From the National Review.
The Daily Princetonian has an illuminating article on the young Elena Kagan, Class of ’81. Under the tutelage of Sean Wilentz — lefty historian, friend of the Clintons, and notorious Bush-basher — Kagan wrote a thesis called “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933,” which first raised eyebrows when Kagan was being considered for Souter’s seat last year:
“Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness,” she wrote in her thesis. “Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation.”
She called the story of the socialist movement’s demise “a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America … In unity lies their only hope.”
Much of the rest of the article is concerned with friends and colleagues from Kagan’s Princeton days defending her politics as ”mainstream,” e.g.
“I don’t remember her participating in marching, protesting, things like that,” [one colleague] said. “I would probably describe her back then — her politics — as progressive and thoughtful but well within the mainstream of the … sort of liberal, democratic, progressive tradition, and everything with lower case.”
But there is another revealing glimpse, via an opinion piece Kagan wrote in the wake of the 1980 elections. Kagan avows herself a liberal, and expresses her wish that the future bring “American disillusionment with conservative programs” and a “more leftist left.”
“I absorbed … liberal principles early,” she said. “More to the point, I have retained them fairly intact to this day.”
In the piece, Kagan also expressed her dissatisfaction with the state of the political left at the time, lamenting the demise of “real Democrats — not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days” and the success of “anonymous but Moral Majority-backed … avengers of ‘innocent life’ and the B-1 Bomber, these beneficiaries of a general turn to the right and a profound disorganization on the left.”
She hoped that the future would “be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore.”
You can read the whole thing here.
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