"Bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy."

That's Sean Wilentz's description of "the new political history," quoted by Gordon S. Wood in his review of Wilentz's "The Rise of American Democracy," which dares to tell the story of dead white males.

[Wilentz] writes as a good liberal, but an old-fashioned New Deal one. Like Schlesinger in 1945, he wants in 2005 to speak to the liberalism of the modern Democratic Party. By suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party.