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(Sklar, like Eugene Genovese, started out as a Marxist and became a rightwinger--even to the point of proclaiming his admiration for Sarah Palin.)
Other former liberals and socialists, including Genovese, have turned rightward in their later years. And there is a continuity between Sklar’s earlier work and his Letters on Obama, which, despite their fevered pitch, still includes some dispassionate theoretical digressions. But there is also a disturbing nuttiness—evidenced in his adulation of Beck and Palin—that runs through his last decade’s work. I did not see or talk to him during the last decade, so I don’t know what happened to him, but I would hope those who assess his contribution to understanding American history and politics pay much closer attention to his large book and to his essays than to these letters, which I suspect were written under a kind of personal duress.
In a memoir written two years ago, entitled “Marty and Me,” historian James Livingston, who knew and studied with Sklar, cited “four big ideas” that Sklar had: first, his portrayal of American liberalism as “corporate liberalism”; second, his analysis of how American capitalism was transformed in the 1920s; third, his view of how America’s foreign policy had been based on John Hay’s Open Door Notes; and fourth, his rejection of Marx’s contention that socialism was a distinct stage of history after capitalism. For Sklar, these four were not separate notions. He developed these ideas at different times in his career, but then proceeded at each successive time to integrate them into grand synthesis of twentieth century American and world history.
full: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118187/martin-j-sklar-and-search-usable-past
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