On June 28, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms in a 5-4 vote.    At the same time, a 50 year old university and government bureaucrat was schmoozing her way through confirmation hearings to become a Justice.

The Court’s conservatives have had their last hurrah.

Why would anyone say such a thing?  Predicting the future is only wise if you do it in very general terms.  Then, people can conjure truth from your words, even if they are totally vague.  But sometimes so many trends are converging that even the sensible think they see patterns in the tea leaves.

One specific trend is ineluctable.  Elena Kagan will be confirmed and her vote will not be conservative.  That makes a 5-4 majority of anti-conservatives.  The next Justice vacancies  will be for the most routinely conservative on the bench.  If Obama gets a second term, we could easily be looking at a 6-3 or 7-2 majorities.  And Kagan is only 50 years old.

Which illustrates the broader trend.  Kagan has spent her life in bureaucracies controlled by anti-conservatives.  Most American Universities are increasingly controlled by anti-conservatives.  I won’t call them liberals because they aren’t liberal according to any standard dictionary definition.  They have a rigid set of beliefs for all students to obey.

A liberal historically has been one open to freedom and new ideas.  The anti-conservatives–who call themselves liberals–are convinced they have all the answers and are very willing to impose them on you.  Modern American liberalism is the new paleo-conservatism.   It is stuck in a set of beliefs codified in the 1960s.  In Australia and England, this perversion of the word liberal has not yet taken hold.  There, liberal parties have always been conservative in the modern American sense because they were open to new ideas and freedom, yet didn’t want to throw away the beliefs which keep us from descending to tribalism.

These radically conservative “liberals” finally gained complete control of nearly all US universities in the 1970s.   Anyone emerging from that system since then has been indoctrinated in how to be politically correct.  Recent graduates of elite American Universities have been subjected to especially intense brainwashing.

By the time Kagan was ready for college in the late 70s, the “liberal” academic elite had codified a rigid set of beliefs in affirmative action, feminism, homophilia, anti-American hegemony, anti big business, pro big government and knee-jerk anti-militarism.  They had forgotten the spirit of liberalism and become rigid legalists.  And they rule the roost.  They are the mainstream and that’s one of America’s worst problems.

Kagan’s supporters say she is in the mainstream of American legal thought. Unfortunately, being in the mainstream of American academic bureaucratic thought is no longer helpful to the US.  The mainstream she is a part of is the cause of our problems.

Now those beliefs will have a majority on the Supreme Court.  Will there be any huge changes?  Nope.  Just a continued slow and steady decline in our nation–including our living standards, our ability to solve technological problems, our ability to manufacture anything, our ability to command respect in the world, our ability to do anything but rack up debt and trade deficits.

We need really tenacious leadership from those who value tried and true beliefs but are ready to try new ideas–and know how to empirically test those ideas.  In short, we need some good engineers to step up and run out the lawyers and politicians and bureaucrats who cater to “entitled interest groups.”

Such leaders are pragmatic.  They try to make things work. They don’t blindly follow rules, if the rules aren’t working.  Their minds are open to new ideas and new approaches.  Much like liberals and some conservatives used to be before interest group politics captured them.