Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by Horowitz David

Author:Horowitz, David [Horowitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Spence Publishing Company
Published: 1999-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

12

Postmodern Professors

WHEN THE IMPEACHMENT OF BILL CLINTON ran out of gas, there was consolation in the fact that for the nation much of the damage was reparable and many of the scars would be readily healed. As a new election cycle rolled into view, Bill Clinton, along with his seductions and prevarications, would in due course be gone. As the impeachment ended, fresh faces became the focus of public attention. There was renewed respect for the privacy rights of public figures, and new skepticism about the Special Prosecutor Law that liberals contrived as a weapon against conservatives and conservatives turned into a weapon against liberals, and then against themselves.

But one institution, whose corruptions thrust it to the fore in the presidential crisis, would not be so easy to mend. This was the American university, which in the midst of the presidential battle volunteered a contingent of scholars to serve a partisan cause. As the House Judiciary Committee was gearing up for its impeachment inquiry in October 1998, a full-page political ad appeared in the New York Times, entitled "Historians In Defense of the Constitution." The historians declared that in their professional judgment there was no constitutional basis for impeaching the president, and to do so would undermine the constitutional order. The historians' statement was eagerly seized on by the president's congressional defenders and deployed as a weapon against his congressional accusers. In the none-too-meticulous hands of these political pols, the signers became four hundred "constitutional experts" who had weighed in with an authoritative constitutional judgment that exposed the Republicans' attempt at a "coup d'etat." One of the three organizers of the statement, Professor Sean Wilentz, even appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to warn the impeachers that "history will hunt you down" for betraying the nation. On the day his Senate trial began, the president himself referred reporters to the battalion of "constitutional experts" who had gone on record to assert that under the law of the land he should not have been impeached.

Those who signed the statement, however, are not constitutional experts at all. One of them, Julian Bond, is not even a historian, though two universities — Maryland and Virginia — have appointed him a "professor of history." Currently head of the NAACP, Bond is a veteran politician with a failed career whose university posts can only be understood as political appointments for past service.

Another signer, Henry Louis Gates, is not a historian, but a talented essayist and professor of literature. A third, Orlando Patterson, is a first-rate sociologist, but not a historian. Perhaps the three constitute an affirmative-action cohort to increase the African-American presence and reassure everyone that the signers were suitably diverse. All three, of course, are men of the left.

Sean Wilentz is himself a Dissent socialist, whose expertise is social, not political, history, though his scholarship does cover the period of the American founding. A second organizer, C. Vann Woodward, is a distinguished historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, but also not specifically a historian of the Constitution.

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