[Today I offer you a guest post from long-time USIH blog and conference participant, William "Bill" Fine. Enjoy! - TL]
In reviewing Jim Livingston’s recent USIH articles and a few posts in his Politics and Letters blog* I’m persuaded that he speaks out of a deeply personal desire to advance a view of history that supports present and future hopes---in spite of his assertion that the priority must be on “going back” to recover historical contexts. [“Museum”]
Livingston might be seen to contradict himself in declaring that the past both exists and does not exist, or that history can be a guide and yet be open to whatever meanings we might project onto it. For him, knowledge of reality is mediated by language and other cultural forms, it’s “what we can act upon,” so “the past as such [is] indistinguishable from what we have said about it.” At the same time, he makes numerous truth-claims. For example, he’s annoyed that Paul Murphy allegedly didn’t practice sufficient “estrangement” from the ‘20s context, on the assumption that it’s a foreign world. But the warrant for that truism isn’t obvious. It’s not that Murphy draws lessons from the past, it’s that he misunderstands its relation to our “different” historical moment, and so draws the wrong lessons. Maybe we can’t understand ‘20s intellectuals without “going back,” but we have to understand them before we can assume the need to do so. [“Museum”]
Both Livingston and his interlocutors soften contradictions into paradoxes that seem to capture the multi-dimensional character of historical practice. Two of Livingston’s best are: “You can’t ‘go back’ to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased”; and “the past is both real and artificial. Like God, it’s consequential because we created it. The past is what we make of it…but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us.” [“Museum”]
Ray Haberski generously finds in the latter a way “around” the either/or of determinism versus freedom, while Dan Wickberg opines that inconsistency is a matter of perception, and at least our modern critical tools protect us from the temptations of totalism. [“Museum”] Along similar lines, William Cronon, in “Loving History,” in Perspectives on History, sees “two fundamentally competing orientations for approaching history”---summarized as "how did things get to be this way?" and “the past is a foreign country.” But he concludes that, if history is to retain its attraction for professionals and others, “we need them both.” What Livingston said of the Rutgers conference on W.A. Williams into might apply here: “there was too much consensus, too little conflict.”
We could shift from logic to rhetoric, to see where and how Livingston deploys points that otherwise might be thought irreconcilable. Sometimes, in criticizing another historian, such as Paul Murphy, or advancing his own positions, he implies a fairly certain knowledge, saying that some views “deny reality,” while others accord with “the world as it actually exists.” There is no particular reason not to take him at his word, as others do in responding to his truth-claims. But at other junctures, to defend against the charge he isn’t a proper historian, he adopts a different rhetoric, asserting at one point that there’s no “practical difference between history, the past as such, and historiography, our interpretations of the past, because all we actually know about the past is contained in those interpretations.” [“Williams”]
The past has a number of discrete though related meanings in his work. Sometimes it’s the almost infinitely plastic material we shape in acts of knowing, as if the very idea of representation implies a closed reality. At other times the past possesses “legibility,” a metaphor he uses repeatedly. The term implies something pre-constituted as text-like, decipherable by historical actors and historians. So, for ‘20s intellectuals, the divide between traditional and modern “became legible…as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.” [“Museum”] In his article on W.A. Williams, “historical circumstances” themselves are described as directly legible, as are both the “original intent” of the Open Door and the immanence of our “ethical principles” in that setting.
On the other hand, the past is presented as virtually created and cumulatively enriched through narrativizing. In his blog, discussing Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels dealing with the trauma of a main character raped by his father, Livingston criticizes those who say it’s a denial of real suffering to read such events as only “fantasy,” since in themselves they are “meaningless.” [“Pol and Letters” - 5.2.12]. Some might insist instead that human events are by definition meaningful, though it’s not clear how much difference it makes -- to the traumatized, for instance---whether stories recount things that actually occurred. Still, if events lack their own legibility, in what sense can they be “falsified” by narratives, except by contrast to some other unnamed device? In any case, here narratives produced over time by different actors accumulate richer meanings, redeeming traumatic pasts, rendering events “significant…as moments in a meaningful sequence,” a story that can be retold. [“Politics and Letters” - 5.18.12]
Livingston’s freewheeling constructionism implies an ontological and epistemological pluralism that stands over against what he calls “metaphysical” accounts that presume an objective, realist history, a “Totalism” or “Absolute”; monolithic, deterministic, and typically declensionist. As he puts it at one point, “the truth of historical reality is always plural. The rhetorics are the reality.” [“Museum”] Perhaps he tends to universalize the interpretive chaos of our historical moment; either way, that wouldn’t prove we don’t live in a block universe after all.
Sometimes he goes further, insisting that good history confirms an emancipatory potential immanent in the historical process, and that history tends toward the good---or will if we think and act properly. For example, in his article on Williams, Livingston writes approvingly that:
“Williams assumed that a post-imperialist future was legible in the original intent of what he called the “imperialism of idealism” and in the real differences over diplomatic means and ends…. Without that assumption,…his critique…stops making sense because its fulfillment would then require the evasion of the world as it actually exists [which] would not allow for history as a way of learning. If the ethical principles of a post-imperialist future do not reside in the historical circumstances…then our only honorable recourse is to repudiate and escape those circumstances….”
Later, in the same essay, he generalizes what’s at stake:
“When people start wishing that things were better and assuring you that they won’t be, largely because nothing has ever changed except for the worse, you know that you’re in the presence of Kantian radicals who lack, or despise, historical consciousness---you’re in the presence of metaphysicians who know the past cannot be a guide to the present because it is the repository of myths, lies, deceptions, and their attendant moral atrocities.”
Livingston is fond of drawing a contrast between Kant and Hegel [though he seems to mention the former by name more than the latter], which he understands in part as the contrast between a morality that stands apart from and tries to impose itself on the world, and one that sees morality to “reside in and flow from historical circumstances,” as he wrote in his “Response to Cotkin.” [JHI 69, 1, April 2008] This may be taken as a descriptive sociological point---and Livingston among others have shown how “the social self” developed out of the interaction of Hegelian idealism and pragmatism, along with feminism. But to me this is quite different than using it to build a philosophy of history.
In “Socialism Without Socialists” [“Politics and Letters” - 7.25.12] Livingston challenges the pessimists of the left, using the terms of Kant vs Hegel to frame a stark choice: one embraces the present, recognizes that the left is everywhere, and “sees the ethical principles of socialism residing in and flowing from historical circumstances…not as ideas imposed from elsewhere,” partly because cultural has replaced political change. The other, from a fixed point of moralistic purity, gives up on a hopeless world, taking refuge in a saving remnant with no one to save, “leading us away from the world as it is.”
Whatever case might be made for Livingston’s argument that the left has been victorious, here he gives full-out expression to a historical teleology almost beyond intention or agency, a progressive conductorless orchestration that “recognize[s] what we ought to be doing in what we’re already doing.” [cf. his quotation of an early, still very Hegelian Dewey in the Williams article] Unless we accept these ideas, we’re denying reality and destroying all hope and possibility; the study of the past must affirm what present circumstances demand.
At the outset I speculated that Livingston is motivated by “deeply personal desire,” which of course goes far beyond what I could know, much less demonstrate, and it’s not terribly relevant anyway in assessing his work. I’m not sure how much is accountable as an act of will in depressing times, and how much flows from a secure confidence in his comic-religious, metaphysical vision. Because he so often frames his arguments in terms of the either/or of hope vs. despair, my guess is that there’s a good bit of trying in his believing. His efforts to show empirically that left-liberalism has “won” notwithstanding, my guess is that most people will see it as a framework brought to history---a leap of sorts---rather than supported by it. Indeed, if he is as much of a Hegelian as I think, it’s not easy to see how it ever could be, partly because we’re not done yet.
Anyway, seeing what comedy sometimes makes of irony, I miss a sense of the obdurate, of difficult trade-offs, the complexities of unintended consequences, the limitations of narrative----and a sense of the past as/in the present, the world to which we accommodate ourselves. I’m inclined to read his comic teleology as more a reflex of its historical moment than a way beyond.
---------------------------
* I draw on the following sources and indicate them following quotations:
USIH
- “Near Dark at the Museum,” 7/12/12; and
- “William Appleman Williams: Fifty Years After His Book on the Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” 7/19/12.
Politics and Letters
a. “The Weight of the Past,” Part 1 (4/22/12), Part 2 (5/2/12), and Part 3 (5/18/12);
b. “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” 7/25/12.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label William Cronon. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label William Cronon. Tampilkan semua postingan
Kamis, 09 Agustus 2012
Selasa, 22 Mei 2012
Analysis or Synthesis?
Cronon's latest column in this series, "Breaking Apart, Pulling Away," compares and contrasts analysis-driven history with synthesis-driven history. He introduces the subject as follows:
Analysis or synthesis: which should we prefer?
Is it better to explore tightly bounded specialized topics by asking small unasked questions that can be answered as rigorously as possible, combining previously unknown primary documents and technical arguments in original ways whether or not they ultimately matter very much? Or is it better to range widely across the historical landscape, borrowing insights from secondary sources to make large claims, relying even on documents everyone already knows to pursue big familiar questions which however unanswerable, we all recognize to be undeniably important?
Cronon loves his false choices. Of course good historians should closely analyze their subjects in original ways. And of course we should also put our subjects in a broad enough context so as to make our work relevant, which requires synthesis. But Cronon points out that where we're trained more to do the former, the public is hungrier for the latter. "The Big Questions of history are often what members of the public most want historians to discuss. Yet Big Questions are precisely what our training has taught us to be wary about tackling—and what the sharp knives of our colleagues make us fear we would be unprofessional even to ask."
Really? Do we still live in this world of hyper-specialization? This is not my understanding of recent historiographical trends. Is my understanding peculiar? Perhaps intellectual historians tend more to Big Questions than others? Even those of us who focus on intellectual biography usually write about individuals who ranged widely--thus requiring us to be capable of synthesis. Two of my favorite recent intellectual biographies--Daniel Geary's Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought and Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right--could only have been written by historians able to synthesize a great deal of postwar US history.
I've been thinking about this issue of synthesis in my own work. I just wrapped up a chapter in my culture wars book on the New Left, broadly conceived to include not only the student antiwar movement and counterculture but also the Black and Chicano Power movements as well as the women's and gay liberation movements. I am extremely confident that my take on the topic is original, since my purpose in writing this chapter is to set the stage for the culture wars of later decades. I am also fairly sure that the mix of intellectual history I bring together in my analysis will strike most readers as fairly original. And yet, because my topic is very broad, because I am asking and seeking to answer Big Questions, I am necessarily reliant upon the historiography of others. In short, I synthesize. And I am very comfortable with this. In fact, I can't imagine it any other way. Is this strange? I'd love your thoughts.
Senin, 09 April 2012
How -- And For Whom -- We Write
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| March 17. 1947: The Second-to-Last Time an Historian Appeared on the Cover of Time** |
Among other issues, Potter and Cronon both address what makes good historical writing good. And both Cronon and Potter put a very heavy emphasis on the need to keep historical writing accessible to non-historians and even non-academics. Here's Potter:
Sometimes scholars are not even accessible to each other, much less colleagues in related fields. Conceptual categories that we take for granted but are obscure to non-professionals; overly-specialized or theoretical language, and “failing to notice the absence of those who don’t feel welcome” in an intellectually exclusive coterie are all weaknesses of practice that can emerge from qualities that are otherwise praiseworthy.Without in any way diminishing the importance of this sentiment, I want to note how commonplace it is. Although in practice we might often honor it in the breach, the idea that historical writing ought to be broadly accessible is, I think, a core professional value held by most academic historians in the U.S. today.
The result can be that despite popular enthusiasm for history, and the genuine desire of other historians to connect with our work, we run the risk of turning people off instead of tuning them in.
Academic historians believe in broadly accessible historical writing for many of the reasons that Cronon lays out in his essay, which is entitled "Professional Boredom." Citing, among other things, the History Channel, he notes that "no other academic discipline has done a better job of retaining a large public audience." Moreover, Cronon adds that there are "essential contributions history can make to public understanding of all manner of problems in the present." If we become too specialized or too boring, or even if we define professional history too narrowly, "the risks," writes Cronon, "could not be more clear."
I'm as much as a believer in broadly accessible history as Cronon or Potter. And, lord knows, I'm not in favor of boring history (though I think we can all think of great works of history that are boring). But the story we tell ourselves about academic history appealing to a mass audience is to a very great extent a myth.
Public interest in academic history is limited to a very small number of historians, generally writing on a small number of topics. And most popular works of history are written by authors who are not academic historians. The current New York Times Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction Best Seller List contains four works of history (broadly understood) among the top fifteen books, none of them written by an academic historian: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson at #7, Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dougard at #8, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand at #10, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot at #13. No works by academic historians appear further down the list, either.
And most of us know from experience that, even if our books get noticed outside academic circles, most sell relatively few copies and find relatively small audiences. If you've ever tried pitching an idea for a historical monograph to a non-academic press or a literary agent, you get an even stronger sense of how different the popular market for history is from the academic one.
Anyone who watches the History Channel with any regularity knows that the kind of content they specialize in is very different from the work that academic historians do.
In this regard, it's interesting to compare the academic discipline of history to such disciplines as English and philosophy. There's actually huge popular interest in cultural criticism and philosophy, as the existence of E! (the cable network and website) and the voluminous "philosophy" section in any bookstore attest. But academic English scholars and academic philosophers understand themselves as doing something fundamentally different from, respectively, E! and the Deepak Chopra-heavy "philosophy" section of most bookstores. Academic historians, on the other hand, tend to see a variation of our own craft when we look at the History Channel or the New York Times Best Seller List.
And yet, this myth of the accessibility of academic history is, in many ways, a very productive one. As I've already said, I value readability. And though few academic historians are writing books for audiences much beyond our subdisciplines, let alone beyond the academy, the notion that one should write as if one were addressing a literate, general audience helps historians counteract the tendency of academic discourses to get ever more abstruse and hermetic. At least when I was in graduate school, many other disciplines seemed on occasion to put a positive value on their own abstruseness, presenting it as a sign of technical sophistication (e.g. philosophy and economics) or even their explicit opposition to negative values that they associated with readable texts (e.g. the literary disciplines).
But while I certainly want academic history to continue valuing clear, non-technical prose, I also think we should try to have a more realistic sense of who we reach and how we reach them. The myth of accessible academic history has its costs as well as its benefits.
To begin with, the myth of accessibility can devalue some of what academic historians do uniquely well. We produce knowledge about the past regardless of whether there is a mass market for the knowledge we produce. And since I don't believe that the mass market does a good job of determining what's worth knowing, I think we ought to moderate our polemics against specialization. Many good ideas--even ideas that eventually have a profound impact on broad, public conversations--start in abstruse corners of academic work. Think, for example, of Kuhn and the idea of a "paradigm shift."
Secondly, if we are going to take seriously our role as interlocutors in larger, public debates, we shouldn't count on traditional academic publications to do so. Academic historians frequently bemoan the fact that our nation's public conversations about history often leave much to be desired. Clearer writing in our academic monographs, however valuable it is in and of itself, is not going to change this situation.
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* I almost called Potter's post "very smart"; those who've read it will understand why I didn't!
** This conclusion based on a cursory online search of Time magazine covers; do not reproduce this thought in an academic work.
Minggu, 01 Januari 2012
Five Influential Books---For Intellectual Historians
The end of the year is a traditional time in journalism to offer up various "best books" lists. Here are a few for your reading pleasure.
Today, however, I want to offer something a bit different. An online magazine called The Browser has a regular series titled the "Five Books Interviews." The series has attracted some intriguing folks, such as Lynn Hunt offering her best of five on the French Revolution, Judith Flanders on the Victorian Age, and Woody Allen discussing the books that have inspired him. Recently The Browser created a list of the five best philosophy books, recommended by philosophers, on "the big questions of morality, suffering, and meaning."
That list inspired me to think about the five works of intellectual history, broadly defined, that have been the most inspirational, or personally influential, to me. What follows are my five, offered in no particular order and only briefly annotated. In the comments I invite you to offer your own choices---with explanations, if you're so inclined. Here goes:
1. Frederick Copleston's eleven-volume A History of Philosophy series. I remain amazed at the depth and breadth of this project, covering philosophy from Greece and Rome up to Existentialism. I don't know how intellectual historians and philosophers get along without this set.
2. Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. I finally read this for the first time early in 2010. I promised Dan Wickberg a series of reflections here on that reading, and I've never followed through. Part of the reason I broke that promise was finding a place to start in the context of USIH. Perhaps I should've started with Lovejoy himself, in whom I believe we have something of a paragon for historians of thought/intellectual historians/historians of ideas.
3. Jonathan Rose's Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Here's a review for a taste of the book's contents. I love the combination of dealing with great books and working class thought, which came together as a kind of intellectual-history-from-below. I loved this book at the first read, and have lost no admiration since.
4. Henry F. May's The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917. This is one of those early books---and a book I read early on---that showed me how one artfully combines intellectual and cultural history. This book inspired me to search for more like it---and to want to write my own some day.
5. John Tracy Ellis's American Catholics and the Intellectual Life. As a Catholic, this short book---which is both a primary source and a work that dealt with a useable past---alerted me to the existence of a critical intellectual tradition within the Church. And I loved learning that one of the main cogs of that tradition was a Church historian, an ecclesiastical historian, who did not explicitly claim to write intellectual history. The link above is an assessment of that book's place in Catholic intellectual history.
And---an unconventional bonus choice:
6. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. Although Cronon is not normally recognized as either an intellectual historian or a philosopher (though he qualifies, I think, as a kind of environmental philosopher-historian), I find his combination of deep reflection, archival work, analysis, and storytelling inspirational. That book is, to me, one of the highest models of historical thinking for all kinds of professionals. The link I provided is to January 2007 summary review of the book that I have found useful for teaching about the book. - TL
------------------------------
[Update: Here's another book list of interest---not really for 2011 alone, and deserving of another post entirely. - TL]
Today, however, I want to offer something a bit different. An online magazine called The Browser has a regular series titled the "Five Books Interviews." The series has attracted some intriguing folks, such as Lynn Hunt offering her best of five on the French Revolution, Judith Flanders on the Victorian Age, and Woody Allen discussing the books that have inspired him. Recently The Browser created a list of the five best philosophy books, recommended by philosophers, on "the big questions of morality, suffering, and meaning."
That list inspired me to think about the five works of intellectual history, broadly defined, that have been the most inspirational, or personally influential, to me. What follows are my five, offered in no particular order and only briefly annotated. In the comments I invite you to offer your own choices---with explanations, if you're so inclined. Here goes:
1. Frederick Copleston's eleven-volume A History of Philosophy series. I remain amazed at the depth and breadth of this project, covering philosophy from Greece and Rome up to Existentialism. I don't know how intellectual historians and philosophers get along without this set.
2. Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. I finally read this for the first time early in 2010. I promised Dan Wickberg a series of reflections here on that reading, and I've never followed through. Part of the reason I broke that promise was finding a place to start in the context of USIH. Perhaps I should've started with Lovejoy himself, in whom I believe we have something of a paragon for historians of thought/intellectual historians/historians of ideas.
3. Jonathan Rose's Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Here's a review for a taste of the book's contents. I love the combination of dealing with great books and working class thought, which came together as a kind of intellectual-history-from-below. I loved this book at the first read, and have lost no admiration since.
4. Henry F. May's The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917. This is one of those early books---and a book I read early on---that showed me how one artfully combines intellectual and cultural history. This book inspired me to search for more like it---and to want to write my own some day.
5. John Tracy Ellis's American Catholics and the Intellectual Life. As a Catholic, this short book---which is both a primary source and a work that dealt with a useable past---alerted me to the existence of a critical intellectual tradition within the Church. And I loved learning that one of the main cogs of that tradition was a Church historian, an ecclesiastical historian, who did not explicitly claim to write intellectual history. The link above is an assessment of that book's place in Catholic intellectual history.
And---an unconventional bonus choice:
6. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. Although Cronon is not normally recognized as either an intellectual historian or a philosopher (though he qualifies, I think, as a kind of environmental philosopher-historian), I find his combination of deep reflection, archival work, analysis, and storytelling inspirational. That book is, to me, one of the highest models of historical thinking for all kinds of professionals. The link I provided is to January 2007 summary review of the book that I have found useful for teaching about the book. - TL
------------------------------
[Update: Here's another book list of interest---not really for 2011 alone, and deserving of another post entirely. - TL]
Selasa, 19 April 2011
Grafton on Cronon and Academic Freedom
There's a blog post by Anthony Grafton over at the New York Review of Books website on academic freedom in light of the Cronon affair. He makes a lot of the usual points, but in the midst of his post he suddenly veers into a territory that I find welcome. While defending academic freedom, he also lays out a vision of academic responsibility that goes hand in hand with academic freedom and is necessary for the maintenance of academic freedom's legitimacy. He says:
"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."
"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."
I was struck by this passage because Grafton hits a different note than I normally hear. Consider this passage from Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957):
"Progress in the natural sciences is not remotely confined to findings made in the laboratory. Insights into the mysteries of nature are born of hypothesis and speculation. The more so is this true in the pursuit of understanding in the groping endeavors of what are called the social sciences, the concern of which is man and society. The problems that are the respective preoccupations of anthropology, economics, law, psychology, sociology and related areas of scholarship are merely departmentalized dealing, by way of manageable division of analysis, with interpenetrating aspects of holistic perplexities. For society's good - if understanding be an essential need of society - inquiries into these problems, speculations about them, stimulation in others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible. Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people's well-being, except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compelling. These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor."
Here Frankfurter states the issue somewhat differently than Grafton does. Academic freedom is freedom from governmental intrusion, Frankfurter says, allowing unfettering inquiry into the full range of existence without fear of political consequence. But many proponents of academic freedom argue that it entails the freedom to enter the public sphere to influence the workings of government, something implied by Frankfurter but never quite elaborated or explained. Grafton's warning that academic responsibility requires that we limit our political interventions to those problems on which we are experts seems to be a necessary limitation to this vision of academic freedom. It is the only way that we can justify that freedom.
Grafton on Cronon and Academic Freedom
There's a blog post by Anthony Grafton over at the New York Review of Books website on academic freedom in light of the Cronon affair. He makes a lot of the usual points, but in the midst of his post he suddenly veers into a territory that I find welcome. While defending academic freedom, he also lays out a vision of academic responsibility that goes hand in hand with academic freedom and is necessary for the maintenance of academic freedom's legitimacy. He says:
"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."
"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."
I was struck by this passage because Grafton hits a different note than I normally hear. Consider this passage from Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957):
"Progress in the natural sciences is not remotely confined to findings made in the laboratory. Insights into the mysteries of nature are born of hypothesis and speculation. The more so is this true in the pursuit of understanding in the groping endeavors of what are called the social sciences, the concern of which is man and society. The problems that are the respective preoccupations of anthropology, economics, law, psychology, sociology and related areas of scholarship are merely departmentalized dealing, by way of manageable division of analysis, with interpenetrating aspects of holistic perplexities. For society's good - if understanding be an essential need of society - inquiries into these problems, speculations about them, stimulation in others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible. Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people's well-being, except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compelling. These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor."
Here Frankfurter states the issue somewhat differently than Grafton does. Academic freedom is freedom from governmental intrusion, Frankfurter says, allowing unfettering inquiry into the full range of existence without fear of political consequence. But many proponents of academic freedom argue that it entails the freedom to enter the public sphere to influence the workings of government, something implied by Frankfurter but never quite elaborated or explained. Grafton's warning that academic responsibility requires that we limit our political interventions to those problems on which we are experts seems to be a necessary limitation to this vision of academic freedom. It is the only way that we can justify that freedom.
Senin, 28 Maret 2011
The Cronon Affair and the Political Culture of the GOP
The executive summary: on March 15, Cronon put up a carefully researched blog post detailing the history and activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and Paul Weyrich, dedicated to drafting model right-wing laws for state legislatures around the country. In response to this post, the Wisconsin State GOP issued an incredibly broad FOIA search of Cronon's personal e-mails. When Cronon stated the plain fact that this was an attempt to intimidate him, the state Republicans, tearing a page from Lee Atwater's and Karl Rove's playbooks, accused Cronon of all the things they were doing to him. Late last week, the story went fully viral. And in the last couple days newspapers--including the New York Times--and professional organizations--including the AHA--as well as thousands of citizens have rallied to Cronon's side.
Though it should go without saying that I stand with Cronon in this matter, I'm less interested in simply adding my voice to the growing chorus of disgust at the Wisconsin Republican Party and more interested in taking a step back and asking an historical question (as is this blog's wont): how did we get here?
Throughout these events, Cronon has repeatedly pointed out that his own politics are far from radical. He's a lifelong registered independent and considers himself a moderate. And by all appearances he is an unusual sort of moderate (at least in the early 21st-century U.S.). Many self-described "centrists" today never tire of accusing those who disagree with them, on both the left and right, of being ideologues. Only their own centrist political positions deserve to be taken seriously by right-thinking Americans. Such people can even be found in our profession. In contrast to such dogmatic centrists, Cronon seems genuinely interested in being open to views on both the left and the right. This willingness to take seriously the politics of those who don't share one's own politics is an unfortunately rare virtue...but one that greatly benefits historical practice. I'm not a political moderate, but I hope that I am able to nevertheless share Cronon's willingness to take seriously the politics of others.
Driven by this desire for fairness, Cronon has repeatedly emphasized the aberrational nature of the Wisconsin Republican Party's behavior, both in their strong-arm legislative tactics that led to his initial research on ALEC and in their efforts to intimidate him. And he has repeatedly compared this latest turn of events to another era of Wisconsin Republican politics that had national implications: the rise of Joe McCarthy. For example, in his latest blog post, Cronon writes:
In my heart of hearts, I keep hoping that even Republicans who learn about my situation will respond by saying to themselves that this is not what their party should stand for. Indeed, in my own understanding of the history of the GOP, leaving aside dangerous aberrations like Joseph McCarthy, what I am experiencing is not what the Republican Party claims to stand for. It is time at last for “the angels of our better nature,” in the words of another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, to reassert themselves.Cronon is correct, I think, in comparing the latest turn of events to the career of Joe McCarthy. But McCarthyism and the tactics of today's Wisconsin GOP are less blips on the radar of "normal" Republican politics than Cronon suggests. I'm more inclined to agree with Paul Krugman's assessment that this is just business as usual in today's Republican Party:
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. . . .
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.
But Cronon's reminders that it was not always thus in the Republican Party, especially in Wisconsin, and his desire to take seriously the views of others can nonetheless be important guideposts to historians. Because while I'm inclined to agree with Krugman that there's unfortunately nothing very surprising about the Wisconsin Republican Party's tactics in the Cronon affair, we need to take seriously the task of explaining why this is the case. The political culture of today's Republican Party is a contingent fact, not an essential quality of Republican-ness or or U.S. conservatism.
One of the tasks facing historians of American political thought and American political culture will be explaining how a party and a movement that proudly trace their roots back to "classical liberalism" and that show enormous affection for the word "libertarian" are so devoted to tactics that undermine transparency in government and free and open political debate.
I'm not going to provide anything approaching final answers in this blog post, though I will finish up with some possible competing (though not mutually exclusive) explanations. But first, I want to explore a little more the McCarthyism analogy, because I think it's particularly interesting and instructive.
Right off the bat, it's worth noting two things that seem to distinguish McCarthyism proper from the recent turn of events in Wisconsin.
First, in the early 1950s, there was a broad political consensus in the United States that communism represented a grave and present danger to this country. This consensus was, of course, far broader than was support for Joe McCarthy. Liberal anticommunists were forced to distinguish both between the presumably real dangers that concerned them and the phony dangers that McCarthy dreamed up, and between McCarthy's tactics and their own support for the Cold War at home and abroad. And McCarthy's defenders were able to appeal to the consensus around anticommunism (stronger on the right, of course) to rally others to Tailgunner Joe's cause. McCarthy's charges tended to be vicious and unwarranted, but they at least referred to what most Americans saw as an existential threat to this nation.
William Cronon's actions--even in the heated rhetoric of the Wisconsin Republicans--would seem to not so easily fit into a grand conspiracy against the American way of life.
Secondly, McCarthyism deeply divided American conservative intellectuals. [For simplicity's sake, my guide here will be Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, not so much because it's the final word on these matters, but rather because I think we can count on Nash to be fair (some might say "too fair") to the conservative point of view (for those interested in Nash's status in the field today, check out Andrew's recent post on Nash's book).] Many were lukewarm about the Senator from Wisconsin. Some, like Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers were openly hostile to him. The only thoroughgoing intellectual defense of McCarthy came from William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell in their co-authored book, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954).
Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as far as I can tell, today's conservative movement lacks heirs to Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers, who might denounce the tactics of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and rally to Bill Cronon's defense from the right.
The absence of conservative criticism of the Wisconsin GOP's behavior at least in part reflects the eventual triumph on the right of the Bozell-Buckley line on McCarthy. Though their full-throated defense of McCarthy was unusual among conservative intellectuals in the 1950s, Buckley and Bozell would, of course, come to define the mainstream of the American conservative thought over the course of the decade or so after the publication of their book.
As George Nash notes, the rise of that vision in the early-to-mid-1960s--which he calls "fusionism" (borrowing the term coined by Buckley associate Frank Meyer) as it brought together the libertarian and traditionalist strands of American conservative thought--was built in part on the centrality of an expansive understanding of the Communist threat:
[F]usionism as an attempt at theoretical harmony was immensely assisted by the cement of anti-Communism throughout the years of self-definition. It is exraordinarily noteworthy that anti-Communism, one of the three principal tributaries of the postwar conservative mainstream, was not a significant source of tension in most of these polemics at all. Instead, nearly all conservatives were bound together by consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe (which included liberalism, too) was an invaluable source of cohesion. . . . Their sense of combat ("the final struggle") with a common foe helped to keep them together.Two things to note about this passage from Nash (which appears on p. 165 of the 1998 ISI edition of his book). First, the seriousness of this existential struggle convinced most self-identified libertarian conservatives to put aside many of their scruples about about state power and individual freedom for the duration (as it were). And because the struggle with liberalism was, in effect, the same struggle as the struggle with communism, even the kinds of flimsy connections to communism that Joe McCarthy provided were unnecessary for a threat from the left to be seen as existential and thus requiring extraordinary exceptions to libertarian conservatives' nominal commitments to individual liberty.
So the first potential explanation of the GOP's role in the Cronon affair is that it is simply the continuation of this attitude toward liberalism. There are of course many additional intellectual dots that need to be connected here. For example, ideas about the New Class (which USIH has frequently blogged about) might provide important intermediate steps that have apparently led so many on the right to see a politically moderate and extraordinarily distinguished U.S. historian as a threat to the republic.
Of course, that entire line of thought may be too high-minded. Perhaps the tactics of the Wisconsin Republican Party, however typical they may have become, may be less the stuff of ideas and more simply political habits. Here one might turn to Rick Perlstein's notion that, since at least the late 1960s, we've been living in "Nixonland," a place in which the right manipulates various social divisions for its own political gain. If Nixon is, in some sense, the author of the political culture of today's GOP, then the best explanation for it lies less in ideology (whatever Nixon was, he wasn't much of an ideologue), and more in a kind of ruthless political pragmatism, backed up by some sense that everybody does it, that if you don't screw the bastards on the other side, the bastards on the other side will screw you.
But one can also gesture toward a more intellectual strain of moral cynicism and illiberalism on the right. In recent years, Leo Strauss's name has frequently come up as an explanation for the political style of the contemporary GOP. The argument that Strauss is responsible for the tone of the Republican Party today has probably been most exhaustively developed by the Canadian political theorist Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right, though it's received more play through Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares.
This view is, IMO, very much overdrawn. Not that one cannot find good examples of such political cynicism among the handful of bona fide Straussians in American political life. But there are just not that many Straussians. And illiberalism and moral cynicism played a major role in American politics--and modern conservatism--well before Leo Strauss became influential in any way. Any consideration of high-minded defenses of Machiavellianism would need to grapple with a thinker like James Burnham (whose influence on the neoconservatives is probably considerably greater than Strauss's). And Willmoore Kendall's peculiar but quietly influential brand of illiberal, statist, Middle American majoritarianism would also need to be thrown into the mix. Thinkers like Burnham and Kendall did not have libertarian scruples that needed to be overcome by appeals to the communist menace. It's an interesting question how practically important such thinkers were. The tendency of their ideas to function as highminded defenses of Nixonian politics were almost certainly less significant for American political life than the actual practice of those politics by people like Nixon and his political team.
Another possible explanation to note is more social psychological. In recent years, prompted in part by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer (popularized by John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)), there has been renewed interest in the idea of authoritarianism, not as a political system but as a personality type. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, it was quite common to explain the American right in terms of political psychology. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel L. Levinson's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was perhaps the key work in this line of thought. But its tendency to understand conservatism as somehow socially and psychologically pathological was also reflected in such works as the essays edited by Daniel Bell as The New American Right (1955; later expanded and republished as The Radical Right (1963)) and Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
This pathologizing line of thought has in more recent years often been dismissed by historians for not taking conservatives and their ideas seriously. But I suspect that there is an analytical middle ground here. One can accept that some people are more drawn to authoritarian points of view than others without entirely dismissing or pathologizing them. Political scientists like Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, for example, have tried to use the idea of authoritarian dispositions descriptively rather than pejoratively in their study of polarization in American politics.
Raising questions about the authoritarian personality (Adorno), mind (Altemeyer), or dispositions (Hetherington and Weiler) reframes the question I'm asking in this post rather than answering it. In principle, left authoritarianism is as much of a political possibility as right authoritarianism is. Yet studies seem to suggest that in the U.S. today, conservatives and Republicans are notably more authoritarian than those on the left or Democrats. Which again brings us to the question of: why?
Finally, we need to raise the possibility that something of longer standing in American political life is going on here. Is it wrong to start our story with McCarthy and post-World War II conservatism? The late political scientist Michael Paul Rogin saw a countersubversive tradition at the heart of American political culture. If Rogin is right, Krugman may unfortunately have it precisely backwards when he bemoans "how un-American one of our two great political parties has become."
The Cronon Affair and the Political Culture of the GOP
The executive summary: on March 15, Cronon put up a carefully researched blog post detailing the history and activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and Paul Weyrich, dedicated to drafting model right-wing laws for state legislatures around the country. In response to this post, the Wisconsin State GOP issued an incredibly broad FOIA search of Cronon's personal e-mails. When Cronon stated the plain fact that this was an attempt to intimidate him, the state Republicans, tearing a page from Lee Atwater's and Karl Rove's playbooks, accused Cronon of all the things they were doing to him. Late last week, the story went fully viral. And in the last couple days newspapers--including the New York Times--and professional organizations--including the AHA--as well as thousands of citizens have rallied to Cronon's side.
Though it should go without saying that I stand with Cronon in this matter, I'm less interested in simply adding my voice to the growing chorus of disgust at the Wisconsin Republican Party and more interested in taking a step back and asking an historical question (as is this blog's wont): how did we get here?
Throughout these events, Cronon has repeatedly pointed out that his own politics are far from radical. He's a lifelong registered independent and considers himself a moderate. And by all appearances he is an unusual sort of moderate (at least in the early 21st-century U.S.). Many self-described "centrists" today never tire of accusing those who disagree with them, on both the left and right, of being ideologues. Only their own centrist political positions deserve to be taken seriously by right-thinking Americans. Such people can even be found in our profession. In contrast to such dogmatic centrists, Cronon seems genuinely interested in being open to views on both the left and the right. This willingness to take seriously the politics of those who don't share one's own politics is an unfortunately rare virtue...but one that greatly benefits historical practice. I'm not a political moderate, but I hope that I am able to nevertheless share Cronon's willingness to take seriously the politics of others.
Driven by this desire for fairness, Cronon has repeatedly emphasized the aberrational nature of the Wisconsin Republican Party's behavior, both in their strong-arm legislative tactics that led to his initial research on ALEC and in their efforts to intimidate him. And he has repeatedly compared this latest turn of events to another era of Wisconsin Republican politics that had national implications: the rise of Joe McCarthy. For example, in his latest blog post, Cronon writes:
In my heart of hearts, I keep hoping that even Republicans who learn about my situation will respond by saying to themselves that this is not what their party should stand for. Indeed, in my own understanding of the history of the GOP, leaving aside dangerous aberrations like Joseph McCarthy, what I am experiencing is not what the Republican Party claims to stand for. It is time at last for “the angels of our better nature,” in the words of another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, to reassert themselves.Cronon is correct, I think, in comparing the latest turn of events to the career of Joe McCarthy. But McCarthyism and the tactics of today's Wisconsin GOP are less blips on the radar of "normal" Republican politics than Cronon suggests. I'm more inclined to agree with Paul Krugman's assessment that this is just business as usual in today's Republican Party:
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. . . .
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.
But Cronon's reminders that it was not always thus in the Republican Party, especially in Wisconsin, and his desire to take seriously the views of others can nonetheless be important guideposts to historians. Because while I'm inclined to agree with Krugman that there's unfortunately nothing very surprising about the Wisconsin Republican Party's tactics in the Cronon affair, we need to take seriously the task of explaining why this is the case. The political culture of today's Republican Party is a contingent fact, not an essential quality of Republican-ness or or U.S. conservatism.
One of the tasks facing historians of American political thought and American political culture will be explaining how a party and a movement that proudly trace their roots back to "classical liberalism" and that show enormous affection for the word "libertarian" are so devoted to tactics that undermine transparency in government and free and open political debate.
I'm not going to provide anything approaching final answers in this blog post, though I will finish up with some possible competing (though not mutually exclusive) explanations. But first, I want to explore a little more the McCarthyism analogy, because I think it's particularly interesting and instructive.
Right off the bat, it's worth noting two things that seem to distinguish McCarthyism proper from the recent turn of events in Wisconsin.
First, in the early 1950s, there was a broad political consensus in the United States that communism represented a grave and present danger to this country. This consensus was, of course, far broader than was support for Joe McCarthy. Liberal anticommunists were forced to distinguish both between the presumably real dangers that concerned them and the phony dangers that McCarthy dreamed up, and between McCarthy's tactics and their own support for the Cold War at home and abroad. And McCarthy's defenders were able to appeal to the consensus around anticommunism (stronger on the right, of course) to rally others to Tailgunner Joe's cause. McCarthy's charges tended to be vicious and unwarranted, but they at least referred to what most Americans saw as an existential threat to this nation.
William Cronon's actions--even in the heated rhetoric of the Wisconsin Republicans--would seem to not so easily fit into a grand conspiracy against the American way of life.
Secondly, McCarthyism deeply divided American conservative intellectuals. [For simplicity's sake, my guide here will be Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, not so much because it's the final word on these matters, but rather because I think we can count on Nash to be fair (some might say "too fair") to the conservative point of view (for those interested in Nash's status in the field today, check out Andrew's recent post on Nash's book).] Many were lukewarm about the Senator from Wisconsin. Some, like Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers were openly hostile to him. The only thoroughgoing intellectual defense of McCarthy came from William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell in their co-authored book, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954).
Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as far as I can tell, today's conservative movement lacks heirs to Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers, who might denounce the tactics of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and rally to Bill Cronon's defense from the right.
The absence of conservative criticism of the Wisconsin GOP's behavior at least in part reflects the eventual triumph on the right of the Bozell-Buckley line on McCarthy. Though their full-throated defense of McCarthy was unusual among conservative intellectuals in the 1950s, Buckley and Bozell would, of course, come to define the mainstream of the American conservative thought over the course of the decade or so after the publication of their book.
As George Nash notes, the rise of that vision in the early-to-mid-1960s--which he calls "fusionism" (borrowing the term coined by Buckley associate Frank Meyer) as it brought together the libertarian and traditionalist strands of American conservative thought--was built in part on the centrality of an expansive understanding of the Communist threat:
[F]usionism as an attempt at theoretical harmony was immensely assisted by the cement of anti-Communism throughout the years of self-definition. It is exraordinarily noteworthy that anti-Communism, one of the three principal tributaries of the postwar conservative mainstream, was not a significant source of tension in most of these polemics at all. Instead, nearly all conservatives were bound together by consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe (which included liberalism, too) was an invaluable source of cohesion. . . . Their sense of combat ("the final struggle") with a common foe helped to keep them together.Two things to note about this passage from Nash (which appears on p. 165 of the 1998 ISI edition of his book). First, the seriousness of this existential struggle convinced most self-identified libertarian conservatives to put aside many of their scruples about about state power and individual freedom for the duration (as it were). And because the struggle with liberalism was, in effect, the same struggle as the struggle with communism, even the kinds of flimsy connections to communism that Joe McCarthy provided were unnecessary for a threat from the left to be seen as existential and thus requiring extraordinary exceptions to libertarian conservatives' nominal commitments to individual liberty.
So the first potential explanation of the GOP's role in the Cronon affair is that it is simply the continuation of this attitude toward liberalism. There are of course many additional intellectual dots that need to be connected here. For example, ideas about the New Class (which USIH has frequently blogged about) might provide important intermediate steps that have apparently led so many on the right to see a politically moderate and extraordinarily distinguished U.S. historian as a threat to the republic.
Of course, that entire line of thought may be too high-minded. Perhaps the tactics of the Wisconsin Republican Party, however typical they may have become, may be less the stuff of ideas and more simply political habits. Here one might turn to Rick Perlstein's notion that, since at least the late 1960s, we've been living in "Nixonland," a place in which the right manipulates various social divisions for its own political gain. If Nixon is, in some sense, the author of the political culture of today's GOP, then the best explanation for it lies less in ideology (whatever Nixon was, he wasn't much of an ideologue), and more in a kind of ruthless political pragmatism, backed up by some sense that everybody does it, that if you don't screw the bastards on the other side, the bastards on the other side will screw you.
But one can also gesture toward a more intellectual strain of moral cynicism and illiberalism on the right. In recent years, Leo Strauss's name has frequently come up as an explanation for the political style of the contemporary GOP. The argument that Strauss is responsible for the tone of the Republican Party today has probably been most exhaustively developed by the Canadian political theorist Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right, though it's received more play through Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares.
This view is, IMO, very much overdrawn. Not that one cannot find good examples of such political cynicism among the handful of bona fide Straussians in American political life. But there are just not that many Straussians. And illiberalism and moral cynicism played a major role in American politics--and modern conservatism--well before Leo Strauss became influential in any way. Any consideration of high-minded defenses of Machiavellianism would need to grapple with a thinker like James Burnham (whose influence on the neoconservatives is probably considerably greater than Strauss's). And Willmoore Kendall's peculiar but quietly influential brand of illiberal, statist, Middle American majoritarianism would also need to be thrown into the mix. Thinkers like Burnham and Kendall did not have libertarian scruples that needed to be overcome by appeals to the communist menace. It's an interesting question how practically important such thinkers were. The tendency of their ideas to function as highminded defenses of Nixonian politics were almost certainly less significant for American political life than the actual practice of those politics by people like Nixon and his political team.
Another possible explanation to note is more social psychological. In recent years, prompted in part by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer (popularized by John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)), there has been renewed interest in the idea of authoritarianism, not as a political system but as a personality type. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, it was quite common to explain the American right in terms of political psychology. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel L. Levinson's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was perhaps the key work in this line of thought. But its tendency to understand conservatism as somehow socially and psychologically pathological was also reflected in such works as the essays edited by Daniel Bell as The New American Right (1955; later expanded and republished as The Radical Right (1963)) and Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
This pathologizing line of thought has in more recent years often been dismissed by historians for not taking conservatives and their ideas seriously. But I suspect that there is an analytical middle ground here. One can accept that some people are more drawn to authoritarian points of view than others without entirely dismissing or pathologizing them. Political scientists like Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, for example, have tried to use the idea of authoritarian dispositions descriptively rather than pejoratively in their study of polarization in American politics.
Raising questions about the authoritarian personality (Adorno), mind (Altemeyer), or dispositions (Hetherington and Weiler) reframes the question I'm asking in this post rather than answering it. In principle, left authoritarianism is as much of a political possibility as right authoritarianism is. Yet studies seem to suggest that in the U.S. today, conservatives and Republicans are notably more authoritarian than those on the left or Democrats. Which again brings us to the question of: why?
Finally, we need to raise the possibility that something of longer standing in American political life is going on here. Is it wrong to start our story with McCarthy and post-World War II conservatism? The late political scientist Michael Paul Rogin saw a countersubversive tradition at the heart of American political culture. If Rogin is right, Krugman may unfortunately have it precisely backwards when he bemoans "how un-American one of our two great political parties has become."
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