Tom Sugrue: "Geoffrey Kabaservice, whose scholarship on moderate Republicanism and internal GOP debates is excellent,: "has launched a sharp critique of histories of conservatism in Politico.... He... falls prey to the crudest identitarian assumptions about who is and isn't a legitimate narrator...
...(Time to fold your tents medievalists, white historians of slavery, millennials who write about the 1960s, scholars of the French revolution, et al.)... Who is @RuleandRuin to say that we historians of modern conservatism have not experienced it (is that true for anyone alive for the last half century?) or don't have friends or family members who are on the right (many in my case) and right-wing colleagues (yep, several)?[But] I'm not just name-dropping obscure scholars here: these historians—and many more—have completely transformed our understanding of the history of modern America. Few of them are polemicists and I would bet that, like me, many of them actually know some conservatives....
.@NancyMacLean, a nemesis of Kabaservice... collaborated on a history of conservatism with none other than Donald Critchlow, a man of the right who wrote an admiring bio of #PhyllisSchlafly. I am left-of-center and have used Critchlow's work with great success. Heck, I have even assigned William Rusher. I make my students read Barry Goldwater. Conscience of a Conservative. Why? Because we have to understand.... As someone who recently co-wrote on the history of modern America (These United States), I took the right seriously and wrote about it in some depth, drawing from scholars as diverse as MacLean and Kabaservice himself. This is not an impoverished subfield, stunted by bias, distortion, and oversight. I have arguments with many of these scholars—and they often argue with each other. But to charge ostensibly liberal historians of the right with ignorance displays Kabaservice's ignorance....
#shouldread
