Last week, I received the email below from Gale Primary Sources, acting on behalf of the University of California’s Center for Right-Wing Studies. It sought permission to digitize and disseminate materials created by my organization, Center of the American Experiment. These materials would be part of an archive that Berkeley will “publish and commercially distribute,” for the purposes of academic research and education on the “Right Wing.” I noticed that, while it was sent by email, the Gale communication was mis-addressed to my organization’s former headquarters–the building that was firebombed by left-wing extremists.
Curious about the bipartisan nature of Berkeley’s interest in “wing” studies, I responded:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Can you send me a link to your Center for Left-Wing Studies?
Thank you.
John Hinderaker
President
My unknown correspondent didn’t get the point:
Hello,
Thank you for your response.
The material is located at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. It is currently unscanned and undigitized, though Gale hopes to digitize it with your permission.
Here is a link to the finding aid for the material at the Center for Right Wing Studies: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/hb596nb6hz/. If you search “Center of the American Experiment”, you can see that it is listed under Organization Files. You will not be able to access the actual materials, though, without visiting the Bancroft Library.
Please let us know if you have any other questions or wish to grant permission for digitization.
Thank you,
Gale Primary Sources
I tried again:
I’m sorry, I think you mis-read my query. I am looking for a link to your center for LEFT-wing studies.
John H.
The light bulb started to go on:
Hi,
Gale Primary Sources does not have a center for left-wing studies as we are a digital academic publisher.
The material we were discussing comes from Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing studies, which I have provided a link here: https://issi.berkeley.edu/crws. Otherwise, there is no left-wing studies center to provide a link for. Apologies if you were hoping for something else.
Thanks,
Gale Primary Sources
I wanted to be sure:
Does Berkeley have a Center for Left-Wing Studies? It sounds like they don’t.
John H.
Gale’s reply:
Hi,
To our knowledge, Berkeley does not have a center by that specific name. We cannot speak for them, as we are simply collaborating with them to provide broader access to this archive for students and researchers.
Thank you,
Gale Primary Sources
Not to keep you in suspense, Berkeley does not have a Center for Left-Wing Studies, or anything similar. You can read about their Center for Right-Wing Studies here. I concluded the dialogue this morning:
If they don’t have a center for left-wing studies, I have no interest in collaborating with them on their purported center for right-wing studies.
Thanks for inquiring.
John Hinderaker
This is typical–the Left is normal, no matter how many millions they kill or hundreds of millions they plunge into poverty. The Right is dangerous and abnormal, no matter how successful conservative policies may be, and no matter how much empirical evidence shows that conservatives are happier, healthier and more philanthropic than liberals. And when liberals talk about the Right–as in Right-Wing Studies–they don’t just mean the handful of wackos who are found at every point on the political compass. They are talking about you and me.
STEVE adds: I know all about these folks. I know the director of this circus, Lawrence Rosenthal, and I get along with him personally. He came to a couple of my events that I organized at Berkeley, and after one event (with Mark Lilla, a smart self-critical liberal who upsets people at Berkeley) we went out afterward for a drink at a nearby bar. He’s quite knowledgeable about serious conservatives; we had a long conversation, for example, about the thought and legacy of James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall at National Review. He did give me the lefty-populist view that Sarah Palin was the plague bacillus inside the GOP that led directly to Trump (this was back around 2018 or so), which I wasn’t sure whether it was better to embrace (because fun to fuel leftist paranoia) or repudiate, except that in a way I can partially agree with it, because I like Palin—and hate McCain for ruining her by picking her before she was ready—and I am sure Rosenthal assumed that I must deplore Palin because I have a Ph.D and was teaching at Berkeley. And therein lies the problem with campus bubbles. He was genuinely startled when I said I esteemed Palin’s political talent.
John gets at the heart of the problem with his query about whether there is a Center for Left Wing Studies at Berkeley. That would be redundant! (As I am sure John knows.) The Center for Right Wing Studies exists in a typical campus bubble, and they never did know what to do with me. They have a big conference every other year, filled with academic critics of “the right,” and I’ve volunteered to come to represent an actual conservative. But they never took up my offer; probably too terrifying. I can only imagine what would happen when I let fly with M. Stanton Evans’s great joke that “I didn’t agree with what Joe McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure did admire his methods!” Or, “I didn’t support Nixon until after Watergate.” I’m sure these jokes would be met with appalled silence, and would be taken as proof of all their stereotypes are true!
