Collective Conscious

“I would like to thank my brother Marc, whose involve­ment in rad­i­cal causes led me to explore the his­tory of Amer­i­can rad­i­cal­ism in the hope of clar­i­fy­ing my own polit­i­cal ideas.”

Elena Kagan’s words sound like a tar­get on her back for the right to try and bring her down. But will they? While the reac­tion in blog com­ments (and the orig­i­nal attack by Red­State, for exam­ple) has been pre­dictable, there’s not the expected all-​​out attempt to cast her as an avowed social­ist with the goal of sub­vert­ing the entire Con­sti­tu­tion or what­ever lib­er­als do these days. What good is it, then, to dredge up her work from 28 years ago and sug­gest that 1) it implies she was a social­ist then and 2) that she is now?

Well, it’s not very good at all. The paper is sim­ply not that inter­est­ing, in the polit­i­cal sense. I don’t even know how peo­ple got through all 130 pages to post some mildly inter­est­ing quotes from a broad his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the move­ment. If that’s the most damn­ing thing that can be pulled out of it by some­one really really look­ing, then there’s no fuss at all.

Given the atti­tude toward social­ism, espe­cially on the right, why not make an effort to learn more about it, any­way? The decr­ial of “Europe” and the “wel­fare state” by con­ser­v­a­tives may have rhetor­i­cal appeal, but it’s first impor­tant to find out what that actu­ally means, and why so many peo­ple lead happy, pro­duc­tive lives under the socially-​​oriented sys­tems in nations from Britain to Scandinavia.

Kagan’s work is an attempt at look­ing why the same move­ment failed in the United States even as it was suc­ceed­ing in cre­at­ing mas­sive, suc­cess­ful national insur­ance schemes in many of the major Euro­pean nations. This, we should care about. This, we should know. This, we should seek to understand.

(Photo: Har­vard Law Record)