Stanford Law Students Are Your Class Enemy
(or, if they aren't, maybe we should reconsider categorical politics)
Stanford Law School students were in the news for awhile, thanks to a contingent of them having shouted down a conservative campus speaker. I had preferred to avoid the whole topic, given that it’s a little too much my thing. (Not being a caricature of yourself is a constant concern for someone who writes as much about current events as I do.) But as time has passed and I’ve turned it over in my mind, I’ve come to think that the whole frame of the thing speaks to a real refusal of the American left to take its own ideas seriously. The debate fell along the typical lines. Liberals and lefties, as is their habit, rushed not only to defend the student protesters but to lionize them. What I find somewhat depressing is that this has become a habit, anointing representatives of the academic 1% as the footsoldiers of progressive change. The catechism of 21st-century progressivism insists that we are creatures of our immutable demographic traits, that our race and our class and our privilege define us and our influence on the world. If that’s true, how 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? Where did all of that demographic determinism go?
(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.