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The National Endowment for the Humanities is one of the remnants of Lyndon Johnson’s foolish “Great Society” idea that the federal government should meddle in almost everything. Signed into law in 1965, the law creating this federal agency (along with the National Endowment for the Arts) declares, “The encouragements and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily matters of private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government.”
That was and still is nonsense. The arts and humanities are not matters of federal concern because the Constitution does not authorize any spending on them. All of the proper “concerns” of the federal government are clearly set forth in the Constitution and you look in vain for anything saying that it may subsidize “scholarship in the humanities and the arts.”
Back then, opponents argued that this unconstitutional move would inevitably lead to the politicization of arts and humanities funding, and they’ve been proven correct year in and year out.
Many examples of NEH funded projects that amount to nothing more than subsidizing some professor’s pet interest are found in this Washington Times article, including grants to study anti-nuclear power protest music in Japan after the Fukushima reactor disaster, to develop a course at Butler University on the “diverse functions of comedy,” for research on magic and medicine in 18th century Yucatan, and a course at Loyola University in Maryland about “modernist women’s poetry and the problem of sentimentality.”
People should be free to study and write about any of that, but with their own money or money willingly given to them for the purpose. Federal bureaucrats should not give away money taken from the taxpayers for such humanities “research.”
The reason why I say that the case for abolishing the NEH, as proposed in President Trump’s budget, just got stronger is that it funded an egregiously political hatchet job of a book that was recently published, namely Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean.
Using phrases like “radical right” and “stealth” are sure to get accolades from leftists who love a good horror story about their supposed enemies. Never mind that any fair account would have to say that there is nothing stealthy in what the “radical right” wants. Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians want a return to limited government under the Constitution and have never hidden that. If that’s “radical,” so was the American Revolution, which also sought to secure individual liberty against an overreaching state. And as for putting democracy “in chains,” that was exactly what the Constitution’s drafters intended.
But the fact that MacLean has written a book meant to confirm leftist biases isn’t the main problem. The problem is that she has chosen to target and misrepresent economist James Buchanan (1920-2013), who received the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his path-breaking work on public choice theory. MacLean portrays Buchanan as the dark, racist figure who provided the intellectual veneer for the movement to downsize the government.
The book has been subject to scathing criticism since its publication. Let’s begin with a faculty colleague of MacLean’s Professor Michael Munger.
Munger is a serious scholar who has focused much of his attention on the branch of economics for which Buchanan is best known, namely Public Choice. In a review for the Independent Institute, Munger calls the book “speculative historical fiction” and calls MacLean out on speculations meant to smear Buchanan that have no basis in fact. For example, she wants readers to believe that his support for school vouchers was motivated by a desire to reinstitute segregation, but that view, Munger writes, “does not withstand even minor scrutiny as an account of Buchanan or Public Choice.”
Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan denounces her effort here, writing, “The government paid her over $50,000 to smear Buchanan and people like him. Rather than challenging his ideas, she accuses him of this and that. Yet, all the while, Nancy is quite literally a hired gun for the government, seeking to rationalize its oppression and abuses.”
Historian Phillip Magness of George Mason University elaborates on those accusations, which amount to nothing more than the guilt by association tactic of declaring that Buchanan was influenced by various bad people, in particular the “Southern Agrarians” who like segregation and longed for the old days. Magness writes that Maclean “misused evidence to depict a non-existent intellectual debt between Buchanan and a group of pro-segregation Agrarian poets from Vanderbilt. MacLean’s primary purpose in doing so was to prop up her own narrative, which portrays Buchanan’s role in the development of Public Choice economics as having been motivated by resentment over the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This claim is not supported by any evidence in Buchanan’s works.”
Moreover, Magness has done what MacLean must have assumed nobody would bother to do, namely to check her footnotes. He shows that a number of them simply do not say what she says they say. Scholars should not be sloppy in their work, but this seems to be not sloppiness, but deliberate deception.
(This reminds one of the fascinating case of Professor Michael Bellesiles, whose book Arming America was lionized by the Left, then so completely torn apart by scholars who showed that his “evidence” was largely made up that Columbia University revoked the prize it had bestowed on the book and Emory University fired him. Here is one account.)
And here, Professor David Henderson notes that MacLean has a bad habit of leaving out words when she quotes people so as to mislead the reader as to just what the person actually said.
I’ll conclude this bombardment with one more quotation, from attorney Greg Weiner on Library of Law and Liberty. “In MacLean’s telling,” he writes, “Progressivism is normal and anything to its right, being deviant, requires apology. It is thus ‘hard to imagine’ why Charles Koch holds the views he does, so MacLean naturally turns to the ‘mysteries of individual human personality’ shaped by a warped father-son relationship. Would George Soros receive a similar diagnosis? That Koch might have actually reached his conclusions intellectually does not appear to be within the range of possibilities. Because what MacLean calls ‘the right’ cannot be rationally explained, only corruption, ill will or, failing those, neurosis can do the trick.”
According to its mission statement, the NEH is supposed to “advance knowledge and understanding of the humanities – history, philosophy, literature and languages, archaeology, jurisprudence, comparative religion, and other humanities subject areas – and make this knowledge and learning widely accessible throughout the nation.” Subsidizing partisan political tracts that mislead people is no part of that.
Too bad we taxpayers can’t demand a refund.
There was never any justification for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Congress ought to repeal the law creating it and the National Endowment for the Arts. There is plenty of money in America to support real work in the arts and humanities. There is also plenty of money to support political hatchet jobs like Democracy in Chains. Leave the funding of all that to people who choose to contribute.
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