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Some of the leading writers and promoters of “rise of the right” scholarship, including former labor historians, began distancing themselves from labor history and attacking radical interpretations of the past around the same time they started producing histories of conservatism. The cases of Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz and Georgetown University’s Michael Kazin, two scholars who had established their careers as labor historians but now identify as political historians, are instructive. In the 1990s, Wilentz, the author of a book about New York City’s working class, became a political historian as well as an enthusiastic supporter and colleague of the Clintons.21 In the introduction to his 2008 book on Ronald Reagan, Wilentz admitted that his “views have ripened over time.”22 Kazin, who left his first major academic mark in 1987 with a study of San Francisco trade unions in the Progressive Era, has expressed regret about parts of his past.23 “Despite claiming to be hard-headed Marxists,” Kazin wrote in 2013, “our analysis of American society was more emotional than rational.” Kazin tells us that he and his comrades were strategically wrongheaded for referring to the police as “pigs” and for spelling America with three Ks.24 Kazin has since distanced himself from what he considers an irrational period tarnished by counter-productive ultraleftism. Nevertheless, he remains politically active and was partially responsible for launching Historians for Obama in 2007.
These liberal historians of conservatism have responded to writers to their left in one of two ways: disregarding them altogether or outright hostile engagement. While they generally ignore Marxist writers, viewing their arguments as more of an annoying distraction than as a set of ideas worth engaging with, some Marxists, including Montgomery, Davis, and especially Zinn, have made too big of a splash to be overlooked.25 All three, in Kazin’s opinion, overstated the significance of class in U.S. history. Zinn, given his popular reach, deserved special scorn from these formerly class-conscious scholars. After Zinn’s 2010 death, Wilentz faulted him for writing for a broad audience: “he’s a popularizer, and his view of history is topsy-turvy, turning old villains into heroes, and after a while the glow gets unreal.”26 In 2004, Kazin wrote the first of several articles and speeches criticizing A People’s History of the United States, calling it “simplistic” and “bad history” because Zinn, in Kazin’s view, exaggerated the power of elites without recognizing “the real choices our left ancestors faced and the true pathos, and drama, of their decisions.”27
full: https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/scholarship-on-the-rise-of-the-right/
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