#The week magazine political bias professional#
Rightists claim that professional historians are leftist partisans making mere political fodder of history. central to their effort to roll back the twentieth century’s expansion of political inclusiveness, social tolerance, and the welfare state.” This alternative history can take the form of fantasies like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which I’ve addressed elsewhere,or arguments that the Civil War wasn’t about the South’s right to enslave people, as in Donald Livingston’s It Wasn’t About Slavery. therefore what they are doing is simply providing a corrective to the leftist political bias of the academy.” In the eyes of some on the political right, history is a zero-sum game whose goal consists of scoring more points than an opponent it makes sense that they lash out when they think “the other side”-me, in this scenario-has indeed scored some.įurther, Gilman has described a movement unfolding amid the right that aims to create an alternative history, or “usable past.” Gilman calls this “a politically self-conscious project. Intellectual historian Nils Gilman put the matter this way: “right-wingers assume that professional historians approach the past from the same (e.g., primordially political) perspective as they do.
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(One right-wing blogger even threatened me.) Why? Not a provocative argument, it seemed to me, as a historian of 20th-century Britain. In other words, contemporaries offered grounds for “judging” Roosevelt and Churchill. African Americans did so, as did American and non-American Jews, a Palestinian veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and more. Was mine an anachronistic critique from ahistorical hindsight? No: there is plenty of evidence of Roosevelt and Churchill’s contemporaries who criticized Nazism as Nazism. “That was the historical path not taken.” “The Allied leadership did not fight the war over fascist race-nationalism,” I wrote. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill fiercely opposed the Nazis, they didn’t argue against the bedrock of Nazism itself: race supremacy. This followed a piece on the in which I highlighted the paradox that, while Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs, 1882–1962, National Archives and Records Administration, 195419.
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Roosevelt (left) and Winston Churchill, John Broich faced intense backlash.