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You'll be surprised to hear, surely, that the Federalist is completely full of sh*t. I happen to know one of the books on this list because I was asked to review it in 1997. 
I read it, but then told the academic journal that had commissioned the review that they shouldn't waste space reviewing a work of speculative fiction. I mean, the book was fascinating, but as a specimen of late 1990s conservative culture, not as an actual work of history.
Looking back now, however, I think I should have written the review. After all, this 20+ year old book, which no professionally trained historian could read without laughing out loud at least once per page, is described here as a "scholarly" and "well-researched" book.
Looking back, I also can see the outlines of an emergent, conservative worldview that is amenable to Trumpism. For example, here's the opening paragraph of the draft of my unpublished review.
West's list of "white male historians who totally got the founders wrong" includes several fairly conservative people. It includes folks who offered a pretty wide range of interpretations of the founders. BUT THEY ARE ALL COMPLETELY WRONG, says Thomas West.
The book's argument relies largely on creating a straw person boogeyman. Our "modern sophisticates" (a precursor to today's term "globalists?") simply don't get how brilliant and perfect the founders were!
The term "sophisticates" is a pretty capacious term apparently. It included Conor Cruise O'Brien (a Burkean conservative) and Thurgood Marshall. It included radical feminist historians and liberal political scientists. Sophisticates all apparently.
Dr. West's previous work, before showing the entire history profession why they were wrong, involved writing about Plato. Because nothing prepares one to disprove what specialists have to say about the 18th century than reading lots of Plato.
But that sure didn't stop a murderer's row of high profile conservatives from blurbing his book, including William Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Michael Novak, and Dinesh D”Souza. Literally nothing has changed in the conservative intellectual world since then. Nothing.
This book offered a willfully obtuse misreading of the scholarship, and then "destroyed it" with a series of decontextualized cherry-picked quotes. It's the kind of scholarship that could only emerge out of a hermetically sealed bubble of right wing self-righteousness.
But there it was...blurbed by leading conservatives in 1997, and there it still is, valorized in 2019 in the Federalist despite the fact that no one who has done archival research with 18th century documents (or who knows the scholarship being demolished) could get past page 5.
I feel sorry for students who are assigned this book as a work of history. There is such a great corpus of work on the founders that offers a diverse array of competing interpretations of them. But no, such "sophisticates" have no place in the conservative academy.
West's book has the substance of a Ben Shapiro YouTube video. It would be great if conservative intellectuals actually took the time to do the archival work necessary to produce a work of history. Sadly, almost none have. And so we get ridiculous books like West's instead.
Instead of choosing to join the world of modern intellectual inquiry, conservative intellectuals have built themselves (thanks to many generous donors) an alternate academic universe where they don't have to engage with people they don't like.
As any student of the free market and biodiversity will tell you, this has led to a real ossification of "the conservative mind." Instead of jumping into the fray, they've created a straw person version of "leftist academics" and decided they are not worth engaging with.
So the conservatives write books for each other, not caring what people outside that universe think of them. They form colleges to train students in their school of thought. And then they point to 99% of other colleges and say "you all just do group think!"
I suspect they justify it to themselves by saying "the culture" has been shaped by "liberal academics" and so their students already are familiar with what professional historians have to say...they need to be reprogrammed (red-pilled if you will) with "the right sort of ideas."
But nothing good will come of building a world of "alternate history" as written by David Barton or Thomas West, or encased between the pages of books like these. It's the historical equivalent of climate denial or creationism.
Once you've socialized young conservatives into your hermetically-sealed world of "knowledge" that is so detached from the reality of the archive and existing scholarship, it's hard for such folks to function effectively in "the outside world."
It just becomes a war of competing worldviews--you brainwashed liberals say slavery caused the Civil War, but I know that slavery had little to do with the Civil War because my "Politically Incorrect" history book taught me the truth, rather than your liberal lie!
I didn't write the review in 1997 because I thought perspectives like West's were simply going to go the way of the dinosaurs. It really wasn't worth engaging with in any serious way. I now realize just how wrong I was about that.
Not that my review would have made any difference in the world. But at least it would be out there in the ether as a counterpoint to the many glowing things that residents of the alternate universe known as "the conservative intelligentsia" had to say about it.
As I was saying...conservatives do their readers no service by encasing them in a hermetically-sealed world of alternate facts.
I highly recommend this powerful memoir by someone who was socialized into the world of the conservative academy and who eventually left it. dissentmagazine.org/article/leavin…
By treating learning as a sort of catechism designed to inoculate someone from "liberal lies," conservative institutions do young people no favors. They just set them up to be repeatedly "owned" like D'Souza, or to eventually leave the fold once they encounter alternate views.
The author of that piece about leaving conservatism, @MatthewSitman, is also the co-host (with @SamAdlerBell) of an excellent podcast on the history of conservatism. It's very much worth your time and your support. listennotes.com/podcasts/know-…
@MatthewSitman @SamAdlerBell For those who crave more "conservatives are terrible historians" content, here's another thread in that vein. In this case, the historian in question is Senator Mike Lee.
