Historians on Wilentz

[Bad Thoughts]

For those in love with Wilentz's credentials and writings: he has taken a beating from his fellow historians not because of his support for Clinton, but because he throws out historical methods in the process of making assertions that don't pass the blush test.

Wilentz jumps the shark

I'd spend time refuting Wilentz point for point if I thought he was trying to make a reasonable case here. But he spends most of the article just shrieking "race baiter race baiter race baiter!", punctuated with occasional whiny, Clintonesque accusations of pro-Obama media bias. (One of the many targets of Wilentz's wrath, Frank Rich, has recently pointed out the problems with that line of argument.) But, in general terms, in order to buy what Wilentz is selling here, you'd have to believe all of the following:

# That there'd be no conceivable political advantage whatsoever for the Clinton campaign to paint Barack Obama as solely "the black candidate" ("It has never been satisfactorily explained why the pro-Clinton camp would want to racialize the primary and caucus campaign.") Hmm. Anyone have a theory on this? Dick Morris? Hitch? I can't for the life of me imagine how such a tack might've helped the Clintons, here in our post-racial America.
# That there were no racial overtones whatsoever to Billy Shaheen and Mark Penn et al, just sorta accidentally invoking drug hysteria, even once the campaign got explicitly Willie Horton with it and called Obama weak on mandatory minimums.
# That, similarly, there were no racial overtones whatsoever to Bill Clinton comparing Obama's huge Carolina victory to that of Jesse Jackson, something that bothered even ostensibly neutral observers such as Josh Marshall and Glenn Greenwald.
# That people (such as myself) who at first wondered in shock if a Bradley effect had anything to do with the fifteen-point New Hampshire turnaround were actually operating on orders from the Obama campaign.
# That African-Americans unaffiliated with the Obama campaign such as Jim Clyburn and Donna Brazile, among countless others, who took umbrage at the dismissive tone of the LBJ/fairy tale remarks (which I've said were not racist, just tone-deaf) were also "deep undercover," at the sinister behest of Obama's race-baiting shock troops.
# That the Clinton campaign has been the unfairly aggrieved party throughout this election cycle, and would never dream of indulging in "outrageously deceptive advertisements."
# That rather than trying to defuse racial controversies as they've emerged during the race, Sen. Obama has personally sought to exploit them for nefarious purposes.
# That Clinton staffers just innocuously sent out the Somaligate photo to Drudge, having no earthly idea at all that it might play to the whispering campaign about Sen. Obama's religion. I mean, who woulda thunk it?

Obama in the valley of insinuations and lies

Scholars uphold equivalent standards, but in today's New Republic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz shows us only the arrogance and opportunism of a man who'd hoped to be the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of a Hillary Clinton Administration. Here, Wilentz treats one of his forays into journalism as slumming to help his side and mess up Barack Obama's effort by spinning charges that Wilentz doesn't trouble to substantiate with interviews or research of his own.

Wilentz plunges Obama into a hall of mirrors and insinuations by stringing others' reports to accuse him of accusing the Clintons of accusing him of calling them race-baiters. Got that? I get it, having written a lot about racial politics for The New Republic myself, not to mention for the New York Daily News, where I had many black readers. ...

Obama is shrewd, and no doubt he's not pure; but if Wilentz has something to show us, let him show it, not pass off his speculations as charges sanctioned by the judgment of history.

Taylor, Wilentz and Race

Wilentz also goes out of his way to defend Bill Clinton’s performance in the South Carolina primary. Wilentz’s long article doesn’t mention Clinton’s pre-primary statement that “as far as I can tell, neither Senator Obama nor Hillary have lost votes because of their race or gender. They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender—that’s why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here.” (By that standard, of course, it would have been hard for Obama to have won anywhere, since women have been a majority in every Democratic primary thus far.) And the Princeton historian pooh-poohs the former President’s post-primary linkage of Obama’s performance with Jesse Jackson’s two victories in the state.

In this respect, Wilentz appears to be more royalist than the king: even most in the Clinton campaign have conceded the harm caused by Bill Clinton’s attacks on Obama.

Portraying Obama as a race-baiter, I fear, will be no more successful than any of the other “kitchen sink” attacks from Clinton supporters in recent days.

Cass Sustein

Is Wilentz actually trying to make a claim about American history? Or about American journalism? Sure, American political commentary has had its fair share of delusions, but the idea of a general "delusional style" is much too vague and abstract to be illuminating. There is no such "style" in American politics. (Wilentz is playing here on Richard Hofstader's illuminating, substantive, and influential 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics.")

Is Sean Wilentz playing history or politics?

That said, is the Obama team's referencing of Kennedy and Lincoln (as well as the Reagan years) really to be characterized as "absurd"? In fact, couldn't one argue that Wilentz himself is necessarily engaged in the same "misuse of history" that he directs at the Obama team as a result of his public statement of support for Clinton? Wilentz is treading on slippery ground here depending on how he wishes to be identified by his readers. In my own case I find it close to impossible to identify Wilentz as a historian rather than as a Clinton partisan. Wilentz's criticisms must be understood as a reflection of his support for Clinton rather than as a commentary on how to properly interpret the past. In other words, there is no fact of the matter in these comparative claims or to put it another way, Wilentz is far from carving the past at its joints. ...

Obamarama part II

Sean defends Hillary’s self-serving correlation of LBJ and MLK—as King the movement leader needed Johnson the politician to inscribe civil rights in law, so Obama the orator needs Clinton the bureaucrat to achieve the Democratic agenda—by getting all historical on us. Now, Sean Wilentz is a distinguished historian, no doubt about it. But he leaves out a lot of what he learned in doing the research for The Rise of American Democracy (2006), a brilliant book that is as wide as my kitchen (I am able to use it as a barrier against dog forays into cat territory).

Sean wants us to know that this is serious business: “So—let us look very, very carefully at the historical record.” But he works backward, as it were, from the 20th to the 19th century. “Her point was simple,” he begins: “Although great social changes require social movements that create hope and force crises , elected officials, presidents above all, are also required in order to turn these hopes into laws. . . .Clinton was also rebutting Obama’s simplistic assertion that ‘hope’ won the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the end of Jim Crow.”

Without any transition, with only a paragraph break, Sean leaps into the 19th century, using a rhetorical frame that suggests any disagreement with him must be nearly demented: “The historical record is crystal clear about this, and no responsible historian seriously contests it.” Uh oh.

“Without Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, black and white (not to mention restive slaves), there would have been no agitation to end slavery, even after the Civil War began. But without Douglass’s ally in the White House, the sympathetic, deeply anti-slavery but highly pragmatic Abraham Lincoln, there could not have been an Emancipation Proclamation or a Thirteenth Amendment. Likewise, without King and his movement, there would have been no civil rights revolution. But without the Texas liberal and wheeler-dealer Lyndon Johnson, . . .there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

And then the subtext of fierce, unfinished debates about the Sixties resurfaces: “Behind this argument over Clinton’s comments lies a false, mythic view of the 1960s in which the civil rights movement supposedly pushed Johnson and the Democrats to support civil rights against their own will.”

False? Mythic? Not just debatable? Do you mean to tell me that Southern Democrats were signing on to the civil rights revolution between, say, 1963 and 1968, when Black Power superseded integration as the agenda of African-American emancipation? Do you mean to tell me that Johnson didn’t know his party and his region would be held ransom for at least a generation by a so-called Southern Strategy that enfranchised Republicans like Jesse Helms? Please. The corrosive divisions that dominated the Democratic Party’s nominating conventions of 1964 and 1968—not to mention George Wallace’s successes in the 1968 primaries—are good indexes of how conflicted the party was on civil rights and its ideological corollaries.

As Obama said on Monday, MLK Day, “change does not happen from the top down.” You would think that Sean Wilentz, who made his bones as a labor historian in Chants Democratic, that prize-winning book of 1984, understands this essential premise of the new social history, which, as David Thelen points out, is now the essential premise of Obama’s campaign. It seems not. Sean would prefer to let the wonkette get ‘er done—because she knows what’s best for us, because she suffers not from false consciousness.

ETA:

It's clear that Wilentz wants to be the Clinton's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian in service of the nation's most powerful Democratic family.

That's fine and all. But don't bend your historical interpretations and make dubious assertions to do so. That's what Wilentz does in his Los Angeles Times op-ed. Wilentz attacks Obama for comparing himself to Lincoln and Kennedy, saying that Obama is wrong in claiming that they didn't have tons of experience before becoming president. Wilentz is just not right about this. In fact, Lincoln's experience matches up quite reasonably with Obama's, for whatever that is worth. Wilentz is also wrong, like the Clintons, in discussing Obama's claim that under Reagan, the Republicans were the party of ideas. Obama is, of course, exactly right. Clinton attacked him for saying this, accusing him saying they were good ideas. Obama never did that. Yet Wilentz reinforces that bogus argument.

[Zynx]

1. I've never understood why some people just roll over and play dead when

a historian asserts something. They are not infallible. Indeed their work is supposed to be critiqued, not accepted at face value.

[Bad Thoughts]

2. A good historian is not political

Which is not to say that they don't participate or take sides. Rather historians are generally cautious about how the past plays into contemporary political discourse. More often than not, people apply it in ways that make no sense, applying a presentist view on the past.

[Zynx]

3. So many historians take on a political bent and they are the ones that everyone posts.

Good academic historians that do solid work in their fields aren't controversial enough for most people to get interested in. We often see the work of marginal historians and academics on this forum that have clear agendas.

[americanstranger]

4. When a historian obviously has a dog in the fight...

...expectations of objectivity should never be applied at the outset.

Wilentz is a Clinton supporter, and his writings should be approached with that in mind.

- as