Past & Present

The New York Times reporter Semoni Sengupta finds the promises of  India’s so-called Green Revolution era now emptied. At the same time,  the environmental harms endure to this day that were inflicted by these farm modernization programs of the 1960s in South Asia.  

The surge this year in food prices has brought some attention back to farming, which is normally willfully neglected by most of the people who eat. That greater attention is a good thing, even if food shortages are not. Good also is examples such as this article of looking backward at the history of agriculture of the 20th century, which deserves to be termed a “revolution” (for better and for worse) every bit as much as the agricultural revolution that was centered in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

 I have used this article by Gregg Easterbrook in my classes on Twentieth Century World History as an introduction to the Green Revolution. It’s a compelling overview, and I agree that it is curious how unfamous is Norman Borlaug, even though the wheat plant he bred saved millions from starvation and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (I had the honor of meeting Dr. Borlaug and interviewing in Platteville, Wisconsin about 20 years ago).

Unfortunately, Easterbrook’s article doesn’t say enough about the social and environmental problems brought on by the Green Revolution; the Times article today clearly points out that some consequences have been unforeseen and regrettable.

It is a conservative who asks in his article about Rick Perlstein’s history book Nixonland: “Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance?”

The conservative is J. Patrick Coolican, and the article is posted on a popular conservative blog called Politico.com. I repeat “conservative” so much here as an ironic illustration that the likes of Coolican put too much emphasis on that.

To a pundit, that label is all important. Like the real one, the political pundit’s bible begins with “In the beginning was the Word”.  But in their creation story the genesis of a brain begins with either the word “conservative” or “liberal”. All else in their worldview unfolds from either the one label or the other.

 Coolican’s point — the article’s “hook”, as reporters call it — about Perlstein and the new book on President Richard Nixon (1969-74) is that the author and the book are liked by conservatives even though Perlstein is a liberal. And the headline for the review is “Historian Bridges Left-Right Divide”.

My own point is that I disagree with this review’s starting assumption: that it is remarkable that a history book about a conservative movement can be both written by a liberal and be worth reading by conservatives. 

In fact, it is sad and laughable that anyone would find that remarkable. It is a symptom in part of punditry’s harmful influence, but it is even more so a sign that this idea of ”a divide” is overdone.  As I said above, Coolican puts too much emphasis on the labels.

I’m still trying to get my hands on the book without buying it in hardback. (I’m not so poor or miserly that I refuse to buy any hardback history books, and I, unlike some historians who would never stoop to such a level —  do read journalistic, popular histories. But such histories are usually good for only one read, except if they cover what I teach and have the good anecdotes that transfer well to the classroom. But I don’t teach U.S. history per se.) But I gather the book is thinner on theory, historiography or archival work (despite what Coolican’s review says) than , say, works on Nixon by Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor whom I have met. And Perlstein has a blog and is out there as a public figure.

So I gather Nixonland is a book meant to be popular, meant to be tossed around in the talk among political types. Perlstein means to argue — based on the articles about it and not my reading of the book itself — that the roots of conservativism today that are found in the 1960s are illuminating but largely forgotten. That’s valuable work to make that point, and interesting to contrast with how visible is the role of the roots of today’s liberalism within the 1960s. To attack today’s liberals, the 1960s have been overblown into ready-to-use cliches of dirty hippies who spit on veterans or militant blacks in Oakland scowling and armed to the teeth.

I’m glad Perlstein’s book is out there, because it seems more serious and beneficial than the books that contain history from the well-heeled conservative pundit establishment (some have called it vast and a conspiracy). Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism come to mind, or one by Ann Coulter that tried to resurrect Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reputation.

Those two books are examples of things written by and for conservatives for the sake of conservatism, of which there are many more examples that do not even try to use history to make their “points”. And self-described liberals such as Michael Moore or Al Franken churn out the same genre from their foxhole on their side of the spectrum.

It’s from this ideological battleground that Coolican comes when he is seemingly surprised by Perlstein’s book on Nixon. How can it be that a conservative would find value in reading a book by a liberal?

In Coolican’s brain this fact produces cognitive dissonance. I pity that brain.