Jan 22, 2005

Keepin' My Lefties straight and My Righties honest ...

by Cliopatria

So, Tim Burke and I are walking up the street from the 2nd Annual Banquet of Cliopatriarchs toward the Convention Center in Seattle. And there's this person pamphleting the passers-by – most of whom, at that point, are historians rushing to their next session. Burke dismisses him with one of those Swattie moves."LaRouchite," he says to me. Sounded likely, because the LaRouchies were working the corner across the street. But, being the gentle soul that I am, I take the man's leaflet and fold it into my convention program. So, today, I'm clearing out all my AHA convention stuff and I come across the man's leaflet. It promoted – not Lyndon LaRouche – but Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

Well, you know me. I'm a Southern, white, evangelical Protestant Republican, myself. I don't have much truck with either LaRouchies or Avakinoids. But the incident reminded me of two things. The first is that Tim Burke is capable of error, except perhaps when speaking ex cathedra. Still, he's always to be read and he's got a good piece on"Liberal Life Stories" over at Easily Distracted. It responds to Errol Morris's op-ed in the New York Times,"Where's The Rest of Him." The other thing it reminded me of was that Scott McLemee would just be shocked and horrified that anyone, much less a Cliopatriarch with Burke's credentials on the Left, would mistake an Avakinoid for a LaRouchie. I don't doubt but that we'll get some learned rant from McLemee about that soon. But when we do, it's likely to appear in Inside Higher Ed, rather than in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. And, remember, you heard that here first.

I was interested in the responses of my former colleague, Michael Tinkler, and my colleagues, Tim Burke and Sharon Howard, to the Ooops Alert that I posted two days ago. I alluded to a historian/blogger's making claims about a social issue and citing, in support of his claims, studies that concluded exactly the opposite of what he said they did. Both opinionated and arrogant, this historian/blogger doesn't bother to notice his readers' comments, so he probably still does not know that he's been corrected in comments. What interested me about the comments of Michael, Sharon, Tim and others is that they were, properly speaking, blind, because I had not identified who the historian/blogger was.

It's fair to say that Michael has some pretty conservative political and professional instincts; and, essentially, he recommended that I go after this other historian/blogger. Why not go after him? On the other hand, a minor theme in my friendship with Tim Burke is his belief that I should be a nice guy. So, my friend on the Left urges me to send the historian/blogger an e-mail calling attention to his mistake. I like it that these recommendations by my peers were blind peer recommendations. As it happens, the historian/blogger in question is a prominent Right Wing historian and blind peer review worked as it should. My colleagues responded from their own understanding of how one should treat the serious error of one's peer, regardless of his or their politics.

I'm still not going to name the historian/blogger in question. But I owe you an explanation of why I've made an issue of this. The error in question was made on 12 January. It was corrected in comments three days later and I didn't notice it until four days after that. It still stands uncorrected over on his blog as I write this. I might not have made an issue of it, except that this historian is the loudest voice among HNN bloggers decrying the deterioration of standards among us. HNN, itself, and I have made much of the history scandals over the last two years. In some ways, they've been HNN's bread and butter. I want to know why this scandal continues on HNN's platform. I want to know why HNN continues to give it a platform, instead of putting this historian on its"hot seat" where he belongs.

More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 1/22/2005

Well said, Scott.

Ralph E. Luker - 1/22/2005

Yes, you did make the visual association of the LaRouchie sign with the guy on our side of the street, but _he_ knew that he wasn't one of _them_. I didn't, until I looked at his handout.
You're right about the matter of proportionality. There's that odd difference in e-postings and print. He can change what he posted. Bellesiles could hardly withdraw the first edition of his book. He could only produce a revised second edition and, by then, it was too late and nobody any longer cared to check it for accuracy.
In this case, I suspect that the historian/blogger is so certain that he's correct about the issue that he just assumed that any studies he cited would sustain his opinion. I do think that holding him up for public mockery, when it's already been pointed out to him that he wrongly cited these studies, is appropriate.

S. McLemee - 1/22/2005

At one level it was just a coincidence -- two political personality cults handing out literature in the same place at the same time. There is no chance of cooperation between them. The egos involved are too huge, nor is there any similarity at all between the ideologies.

That said, there is another sense in which it is not a coincidence at all. Both groups are saying, in effect, "The country is under the leadership of dangerous authoritarians! Come and follow our authoritarian leadership instead!" I am not being sarcastic or satiric at all in making that characterization, either; it's actually a pretty fair paraphrase of what they are saying.

And they are both having some success in making that appeal to young people. The LaRouchies in particular have had a campaign to recruit college students over the past few years. (And speaking of coincidence: Swarthmore was once a kind of stronghold of the LaRouche when he recruited his initial following in the late 1960s, second only to Columbia University, which was his home base.)

I offer these comments, not as a "learned rant," in our host's amusing phrase, but with some head scratching. These movements are tiny and powerless, but very attractive to some idealistic young person who, in a healthy political culture, would find better uses for their energy.

I say that without quite knowing what a healthy political culture would look like, right about now. Clearly the kids who are signing on don't, either. Four more years and who knows what will be taking shape, and not necessarily at the margins either.

Timothy James Burke - 1/22/2005

The guys in front of the convention had a sign for LaRouche on their booth! I almost wonder if some LYM members have added Avakian's RCP materials to their portfolios--that would bring LaRouche himself full circle back to fringe Marxism.

It is interesting that we had different instincts about how you deal with the errors of others. I think I start from the feeling that I'd like to believe the best of people and see what they do when given a chance to explain or correct a mistake. I guess I also have a proportionality concern that in the absence of knowing how bad a mistake is, I can't say for sure what I think is required. In the case of Bellesiles, for example, the mistakes were so bad and so numerous and couldn't be explained save by some kind of serious misconduct that there was a proportional critical response that was absolutely mandatory. Flying blind, I can't know just how bad or important the mistake in this case might be, and what it's probable or possible cause might plausibly be thought to be. So I can't know what's proportionally appropriate here as a remedy.