Once More Into the Elena Kagan Thesis Frenzy!

Last week, I read Elena Kagan's Princeton thesis—the whole document, not just the oft-quoted personal soundbites from her preface and conclusion—and found it to be an evenhanded assessment of the Socialist Party's brief window of effective politicking in New York during the early 20th century. In fact, the bulk of her academic work paints a picture of radicals demanding more change than the American system wants to handle, which in turn causes leftist infighting that frustrates the progress of even moderate liberal goals. It's easy enough to read Kagan's work, and look at her mostly cautious demeanor in the years since, and surmise that her takeaway from the project had as much to do with radicalism's practical drawbacks as anything else. But then RedState.com put the whole thing online, declaring it her love letter to the Third International. Next, Princeton demanded that RedState pull it down (citing copyright), and now the White House is promising to release it under the "exception rule," along with another Oxford thesis, all in the name of transparency.

So perhaps this issue will thrash around for another news cycle or two, despite its not really deserving all the ink. But while we're hyperventilating about the supposed relevance of a 29-year-old, undergraduate history thesis to the business of being confirmed to the Supreme Court, it's curious to find that Chief Justice John Roberts once studied dirty commies as an undergraduate, too! And The Weekly Standard even broke the story! From its August 8, 2005 issue:

Roberts entered Harvard with sophomore standing; his first year, he won the William Scott Ferguson award—given annually to the sophomore history major who writes an "outstanding essay" as part of a class assignment. To win a second-year award in your first year is no small thing. Roberts's essay was entitled "Marxism and Bolshevism: Theory and Practice." Unfortunately, no public copy of it seems to exist. Maybe Sen. Schumer will subpoena it from the nominee's private papers.

Hah! When will those Democrats stop making mountains out of decades-old academic molehills? Meantime, back on planet Earth, the truth is that plenty of people (even conservative outlets, when it's a conservative they're talking about) realize it's beyond dense to paint a Supreme Court nominee as a Marxist on the basis of an academic thesis that treats Marxism seriously. But in this post-SEO world, the proximity of a Democratic nominee's name to a bugaboo keyword like "socialism" turns out to be irresistible, and so here we are.