Conservative Scholarship: Seeing the Object as It Really Isn’t

Abstract

From the late 1970s to the present, the conservative attack machine has also included organizations of students, faculty members, trustees, and alumni, along with outside groups like Accuracy in Academia and David Horowitz’s personal crusades against campus PC. There is little to be added to the many thorough accounts of these organizations’ histories.¹ All I want to highlight is their convergence with the branches surveyed in my three previous chapters, in terms of their (often concealed) direct connections with the Republican attack apparatus, their rhetorical deviousness, and logical inconsistencies—culminating in their becoming virtually identical ideologically to the Tea Party right wing dominating the Republican Party and conservative media like Fox News today. In each instance, as noted in chapter 5, the justification has been that these organizations are only providing needed balance against the biases of liberal-to-leftist forces that are more powerful, and that they are providing evidence and arguments that are intellectually superior. In many of these instances, I again argue that the forces of the right falsely present themselves as analogous to those of the left, blurring the difference between ideas that are arrived at through individuals’ independent thought—whatever those individuals’ biases may be—and those arrived at through individuals and organizations serving more or less directly the interests of sponsors and parties.