Reaganite Independent: Elena Kagan Personal Life

10 May 2010

Elena Kagan Personal Life

The blogosphere is abuzz with stories re. Obama's inexperienced Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan personal life- as a matter of fact Google Trends actually has the term "Elena Kagan Personal Life" as the hottest search item today in the US.

But Left Coast Rebel is going a step further to get to what really matters re. Elena Kagan's pending confirmation hearing:

Kagan’s undergraduate years at Princeton reveals a young woman who, even if restrained, was passionate about political life. Her senior thesis, the editorials published under her tenure as editorial chairman of The Daily Princetonian and her campus activities, as well as the words of those who worked closely with her at Princeton, shed light on Kagan’s commitment to political activism and her liberal beliefs.

A history major, Kagan had a strong interest in political history — especially labor movements and radical politics — and was passionately committed to her studies. History professor Sean Wilentz, who advised Kagan on her senior thesis, described her as “one of the most extraordinary people I’ve met in my life, let alone teaching at Princeton.”

Under Wilentz’s direction, Kagan spent her senior year conducting research for her thesis on the history of the socialist movement, which was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900–1933.” Her thesis has been criticized by her opponents for revealing sympathies with the Socialist Party and became a source of controversy when she was a potential nominee for Associate Justice David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court last spring — a position which instead went to Sonia Sotomayor ’76 — and when she was nominated for her current position of solicitor general in January 2009.

“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.”

More updates today at here at Reaganite Republican, and as well at allied site Left Coast Rebel...