Damn hippies

Dahilia Lithwick annotates a portion of Alito's opening statement to the Senate Judiciary yesterday.

There is, for instance, the surreal lapse during his opening statement, when he blurts out—sans explanation—that his classmates at Princeton were spoiled and privileged and far less sensible than the folks in his working-class neighborhood back home:

After I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed. And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.

Did anyone vet this statement? Because if you parse it closely, it looks like he's maybe saying this:

After I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. (Damn snobs.) A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. (And as I shall now illustrate, I was not.) But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed. And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. (Ideas, love 'em. It's the people I hate…) But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. (Damn hippies.) And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. (Smart and privileged people who went on to become yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate.) And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. (And so that is why I joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton and why, moreover, I am still so inflexible and judgmental today!)

This is a subject Digby has written about quite a bit. That is, those baby boomers who came of age on campus during the sixties and early seventies, and who still can't quite get the taste out of their mouth.

This is the same guy who wanted to keep women out of Princeton. Presumably, they wouldn't have "felt comfortable" there. But that's not what made that statement so revealing. It's this notion of smart and privileged people "behaving irresponsibly."

I think it's fairly certain that he's not talking about branding frat boys' asses or getting drunk and stealing Christmas Trees. He's talking about anti-war protestors, feminists etc. And like so many campus conservatives of that era, he sounds like he's still carrying around a boatload of resentment toward them.

Roberts apparently came out of all that unscathed. Confident in his own abilities and social prowess, he didn't appear to have this puny, pinched view of liberalism as a threat to decency and morality. (He may have it, but it didn't show --- or he was smart enough to hide it in his hearings.) Alito is one of those other guys.

It's often said that those who really had a good time in the sixties can't remember any of it today. The flip side seems to be those who do remember, all to well, that they didn't have any fun at all. At the same time, they don't have any hail-fellow-well-met memories of "Nam" to fall back on either. Thirty years on and they still resent both of those things.

Resentment that eventually leads them to the Federalist Society.