"It is no accident that in Judge Samuel Alito’s famous 1985 application for a job in the Reagan Justice Department he mentioned his membership in two organizations: the Federalist Society and the now-notorious Concerned Alumni for Princeton. Both were founded as a dissent from liberalism’s grip on academe. What were initially the rumblings of a powerless conservative counterculture eventually gelled into an effective conservative counterestablishment.
CAP is long-since defunct, although its model of conservative activism/journalism — often in alliance with conservative alumni — thrives on campuses around the country. The Federalist Society has gone from a tiny, embattled group when it was founded in 1982 to a steppingstone to countless careers in government, on the bench and at law schools. Liberalism still dominates the elite universities, but that means much less than it used to, thanks to the counterestablishment that has nurtured and credentialed the likes of Samuel Alito.
At his hearings, Alito didn’t seem counter- anything. He is sober, intelligent, and thoughtful. He is the opposite of a bomb-thrower, but when he entered Princeton University in 1968, that made him a dissident.
Alito mentioned this fact in his opening statement. He was from a middle-class family in Trenton, N.J., and was shocked at what greeted him at Princeton: “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 decency of the people back in my own community.” Alito joined the ROTC, which was thrown off campus, forcing him to go to Trenton State College for his ROTC work. In their wisdom, Princetonians firebombed their own ROTC building.
“Conservatives lived quiet lives of desperation,” is how one Federalist Society lawyer describes the environment on campus at this time. A conservative with intellectual or public-policy interests in the late 1970s surveyed a bleak environment. The universities, the law schools, the federal government and the courts were held by the left.
But then, the values Alito had grown up with struck back with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. What was most important was not that conservatives had gained power, but what they did with it. The Reagan Justice Department set out to grow the counterestablishment. It identified bright young conservatives and prepared them for bigger things. It hired Alito, then got him a gig as a U.S. attorney, knowing that might prepare the ground for becoming a judge.
Twenty years later, he is about to assume a seat on the Supreme Court...."
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