As for the call to fire her, “Such rhetorical bullying would be laughable,” she says, “if it weren’t part of a pattern on the right of escalating attempts to intimidate scholars who disagree with them.” “It made me feel vulnerable and exposed (which may have been their intent),” she writes. One online commenter on Mises Wire, calling her a “rabid feminazi” and an “anti-Southerner,” posted information about her home. In an email interview with The Chronicle Review, she described how supposed reviewers on Amazon recycled right-wing critiques of her book, sometimes in “crude terms.” Without her knowledge, someone put up a Wikipedia page about her featuring the attacks. The personal attacks have unnerved MacLean. Scholars on both sides manned their ramparts without actually reading the entire book. MacLean’s sympathizers have also quickly dug in, branding the criticism a Koch-backed smear campaign. A phalanx of largely libertarian critics has waged an online battle against the Duke University historian who wrote the book, Nancy MacLean, accusing her of scholarly misdeeds so egregious that she should be stripped of tenure, fired, and perhaps sued.
But the argument over a new intellectual history of the right has played out with unusual intensity. Polemical books often provoke a strong response. Duke Photography Nancy MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke U., has riled libertarians with her new book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”
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