"In the weeks ahead, we’re going to spend a lot of time going over Brett Kavanaugh’s biography — where he’s from and what he’s written. But that’s not the most important way to understand the guy."

Right. Because Kavanaugh, on his own, is completely boring. A normal person hearing the announcement, got excited for 2 seconds before the name was said, then immediately lost interest and moved on. Kavanaugh is a name we'll see for years, merged with other dull names, in Supreme Court opinions that we won't have thought about all that much, because we'll know how they're going to come out. No surprise. No, gee, I wonder how Justice K thinks about these complexities. The new Justice K won't be someone you need to get to know so intimately.

So David Brooks is taking the right tack here:

Kavanaugh is the product of a community. He is the product of a conservative legal infrastructure that develops ideas, recruits talent, links rising stars, nurtures genius, molds and launches judicial nominees. It almost doesn’t matter which Republican is president. The conservative legal infrastructure is the entity driving the whole project. It almost doesn’t even matter if Kavanaugh is confirmed or shot down; there are dozens more who can fill the vacancy, just as smart and just as conservative. 

A judge should seem boring, right? He should seem like a humble servant discovering the meaning of the law and faithfully articulating it. The great accomplishment (described in detail at the link) was to make the conservative view of law feel so completely normal that a judge like Kavanaugh would bore us, instead of seeming like a monstrous outlier, as we were made to see Robert Bork.

I vividly remember this depiction (click to enlarge):

Bork should have been confirmed, of course, and would have been confirmed if there had been a structure around him to explain and defend conservative judges. Brooks explains how in the years since Bork's defeat that structure has been built. But if that had not been needed, Justice Kennedy — about whose swingable moderation liberals wring their hands today — would never have sat on the Court. All these years, Bork would have staked out the right end of the Court, and who knows how much that would have affected all the other Justices and Presidents? Everything would have been different. Perhaps the Federalist Society would not have grown the way it did. Perhaps Bork would not have died of heart disease in 2012, but if he did, would the President who replaced him have been Barack Obama?