Oh dear. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, and the interval has been a pleasant one. Here’s an excellent Terry Teachout article on our friend, in which we learn about some of Baker’s beliefs, such as:
Most of the population of the United States is financially hard-pressed, crippled by the absence of justice in everyday life, and distressingly aware that an unseemly white-male profittaking during the 1980s has brought the United States to the precipice of human disaster.
I suppose that this mix of race-baiting rhetoric, economic illiteracy, and ridiculous hyperbole makes Baker no different from a zillion other tenured radicals at American universities. Yet anybody who holds the misperception that this man is one of the leading lights of our generation should really spend more time reading what he has written–or at least read the article by Teachout, who suffered through the experience so the rest of us don’t have to.