Sociologist Claude Fischer has an interesting review of an edited book, “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.”
I’m a big fan of the “Why everything you thought you knew was wrong” genre—it’s a great way to get into the topic. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a fan of contrarianism for its own sake, especially when dressed in the language of expertise (see, for example, here and here). My point, rather, is that if you do have something reasonable to say, the contrarian or revisionist framework can be a good way to do it.
Just as a contrast: Our book Bayesian Data Analysis, published in 1995, had many reasonable takes that were different from what was standard in Bayesian statistics at the time. We just presented our results and methods straight, with no editorializing and very little discussion of how our perspective differed from what had come before. That was fine—the book was a success, after all—but, arguably, our presentation would’ve been even clearer and more compelling had we talked about where we thought that existing practice was wrong.
Why did we do it that way, writing the book using such a non-confrontational framing? It was my reaction to the academic literature on Bayesian statistics which was full of debate and controversy. Debate and controversy are fun, and can be a great way to learn—but the message I wanted to convey in our book was that Bayesian methods are useful for solving real problems, both theoretical and applied, not that Bayesian inference was necessary or that it satisfied some optimality property. I wanted BDA to be the book that took Bayesian inference beyond philosophy and argument toward methodology and applications. So I consciously avoided framing anything as controversial. The goal was to demonstrate how and why to do it, not to win a debate.
As I say, I think our tack worked. But there are ways in which it’s better to acknowledge, address, and argue against contrary views, rather than to simply present your own perspective. Both for historical reasons and for pedagogical practice, it’s good to talk about what else is out there—and also to explore the holes in your own recommended approach. In writing BDA, we were pushing against decades of Bayesian statistics being associated with philosophy and argument; thirty years later, we have moved on, Bayesian methods are here to stay, and there’s room for more open discussion of challenges and controversies.
To return to the topic of our post . . . In his discussion of “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” Fischer writes:
The book’s premise is that these myths derange our politics and undermine sound public policy. Although the authors address a few “bipartisan myths,” they focus on myths of the Right. . . . They might have [written about] the kernels of truths that are found in some conservative stories and also by addressing myths on the Left. . . .
Fischer shares a bunch of interesting examples. First, some myths that were successfully shot down in the book under discussion:
Akhil Reed Amar argues that the Constitution was not designed to restrain popular democracy but was instead a remarkably populist document for its time.
Daniel Immerwahr debunks the sanctimony that the U.S. has not pursued empire . . .
Michael Kazin criticizes the depiction of socialism as a recent infection from overseas. . . .
Elizabeth Hinton challenges the view that harsh police suppression is typically a reaction to criminal violence. She chronicles the long history, especially but not only in the South, of authorities aggressively policing even quiescent communities.
Before going on, let me say that this first myth, that the Constitution was designed to restrain popular democracy, seems to me as much of a myth of the Left as of the Right. On the right, sure, there’s this idea that the constitution protects us from mob rule; but it also seems like a leftist take, that the so-called founding fathers were just setting up a government to protect the interests of property owners. To the extent that this belief is actually in error, it seems to me that Amar is indeed addressing a myth on the Left.
In any case, Fischer continues with “a few examples of conceding some conservative points”:
Carol Anderson reviews recent Republican efforts, starting long before Trump, to cry voter fraud. Although little evidence points to substantial fraud these days, imposters, vote-buying, and messing with ballot boxes was common in the past. It was most visible, though not necessarily more common, in immigrant-filled cities run by Democratic machines. . . .
Erika Lee’s and Geraldo Cadava’s chapters on the southern border and on undocumented immigration undercut the current Fox News hysteria. They discuss the long history of cross-border movement and the repeated false alarms about foreigners. . . . However, the authors might have admitted that large-scale immigration is often disruptive. . . . reactions were not just xenophobic, but often over real material and cultural worries.
Contributors describe as “rebellions” the violence that broke out in Black neighborhoods at many points in the 20th century, but they do not dignify similar actions on the Right as rebellions, for example, the anti-immigrant riots of the 19th century and the anti-busing violence of the 1970s. These outbursts also entailed aggrieved communities raging against elites who imported scabs and elites who imposed school integration. Why are some labeled as rebellions and others as riots?
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway debunk the “The Magic of the Marketplace” myth. American businessmen and American economic growth have always relied heavily on government investment and subsidies . . . Still, a complete story would have appreciated how risk-taking entrepreneurs, from the Vanderbilts to the Fords, effectively deployed resources in ways that enabled prosperity for most Americans.
Fischer then provides some “legends of the Left, critique of which might burnish the historians’ reputation for objectivity and balance”:
The slumbering progressive vote. Seemingly forever, but certainly in recent years, voices on the Left have claimed that millions of working-class, minority voters are poised to vote for progressives if only candidates and parties spoke to their interests (the “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” question). Repeatedly, such voters have not emerged. Trump, however, did mobilize many chronic non-voters, suggesting that there are probably more slumbering right-populists than left-populists.
Explaining the Civil War. In a perennial argument, some on the Right minimize the role of slavery so as to promote the “Lost Cause” story that the war was about states’ rights . . . ome on the Left have also downplayed slavery, preferring to interpret the war as a struggle between different kinds of business interests, thereby both inflating the role of capitalism and blaming it. Also wrong; the cause was slavery.
“People of Color.” This label is an ahistorical effort to sort ethnoracial groups into two classes . . . submerges from view the vastly different experiences of, say, the descendants of slaves, third-generation Mexican-Americans, refugees from Afghanistan, and immigrants from Ghana. It would seem to lump together somewhat pale Latin or Native Americans with dark-skinned but economically successful Asians. . . . POC is a rhetorical slogan, not a historically-rooted category.
I don’t have anything to add here. Fischer’s discussion and examples are interesting. I don’t buy his argument that more left-right balance in the book would represent an “opportunity to increase public confidence in professional history.” To put together a book like this in order to increase public confidence seems like a mug’s game. I think you just have to put together the best book you can. And, at that point, you can do it two ways. Either present a frankly partisan view and own up to it, saying something like, “Lots of sources will give you the dominant conservative perspective on American history; here, we present a perspective that is well known in academia but does not always make it into the school books or the news broadcasts.” That’s what James Loewen did in his classic book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Or you try your best to present a range of political perspectives and then you make that clear, saying something like, “There are many persistent misreadings of American history from conservatives, and our book shoots these down. In addition we have seen overreactions from the other direction, and we discuss some of these too.” I don’t think either of these presentations will do much to “increase public confidence in professional history,” but they have the advantage of clarity, and they help the editors and the readers alike to place the book within past and current political debates.
P.S. One of the editors of the book under discussion is Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who came up in this space a couple years ago regarding some plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis. Fischer didn’t mention this in his post. I guess plagiarism isn’t so relevant, given that he’s just the editor, of the book, not the author. As an editor of a couple of books myself, I ended up doing a lot of editing of other people’s chapters, which I guess is kind of the opposite of plagiarism. I think that’s expected, that the editors will do some writing as necessary to get the project done. I have no idea how Kruse and his co-editor Julian Zelizer operated with this particular book.
P.P.S. The other editor of that book is Julian Zelizer. I’ve collaborated with Adam Zelizer. Are they related? How many Zelizers could there be in political science??
Lots here for discussion! On voter fraud, in the early 1906s, I lived with my communist aunt and uncle on the west side of Chicago, and we helped an independent candidate named Biggs run for city council run against the Daley Machine candidate, who was a white guy who had long since moved out of the neighborhood. We did well in precincts where we had campaign workers, but got only a couple percent of votes in precincts where we did. The Machine saw the handwriting on the wall and recruited Biggs, who in the next election won the precincts he lost last time by similar margins. There was a plausible argument at the time that Daley stole the 1960 presidential election from Nixon, but a counter argument that Republicans stole a comparable number of votes downstate (I had no personal experience with that, so I don’t have an opinion).
On uprisings in Black neighborhoods,” I was visiting my aunt and uncle when MLK was killed, and we and our neighbors sure as hell thought it was a riot. Neighborhood leaders were trying their best to damp it down. The violence seemed spontaneous, but not random, in that people burned buildings on the commercial streets, not the residential streets, but then in a few days realized that they had no place close by to shop.
On the intention of the constitution, I haven’t read Amar’s piece, but I think both points of view have a lot going for them. Why does it have to be one or the other?
Oreskes and Conway set out to understand the motivation of good scientists who helped create doubt about anthropogenic climate change, not to write a complete history of the US economy, or an assessment of private enterprise. [If I remember correctly, Mark and Engles gave capitalism a lot of credit for mobilizing resources, however.] Any readable book is going to have a focus, and dinging it for not being about something else seems unfair.
On the slumbering progressive vote, in 2016 a share of Trump voters where I live now also liked Sanders; I think that was true elsewhere, as well. How big that group was is questionable, but certainly it existed.
“Oreskes and Conway set out to understand the motivation of good scientists who helped create doubt about anthropogenic climate change, not to write a complete history of the US economy, or an assessment of private enterprise.”
A reader cannot get through much Oreskes without encountering her views on climate change, but I think you are conflating “Merchants of Doubt” with “The Big Myth.”
I don’t think so. I can’t put my hand on my copy of “The Big Myth” to check, but I’m pretty sure that the forward explains what they set out to do.
The voter fraud issue is interests me in several ways; I should read more about it. There really was a lot of voter fraud, sixty years ago and more. I think (possibly incorrectly) that the 1960 presidential election represented a kind of turning point there, because the GOP thought Kennedy had successfully stolen the election with ballot-box-stuffing in Chicago and in Texas, and the Democrats thought the GOP had almost stolen the election with ballot-box-stuffing in southern Illinois, so ironically there was bipartisan interest in cleaning up the elections. Perhaps the bipartisan interest is apocryphal — I’m sure some readers of this blog will know, but I don’t — but the accusations of voter fraud by both sides definitely happened.
I think the 1960 election was also important from the standpoint of campaign strategy because it clarified the seemingly obvious fact that campaigns should focus on the electoral college vote rather than the popular vote. The electoral college structure also has implications for monitoring elections and looking for voter fraud. If it were the popular vote that mattered then fraud would be equally damaging anywhere, but since it’s the electoral vote that matters you really only have to focus on half a dozen states or so, at least nowadays: the amount of fraud required to swing Massachusetts or California to the Republican presidential candidate would be so massive that it couldn’t be missed, and ditto for swinging Oklahoma or Arkansas the other way.
I really wish people would credit Thomas Frank with more than the title of his book, i.e. “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” because he puts forward a rather convincing answer in that work, as well as his following one, “Listen, Liberal.”
What was his answer?
Andrew concluded with, “How many Zelizers could there be in political science??”
Here is another one, although not by birth:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/zelizer-viviana-1946
For those who wish to quibble, Viviana Zelizer, mother of Julian, is not in political science but in sociology.
In “.. the Constitution … a remarkably populist document for its time.”, I think the key words there are “for its time”. As in, you can argue the Constitution was “populist” if you twist that to mean it’s advancing the interests of common property owners _per se_ against, at the time, the dominance of inherited nobility. But that’s really not what the Left thinks much about. Yes, the Monarchy theory of government was a real issue then. The US was very anti-monarchist. But all the enslaved people and poor workers really didn’t care which group of elites got to be in charge.
“… the Left have also downplayed slavery, preferring to interpret the war as a struggle between different kinds of business interests, thereby both inflating the role of capitalism and blaming it. Also wrong; the cause was slavery.”
No, there were REASONS for slavery. Business reasons. That’s a very important part of the story, and it get lost too often. It’s really interesting to read the pro-slavery pundits of the time, they talk frequently of “slave property” and how the abolitionists are trying to take their property, and the Constitution specifically protects that property. That’s a capitalism aspect which should be more well-known.
I’m with Seth. The constitution was clearly not written to give any considerable power to lower level individuals, like shopkeepers or small farmers. It was about breaking free from Monarchy, but that’s a long way from breaking free from authoritarian class hierarchy. The senate is explicitly designed to preference elite slaveholders and has continued to cause major problems for the country.
Slavery was about making money for elites.
Systemically the problem is elites.
I never realized democracy originally meant using sortition (specifically *not* elections) until one of your earlier comments.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I’d guess that is a key fact most people are ignorant about (as I was). Elections were assumed to lead to oligarchy since ~500 BC. Is there any evidence otherwise since then?
It seems to me that theory and practice show elections -> oligarchy. That isn’t to say sortition is necessarily better than elections, but if a goal is to avoid oligarchy then attempting to run elections “just right” are doomed to fail.
*That very useful term isn’t even in my spell checker
I remember reading this article a couple of years ago:
– “Slavery Was Never an American Economic Engine”: https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-24/slavery-was-never-an-american-economic-engine
I can’t access it anymore but I don’t recall it’s tone as being apologetic to the Confederacy; I think the point being made was that though slave-owners did make money slavery was both terrible economically and morally.
Regarding a confrontational v non-confrontational framing:
A confrontational framing is (almost) necessary to synthesize conflicting views. Too often researchers simply present their new approach without contrasting it to other approaches, for example the dominant one. Often, the relevance of the new is unclear; finding out how everything relates is left as an exercise for the reader. Thus, it is better to develop one’s own position in close connection to the dominant position. Differences, advantages and disadvantages will be much clearer and also mistakes can be spotted more easily.
Furthermore this ensures that there is common ground and people talk about the same things. Consider political discussions: Ignorance of other positions is widespread. 100 years of globalization and people on the left and right still disagree fundamentally whether globalization is good or bad. Why is that? Imagine people on the far left would read pro free market outlets or people on the far right look at places where globalization indeed wrecks havoc. Maybe a better understanding of when it works and fails would emerge
I had a long conversation with an Anarchist on Mastodon. I share some of his concerns (ie. I dislike the way The State does many things, policing, industry protectionism, taxation, perpetuating racism and poverty, etc). But I don’t share his *ideological* commitment to certain ideas (the labor theory of value, the idea that capital property is theft). In any event the result was frustration on both our parts because he was unwilling to engage certain questions (like, what if we had capitalism and hence ownership of companies and capital goods by owners, but the profit collected by owners was not in general more than the wages they’d be able to command for management labor under a more community ownership system).
Anyway the point is mostly about ideology and its role in making differences persist. People sometimes start from very different baselines, and they can’t converge on what the *subject of the conversation even is*.
I’ve seen this in the Bayes vs Frequentist discussions. Physicists are much much more likely to be amenable to the Bayes perspective, because they start from some mechanistic descriptions and they *don’t want to substitute randomness* for those mechanistic descriptions. Thus a theory of inference in which we extract information about a mechanistic description subject to the limitations we know it has is attractive. On the other hand, I think Economists like the idea that “stuff is essentially random, and the differences are in the parameters of the randomness” because they rarely have mechanistic descriptions but they still think that outcomes should vary in different circumstances.
These people have difficulty communicating because baseline assumptions are mismatched.
I know we’re really getting on a tangent here, but I am firmly convinced the solution here is (some sort of) Georgism :) In brief, the Left vs Right struggle since Marx has fought over ideological terrain in a 2 dimensional projection of what is better understood as a 3 dimensional world. To understand political economy you need labor (the Left), capital (the Right), AND land/rent (neither). Side note: Marx was so perturbed by reading Henry George that he specifically lumped land together with capital as a way to re-write the terms of debate, as did the burgeoning academic discipline that birthed the Neoclassical school. But I digress. The return to labor is wages, to capital is interest and to land is rent. Note that land is a shorthand for all natural opportunities, including literal land, but also things like subsurface minerals, EM wavelengths, etc.etc.
So labor and capital only duke it out for what remains of profit – rents, and the role of rent in distorting the proper returns to both is widely overlooked, misunderstood or both. The central premise of Georgism is that since *land* is not created nor destroyed by labor or investment, it is morally and practically best thought of as the collective inheritance of everyone. But labor and investment do represent the creative activity of people and are the source of all “value added”. We run into problems because a shockingly large share of the socially created ‘value added’ of individuals and their communities gets soaked into rising land values and therefore rents, allowing the land-owning/rentier class to parasitize an increasingly disproportionate share and incentivizing tons of deadweight speculation that holds land and resources out of their highest and best use, and leads to cyclical bubbles.
So, the answer is to socialize what is easily morally regarded as collective inheritance (the “land/ground rent”) and un-tax and de-monopolize labor and capital to the best possible extent :) Ironically, Smith and Ricardo would both agree with this for the most part, but this approach is unrecognizable to contemporary Left and Right alike…
By the way, while I have spent a ton of time pondering and now doing empirical analysis of land values, especially in connection with agriculture, which is my academic area, one of the best examples of what is possible with doing Georgism for natural resources is Norway’s oil sector.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund
Imagine for a second how large of a sovereign wealth fund the US would have if we had not let monopolistic rentiers basically claim OUR oil as their private land and hoard all of the resource rents for themselves? A back of the envelope compared to Norway (sitting on a pretty $4 trillion currently) suggests it would be truly staggering…
Again, all of this becomes possible when we let go of the traditional terms of debate, and fully move into the 3 dimensional political economy.
Correction: $1.6T
Chris, interesting take. I definitely see where you are coming from. But I also think there’s something to the idea that minority private ownership of things like, say, power transmission lines, electric generation plants, fiber optic lines, and even chip fabs and server farms and vehicle manufacturing plants etc is highly problematic. My solution is something like Georgism for capital. For example make the owners of corporations sell a fraction of their stock every year (say 5% ish), with the proceeds paid as taxes. Slowly the ownership of the companies becomes pluralistic.
Daniel, good point! I consider myself a Georgist at this point, but not a die-hard ‘single taxer’. George advocated for outright public ownership of utilities rather than government granting private monopolies to run things, and I suspect that’s probably the way to go most of the time. But yes, broadly, I think we need to aggressively check against excessive concentration in capital and market power – I’m also one of those “hipster anti-trust” guys :) Getting ‘ground rent’ right would go a long way but doesn’t completely fix everything alas.
My co-editor and I developed a more narrow historical myth-takes book at the same time Kruse and Zelizer did, on the history of education, and our target was to do less myth-debunking and more “here’s what’s truly interesting on this topic.” We also limited the length of the chapters, so they’d be more accessible. We ended up with a lot more editorial work – working with more author’s voices – and it certainly won’t be a best-seller. But we also ended up with a less explicitly partisan collection, in large part because we encouraged our collaborators to pick myths that had irritated them over years of teaching and reading the news.
Your mileage may vary. For those who are interested, we receive no royalties (all go to the U.S. History of Education Society), and you can ask your library to buy the book for you! https://www.tcpress.com/23-myths-about-the-history-of-american-schools-9780807769263