1. I used to be a TNR columnist, so when I heard the mag was doing a takedown of my Politico piece on histories of conservatism, I worried a little. Fortunately, TNR is no longer what it was: newrepublic.com/article/151127…
2. I appreciate Jeet Heer's praise for my book on moderate Republicans, but he doesn't seem to have read it because the views he ascribes to me are more or less the opposite of what I believe. Start with the idea that I "lamented" the new wave of scholarship on conservatism...
3. Why would I lament that? I was calling 20 years ago for academic historians to study conservatism seriously. I'm delighted with the results. If Politico had let me, I would have offered a gallery of superb histories, for ex. Nikki Hemmer on con media: amazon.com/Messengers-Rig…
4. And there's Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand, Kevin Kruse on white flight, Kim Phillips-Fein on the Liberty Lobby, Leah Wright Ligueur on black Republicans, Stacie Taranto on the Right to Life Party... The list goes on and on. amazon.com/gp/product/019…
5. I've learned a lot even from works I've criticized, such as Joseph Crespino's excellent Strom Thurmond bio, where my main objection was that Thurmond didn't really have the political heft and significance the book ascribes to him: newrepublic.com/article/107308…
6. My major criticism of these histories is principally that the authors know less about the GOP than the con. movement (in the era before those two became one and the same) and so gave greater political importance to some con. actors and movements than they deserved at the time
7. And this tendency to emphasize the wrong things also sometimes applies to devs. inside the con. mvmt. It's like Leo Rosten's point that "Two tickets for her concert I should buy?" can be read 7 different ways depending on which word is stressed books.google.com/books?id=V04IR…
8. Is it necessary to have been involved with the con mvmt to write about it? No. Would such experience be helpful? Yes. More pol. historians should also spend time on Capitol Hill. Writing history is in many ways an effort to compensate for the handicap of not having been there
9. What I do lament is that there are few conservative scholars at universities and the vast majority of academic histories of conservatism therefore are written by liberals. If you don't think this limits the collective possibilities of such history, you lack imagination
10. Heer's claim that I gloss over the dark side of conservatism is false. My book is all about the decades-long effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to keep the dark side out of the movement and the GOP.
11. I argued, years ago and in Heer's own mag, that Buckley deserved credit for this but that the failure of his successors to gatekeep was a major indictment of modern conservatism: newrepublic.com/article/102241…
12. But that doesn't mean I think Buckley's racism, and NR's, deserve a pass. One of the strengths of Carl Bogus' WFB bio is that he levels a scorching indictment against NR's opposition to civil rights... amazon.com/Buckley-Willia…
13. ...but at the same Bogus acknowledges that free-market logic compelled NR to support the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. That level of nuance is lost, if not in lib histories of conservatism, at least in indictments like Heer's
14. An advantage of *not* being a liberal historian writing about conservatism is that you don't have to use kid gloves when dealing with the dark side, as I think McGirr did at times with the Birchers' racism & lunacy in her (superb) "Suburban Warriors" amazon.com/Suburban-Warri…
15. But objectivity should compel the acknowledgement that Buckley at least did struggle to find the line on racial issues -- as he did for ex. by firing Joe Sobran for racism, which you wouldn't know from Heer's article nationalreview.com/magazine/2012/…
16. Heer does have a point that conservative historians of conservatism typically minimize the dark side in writing about their heroes and forebears. I wrote about that too in TNR a long time ago: newrepublic.com/article/106505…
17. The unwillingness of conservative historians to include the unsavory parts of the tale is a major drawback of the firsthand accounts of the movement, and part of the struggle for historians has been to fill in the elements these primary accounts omit
18. More conservatives won't write histories of equal merit to the best liberal histories unless they abide by academic standards of objectivity, but they won't write such histories until the univs admit them, OK their approaches and offer them real possibilities of getting jobs
19. But I have real problems with the approach of too many lib commentators, and some lib historians, to write off Buckley, and the con movement, and the GOP, and all Trump voters, as nothing but racists. That way lies civil war as well as bad history.
20. Curiously, Heet is on stronger ground in this tweet than in his article. It *is* part of my larger political project to try to recover the bygone big-tent approach of the GOP in which moderates played a major role:
21. What I don't acknowledge is the claim that there is no decent Republican inheritance to recover. Is it recoverable? That's the great political struggle of our age, and the stakes are very high: niskanencenter.org/blog/whither-n…
