Another hit from the Elena Kagan archive: an article she wrote for the Daily Princetonian a week after Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 election. The final graph of that piece contains her hope that the 1984 election will bring in a “more leftist left” than the Carter administration:
Bonus quote dripping with condescension toward pro-lifers: “Even after the returns came in, I found it hard to conceive of the victories of these anonymous but Moral Majority-backed opponents of Senators Church, McGovern, Bayh and Culver, these avengers of ‘innocent life’ and the B-1 Bomber, these beneficiaries of a general turn to the right and a profound disorganization on the left.” The scare quotes on innocent life are in the original, though I’m not quite sure what they’re meant to convey. In response to the earlier quotes posted here from Kagan’s thesis, Princeton professor Sean Willentz has come to the defense of his former student. He tells Salon’s Alex Koppelman:
For the record, the Sachs fellowship is awarded in the fall — she’d already won the award long before she turned in her thesis. But as to whether she was sympathetic to the socialists, the thesis offered the same plea for unity among radical socialists (“Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.”) that she offers in this op-ed on behalf of liberals. Nowhere do we see the young Kagan pleading for unity among Conservatives as they mindlessly organize on behalf of B-1 Bombers and “innocent life.” Thanks to the Princeton University Library, you can read the
whole article here
