1. This @RuleandRuin article arguing that liberal historians have done a poor job of covering conservatism is getting a lot of attention but I think very weak. politico.com/magazine/story…
2. There are lot of incidental problems with the piece: I don't think @CoreyRobin or @NancyMacLean5 would self-identify as liberals, as against radicals or leftists, he understates power of Birch Society in 1960s, & misunderstands Buckley's feud with Birchers.
3. This Sam Rosenfeld thread goes into some of the problems with the Birch stuff. Briefly, Buckley & National Review had strong overlap with JBS & didn't turn against them until 1965 (i.e. after Birchers helped conservative takeover of GOP).
4. The timing of Buckley's turn against Birch Society is crucial: it happened in 1965 after Birch Society came out against Vietnam War. (JBS thought, logically from their point of view, that communists in Washington worse than in Hanoi).
5. It's contradictory for @RuleandRuin to acknowledge "the present-day political right and points toward the enduring appeal of conspiratorial thinking in American life" & also berate Lisa McGirr for writing a brilliant study of the John Birch Society.
6. But the deeper problem with @RuleandRuin's piece is the pretence that "nearly all" the scholarship on conservatism is from liberals. The fact is liberal/left literature has a counterpart in large body of works by conservatives.
7. When I first got interested in history of American right back in (God help us) the 1980s, almost all the books on the subject were by conservatives: George Nash, Jeffrey Hart, Buckley, Rusher etc.
8. I supplanted my reading of these conservative histories of conservatism by reading back issues of National Review, American Spectator etc. And I quickly discovered that conservative histories were very unreliable because they all whitewashed the racism.
9. For example, these books often treated Willmoore Kendall as a towering figure but completely ignored stuff like this. 
10. A lot of conservative histories of conservatism weren't really histories at all but Tributes to The Wise Men of Olde Who Thought Right. Which meant, necessarily, ignoring tensions, contradictions, evolution. Not to mention social history.
11. So I was really grateful when liberals and leftists like @CoreyRobin, @rickperlstein @HC_Richardson @NancyMacLean5 etc. started writing on conservatism. Whatever disagreements I have with their work (and they disagree with each other) at least it's at least not a whitewash.
12. Here are my deeper reflections on why the history of conservatism is too important to be left to conservatives. newrepublic.com/article/151127…
13. I have something more to say about that @RuleandRuin piece, although I realize I'm risking beating a dead horse. I think the larger political project of the piece is to recuperate a good, moderate GOP that no longer exists.
14. You see this a lot, not just among conservatives but also centrists & liberals (including Obama & Hillary Clinton): a positing of 2 GOPs: a good, moderate, intellectual GOP just interested in low taxes & military spending versus a bad racist Trumpian GOP
15. @RuleandRuin is of course the world's authority on moderate Republicans (his book is very good! Should be widely read!). But I wonder if he doesn't understate how powerful Trumpian currents were in GOP since at least the 1930s.
