I really like this quote from John Rosenberg, linked by Instapundit, for its concise explication of the evil of postmodernism:

At the risk of oversimplification, on one side of the increasingly barbed cultural barricades are those who believe truth is whatever serves justice, i.e., women, minorities, critics of American foreign policy, gun control. Thus Wiener returns over and over to "[t]he political implications" of Bellesiles' book. "The Second Amendment," he says it suggests, "was not adopted to protect the widespread ownership or popularity of guns ... it undermines the NRA's picture of a citizen militia (rather than a national army) as the bulwark of American freedom" etc. And he closes his article with the following dark warning:


But the campaign against Bellesiles has demonstrated one indisputable fact: Historians whose work challenges powerful political interests like the NRA better make sure all their footnotes are correct before they go to press.


On the other side of the cultural divide are those still dedicated to an older "correspondence theory" of truth as reflecting, however imperfectly, some objective even if not completely knowable reality. They are indifferent to, or at least not transfixed by, the "political implications" of the work and more concerned with the book's basic honesty and whether the history profession relaxes its professed standards for politically correct interpretations.