Stuck in the Big Ditch

Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, by Adam Clymer (Kansas, 304 pp., $29.95)

THE prominent historian Alan Brinkley wrote in 1994 that “it would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in 20th-century politics and culture suggests it should.” He’d be hard-pressed to say that today. Starting even before 1994, historians have produced a small river of books on the subject, and they are joined by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and even some of those psychologists who continue to treat right-of-center views as a kind of mental impairment. Given all their work, we are now in a position to say that there might be one thing worse than hundreds of academics and journalists ignoring the Right, which is the same group writing about it.

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Gerard Alexander

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Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, by Adam Clymer (Kansas, 304 pp., $29.95)

THE prominent historian Alan Brinkley wrote in 1994 that “it would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in 20th-century politics and culture suggests it should.” He’d be hard-pressed to say that today. Starting even before 1994, historians have produced a small river of books on the subject, and they are joined by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and even some of those psychologists who continue to treat right-of-center views as a kind of mental impairment. Given all their work, we are now in a position to say that there might be one thing worse than hundreds of academics and journalists ignoring the Right, which is the same group writing about it.