Elena Kagan and the American aristocracy

My late father was right about so many things, but in this one area he was simply wrong. And naive.

"Where you go to school is really unimportant," he said, "at least after you've been out a couple of years. At that point, no one cares where you went, only what you can do and how well you can do it."

A concise summary of a core American value, wouldn't you agree? And, maybe, it was even true for awhile in my father's time, in the heady days after World War II, when the need for college-educated professionals exploded and beneficiaries of the GI Bill rushed forward to fill the need. It must have been a frontier situation. (It always comes back to Frederick Jackson Turner, doesn't it?)

But if this was once true, it is true no longer.

The nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court of the United States provides another illustration of this point: Elite positions are reserved for members of the elite alone.

Our American aristocracy has no dukes or marquesses to help one sort out who is above whom. And, importantly, one need not be born into it to become a member of our American aristocracy.

The old Romans used to refresh the ranks of their aristocracy by adopting (co-opting) promising individuals. In America we do it by college degrees. At least since the 1960s we've opened up the ranks of our American aristocracy so that it "looks like America" by reaching into the masses and plucking a few of the best and brightest of our youth. Thus Bill Clinton climbs up from Arkansas, first to Georgetown -- and then, after winning a Rhodes Scholarship, to Yale Law School. Michelle Robinson (now Michelle Obama) gets recruited from Chicago to Princeton and thence to Harvard Law School. Barack Obama started college at Occidental College in Los Angeles -- a very good liberal arts school -- but where would his career have gone if he hadn't transferred to Columbia University? (From there he cemented his status in the elite by going to Harvard Law School.)

But the principle of inclusion only goes so far. One cannot ascend the to summit of the Ivies and then concede that a graduate of Cornell College, the Iowa liberal arts school, can be the equal of a graduate of Cornell University of Ithaca, New York.

And who would be more jealous of the prerogatives of the elite than those newly admitted? You don't need a conspiracy theory or secret cabal to keep the elite marching in lockstep. Common interest will be more than sufficient.

Humans are instinctively tribal and -- like a lot of primates -- hierarchical. If (at least grudgingly) we acknowledge that we have betters it is because, in such a system, there's always someone who is our inferior, too.

There are valid distinctions among people -- some are smarter, some are better looking, some sing better, some are stronger. But full expression and fulfillment of our talents is available only when humans are thinly distributed on the ground. When we get more bunched together, as in modern urban settings, artificial distinctions must be added to satisfy our need for minute stratification.

My grandmother used to tell the story about how, when people arrived in Chicago from County Mayo (God help us) at the turn of the century, they tended to settle on the near Southwest Side. And no one had anything then; they were all equally poor. Equality is great in theory -- and impossible in practice. Distinctions had to be found... or imagined. A person newly arrived would scout out the parish church and look to see if anyone in the congregation was from his or her home village. If not, then he or she could gain status over the neighbors by asserting a more exalted (and imaginary) family pedigree. County Cork had farms with actual dirt in those days, as opposed to County Mayo where there were only big stones and littler ones. So the people of Cork were generally more prosperous. Anyone with relatives there, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, must surely be better of than everyone else. (My grandmother's people, she told me, were from County Mayo -- but my grandfather -- who died years before I was born -- his people, my grandmother said, were from Cork.)

A person's Harvard degree is no guarantee that he or she is smarter than the next person, who went to the University of Illinois; they may be equally smart, in fact, with the edge going to the fellow from Champaign even, but if there are only limited elite opportunities around, the Harvard man will usually get the edge. Aristocracy. Multi-ethnic now, even multi-racial, but no less exclusive for all that.

In other words, you will never, ever see a DePaul Law School graduate on the Supreme Court of the United States. Of the current bunch, only John Paul Stevens didn't take an Ivy League degree -- but, then, he's a WWII vet who came from Northwestern.

Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Breyer went to Harvard Law School -- Ms. Kagan's law school alma mater.

Justices Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor went to Yale Law School.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't graduate from either Harvard or Yale. But she's all Ivy: She went to Cornell University and Columbia Law School. (And Justice Ginsburg started law school at Harvard -- transferring to Columbia, according to her Wikipedia biography, when her husband took a job in New York City.)

With the frontier gone, in an increasingly crowded nation, our American aristocracy will gain an increasingly firm hold on all elite offices and positions. Ours may be the most inclusive, diverse and porous elite in the history of mankind. But don't kid yourself: It's still an aristocracy.

And we are still peasants.

At least until the next frontier opens up opportunities again.