In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation. Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?

Who said that?  Karl Marx?  Vladimir Lenin?  Danny Glover?  George Clooney?  Barak Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm)?  Nope.  It was Obama’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan.  The quote was a part of her senior thesis, written almost thirty years ago while an undergraduate at Princeton. The title of the thesis: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”.

Like Obama’s first Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan is a New Yorker and a Princeton graduate.  She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side – a neighborhood where, she wrote in her college newspaper, “nobody ever admits to voting Republican.”  Her father was a tenants’ rights lawyer; her mother was a grade school teacher.

Kagan received her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton in 1981. She attended Worcester College, Oxford, as Princeton’s Daniel M. Sachs Graduating Fellow, and received an M. Phil. in 1983. She then attended Harvard Law School, where she was supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude in 1986.

Kagan clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1986 to 1987. In 1988, she clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.  After that, she worked as an associate in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly from 1989 to 1991.

Kagan began her academic career at the University of Chicago Law School. There,  she became an assistant professor in 1991 and a tenured professor of law in 1995.    While there, she met a young, part-time instructor named Barry Obama, who was getting his start in the local political scene.  Kagan received the graduating students’ award for teaching excellence in 1993.

From 1995 to 1999, Kagan served in the White House, first as Associate Counsel to the President (1995-96) and then as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council (1997-99).

There, Kagan gave her opinion on a wide number of complicated issues.  Clinton senior adviser Rahm Emanuel reportedly ended numerous conversations each day with:

Well, Elena better come up with some policy!

She helped defend Clinton from the Travelgate scandal and worked on issues including welfare, hate crimes, race and tobacco regulation.

Her stances were reflected in memos and other written documents.

The first of those memos emerged late Monday when the Associated Press unearthed a memo written by Kagan in 1997 advising Bubba to ban late-term abortions.

Monday, Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee did not divulge how they’ll approach the memos. Recent history indicates they will have to fight hard to get to see the memos in question.

Funny, when Dubya  nominated John Roberts to the court in 2005, then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter threatened the White House saying that he would issue subpoenas for Roberts’s memos from his time in the Reagan White House and in the Justice Department if they were not produced.  The White House caved in and  produced them.

On Monday, only one Senate Republican openly called for the Kagan memos to be released.

Girlie-men.

The White House said Monday it will not immediately release the memos.

I’m shocked, I tell you.  Shocked.

Kagan came to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor in 1999 and became Professor of Law in 2001.  She was appointed Dean of the Law School in 2003.  While there, she argued in favor of banning the ROTC from campus.  (What a patriot.)   She was confirmed as the 45th Solicitor General of the United States in March 2009.

A much-discussed question about this new Supreme Court Nominee concerns her sexuality.