Thread: 1/ Geoffrey Kabaservice @RuleandRuin whose scholarship on moderate Republicanism and internal GOP debates is excellent, has launched a sharp critique of histories of conservatism in Politico. politico.com/magazine/story…
2/ He begins with an ad hominem critique of "liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience." This invalidates the work of the vast majority of historians who write about topics outside of their life experience...
3/ He also falls prey to the crudest identitarian assumptions about who is and isn't a legitimate narrator. (Time to fold your tents medievalists, white historians of slavery, millennials who write about the 1960s, scholars of the French revolution, et al.)
4/ Who is @RuleandRuin to say that we historians of modern conservatism have not experienced it (is that true for anyone alive for the last half century?) or don't have friends or family members who are on the right (many in my case) and right-wing colleagues (yep, several)???
5/ @RuleandRuin then goes on to conflate the work of very different scholars (Lisa McGirr meet @CoreyRobin meet Rick Perlstein meet @NancyMacLean5 meet @HC_Richardson) wrongly suggesting that they all distort history of conservatism for the same (nefarious) political purposes.
6/ Well, I know for sure that Perlstein and MacLean don't see eye to eye on Buchanan and Kochs. McGirr doesn't claim that the Birchers were the dominant force in the GOP, even at their peak of influence. And @CoreyRobin a liberal?
7/ For me, the most egregious flaw in @RuleandRuin's article is that he appears not to have read much of the extraordinary new work on the history of the modern right.
8/ Take for example Robert Self on the role that family politics and sexuality played in the rise of the right
amazon.com/All-Family-Rea…
amazon.com/All-Family-Rea…
9/ Another big miss @pastpunditry has written a field-defining account of how the new right remade American media. She's a rigorous historian of conservative politics who reaches outside the academy. Read her great op-eds and hear her on @pastpresentpod. upenn.edu/pennpress/book…
10/ Kabaservice doesn't account for the exciting work on women, the GOP, and the rise of the right, including Michelle Nickerson on women anticommunists and GOP, Catherine Rymph on feminism & conservatism or Stacie Taranto on family values and women in NY. amazon.com/Kitchen-Table-…
11/ Or the books that blow the old "southern strategy" argument about the right and the Sunbelt by Matt Lassiter, Joe Crespino, Ellie Shermer, and so many others? press.princeton.edu/titles/8044.ht…
12/ What about Kim Phillips-Fein, Kathryn Olmsted, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel on labor, business, and the right-wing rebellion against the New Deal? amazon.com/Invisible-Hand…
13/ Where is the important work of @KevinMKruse, Leo Ribuffo (a man of the left who definitely takes conservatism seriously), Darren Dochuk, Paul Harvey (the historian, not the radio host), and many others on religion and the right? amazon.com/One-Nation-Und…
14/ Joshua Farringdon and @LeahRigueur have busted open the field with their work on black Republicans. And Jason Sokol has turned his light on the important, forgotten Ed Brooke. press.princeton.edu/titles/10372.h…
15/ @julianzelizer, the preeminent historian of high politics, has edited or co-edited important books on the rise of the right in the 70s (which includes me), business and conservatism, the Reagan presidency, and on the Bush II presidency. amazon.com/Rightward-Boun…
16/ The intellectual history of the right has attracted some first-rate scholars too, among them Michael Kimmage, Daniel Rodgers, Daniel Stedman Jones, Andrew Hartman, Angus Bergin, and more amazon.com/Masters-Univer…
17/ I'm not just name-dropping obscure scholars here: these historians--and many more--have completely transformed our understanding of the history of modern America. Few of them are polemicists and I would bet that, like me, many of them actually know some conservatives....
18/ Like @NancyMacLean5, a nemesis of Kabaservice, who collaborated on a history of conservatism with none other than Donald Critchlow, a man of the right who wrote an admiring bio of #PhyllisSchlafly amazon.com/Debating-Ameri…
19/ I am left-of-center and have used Critchlow's work with great success. Heck, I have even assigned William Rusher. I make my students read Barry Goldwater. Conscience of a Conservative. Why? Because we have to understand the right to understand America. press.princeton.edu/titles/8388.ht…
20/ As someone who recently co-wrote on the history of modern America (These United States), I took the right seriously and wrote about it in some depth, drawing from scholars as diverse as MacLean and Kabaservice himself. amazon.com/These-United-S…
21/ This is not an impoverished subfield, stunted by bias, distortion, and oversight. I have arguments with many of these scholars--and they often argue with each other. But to charge ostensibly liberal historians of the right with ignorance displays Kabaservice's ignorance.
Footnote: For the sake of full disclosure, that I serve on the editorial advisory board of the series at @OUPAcademic that published Kabaservice's book, Rule and Ruin. Read it. It's good. global.oup.com/academic/conte…
I forgot to give a shout out to my brilliant co-author, @GilmoreGlenda amazon.com/These-United-S…
