No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. Last week, you may recall, I had some kind words for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Well, in the very issue that prompted my kind words was an attack on yours truly. I read the piece last week, but never got around to responding until now. Sorry for the length, I didn’t have time to make it short.

The essay in question is by historian Kevin Mattson. Mostly, it comes across as an earnest liberal historian’s plea for greater engagement by serious historians in political discourse. He criticizes pundits for bad historical analogies. He even opens with criticism of Jacob Weisberg and, ostensibly, his main focus is to criticize Howard Zinn. His complaint is that radical leftwingers like Zinn distort the political debate by giving opportunistic rightwingers an easy and misleading target for what the left stands for. Fair enough. Conservatives make similar complaints about some folks on our side as well. So, what’s the problem?

Well, there’s a principled point and a personal one to be made. I’ll start with the personal. Mattson attacks yours truly in fairly strident terms. He writes:

I recently witnessed firsthand how the right uses history to further its own agenda while writing a biography of Upton Sinclair, a socialist and hero to Zinn. In December 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that a man bought a bundle of Sinclair’s letters at an auction; in one letter Sinclair admitted to knowing that Sacco and Vanzetti–two Italian immigrant anarchists put to death for murder in 1927 and lionized by the left–were guilty, but that he decided nevertheless to write a book that could still help their “cause.” The right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg pounced on the story, declaring that the episode exposed the “clay feet of liberal saints,” including historians, who had written Sinclair into the canon of historical American heroes. Goldberg quickly compared Sinclair’s reaction to the Sacco and Vanzetti case to Al Sharpton’s own use of Tawana Brawley (she claimed that six white men raped her and later was found to have lied about it) in New York in the 1980s. Goldberg didn’t even bother to discuss (or perhaps even read) the book that Sinclair had mentioned in the letter. (If he had, he would have found that the book presented a grayer picture of the case than Goldberg made it seem.) But such journalistic responsibility and historical accuracy would have slowed down the mad dash for the op-ed that could scream out: Liberal history is a lie! And with people like Howard Zinn supposedly at its helm, who would disagree? Thus Zinn’s approach to history provides both a target and a method to those who would profit from the debasement of serious history–those who, like Goldberg, can only win ideological arguments by delegitimizing those who could prove him wrong.

Me: This is silly and I suspect that if Mattson weren’t so close to the subject matter in question (he has a new book out on Sinclair), he wouldn’t be so vexed. Here’s the column in question . It was written primarily in response to the following statement by George Clooney: “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.”

I would like to think a historian of Mattson’s caliber would agree that this is what social scientists call “really frick’n stupid.” Indeed, it is even more cartoonish than the stuff Zinn says. And yet, Mattson makes no mention of it. Instead, I’m journalistically irresponsible, a champion of “historical debasement” and incapable of winning ideological arguments without “delegitimizing” those who could prove me wrong. All of this because I relied on that known rightwing rag and distorter of historical truth: The Los Angeles Times. Yes, yes, it’s true: I wish I had had the time to dive straight into Sinclair’s entire ouevre. Yes, it turns out that the story was more nuanced than the Times originally indicated. Fair enough. How this justifies attacking my integrity is beyond me. And the idea that this makes me Zinn-like is an enormous stretch.

I should also note that criticizing bad historical analogies has been a theme of mine for quite a while (See here , here , here and here for examples). And, if I were incapable of having an argument without deligitimizing those who could prove me wrong, why am I treating Mattson so cordially? Indeed, why am I constantly getting angry email from readers for my tendency to speak flatteringly of folks like Jonathan Chait, Kevin Drum, Peter Beinart and the folks at Tapped? I mean, really, who’s doing the deligitimizing here?