GLENN: The new justice has been named. Elena Kagan. You know, another left activist. She wrote in Princeton University her thesis was, "To the final conflict, socialism in New York City, 1900, 1933." In her thesis she writes, in our times a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. This is 30 years ago. "Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than 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? Then she issues a call to action. Her call for socialists to unite in order to, quote, defeat the entrenched foe. She writes, quote, through its own internal feuding, the Socialist Party has exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it never has covered. The story is sad. But also a chastening one for those who, for more than half a century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one's fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if history of local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.
PAT: Oh, Glenn, that's just academic.
STU: Yes. The professor did have a response to that, by the way, which was she wasn't interested in socialism.
GLENN: Why did she write her thesis on it?
PAT: What?
STU: She wasn't interested in it, he said, to study something is not to endorse it. So —
PAT: Sure sounded like in the thesis there that she was endorsing it.
STU: Did it? Because he just said she wasn't interested in it, period.
PAT: Oh, I'm sorry.
STU: Alert, Media Matters alert: The professor said she wasn't interested in it.
PAT: And yet Pat Gray said it sounded like she was!
STU: Baselessly claimed! That he was!
PAT: Baselessly. Yeah, I was just going by her words, I'm sorry.
STU: Right. And that's baseless because —
PAT: That's baseless. You shouldn't listen to her words or read them. I mean, if a professor says it, he went to college and stuff.
STU: Right. And he advised her on the thesis and she obviously wasn't interested which is why —
PAT: Wasn't interested in it.
STU: Do you know how many times I wrote a 153 page paper on a topic I wasn't interested in? Happens all the time.
PAT: Most every day, almost every day.
GLENN: It's true that you don't necessarily endorse it in your thesis.
STU: Of course that's true.
GLENN: How many times do we have to hear this from people?
PAT: Good gollee.
GLENN: I mean, Hillary Clinton wrote it on Saul Alinsky. I mean, how many times do we have to hear this? Wouldn't you love somebody who is really not interested but wrote their thesis on George Washington?
PAT: Or the free market?
GLENN: Or James Madison? Any of them, any of them? How about that?