During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accom… - Michael Parenti

Facing a campus that is not nearly as reactionary as they would wish, ultra-conservatives rail about how academia is permeated with doctrinaire, “politically correct” leftists. This is not surprising, since they describe as “leftist” anyone to the left of themselves, including mainstream centrists. Their diatribes usually are little more than attacks upon socio-political views they find intolerable and want eradicated from college curricula. Through all this, one seldom actually hears from the “politically correct” people who supposedly dominate the universe of discourse.

This established familiarity and unanimity of bias is frequently treated as “objectivity”.

Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure. As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called "gentlemen's history," a genre heavily indebted to an upper class ideological perspective. In 1773, we find him beginning a work on his magus opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by half-a-dozen servants. Being immersed in what he called the "decent luxuries," and saturated with his own upper-class prepossession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy. He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil. No accident that the impoverished laborer, even if literate, seldom had the agency, agency to produce scholarly tomes.