It may be too vast and subtle a problem to fairly raise here, though. It was certainly a vast sentence.

So here, in conclusion, a president-related story we can all enjoy: I just heard on the news that a counterfeiter of $100 bills was arrested after it was noticed his bills had Abraham Lincoln on them. Hard to imagine that happening.

Here’s the thing, Todd. The basic structure of our disagreements *predate* my entry into professional academia by a good number of years. After all, I found fusionism with the right sufficiently unattractive as to prompt my goofy Spectator resignation almost [holy freaking sugar] 18 years ago. I was arguing with you about the perils of a Christian Coalition-dominated GOP back when the CC was first taking over rural school boards in the early 1990s. And my “libertarianism and welfare liberalism are both liberalisms, but conservatism isn’t” view is almost as old– call it no later than Rawls’ Political Liberalism, 1993.

I’ve become more of a wet and trended away from anarchism, in ways that derive from my intellectual identity as a political scientist and don’t have any clear left-right valence. But I haven’t moved noticeably left in either substantive views or rhetorical posture. If you think life in the mythical faculty lounge (neither of the departments that has employed me has had such a thing, though my grad school department did) has made me conform, please point to something on which I’ve changed over time. Anything I’ve disagreed with you about since 1990 can’t have been caused by faculty lounge peer pressure!

Here’s Seavey’s Law: Use apt comparisons, including the many made available by the often-relevant history of Naziism, especially when discussing phenomena such as collectivism, groupthink, and of course actual totalitarianism.

I will say this, though, in support of the view that not all academics are leftists: some obviously have a hard time understanding, as a good Marxist would, the extent to which allegiances are shaped subconsciously rather than by a conscious desire to be like the cool kids (I’m sure that reporter who famously said she couldn’t understand how the Republican got elected when no one she knew voted for him also never once said “I want to fit in with the cool people”).

On a related note, Brown alum lit-major, MLA veteran, and Dartmouth librarian Laura Braunstein (I adore her, but _can you guess whether she’s a Republican??_) forwards this article about a rare Dem/GOP academic couple studying the filter effects that make academia leftist.

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=B8mj3d8YCSvzvmcZmc4hmrqF3sdmyvtZ

As with media bias, one can be very sincere and still be a product of one’s environment.

Personally, I don’t talk about politics with my colleagues, except when the issue involves China and I actually have some expertise. Jacob, as far as I can tell from reading his online writings over the last 10 years, hasn’t exactly kept his views hidden from other academics.

I have no problem with people asserting that most academics in the humanities lean strongly left. There’s little room for doubt about that. But I do grow weary of your assumptions that any political thoughts those of us in academia have that are at odds with your own are no more than attempts to fit in with the cool kids.

If, for instance, you disagree with people as radically as a laissez-faire capitalist surrounded by welfare-statists and socialists must but most of the time merely find yourself nodding along as people say “That Bush is a warmonger” and “That Obama might be better for the poor, the way these Republicans waste money,” you may as well be a lefist, like a Nazi-infiltrating spy whose behavior never externally differs from a Nazi — a sad lost opportunity for education, if you will.