The "New Bellesiles"

Many years ago, Richard Nixon's public relations team repeatedly deplyed the phrase, the"New Nixon," when announcing Nixon's periodic makeovers. Now, Michael A. Bellesiles, the disgraced former professor at Emory University, and author of the discredited Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, is similarly trying to remake himself. Will he succeed? I fear that he will. His forthcoming book, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently, seems almost tailor-made to appeal to the anti-free market, anti-classical liberal biases of the profession.

Bellesiles argues that "[c]lass superseded race as the primary area of conflict; abolitionists became social [sic] Darwinists; onetime liberals came to see the wisdom of social control; those who fought for freedom demanded prohibition; elites battled to maintain their power in every corner of the country."