Further reading: “I got into Yale” isn’t a moral defense.

One result of these larger shifts is that the American right has grown more explicitly anti-elitist, a development that arguably culminated in Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and attacks from the right on the interrelated worlds of elite journalism and academia have intensified. This has made the position of centrist liberals in elite law schools uncomfortable in the extreme. Faced with leftists who reject the pretense of political neutrality and a mainstream right that feels alienated from and hostile towards a liberal elite they see as opposed to their way of life, their efforts to create room for elite conservatism are becoming untenable.

There is one force that continues to bolster embattled centrist liberals in their seemingly doomed defenses of pluralism: careerism. The nature of the American political system is such that there are many plum positions in the federal government that will be filled by Republican presidents and their judicial appointees. As long as appellate court clerkships are a route to prestige, there will be some pressure on the elite law schools to make nice with a select handful of right-of-center judges, and on students to at least entertain the idea of working for them. Though the number of students who secure the most desirable clerkships is small, they set the tone for a far larger number of aspiring lawyers.

Read Caleb Mason on why the Kavanaugh facts aren’t unknowable

Far more significant, though, is the fact that much of the new wealth that is being created in the United States is in the hands of investors and entrepreneurs committed to cosmopolitan liberalism, for whom a more populist and nationalist right represents a grave threat. I don’t doubt that students and faculty members at elite law schools are sincerely committed to leftist politics. Yet the often-strident social liberalism of Silicon Valley and other citadels of wealth helps ensure that the cost of embracing leftist politics, in professional opportunities and social opprobrium, is lower than it’s been in decades. One could argue that the cost of wearing traditionalist convictions on your sleeve is, in the uppermost strata of American society, certainly, heading in exactly the opposite direction. To be a Federalist Society stalwart at an elite institution today means something sharply different than it would have a decade ago.

So what does this all mean for the trajectory of America’s legal elite? I suspect the centrist liberals who continue to make the case for pluralism in a polarized political climate will be vanquished by their critics on the left, especially at the most elite of the elite law schools. Those belonging to the legal right, meanwhile, will have a choice to make. Some will assimilate by moving leftward themselves, or by engaging in self-censorship. Others will, perhaps, try to build up institutions of their own—an endeavor that, to my mind, is long overdue.

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