‘Historical Fiction’ at Duke Is a widely criticized attack on a Nobel economist all based on a typo?By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/historical-fiction-at-duke-1508449507
It’s become almost a punch line that the academic left seeks to label as “white supremacist” any idea they don’t like—and are unable to rebut. But a Duke University professor’s attempt to smear a giant of the economics profession hasn’t been very funny. Now the question is whether it was all the result of a simple mistake.
In July this column described the reaction to “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” by Duke’s Nancy MacLean. The book, which your humble correspondent has not read, is an attack on Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, a pioneer in “public choice” theory, which holds that government officials act out of self-interest just like everyone else. Ms. MacLean’s, umm… contribution to the Buchanan story is her argument that the Nobelist was the author of a “diabolical” secret plan to subvert democracy and favor rich white people. The work is now a finalist for a National Book Award.
Writing at the leftist website Vox of all places, professors from George Washington University and Johns Hopkins have flagged various alleged errors in the book. Other critiques have appeared in the Washington Post, among other places. NPR for its part had to explain to readers why its editors selected a novelist, rather than a historian, to review the book.
Now historian Phillip Magness says that, lacking direct evidence that Buchanan was a white supremacist, the book relies on alleged commentary he contributed to a now-defunct segregationist newspaper. But Mr. Magness says that the source on which Ms. MacLean relied erred in the citation. Mr. Magness reports that Buchanan had actually contributed to the anti-segregationist Richmond Times-Dispatch, which still exists today.
Ms. MacLean said via email that Mr. Magness is “wrong about the facts of Virginia history” but has not responded to a follow-up question asking specifically which of the publications carried Buchanan’s work. In the meantime, this column has been able to confirm that Buchanan co-authored a two-part series in the anti-segregationist Times-Dispatch in April of 1959 along with Warren Nutter, his colleague in the University of Virginia economics department, where Buchanan served as chairman.
The Magness report follows a critique of the book by Ms. MacLean’s fellow professor at Duke, Michael Munger:
Early in Democracy in Chains, in a preface entitled “A Quiet Deal in Dixie,” MacLean recounts an exchange, a conversation really, between two conservatives. One is the president of a major southern university, the other is an academic worker intent on reverse-engineering a repressive sociopolitical order in America, working from the ground up, using shadowy methods and discredited theories.
The academic writes a proposal for a research center where these ideas can be given a pestilential foothold, a source of viral infection hidden in a legitimate academic setting. The goal, as MacLean tells it, was to begin a Fabian war to re-establish a repressive, plutocratic society ruled by oligarchs. MacLean has actually examined the founding documents, the letters in this exchange, and cites the shadowy academic as saying: “I can fight this [democracy] . . . I want to fight this.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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