Goebbels and The Left

                      Goebbels and The Left

There has been a sudden outpouring of scholarship from left-leaning "scholars" on the history of post-World War II free market and libertarian thought. Much of it lacks academic rigor and has something of a conspiratorial tone as if no reasonable person could believe such ideas, and therefore they must be the product of corporate influence, a cover for racism and white supremacy, and so on. This kind of propagandist rewriting of history works; Goebbels was a genius at it.

Scholarship in drag, like the 1619 Project.

Attacking origins of thought through speculation is a standard. A great one is the attack on Christianity through its original documents. The Jesus Project, disguised as a Christian research project, was really made up of very aggressive, dare I say "evangelical," atheists who tried to cobble together a narrative that challenged the traditional Christian scripture with gnostic writings written three hundred years later. Some fun fiction is out there built around the Council of Nicea and the choice of preferred writings that emerged. (Khoury's Templar series is a good one.)

Berstein has an article on the topic in Reason. He analyzes Robert Van Horn who writes "from 1946 throughout the 1950s, corporations made possible and crucially supported the rise of Chicago law and economics through funding and advice…" He implies that corporate involvement influenced the normative positions of Chicago School economics, in particular skepticism of antitrust laws. there is nothing in Van Horn's post documenting that corporations funded the relevant scholars at Chicago. The only funding discussed in the article is from the Volker Fund. As Wikipedia explains: "The William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. Volker founded the fund with the purposes of aiding the needy, reforming Kansas City's health care and educational systems, and combating the influence of machine politics in municipal governance. Following Volker's death in 1947, Volker's nephew, Harold W. Luhnow continued the fund's previous mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics."

"In sum, "corporate funding" amounted to a handful of three-year fellowships for independent scholarly research, and a two-week seminar. To extrapolate from that corporate funding was "crucial" to the rise of law and economics (the start of which the author himself dates to several years earlier), much less that it affected the substantive views of those involved, is quite a stretch."

But this is, and will be, the way of our new world. We will be overwhelmed by the audacity and the volume of fraud. Ideologues, tabla rasa politicians, and wide-eyed fools will adopt the style of sincere mystics and itinerate patent medicine hucksters. The new politician and his Press supporters will parse 2+2 and often will be overlooked because nobody will believe, like Goebbels, that anyone could lie so easily, so massively or be so egocentrically cruel.