The American God, Abraham Lincoln: A Dispatch From a Time-Traveling Anthropologist From Ancient Greece

 

A useful thought experiment for historians is to imagine the kinds of mistakes that someone writing from a different time and place could fall into when attempting to describe our society, particularly if they are already beginning with limited sources of information. This serves to open the historian to the possibility that, as an outsider writing with limited information, he is making equally egregious mistakes about past societies. An example I recently gave some of my students was to imagine what a time-traveling anthropologist from ancient Greece might write about the Lincoln Memorial. It would be obvious to him that the Lincoln Memorial is based on a Greek temple. This resemblance, though, could all too easily become a trap. 

Abraham Lincoln came from humble origins. He gained the presidency out of nowhere without any significant political experience. He then held the nation together through a bloody civil war, only to die tragically soon after victory was won. In looking back at his achievements, it became clear to the American people that Lincoln was really a god who had come down in human form among them to preserve their nation in difficult times. As such, the American people built a temple in Lincoln's honor. Like most civilized temples, the Lincoln Memorial Temple consists of columns to allow for open space with a statue of the god looking out. Above the god's statue is a sign telling everyone that this is a temple. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans visit this shrine to pay homage to this god by reading selections of his speeches placed on the walls of the temple.

When I inquired about their god, Lincoln, many Americans objected, finding the use of the term "god" offensive. Americans claim to practice monotheism, the worship of only one god. This position stops Americans from openly worshipping the variety of powers manifest in nature. As it is only natural, for people to worship the gods they see around them, Americans are forced to pretend to only worship their supreme god Jesus while labeling their other gods as founding fathers, saints, or celebrities. On top of this, Americans pretend that their politics are secular, divorced from the worship even of their Jesus god as if it were possible to separate the actions of a government from the veneration of the gods. Why would anyone obey rulers who did not have the blessing of the gods?    

To be clear, Americans do not place Lincoln on par with Jesus. That being said, both Lincoln and Jesus have their birthdays celebrated as national holidays. Lincoln has the advantage that he is a native god as opposed to Jesus who first arose among Middle Eastern Jews. Since the United States is a young country, there is a shortage of native gods to worship. As such, Americans are eager for gods of their own to replace the foreign gods that have been brought to their shores. 

Recent years have seen the rise of a new cult of Wokism to challenge the traditional American gods. This new Woke cult has been driven by people who, until a few decades ago, were largely shut out of political life though it receives much support from the children of the establishment. Since practitioners of this cult deny the validity of American political traditions and wish to replace them, it can only be expected that they also replace America's gods and their rites with new ones. Hence the Wokists have worked hard to replace Abraham Lincoln and other similar gods like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Christopher Columbus with the god Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a god they have imported from Cuba known as Che Guevara. This process has involved the ritual defacing of the statues of traditional gods. Anyone who doubts whether Americans really believe in the importance of venerating statues of the gods should ask themselves why the Wokists are so keen to eliminate the statues of America's gods and why traditionalists want to protect them. It is clear that, if the Wokists succeed, America's gods will abandon them and the traditionalists will have no choice but to accept the protection of the new Woke gods.   

Laughter aside, it is hardly obvious why our Greek anthropologist is wrong in his interpretation of the Lincoln Memorial. I put it to readers to offer their own responses. As I see it, the primary weakness of our anthropologist is that he approaches American civics with categories and questions from ancient Greece. In his framework, great men naturally flow into minor gods worthy of veneration and divine worship is an extension of politics. An implication of the latter is that he does not think in terms of private religion unrelated to politics. As such, he cannot imagine any freedom of religion any more than most people are able to imagine the freedom to commit treason in the privacy of their own homes. 

In itself, this is not a bad thing. Alexis de Tocqueville understood America through the lens of France with the implicit question of why was it that it was the American Revolution and not the French Revolution that succeeded. Tocqueville's outsider perspective offered useful insights into American democracy. There is certainly a value in Americans being willing to question their willingness to craft neat categories of secular and religious, something that would not have been obvious to a pre-modern. For those without the privilege of talking to a time-traveling Greek anthropologist, the next best thing is reading what Greeks actually wrote about politics and religion.  

The problem with our Greek anthropologist is that he is a little too insistent on his framework. When faced with the reality that Americans do not think in his terms, he is unable to ask the truly interesting question of why Americans think differently from him. Instead, he falls back on insisting that his framework is superior and that Americans simply do not understand how religion and politics function. 

Analyzing people who think in different frameworks is a major challenge for historians, anthropologists, and anyone else in the social sciences as such people are, almost by definition, academics and most people are not. Someone becomes a historian not just because it seems like a nice job but because they think differently from other people. This means that a historian is a double outsider. Not only does he study people who think differently because they are from a different time and place but he is also presumably studying normal non-academic people. For someone on the autism spectrum like me, there is a third level of outsiderness in that most people are neurotypicals. The fact that I naturally think in terms of clearly defined consistent rules may make me a better historian but it only further alienates me from neurotypicals who can be defined precisely by their disinclination to operate under such rules. Yes, I like to believe that I can offer valuable insights into how human societies function but it will always be as an outsider.   

Toward a Meaningful Neo-Liberalism: A Historical Narrative

As a general rule of intellectual honesty, one should try to describe one’s opponents using their language as opposed to using loaded straw man language. This is an extension of the Ideological Turing Test. Can you describe a viewpoint you oppose without it being obvious you oppose it? For this reason, it is, in practice, counter-productive to call people racist or anti-Semitic unless they already embrace those labels for themselves. An extreme example of this problem with labeling is the term “neoliberalism.” While you can fill a library with books on neoliberalism, I know of no neoliberal thinker, someone who self-consciously embraces the label for themselves instead of using it as an epithet against others. Contrast neoliberal with neoconservative. Neoconservatism may have taken a hit with the failure of the Iraq War (which is part of the reason why I abandoned the system) but there still remain proud neoconservatives.

One of the reasons, one needs to stick to what people openly proclaim about themselves is that, without that grounding, it is all too easy to fall prey to conspiracy theories that say more about you than your opponent. Nancy Maclean is the perfect example of this. Her search for a secret agenda makes her incapable of engaging with the thought of the late James Buchanan specifically or of Public Choice in general. Instead, she falls prey to conspiratorial thinking that sounds delusional to anyone not already convinced of the existence of a Koch Brothers plot to take over the world.

This is not a unique problem for people on the left. Consider the state of conservative discourse on Marxism. In the case of Marxism, we are dealing with a concept that continues to attract open self-proclaimed, followers. Furthermore, Marxism, by its very nature, is a conspiracy. More so than any other political ideology, Marxism is not simply a set of beliefs but a methodology for seizing power. Furthermore, Marxists pursue the dishonest strategy of framing their position in terms of their noble intentions as opposed to what they may have to do to bring about those ends. Despite all this being true, it is usually counter-productive to accuse people of being part of a Marxist conspiracy. (For one thing, not all Marxists are conspirators; many are not even political.) Such anti-Marxist thinking will usually backfire on the accusor, trapping them in paranoid delusions. Personally, I think Jordan Peterson is great until he starts talking about Cultural Marxism and equating it with post-modernism. The moment he does this, he stops engaging living people but his own fears. He should stick to Jungian literary analysis and preaching personal responsibility.

I would like to suggest a means to rescue neoliberalism from being a generic conspiratorial term of abuse for those not sufficiently on the hard left. We can use neoliberalism to refer to the political consensus that arose in the 1970s in England and the United States that combined a pro-business skepticism in regard to heavy welfare spending with a warfare mentality abroad and at home.  Underlying this was a cultural Christianity even as the shifts in society made openly theocratic politics implausible.

The key thinker here was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, who fashioned late 20th-century conservatism as an alliance between social conservatives, neoconservatives, and limited government free marketers. Getting such different groups to cooperate was possible because all three groups had a perceived common enemy in the 1960s liberal, who wished to use an expansive state to overthrow traditional values and undermine the United States military in order to allow the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. It was this brand of conservativism that defeated the post-war liberal consensus and fashioned a neoliberal consensus in its place.

The United States and England, after the Great Depression and World War II, were dominated by a "New Deal" consensus in which it was assumed the government would take on a greatly expanded role in running the economy and offer a wider range of welfare programs. In England, national healthcare was seen as a reward to the English people for the sacrifices they underwent fighting Nazism. Even if Churchill had been able to stave off the 1945 Labor landslide, there was no way that conservatives could have resisted the popular tide to offer a major state-sponsored safety net.

This did not mean that voters in either country rejected right-wing parties. One of the marks of a political consensus is its ability to draw in even the opposition to the point where, even as they criticize particular points of policy, they accept the fundamental premises behind those policies. This serves the ironic purpose of establishing the consensus as it makes it almost impossible to think outside of it. The Republicans in the United States under Dwight Eisenhower did very well for themselves. That being said, Eisenhower helped entrench the New Deal, perhaps with a more corporate spin. In England, Conservative prime ministers like Harold Macmillan or Ted Heath could succeed by being innocuous managers of the ship of state. Neither of them were ideologues with a vision to counter that of the Labor Party. As such, whether Labor won or lost, it was still Labor's agenda that was going to dominate; the only question conservatives were left with was to what extent specific Labor policies would be implemented.

This post-war consensus in the United States and England was made possible by strong working-class support. This collapsed in the late 1960s and 70s. In the United States, we see white disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement. The parallel for England, perhaps, was the end of the British Empire, which had the ironic result of England bringing the empire home with its liberal immigration policy for those from the former imperial holdings. This undermined a sense of common ethnic identity so important for consensus building. Both the United States and England faced the problem of transitioning to a post-industrial economy. As long as both countries benefited from the post-war economic boom and the optimistic belief that things were improving it was possible to paper over the differences in society, making compromise possible. A growing tax base would be able to pay for an expanding list of programs either in the present or at least in the near future. Without the economic boom and the optimism that it usually generates, such compromise became impossible as politics was reduced to a collection of tribes fighting over the remnants of a shrinking pie, each side trying to grab their piece before it was all gone.

Into this gap left by the failed post-war consensus came neoliberalism as represented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Unlike their Conservative and Republican predecessors, they actually had an ideology. Limiting government spending in the name of free markets served a practical purpose under the economic challenges of the 1970s. It also helped frame neoliberal policies as advancing the cause of freedom through limiting government. It is important to realize that neoliberalism was a product of a wider liberal consensus and, unlike traditional conservatism, was not about to take any kind of principled stand in favor of hierarchy.

Much as neoliberalism was not a defense of any kind of crown, it also rejected the altar of religious authority. As Victorian morality was an attempt to find a justification for religion in a world with Darwinian Evolution and Biblical Criticism, Neoliberalism was a product of the secularization of the public sphere and an acceptance of that reality. Neoliberalism still wished to fight a rearguard action to save religion as a cultural force. Beyond that, religion served to cement the 1960s liberal as the enemy trying to shove secularism down the throats of common folk. Abortion is a good example of this. Making abortion illegal was never a practical goal. Roe vs. Wade was the product of a growing wave to legalize abortion (ironically enough, helped along by then Gov. Reagan of California) even as the Supreme Court's decision counter-productively short-circuited the national conversation. The Court's ham-handed approach gifted neoliberals by allowing them to campaign less against abortion itself than against Roe. The real story of Roe became liberals trying to force their values on the rest of society as opposed to a woman's right to choose.   

From the earlier liberal post-war consensus and ultimately the Wilsonian tradition, neoliberalism inherited an activist foreign policy in the name of advancing democracy. Thatcher famously fought the Falklands War in 1982 to hold on to one of the last vestiges of the British Empire even as it served little purpose beyond taking a final stand in the name of the Empire. What was different now was that this foreign policy was meant to be pursued in defiance of the hard left who rejected the Western tradition, seeing it as the source of imperialism and racism. Neoliberalism was meant as a war to be fought at home as well as abroad. One manifestation of this was the War on Drugs, which served to establish active drug users (in practice those on the left) as the enemy and gave the police the tools to wage actual war against this enemy.

Up until now, my description of neoliberalism has simply been late 20th-century Anglo-American conservatism. Here is the twist; just as the post-war consensus did not keep conservative parties out of office as long as they were willing to play the moderate pragmatists to the dominant liberal ideology, neoliberalism offered a temptation to liberals to gain electoral victory as the moderate pragmatists, cementing neoliberalism as the reigning ideology. From this perspective, a critical part of neoliberalism was the rise of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They were not a rejection of neoliberalism but the epitome of its power.

Both of these politicians criticized Reagan and Thatcher but from within a certain consensus. So conservatives were to be criticized for running up deficits to support tax cuts for the wealthy. Gone was the romantic notion of a welfare state that could transform society. In its place was an accountant's pragmaticism of getting the maximal utility for the taxpayer's money. Clinton was willing to fight for abortion but he did so from within a consensus that still paid religion cultural deference. Most infamously, he signed the Defence of Marriage Act. Clinton's foreign policy was a continuation of a neoliberal desire to see the United States as the global defender of freedom now being practiced without the Soviet Union as an excuse. Bush's Iraq Invasion in search of weapons of mass destruction was simply an extension of Clinton's use of the American military in a post-9/11 world. It was Blair who was Bush's most important ally in invading Iraq.

Just as the post-war consensus benefited from the post-war economic boom, which granted legitimacy to the dominant government policies, neoliberalism benefited from the computer and internet revolutions of the 1990s. How does one argue with policies that seem to work and seem to be creating a rising tide that should raise all boats? Just as the economic stagnation of the 1970s made the post-war consensus appear suddenly vulnerable, the economic crisis of 2008 made neoliberalism suddenly appear as the emperor with no clothes. The political fallout was slow in coming as the political class remained under its spell long after the general public. Barack Obama came from the same mold of pragmatic neoliberalism as the Clintons. Thus, he framed his policies in anti-Republican terms, ignoring the wider neo-liberal framework.

Donald Trump brought down Republican neoliberalism by demonstrating it lacked a real basis of ideological support. Similarly, David Cameron was brought down by Brexit, which demonstrated that his own Conservative Party base did not support the relatively free-trade and open-border policies of the European Union. Once neoliberalism fell as an ideology within conservative circles, there was no longer a reason for liberals to play pragmatic lip service to neoliberalism either. Hence the rise of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in England.

In the wake of the fall of neoliberalism, Anglo-American politics seems to be turning into a conflict between nationalists and democratic socialists. What the new dominant consensus will be remains to be seen. I suspect that it will be some version of a blatantly extractive state that attempts to bribe its voters with the right and the left simply disagreeing on who should be expropriated and for whose benefit.

From this proposed definition of neoliberalism and this history offered a few things should be clear. I discuss neoliberalism within an Anglo-American context, though I confess that I might be stretching things even to include England. How much more problematic to include other countries. I readily grant that one could draw parallels between Anglo-American neoliberalism and policies in other countries. Those who are more knowledgeable than I am regarding non-Anglo-American politics should feel free to make those comparisons as long as they show proper caution. The more you stretch a term, the greater the risk of either distorting the reality on the ground or rendering the word meaningless. One thinks of the problem of talking about "feudal" Japan. Yes, there are certain parallels to Europe but it is risky to push those comparisons too far. Similarly, I do not think it is productive to call authoritarian figures like Augusto Pinochet of Chile or Deng Xiaoping of China neoliberals. Doing so risks distorting the differences between these countries and descending into conspiratorial thinking where Anglo-American neoliberals not only become people plotting to violently undermine democratic norms but also have Elders of Zion capabilities to rule the world.

Even within Anglo-American politics, notice the number of people who should be placed outside of neoliberalism. While Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were influential figures in the rise of neoliberalism, one should not make a direct link between neoliberalism and libertarianism. Here, the War on Drugs is important. Nor should one equate neoliberalism with neo-confederates or white nationalism. On the contrary, neoliberalism grew out of a world in which open white nationalism was no longer politically viable and its fall has opened that door once again.

Because I have limited the scope of neoliberalism in time and place it appears much less all-powerful and sinister. Neoliberalism was a political ideology espoused by specific people in a specific time and place with a variety of policy positions some of which may or may not appeal to readers. My teenage self was more supportive of this kind of neoliberalism than I am now. That being said, the fact that whatever is going to replace neoliberalism is likely to be worse, I do confess to being nostalgic for neoliberalism. 

No, Nancy MacLean, Autistic People Do Not Become Libertarians Because They Lack Empathy

I must confess that since reading Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, my opinion of her has only lessened. To move away from her incompetence as a historian or an economist, I would like to discuss her views on autism. As always, whenever suggesting that MacLean might not be completely correct, it is important to confess, right from the start: I am a Koch minion so you should ignore everything that I say. All arguments against her simply prove how deep and nefarious the "not exactly a conspiracy" against her is and how desperate her enemies have become now that she has revealed the truth about them. (Also, as an Asperger, I have no sense of humor and am incapable of sarcasm.)

This is a video of a speech given several days ago by historian MacLean about her book. At about the hour mark, she speculates that James Buchanan and other people who share his libertarian politics (or his desire to take over the world) are autistic as they do not "feel solidarity or empathy with other people." This is a further jump from her attempt, in her book, to make something out of the fact that Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist, is involved with the autistic advocacy. Now she is going so far as to diagnose Buchanan, a man who never identified himself with the neurodiverse community.

Whether Buchanan really was on the spectrum or not, this is dangerous slander, particularly for the casual way in which she frames it, as if it was a truth that everyone knew that people on the autism spectrum lacked empathy. Such "casual truths," by their nature cannot easily be refuted by simply pointing out the facts because people are not going to think that it is even a matter for debate. You can actually see this in action a few minutes later in the video. A person in the audience runs with MacLean's statement and jokingly starts talking about autistic libertarians trying to take over law schools.   

The principle of rational ignorance teaches us that there is no reason to expect MacLean to educate herself about autistic people or care about what we might find offensive. It is generally not productive to get worked up about someone (even a university professor) being wrong on the internet. My justification for this is twofold. First, her account of Buchanan's life is an exercise in trying to tar someone as a racist on the vaguest kinds of guilt by association. (Contrast her case against Buchanan with the kind of evidence that Prof. Deborah Lipstadt and her team had to produce when sued by David Irving.) It is a losing proposition to simply attempt to defend Buchanan. It is inevitable that at some time, over his career, that he walked within a mile of a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue. It is necessary, therefore, to hold MacLean to her own standards. The fact that she fails, robs her of the authority to prosecute her case and demonstrates that she does not care about tolerance, but merely uses it as moral cover for her progressive agenda. (If Buchanan was guilty of all of MacLean's charges, but was a progressive in his politics and economics, would this book have ever been written?)

Second, there is a wider case to be made against modern liberalism, which gains much of its moral authority from its claim to universal tolerance. This is connected to modern liberalism's claim to knowledge of some objective "public welfare." It is impossible for anyone to be universally tolerant or to grasp the public welfare. Inevitably, much like G. K. Chesterton's insane rationalist, reality is chopped up to fit the limitations of the human mind. Tolerance for certain people must take precedence. In practice, this means that liberals are terrible at considering problems of justice the moment they have to step outside of their narrow index card of privilege scoring. (What do you do when the villains are not white Christian heterosexual men?)

There is an even larger problem in that the liberal's belief in the ultimate value of tolerance makes it difficult for them to ever question their own prejudices. This is similar to how formal religion has a tendency to work against actual spirituality. How can a person whose very notion of self is equated with their relationship with God ever question the genuineness of that relationship? (The dark night of the soul, by its very nature, is something that only God, not the human seeker, can initiate.) Likewise, since the liberal defines himself as tolerant and it is this tolerance that gives him moral authority over all the "less enlightened," any attempt to question that tolerance challenges the liberal's very being. By contrast, both religious people and liberals might agree that it is a virtue to be slow to anger. That being said, acknowledging that one is quick to anger (something I am quite guilty of) is not that serious a problem as it does not challenge anyone's central narrative of themselves nor undermine anyone's moral authority.  

Are libertarians likely to be on the autism spectrum? In my experience, there seems to be some truth to this. If I were in charge of a libertarian organization, I would make a special point in reaching out to autism organizations on the assumption that they contained likely converts and vice versa. (Admittedly, as a libertarian on the autism spectrum I am biased to notice people like me.) This is not because we lack empathy; whatever the very real challenges of being on the autism spectrum, lacking empathy is not one of them. I suspect that autistics come preconditioned to make the kind of Faustian bargain necessary for ideological libertarianism (as opposed to simply being socially liberal and fiscally conservative). Libertarianism offers the prospect of being right and logically consistent, but the price you pay is irrelevancy. Note that I am not claiming that libertarians are right or consistent; on the contrary, to even seriously consider libertarianism you have to be willing to surrender relevancy and you may never turn out to be right or consistent.

I confess that this is a limitation of my own thinking. A politically conservative relative recently compared reading this blog to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. You can count on Calvin being logical, but nothing he says has anything to do with planet Earth. I write in order to have my own little universe that is rational and where the things I care about matter. There would be no point in writing if I lived in a world that actually reflected my mode of being. 

In politics, this leads to voting for Gov. Gary Johnson in the last election even though he only got three percent of the vote. (Not that Johnson was some kind of perfect libertarian. Furthermore, voting for him did not make you one and vice versa.) I voted for Johnson precisely because I refused to make the practical consideration of whether Trump or Clinton was worse than the other. I simply voted for him out of a desire to stick to my principles, to live according to a set of values that exist only in my head. I readily grant that, by doing so, I chose to make myself irrelevant. Not that I have any regrets, but I threw my vote away and neither of the two parties has any reason to take me into consideration.

Consider libertarian principles like "taxation is theft" and "the state has no special moral authority." These are great for those on the spectrum as it offers the chance to turn political science into geometry with beliefs that logically follow clear axioms and theorems. Trying to beat neurotypicals' heads with these ideas is unproductive as they do not relate to their lived experiences. We live in a world of states that claim the moral authority to tax and do anything else for the "public welfare." The state is so ubiquitous that it is meaningless to seriously analyze it as an instrument of power. Unless you can produce something tangible with it, neurotypicals are not likely to make the moral jump and reject the state. To mentally live in a world where you have rejected the government from your own head has no meaning for them.

This leads us to a certain irony in MacLean's accusations of a Koch backed libertarian conspiracy. Much as anti-Semites would have never dreamed up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion if they only had spent time with Jews and saw that Jews could not plot through a kiddush, if MacLean understood either libertarians or autistics, she would have realized that we have no master plan and, if we had to come up with one, it would be much better than the one she invented for us. Buchanan, whether or not he was on the spectrum, wrote as an academic for people living a century in the future, not guidebooks on overthrowing the state.

Autistics are often accused of lacking a theory of mind. In essence, this is a more sophisticated version of the lacking empathy libel. It has the advantage of sounding more clinical and offers the fig-leaf of pretending not to be prejudiced. What is funny about MacLean is the extent that she seems to lack any theory of mind regarding her opponents. Conspiracy thinking is fundamentally about lacking theory of mind in the sense that you assume that your opponents claim what they claim, knowing that it is false, for some sinister purpose as opposed to accepting that, whether they are right or wrong, they honestly believe what they say.

History is about getting into the mind of your subject. If MacLean honestly wanted to write a biography about Buchanan, she should have, for the purposes of the book, started with the assumption that public choice economics is correct. Furthermore, that progressivism, the New Deal, and the 1960s marked wrong turns for this country. If you were an academic who believed this, how would you have responded? Now you have a story worth telling regardless of your political affiliation. The fact that MacLean failed to do this does not mean that she is autistic; she simply lacks the moral imagination to be a good historian.

Polemic or Scholarship: A Historian's Choice

Before I begin, let me confess to having attended several conferences hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), a group funded by the Koch brothers. I had a great time listening to lectures, I met scholars such as Michael Munger, Steve Horwitz, and Phil Magness, drank beer and had late-night philosophical discussions with other graduate students from around the world. I strongly deny ever being present for any sessions outlining a plot to overthrow American democracy. In all seriousness, there was shockingly little discussion of practical policy or political strategy at all. Most of us were there because we had some kind of affection for libertarian philosophy and we engaged in a lot of talk (including disagreement) about theory. So much for there being some kind of plan, Koch hatched or otherwise.  

A basic feature scholarship is a need for a clear line to be drawn between the gathering of information and what implications might be drawn from it. This is most obvious in the realm of public policy. For example, if you were an analyst working for the Bush administration in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the question of whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, you could not be in any way connected to making the argument that the United States should invade. The moment it was established that you believed in the invasion, any evidence you produced in favor of there being weapons of mass destruction must be discounted. It should be assumed that you came into your research with the agenda of making a case for invasion and therefore, perhaps even unconsciously, you fell into the trap of confirmation bias. Instead of seriously considering the possibility that there might not be weapons of mass destruction, you assumed that there were, interpreted everything in that light and came to believe that the evidence for such weapons was overwhelming. Much can be made of the fact that the Bush administration did not take such intellectual precautions and was surprised when it turned out that the weapons did not exist.           

As historians, we may have our ideological preferences but our credibility as historians requires that we submit ourselves to a historical methodology designed to keep our biases in check. It is not that upon becoming historians we stop being biased, but the method is designed to produce something close to an unbiased result from the mass work of biased people. This is much the same way as Adam Smith's hidden hand produces social good from the mass labor of selfish individuals. As with other forms of scholarship, we need to distance the gathering of facts from their implications. First, we need to recognize that we are not going to achieve any great knockout blow for our cause. Second, if we do find a text that supports our cause, we must bend over backward to read it in a fashion favorable to the other side, forsaking any advantage for our own cause. Ultimately, ideological polemic and history are distinct fields and you can only engage in one of them at a time.  

This brings us to the recent uproar over Prof. Nancy MacLean. Over the past few weeks, a guilty pleasure of mine has been following the controversy over MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains. I have not read the book (I am waiting for it to go on sale on Audible) so I will refrain from making any judgments on the book itself and restrict myself to the discussion surrounding it. What strikes me as interesting is that MacLean is plainly trying to be both a polemicist and a historian. She is a self-conscious progressive, who rejects libertarianism intellectually on its merits and, at the same time, claims to have unearthed documents that are damaging to the credibility of a particular libertarian, the late economist James M. Buchanan. It is important here to recognize that I am not attacking either MacLean's progressivism nor her evidence against Buchanan. On the contrary, for the purposes of this post, I am willing to assume that both are correct. She may be right in terms of facts but her willingness to be both polemicist and historian destroys her credibility to be the latter. 

Let us give MacLean the benefit of the doubt. Let us imagine that she snuck into the late Prof. Buchanan's office and discovered the secret protocols of the Elders of Wichita along with Buchanan's KKK membership card. While we are at it, let us throw in a letter stating: 

Dear James Kilpatrick,

John C. Calhoun is my intellectual lodestar. The southern agrarian poets are the greatest. I find myself really inspired by Donald Davidson. I never realized that Hobbes' Leviathan could be the federal government. Brown vs. Board of Education is the worst. I hate n******. I want to keep them from voting so we can overthrow democracy and put Donald Trump (our own August Pinochet) into power. MAGA

Heil Hitler, 

James M. Buchanan

P. S. Did you get the suitcase full of cash from the Koch brothers?

Assuming all of this were true, MacLean, as a historian, would have two options. The first would be to publish this information in the most charitable way possible. Perhaps Buchanan had a strange sense of humor or was an informant for the FBI. It would make sense to walk across campus to present the evidence to Michael Munger or any of the other prominent public choice theorists at Duke to get their interpretation. Under no circumstance should she imply that this evidence challenges libertarians. If other people wish to try to use this information in a polemical fashion, that is their issue. This way, despite her progressive beliefs, her scholarship would be beyond reproach. 

There could be a second option if MacLean was a supporter of public choice theory. As an admirer of Buchanan's work, she could acknowledge that she discovered a dark side to him, mainly that he was a racist, who plotted to overthrow democracy. On a serious note, as a libertarian, I readily acknowledge the existence of a dark side to libertarianism. This ranges from the personal issues of Ayn Rand to the white nationalist outreach of the paleo-libertarians. While I do not think that Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul were racists, they were certainly willing to associate with actual racists as part of a strategy of allying themselves to anyone openly hostile to the federal government. This is a problem that libertarians need to face, particularly as it led to a failure on the part of many libertarians to actively oppose Trump. Very well, Buchanan might have been of a similar stripe or worse. I am not about to reject such a position a priori.   

Understand that I can say these things about libertarianism precisely because, as part of the libertarian family, I am not trying to score ideological points. I am criticizing myself as much as anyone. These same words coming from an outsider are going to come across very differently and perhaps should not be said. This is not different from how there may be very real problems in the black community but I, as a white person, should not be the person to talk about them no matter how right I might be. No matter how good my intentions, my words are going to sound wrong and prove counter-productive. Let me address the problems of my community (libertarian, Jewish or otherwise) and leave it to others to address the problems in theirs.

If MacLean wants to engage in polemics against libertarians in her free time, in addition to her scholarship, that is fine. One can do legitimate research and have an ideology at the same time as long as they are no obvious connections. A reader should be able to buy into your scholarship completely without there being any expectation that your work will affect what they do inside a voting booth. With MacLean, not only are there obvious ideological implications, she eagerly connects her book to the ideological clashes of today all while using her status as a historian to bolster the legitimacy of her own progressive views. For example, in defending herself, she doubles down on the idea that she is the victim of a Koch attack. If she was serious about defending the integrity of her scholarship, she should have avoided any mention of ideology. She could have just explained how her critics were factually incorrect and left it at that. Let other people try to fathom the larger implications of her work; she is just a humble scholar wanting to be left alone to do research with no expectation that it should be of interest to a wider world.   

There is a place for research into the history of libertarianism, even when it turns up problematic material, and there is a place for polemics against libertarianism. I welcome both but they need to be kept in distinct spheres and carried out by different people. The moment that line is crossed, the research is tainted and must be dismissed. It is quite possible that MacLean is correct and she has real dirt on Buchanan. If that is the case, let another scholar not contaminated by progressive activism go back through her sources and write another book confirming her thesis. In the meantime, I have no choice but to reject her as an illegitimate historian who fails to follow the historical method.