Elena Kagan and the new (unprincipled) elite

Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman had a bit of Jewish triumphalism published recently in the NY Times (“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP“).  Now that the WASPs have gone down to zero seats on the Supreme Court and there’s a Black president, it’s time to congratulate the WASPs for holding onto their principles even though their principles caused their demise: WASPs as the first and only proposition ethnic group.

Satisfaction with our national progress [by having 3 Jews on the Supreme Court and no WASPs] should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

I would go beyond Feldman by saying that no other elite has ever voluntarily allowed itself to be eclipsed because of steadfast adherence to principle. Feldman is doubtless quite happy because he realizes that the new elite (including himself) will not allow itself to be eclipsed by such madness–suicide by principle.

Indeed, Kagan’s arrival on the Supreme Court is a sort of official coming out party for the new elite. It’s been there for quite some time, but the Kagan nomination is an in-your-face-demonstration of the power of Jewish ethnic networking at the highest levels of government. And the first thing one notices is that the new elite has no compunctions about nominating someone for the Supreme Court even though she has no real qualifications.  So much for the principles of merit and inclusion: Inclusion does not apply to WASPs now that they have been deposed. And the principle of merit can now be safely discarded in favor of ethnic networking.  As I noted previously,

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

The same goes for Jewish over-representation in elite academic institutions–far higher than can be explained by higher Jewish IQ. Does anyone seriously think that Jewish domination of Hollywood and the so much of the other mainstream media  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article) is about merit rather than ethnic networking and solidarity? And then there’s the addiction of the new elite to affirmative action for non-Whites.

Whatever else one can say about the new elite, it certainly does not believe in merit. The only common denominator is that Whites of European extraction are being systematically excluded and displaced to the point that they are now underrepresented in all the important areas of the elite compared to their percentage of the population. The new elite distinguishes itself mainly by its hostility to the traditional people and culture of those they displaced. It is an elite that cannot say its name. Indeed the ADL was all over Pat Buchanan for merely mentioning that Kagan is Jewish and that, upon her confirmation, Jews would be one-third of the Supreme Court.

This lack of principle at the foundation of the new elite extends to every area of the culture: The financial elite that produced the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression by participating in and massively profiting from wholesale fraud in the mortgage market; the academic elite that systematically excludes ideas related to the legitimacy and reasonableness of White ethnic interests; the media elite that routinely provides invidious depictions of Whites and especially Whites with a sense of White identity and ethnic interests; the political elite that fails to perform the most basic function of government: protecting the people and culture from invasion and displacement; the organized Jewish community with its influence spread throughout the government, routinely supporting an expansive ethnonationalism in Israel while condemning any hint of ethnonationalism in White Americans.

This lack of principle will certainly extend to Elena Kagan once she accedes to the  Supreme Court. Her academic publishing record, meager as it is, indicates someone who does not believe in principles such as free speech:

Kagan [will]  be quite willing to fashion her legal arguments to attain her liberal/left policy goals, and that is exactly what her other writings show. Her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” (60 University of Chicago Law Review 873; available on Lexis/Nexis) indicates someone who is entirely on board with seeking ways to circumscribe free speech in the interests of multicultural virtue: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” She acknowledges that the Supreme Court is unlikely to alter its stance that speech based on viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment, but she sees that as subject to change with a different majority: The Supreme Court “will not in the foreseeable future” adopt the view that “all governmental efforts to regulate such speech … accord with the Constitution.” But in her view there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Clearly, she does not see the protection of viewpoint-based speech as a principle worth preserving or set in stone. Rather, she believes that a new majority could rule that “all government efforts to regulate such speech” would be constitutional. All government efforts.

I suspect  that the new elite will continue to pay lip service to the founding documents, the rule of law, and high principles like merit. But in reality these documents will be interpreted in ways that benefit the new elite and allow it to consolidate and maintain its power. I believe that with one more vote after Kagan’s confirmation, the First Amendment will be a historical curiousity.

And the principle of merit will mainly come down to promotional hype  in the media (when not obviously a matter of affirmative action).  Feldman represents Kagan as an exemplar of the shift to an American meritocracy — despite her remarkably undistinguished record. (A Google ssearch for “Elena Kagan” and “Harriet Miers” yields dozens of articles on the very real question of her qualifications.)  Senator Jeff Sessions correctly called Kagan the least experienced nominee “at least in the last 50 years.” He also noted that his main concern about her is his fear that she lacks a firm sense of the  rule of law–in other words, that she does not see law as defending the principles that were so sacrosanct to her WASP antecedents: “Will she as a judge subordinate herself to the constitution and keep her political views at bay?”

That is the question precisely. And all the evidence is that Kagan, like the rest of the new elite, will reject principle in favor of interest. We already see that honest, empirically grounded analyses of the Jewish role in the new elite and how this new elite serves Jewish ethnic interests will continue to be proscribed. As in the USSR, the topic will be officially off limits. (Solzhenitsyn makes this point in 200 Years Together.)

Finally, I agree with Feldman that the WASP elite was extraordinarily principled–uniquely so. This is not the entire story, however, since the WASPs did mount an ethnic defense culminating in the 1924 immigration law. It failed, in my opinion mainly because of the rise of Jews as a hostile elite who attained their position by seizing the moral high ground and making alliances with and promoting the more principled (suicidal) component of the WASP elite. (WASPs like Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and A. Lawrence Lowell were not part of the the WASP suicide mission; they could see the writing on the wall and I think they understood who the enemy was.)  As Israel Zangwill said in opposing the 1924 immigration restriction law, “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way” (see here, p. 266).

Jewish intellectuals understood that WASP dedication to principles and ideals was their soft spot. We can expect that the new elite will not be similarly inclined to adhere to principles at the expense of self-interest. The result will be a catastrophic loss to the people who founded and built America.