Historians tend to reason backwards from their ideological priors unconstrained by reason, logic or standards of causal inference

From Something is Amiss in the History Profession by David E. Bernstein. When presented with a complex argument, it has been my experience that academic and corporate lawyers tend to be among the few who can relatively quickly cut to the key and necessary elements of the argument and then focus on the weak links. Something there is in their training.

Bernstein's post is perhaps in some ways less about authoritarian social justice historians and their shenanigans and more about differences in argumentative traditions. A lot of historians are, at best, trained in persuasive rhetoric. They try and persuade people that their arguments are right. Lawyers are trained in formal logic and prove that the argument is wrong.

No, this isn't another post about that horrible Nancy MacLean book, but it is related. As an early, vociferous critic of the book, I wound up in email, blog, and Twitter debates with some of her defenders among fellow historians, especially those who purport to specialize in intellectual history. And what I learned from this was troubling. While I'm sure there are many excellent historians around, I found that the historians I interacted with not only tended to reason backwards from their political priors, but that their standards of how one makes an appropriate inference from existing evidence are such that they would be laughed out of any decent philosophy or law school academic workshop.

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The historians I've discussed and debated with are not fringe-y. One of my interlocutors is a chaired professor at a major state university. Others are junior professors or grad students or post-docs or think tank fellows with degrees from some of our most reputable history programs.

Again, I'm not saying that these folks represent all historians, all American historians, or even all intellectual historians who specialize in the U.S. Nevertheless, the fact that all of these arguments (and more) have been made with a straight face by well-credentialed historians suggests something is amiss in the profession.

The five examples Bernstein provides are compelling.