:::Collect, it's a bit hard to interpret this passage out of context, and I unfortunately do not have either Questia access or a library at hand to provide that context. But I would tend to interpret the quotation marks as marking his assertion that the consensus consists of the (presumably limited) set of specific people referred to as "the historians and journalists cited above", with the further implication that a larger set of authorities would not produce such a consensus. Even if it is supposed to be quoting a single word from a New Republic article (which I cannot tell from here), the text itself states that consensus spoken of is not necessarily much larger than the specifically named group. I think you would have to go back to that New Republic article to get an assertion that there is a larger consensus, and this article seems from the limited evidence at hand to be aimed at denying among other points that there is such a wide-ranging consensus.