Today’s advocates, such as Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Joe Wurzelbacher and all kinds of fervent amateur philosophers on the net may not deserve a place in Academia, but they nevertheless play their part in airing the importance of conservatism, its routine misrepresented in our airborne rethoric, and the urgency of defending it, one citizen at a time.

Kim Phillips-Fein—and apparently Douthat and Salam don’t understand economics. So-called “hard-line laissez-faire” policies are best for all Americans. Do you really want to help the poor and disenfranchised? Then you should advocate free market remedies. Progressive Republicans like Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon unwittingly caused much harm. As matter of fact, Hoover and the protectionist Republicans of his era are mostly responsible for bringing about the Great Depression. The disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff was the fault of Republican U.S. senators and their president who signed it into law. Never forget that Nixon believed we have all become Keynesians and enacted wage and price controls. He did enormous damage to the domestic sector. Ms. Phillips-Fein might want to refer to Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man and Burt Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? The odds, of course, are that she has never read these works. At best, our rather young professor has read a number of highly negative reviews.

The Main Stream Media and left-wing domination of our nation’s intellectual institutions is the number one reason why conservatives have had an overwhelmingly difficult time getting their message out. But that is rapidly changing. Phillips-Fein might also want to watch Glenn Beck later this afternoon. His audience is significantly larger than all of his left of center competitors combined.

The springboard of Radosh’s piece is Kim Phillips-Fein’s “Right On” article in a recent number of The Nation. Therein, Phillips-Fein outlines the liberal scribe’s penchant for writing the premature obituary for conservatism, admits that liberal scholars have “sought to understand the conservative movement partly to forge the tools to undermine it,” and explains that such histories rarely view conservatives on their own terms. Instead, theories about why conservatives have made gains generally center around how evil they are (racism, e.g., “the Southern Strategy”) or how ignorant the masses are of their own interests (false consciousness). Such convenient explanations never laid the onus for liberalism’s decline on any inherent weakness of liberalism.

It is perhaps this honest assessment of liberal historiography that prompts Radosh to write, “At a moment when most liberal/left commentary is purely a set of venomous screeds, this essay by Prof. Phllips-Fein stands alone.” This rings true. As for Dr. Radosh’s affirmative answer to the question of whether liberals can write a fair history of conservatism, his answer may be affirmed but Phillips-Fein’s article is not the affirmation of it. The Nation article reads less as a history of conservatism than it does a critical history of leftist histories of conservatism. There is Richard Hofstadter, but no Russell Kirk; Thomas Frank, but no F.A. Hayek; and Alan Brinkley, but no William F. Buckley. That ideological narcissism, in a nutshell, explains why leftists have done such a poor job understanding their political adversaries.

It is tough to understand that which doesn’t interest.

http://www.flynnfiles.com/archives/culture2009/lefties_writing_about_righties.html