Clues from Princeton..Does Kagan's "Socialism" thesis reveal her as … a moderate?

Interesting..


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), and which suggests some identification with the aims of her socialist research subjects


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