. The Root moans: “Amber Heard Verdict Sends a Message to Black Women Everywhere.” The subtitle to that article is: “If the mistreatment of a wealthy blonde haired, blue-eyed white actress is ridiculed by the world, what does that mean for Black women? “ (One answer is they shouldn’t lie on the witness stand, but I’m getting ahead of myself. )

On the right, some seemed reflexively to take Depp’s side. House Judiciary Committee Republicans celebrated Depp’s victory, even though Depp once joked about killing Donald Trump. I sense that their jubilation had more to do with taking a side in the culture war than with a studious examination of the trial record.

Even if everything the left believed in 1950 about public policy and the excesses of post World War II anti-communism had been true, Alger Hiss might still have spied for Russia. (I think it has now been established that, in all likelihood, he did.) Even if everything the left believes about feminism and the prevalence of sexual harassment (other than the absurdity that women always tell the truth) is accurate in general, Clarence Thomas, Bret Kavanaugh, and/or Johnny Depp might not have engaged in the particular conduct their accusers alleged.

What Hiss, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Depp did or didn’t do can only be determined by a careful examination of the evidence. Ordinarily, such an examination merely gets one close to the truth. But ideologically-based judgments don’t accomplish even this. They’re essentially worthless in determining what occurred in a particular case.

Depp’s case differs from the other three because it did not relate directly to politics. Certainly, nothing as important as filling a Supreme Court vacancy was at stake. That’s why at the Washington Post, for example, developments at the Depp trial were reported in the “Style” section.

But the “political” has expanded to the point where a trial that once would have been of interest only in gossip columns now produces dire pronouncements about jeopardy to “survivors” and to black women generally.

The Depp case differs from those of Thomas and Kavanaugh (but not that of Hess) in another respect. It was decided by a jury, as opposed to that most partisan of bodies — the U.S. Senate.

The jury believed Depp, not Heard, on the key allegations. Did it decide the case correctly?

I don’t know. I didn’t watch a minute of the trial, though I did read about it on almost a daily basis.

I gather there was evidence from which the jury could have found that Depp physically abused Heard, as a judge in England did. However, that doesn’t mean the jury erred in reaching the opposite conclusion.

I also gather that there were inconsistencies in Heard’s testimony from which the jury could have concluded that she wasn’t testifying truthfully on key disputed matters. Indeed, her lack of credibility seems to have been decisive.

If I have a prejudice that applies to this case, it’s faith in juries. To be sure, juries don’t always reach the correct verdict. The Depp-Heard jury might have gotten it wrong.

However, I have more confidence in the ability of a jury that hears all of the evidence in a lengthy trial to reach the right conclusion about what happened in that particular dispute than I do in the ability of stakeholders in the #MeToo movement and their adversaries in the culture wars to reach it..