Today’s Revolutionaries, Tomorrow’s Haute Bourgeoisie
Freddie de Boer, Meritocracy, Shrieking Student, Stanford Law School, Time and Change, Yale
Remember Yale’s Shrieking Student? Jerelyn Luther is just graduating from Columbia Law this Spring.
Leftie Substacker Freddie de Boer has a cynical prediction about those Woke Stanford Law Students who recently shouted down a conservative judge and prevented him from speaking, and I suspect he’s perfectly right.
[H]ow are we to assume that law students at Stanford Law School are anything other than the next generation’s shock troops of the bourgeoisie, whatever their professed politics?…
(Do people ever do postmortems about, say, the Yale protests from 2015ish and ask whether those students became committed revolutionaries, or whether they just went on to be the busy little meritocrats they were destined to be?)
There’s a lot of different ways to approach the Stanford controversy; it’s a rich text, as an old English professor of mine would say. For one thing… what do people think is going to happen, exactly? That every one of these Stanford Law students is going to go on to be a virtuous public defender? That they’re all going to go do pro bono work for Erin Brockovich? What role do you think the average Stanford Law graduate plays in our nation? This isn’t even an indictment of anyone’s character, either. I try to point this out all the time: becoming functionally a tool of the status quo doesn’t require ideological transformation. I don’t think people become conservatives en masse as they age. I do think that people get busy with life and find themselves increasingly deepening inequality and supporting unjust structures as they just try to get ahead. I’m sure that will happen with a lot of these Stanford law grads. But I’m also sure a lot of them are going to wave the black flag right up until they get a cush $350K/year entry-level job at a major firm and then get busy helping cigarette manufacturers avoid lawsuits. And I’m also sure they’ll never feel bad about any of it.
That’s certainly what happened to most of the bomb-throwing radicals in my Yale Class who shout down the University on May Day of 1970.
