Since 1960, the racist identity politics of the left has politicized and degraded American history in academia and the news media. One of the problems with academia is that, in a metaphorical sense, it is inbred.
It is so liberal, the 33 wealthiest colleges in the last election gave Hillary Clinton $1,560,000. They gave Donald Trump $3,000.
Over 90% of professors in the humanities and social sciences, which include history, are liberals, and it has been this way for decades. Those with differing opinions, if they even get hired, do not dare speak up. If they do, they will not get tenure and will often lose their jobs. There is no real debate on many topics, no challenge to liberal dogma.
The hypocrites in academia scream about diversity but have none themselves, yet diversity of thought is the most important kind of diversity.
When the views of half of the country are not represented, and, indeed, are deplored by most in academia (remember Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables"), then what comes out of academia and their accomplices in the news media -- especially with regard to history -- is the liberal party line: political propaganda preached by liberals without fear of criticism or examination.
There is also rampant discrimination in hiring in academia. People are discriminated against because of their political views.
How could it be any other way when academia is overwhelmingly liberal -- in some fields 30 to 1 -- as stated by Horowitz and Laksin in Footnote 2. It has been this way for the past 50 years. Liberals discriminate against non-liberals in hiring. Liberals hire only other liberals.
It is obvious that academia is a hostile work environment for everybody but liberals, and increasingly hard left liberals, because of diversity departments that demean white people, speech codes that treat conservative views as hate, anti-Christian rhetoric, etcetera, ad nauseam.
This also makes much of academia extremely hypocritical -- again -- because in addition to screaming about diversity, which is non-existent in academia, they also scream about discrimination, yet they discriminate openly against the views of over half the country.
Conservatives and other non-liberals need not apply to academia, though much of academia is funded by taxpayer money from conservatives and non-liberals.
I know from personal experience that some liberals in academia are fine people who, despite their liberal bias, try to be fair. But many others are rigidly doctrinaire and definitely not fair, and they have the power structure and majority to impose their will with impunity.
These doctrinaire liberals preach their views constantly by weaving them into their classes -- comments, smirks, rolls of the eyes here and there -- which intimidate young students and coerce them into writing things they don't believe in order to pass.
As every honest scholar knows, to understand the past, one must view the past the way the people who lived in the past viewed it. The world of the past was not today's middle class America but that is the standard ignorant liberals want you to judge it by.
David Harlan in his book, The Degradation of American History, says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist.
They said it "focused our attention on great white men at the expense of women and minorities, that it ignored the racial and ethnic diversity of national life, that it obscured the reality of class conflict."
They wanted to expose the complicity of white men "in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history."
They "feel no need to say what is good in American history."
It's worse for Southern history.
