Clues from Princeton

Imagine you’re a right-wing think tank opposition researcher tackling a Democratic president’s latest Supreme Court nominee. You’ve just been handed her college thesis. Its title? “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933.” Or, put another way: Bullseye! Right? Sound the alarms. Glenn Beck, report to the Danger Chamber (or whatever it’s called). But then—and this may not come as a shock to anyone familiar with the partisan blogosphere or cable news—maybe the total tonnage of TNT suggested by the readymade headline turns out to be something of a fizzle.

It’s instructive to note that, in the last year or so since Kagan’s name started kicking around as being on the shortlist for Obama court picks, her thesis has been out in the world. (You can search for it on this Princeton database.) And in that time, there have been precious few morsels from the meat of her 130-plus page thesis that have been objected to from observers on the right. If it were chock full of lamentations on behalf of Trotsky, you’d think they’d have been itemized to death by now. And yet, those raising the red shirt of socialism on this issue tend to pick one of two passages to highlight, neither one of which comes from the main body of Kagan’s scholarly text. (The Weekly Standard hit them both over a year ago, in a blog post. National Review Online repeated one of the by-now familiar quotes this week.)

The first morsel comes from her dedication page, in which Kagan identifies a brother “whose involvement in radical causes” as the inspiration for her interest in the topic of the Socialist Party’s quick (though moderate) rise and rapid fall in the early 20th century. Well, fine, but we’re just talking about Kagan’s brother’s “radical causes” here, not Kagan’s. And are we really going to make caring about something that a member of your family has been involved with into a disgraceful form of locating one’s academic inspiration? (We’d have a lot fewer academic papers, at least.)

The other passage that pricks up conservative ears comes from Kagan’s conclusion—a more personal-sounding note that comes after her 130-plus pages of meticulous and balanced academic work (which no one has been objecting to as dangerous, remember) suggests some identification with the aims of her socialist research subjects:

And then, a couple of pages later, there is a hint of lament at the failure of the socialist movement—or at least lessons learned by their political shortcomings:

But read those two paragraphs again: the first two sentences up in the first selection are just facts, plainly stated. And the word “sad,” in the second graph, refers to the prospects of a broad, left-liberal desire to make society more equitable. This may be difficult to understand if you’ve only read her acknowledgments and conclusion, while ignoring the rest of the text. And yet Kagan’s thesis itself spends quite a lot of time in its early stages detailing the offensive working conditions in New York sweatshops—ranging from obscene working hours to sexual abuse—the banishment of which we largely take for granted today. You don’t have to be a radical to lament the fact that the activists who pushed back against that noxious state of affairs descended into bickering and, per one of Kagan’s juicier historical finds, chair-throwing at meetings.

Perhaps this is why nothing about this came up during the Senate confirmation hearings after Kagan was nominated to become President Obama’s solicitor general. Because there’s simply not anything at all that’s radical here. But as long as we’re armchair philosophizing about what a 29-year-old thesis may reveal to us about Kagan’s present political philosophy (and as long as my editor makes me speed read a 150-page PDF during lunch!), let’s consider the reverse for a moment. Instead of exposing her as a radical, what if it gives us clues as to her moderation? At one point, Kagan discusses a moderate Socialist Party member complaining about German-educated doctrinaire Marxists:

Let’s see, then: suspicious of closed circles, moderate-minded, and willing to work with foes to find common ground. Sounds rather a lot like what we’ve heard about Kagan herself, right? The charmer who finds friends on both sides of the aisle, etc. etc. What if, 29 years ago, when Kagan was researching the dismal outputs of fierce radicalism as a vehicle for left-liberal political change, she came down with the moderates as opposed to the radicals? It doesn’t make for great cable-news outrage, but it’s at least as compelling a hypothesis as one borne from reading only the acknowledgments and conclusion from her senior thesis.