Guilt Trip: Eric Foner Writes History to Suit the Politically Correct Left--and the Neocons (Ideas‪)‬

ERIC FONER, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the most professionally successful academic historian of our time. He has served as president of all three major historical organizations, published a widely acclaimed book on Reconstruction as "America's unfinished revolution," and appears frequently on national television. He and a likeminded historian, James McPherson, have been conspicuously urging President Obama to sustain affirmative action and consider reparation payments for the descendants of American slaves. Foner has put before the public what he considers the unfinished civil-rights agenda in his 2002 textbook Give Me Liberty: An American History and in other books written for a popular readership, such as The Story of American Freedom and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Rarely has an historian had such abundant opportunities to shape public consciousness on a critical social issue. Foner's vision of American history comports with the political correctness favored by the Left today--indeed at times he seems less interested in Reconstruction than in reconstructing latter-day American society. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, this project has won him influential admirers among the Republican Party. But even as Foner invokes the legacy of slavery and other racial iniquities as pretexts for government-mandated "social justice" and sensitivity today, he has never had to say he was sorry that he and his family whitewashed the crimes of Stalin's USSR.