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Duke historian Nancy MacLean is featured in the link Louis posted. She claimed that the Koch brothers were behind an attempt to smear her and her book about the economist behind the 1%, etc., Democracy in Chains. She urged her friends to write reviews of her book on Amazon as a way to challenge the Koch Brothers' acolytes. A better PR ploy is hard to imagine. Now she knows precious little about economics and is a typical left liberal of the Bernie Sanders variety. Others have pointed out the shallowness of her arguments. But her book has done remarkably well, precisely because it is the kind of liberal critique that is loved and acceptable to the mainstream. Radical historian, Chad Pearson, has a forthcoming essay in Monthly Review that sharply criticizes the new left liberal historians who argue that there was once a good country, from FDR til the 1970s, when unions were strong and Keynesian economics was in the drivers' seat in terms of federal economic policy. Then the bad guys took over and everything went to shit. Maclean greatly admires Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Pearson points out the sordid backgrounds of Holmes and Brandeis, both of whom did plenty of dirty work for employers. It's just typical liberal crap, and it is hostile to the left. Maclean's book's subtitle is The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Deep, get it? Like the deep state. She's shallow but those dastardly economists at George Mason U., well they're deep. As if Buchanan's ideas haven't been well-known for more than 40 years. And the right has been right out in the open since at least the 1890s. See Pearson's book, Reform Or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement. It's not as if neoliberalism doesn't have a long pedigree, as Pearson shows. It's no deeper than capitalism itself. What Maclean and company don't seem to able to do is examine what is new in the world historically and as part of a whole. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
