The Wingnutosphere: A Test Case
By David Duke has endorsed the Mearsheimer/Walt paper about the alleged “unmatched power” of the “Israel lobby,” something that I’m guessing will be picked up around the right-wing blogosphere. Most of the lessons will be obvious: it’s a bad paper, but I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that anti-Semitism played a role in writing it even if anti-Semites trumpet it, but I’m sure some clueless hacks will run with the New York Sun‘s angle and play the guilt-by-association game–turning this work of two scholars into something about “Harvard” (and even more amusingly into something about “liberal academics.”)
What will be particularly instructive is to compare the reaction of the purveyors of reactionary academic identity politics to this with their defenses of their allegedly martyred idol Larry Summers. We have two cases in which somebody used poorly supported, largely circular arguments to reach “anti-p.c.” conclusions. Except that it’s worse in Summers’ case, because he was speaking as a representative of the university, and his comments were consistent with a terrible record of hiring and retaining women in science faculties. Somehow, though, I don’t think we’re going to see Mearsheimer and Walt similarly portrayed as victims of a political witch hunt when the media and other faculty start attacking them. Because, of course, “acadmic freedom” as they define it (which, if we can derive its conservative usage in the Summers case, seems to mean “the right to say stupid things without being criticized by people who know far more about the subject than you do and without any consequences”) somehow becomes less important when the “anti p.c.” comments are less congenial with the conservative line of the day…