Brett Kavanaugh and the corruption of the American aristocracy

Moral rot at the very top of America's most elite universities

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Chua.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, bpperry/iStock)

Yale Law professor Amy Chua cruised to wide attention several years ago for a supposedly satirical book about shaping her kids into child prodigies with brutal hazing. She recently wrote another book about the dangers of tribalism, arguing that American democracy was fraying due to people developing stronger attachments to various group identities than they have to the national one. Both books were of the dubious, vaguely insipid sort that the Aspen Ideas crowd is expected to crank out every now and then. But there is one group in the United States that displays the near-absolute loyalty to insiders that motivates Chua's critique of tribalism — the American aristocracy of which she is a very prominent member.

Her defense of President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is an extraordinarily telling demonstration of the corruption of that aristocracy, and the damage it inflicts on both the nation and its own members.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.