“The
idea that tens of millions of Americans could be, in effect, turned into
anti-Americans seemed insane. But it happened, didn’t it?”
In
Silent
Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance,
historian and political scientist Barry Rubin answers that question in
convincing style and considerable detail. What happen was a “break from all
American history” and “an ideological defacing of liberalism” on the part of
the “Third Left,” the heir to both the Old Left of the 1920s-1950s and the New
Left of the 1960s and 1970s.
As
Rubin sees it, the Third Left took over liberalism, portrayed its only opponent
as reactionary right-wing conservatism and claimed that their radicalism represents
all that is good in America and a correction to all that is evil. The new
radicalism also claims a monopoly on truth and a right to fundamentally
transform America. This altered approach, Rubin explains, “was one of an
unprecedented degree of statism, an imperial presidency that went far beyond
Richard Nixon’s dreams: record high levels of government regulation, taxation
and debt.” It was “a different system from the one through which America
achieved success and prosperity. Yet the fact that such changes were occurring
was everywhere denied even as it was happening.”
The
timing was also significant. Across the globe, regimes following the Old and
New Left’s model were collapsing. At the very moment in human history when it
became obvious that the far left’s ideas had failed and that statist big
government, ever-higher-regulation policies did not work, it became possible
for the first time ever to convince Americans that these things were precisely
what the country needed. And at the very time in human history when Western
civilization and liberal capitalism were so obviously the most successful in
history – recognized as such in the Third World and most of all in formerly
Communist China – a camouflaged radical movement convinced many of those benefitting
from the system that their own societies were in fact evil and failed......To Read More.....
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