"The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of cultural conflict, a battle between what I have called the beautiful people and the dutiful people [or as Andrew Sullivan might put it, the palatial people and the fellatial people]. While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers, ordinary people in the outer boroughs and the far-flung suburbs of New Jersey like Hamilton Township were going to work, raising their families, and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.

The glitterati in the 1970s seized and still hold the cultural commanding heights of our society -- the universities, the media, the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Westside of Los Angeles [and the best part of Northwest DC, where Michael Barone lives]. But, as the success of Sam Alito shows, they have not entirely won the hearts and the minds of the people. [Sounding more like an old-line Commie than a Republican here. The hearts and minds of the people!]

I recently traveled through both Hamilton Township and Princeton. The contrast between the million-dollar-plus homes and fancy shops of Princeton and the modest-to-downright-depressing [at least he admits it] neighborhoods and strip malls of Hamilton Township was stunning. So, too, are the voting figures. Princeton voted 76 percent for John Kerry in 2004 [similar numbers, I think, in Barone‘s baronial neighborhood]. Hamilton Township voted 49.3 percent for George W. Bush and 49.8 percent for Kerry. [But he doesn’t do anything with his correct observation that some of the dutiful territory is depressingly strip malled, etc. Who wouldn’t rather be in Princeton? Michael Barone himself spends more of his time in Princetonian than Hamiltonian settings… And he‘s both a Harvard and Yale graduate.]

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. [That’s an easy one. What other intellectual institutions do we have? The French Academy? … No…. that’s in France…] University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hamilton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy. [Really? The trust-fund kids of Princeton? Do you think they say things like “Bush equals Hitler”? I don’t think so. I don’t think Barone thinks so.]

It's interesting that Sen. Edward Kennedy tried to charge Alito with racism and sexism because he once belonged to an alumni group critical of Princeton. Evidently in Kennedy's mind, dissent from campus orthodoxy is prima facie evidence of bigotry.

Judge Alito, I think, is a better example of the things that American universities before his time stood for: intellectual excellence, free inquiry, civility in the face of disagreement, commitment to patriotism. [He forgot quotas.]"