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I recalled this moment recently, when I came across a report from the Progressive Policy Institute: “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s.” The report excoriates American studies for painting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait” of the United States. Reviewing almost 100 articles over three years in American Quarterly, the authors coded their orientation as “critical,” “neutral,” or “positive.” Eighty percent were critical; zero were positive. I am a historian of the political culture of the United States, and my colleagues in American studies are, it seems, unlikely to adorn their cars with American flags, or even to take seriously the impulse to do so.
The responses to the report have been predictable but fail to offer a productive path forward. The right-wing anti-woke crowd seized on the new evidence to cheer the dismantling of the humanities with renewed vigor. On the other hand, the president of the American Studies Association, Alex Lubin, made no effort to deny the leftist slant of the field. Instead, he swiped at the “purportedly ‘progressive’ policy institute” that published the report, insinuating that its authors, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, were colluding with the Trump administration (the uncritical patriotism of which they condemn outright) at an especially “dangerous moment.” Academics, Lubin argued, should be focused on the White House’s authoritarianism rather than taking a hard look inward at their own disciplines.
Egging on the destruction of the humanities, infusing more patriotism into scholarly study, or denying there’s any merit to these criticisms are all indefensible responses. As The Chronicle Review’s Len Gutkin argued in these pages, the “ritual political posturing” common in American studies is undeniable, but the solution to the field’s “credibility problem” does not lie in balancing it with more positive depictions of the American past but rather in a recommitment to dispassionate scholarly rigor.
Furthermore, the sharp analysis of American ideas, images, experiences, and aspirations has never been more urgent. American studies, one would think, is exactly where such work should transpire — but for several of the reasons the institute’s report lays out and others, the field can feel more symptomatic of academe’s well-documented alienation from much of the American public than a place to understand the full range of American experience.
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