Letters

To the Editor:

I have very mixed feelings about David Kaiser’s article, “How Postmodern Historians Have Helped Cripple the American Left,” in the Spring 2015 Academic Questions (vol. 27, no. 1). Certainly, the scholarly discipline of history is being destroyed by political activists and their “theory”; but Dr. Kaiser’s complaint seems to be that they simply have the wrong kindof political activism, not that the activism itself is wrongheaded. And, in any case, I doubt that the ruination visited by their practices has “crippled” the American Left in the least, as Kaiser seems to think. According to their own theory, an ideal of something like historical accuracy or truth is a fiction of power. They demonstrate this with the naked practice of their own power, which is to purge faculties of dissenting voices, and to silence all dissent at