Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
by Jonah Goldberg
Ronald Reagan said “Do not be afraid to see what you see”. Unfortunately, the truth can be ugly and uncomfortable, so many would rather ignore it, deny it, or dispute it. This book will open your eyes to the truth of the history of American liberalism. Knowing its history you can then predict its projection into the future. It won’t be pleasant, but it will be solid and informative. Get it, read it, pass it on to someone else.
Description from the publisher:
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
BUY: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Reviews:
“Well-researched, seriously argued, and funny.” —Publishers Weekly“Bold and witty… [Goldberg] makes a persuasive case that fascism was from the beginning a movement of the left.” —New York Post“Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past seventy-five years, very much including the present moment.” —Tom Wolfe
From Publishers Weekly
In this provocative and well-researched book, Goldberg probes modern liberalism’s spooky origins in early 20th-century fascist politics. With chapter titles such as Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left and Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism—Goldberg argues that fascism has always been a phenomenon of the left. This is Goldberg’s first book, and he wisely curbs his wry National Review style. Goldberg’s study of the conceptual overlap between fascism and ideas emanating from the environmental movement, Hollywood, the Democratic Party and what he calls other left-wing organs is shocking and hilarious. He lays low such lights of liberal history as Margaret Sanger, apparently a radical eugenicist, and JFK, whose cult of personality, according to Goldberg, reeks of fascist political theater. Much of this will be music to conservatives’ ears, but other readers may be stopped cold by the parallels Goldberg draws between Nazi Germany and the New Deal. The book’s tone suffers as it oscillates between revisionist historical analyses and the application of fascist themes to American popular culture; nonetheless, the controversial arc Goldberg draws from Mussolini to The Matrix is well-researched, seriously argued—and funny. (Jan.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Tags: american history, conservative, education, fascism, history book, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, liberalism, political, political science, politics, theory
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. by by Christopher Caldwell
BUY: Reflections on the Revolution In Europe
A look into Europe and the changing landscape of the social and political region that liberals seem to want to emulate, while conservative watch as a tale of caution. Caldwell examines everything from elitism to rampant uncontrolled immigration. Imbedded in this neocon view is a discussion of the impact of Islam on the E.U. and how the growth of the Islamic population may change the face of Europe, particularly when these non-assimilated Islamic communities continue to make drastic demands in regards to public laws regarding dress, diet, and day to day living.
BUY: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West
Caldwell’s opinion is the European leaders lack the tenacity and the leadership to stand up for their own nations, or to protect their own way of life in the face of the rising demands of immigrant populations.
If you are interested or concerned about immigration, the spread of radical Islam, the dangers of the progressive movement, or the weaknesses of a liberal elite leadership, then this book will be an interesting read for sure.
Here is the review from the Claremont:
From the start, many Americans saw Europe as corrupt and decadent, prone to aristocratic politics, venal economics, and predatory wars. We might call this the republican image of Europe. Later, Americans came to see Europe as a living museum, good for visiting to see relics of the past. This is the American tourists’ conception of Europe. And at least since 1945, Americans have considered Europe an experiment in social democracy. In America’s current health-care debate, conservatives invoke Europe in just this way with caution and concern, and liberals with occasional praise or envy. Call this our social-welfare image of Europe.
To this list, Christopher Caldwell would add a fourth image. He sees Western European countries plagued by crime and other indicators of a fraying, even rent, social fabric, their core liberal values and way of life challenged by dissenting minorities, and their societies unprotected by political elites who are temperamentally and intellectually too flabby to defend what deserves to be defended and to resist what needs to be resisted. This is the neoconservative view of Europe, not in the sense of calling for an invasion (we tried that), but as in the critique of U.S. society that Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, and others mounted in the 1960s and ’70s. Kristol and the other original neocons saw the American experiment at risk in those years. They warned that the minimal social cohesion and agreement on values required for a stable, effective liberal society were under assault, most flamboyantly by campus demonstrators and urban rioters, and most corrosively by rising crime. In addition, intellectual radicals were making demands that stood to undermine the foundations of liberal democracy. To the neocons’ disgust, many politicians, social commentators, and institutional leaders—instead of standing up to all this—flinched, compromised, and capitulated.
A columnist for the Financial Times, contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and senior editor at the Weekly Standard, Caldwell sees many of the same dynamics at work in Europe, but with a twist. The forces currently laying siege to the citadels of European liberalism are millions of immigrant and first- and second-generation European Muslims, whose families originated mainly in North Africa and Turkey.
European integration has of course permitted migration across its internal borders, and many residents and citizens of European countries categorized today as “foreign born” are in fact transplants from elsewhere in the European Union (E.U.). But during their great post-World War II economic boom, West European countries also invited in large numbers of laborers from outside the region, most famously under the label of Gastarbeiter—guest workers. As that name implies, their presence was assumed to be temporary. But the workers saw it otherwise, and started to make homes for themselves on European soil.
Economic downturns ostensibly closed the doors to new immigrants from outside the E.U. in the 1970s and 1980s. But family reunification and then waves of people seeking asylum from wars and worse ensured that Europe’s immigrant populations continued to grow prodigiously. Crucially, even as what might be called indigenous Europeans are having many fewer children—author Mark Steyn calls this “the gelded age”—these immigrants from outside the region are having many children. The result, Caldwell says, is not just that in “almost all Western European countries, the population of immigrants and their children approaches or surpasses 10 percent.” It is that
[a] fifth of the children in Copenhagen, a third of the children in Paris, and half of the children in London are born to foreign mothers. French-born women have 1.7 children apiece, but foreign-born women in France have 2.8 children. Tunisians, Turks, and Moroccans average between 3.3 and 3.4, more than their counterparts in their home countries.
As a result, many cities will almost certainly eventually become dominated by people whose family histories trace to North Africa or South Asia.
Caldwell concludes that “[t]he demographic and cultural weight of Islam in the world continues to grow, and Europe is the place it is growing fastest.” And it is the Muslim-ness that is the issue for him. Comparable numbers of Latin Americans have immigrated to the United States, but he points out that these Hispanics largely share other Americans’ religious heritage and attitudes toward marriage, national pride, and many other aspects of social and political life. That makes them good candidates for long- and even medium-term assimilation, even as they help reshape American culture along the way, through food, music, and other contributions.
In contrast, Caldwell insists, Europeans are “not dealing with an ordinary immigration problem at all, but with an adversary culture.” He says that many European Muslims do not and will not anytime soon share core values with their new fellow citizens, and in too many cases have not developed basic allegiance to their new countries. Compromised or even dual loyalties may explain why, say, British Muslims volunteer for the military at startlingly low rates, why they refer to the U.K. as “my country” at low rates that decline among younger respondents, and—most disturbingly—why a substantial slice voiced support for the horrific 2005 London bus bombings and why a few even volunteer to fight in Iraq as insurgents targeting British soldiers. On more workaday issues, Caldwell observes, Muslim faith has big implications for gender roles, dress codes, foods, and sexual mores. These topics add up to much of the stuff of daily life, and have led diverse European Muslims to demand institutionalized accommodation on meals, holidays, gender segregation, dress codes, polygamy, speech, and much more.
* * *
Caldwell thinks it important that Muslims in France, Britain, Germany, and other countries seem highly confident in making such demands, suggesting that this reflects a civilizational confidence now visible in Islam’s adherents worldwide. For example, in Germany, “68 percent of Turks think their religion is the only true one, versus just 6 percent of [non-Muslim] Germans.” This cultural confidence is accompanied by political ambition. Polls suggest that large minorities, even majorities, of European Muslims want to see their new countries become Islamic states or adopt sharia law. This suggests to him that Muslim assimilation into mainstream European societies is unlikely anytime soon. He notes that in Britain, where the record of integration is in many ways the best, in “virtually all polls, British Muslims stand out as significantly more radical than all other European Muslim populations.” The current global spirit of Islamic pride may be leading once-distinct Muslim communities across Europe “to converge into a larger Muslim culture,” which suggests that many of the region’s younger Muslims are if anything “dis-assimilating.”Caldwell reserves special attention for Europe’s political and intellectual elites. He compares their behavior to the “hand-wringing inaction” with which so many American leaders greeted grave problems in their own midst in the late 1960s. In Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, elected officials, bureaucrats, and commentators repeatedly have proven unable to respond to illiberal challenges from activist Muslims. He is not sure how to explain this. At some points, he refers to an intellectual failing, saying these leaders lack a “moral code that would give answers” to immigrants. At others, he detects a self-loathing, according to which “Europeans were coming to despise their own cultures” and thus proved unwilling to defend them in the face of demands that they, and not immigrants, be the ones to change. And at yet other points, he paints Europeans as downright intimidated by the Muslims among them, perhaps because of events like periodic riots in France, the savage murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, the murderous Islamist response to the Danish cartoons the next year, and Salman Rushdie’s years in hiding.
* * *
Whatever the cause, European elites have flinched. They have shown they lack the backbone, self-confidence, or je ne sais quoi to defend their way of life. And this matters because the habit of sacrificing liberal practices to spare illiberal Muslim sensibilities might lead to the compromising of modern liberal values themselves. Caldwell does not identify a lot of movement so far down that particular road. His best example is expanded speech codes, which increasingly criminalize certain types of speech that “offend” listeners, Muslims or otherwise, and the general ostracizing of commentators who express concern over these illiberal trends. He remarks acidly that “[a] democracy cannot long tolerate a system that makes an advanced degree in sociology or a high government position a prerequisite for expressing the slightest worry about the way one’s country is going.”Just as the original neoconservatives warned that weakness or prevarication in the face of a challenge invites disrespect and aggression, Caldwell suspects that “[t]he largesse, nonjudgmentalism, and leniency of European governments bred contempt” among its challengers. He closes by warning that “[w]hen an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
But, also like the neocons of old, he is not without hope. Above all, like them, he insists that the reassertion of social authority can rescue even dire situations. France is front and center here. Caldwell predicts that France is best-positioned for “fully assimilating the children and grandchildren of immigrants,” because its still-muscular “republican traditions” endow its possessors with the moral self-confidence needed to insist that everyone at the table must share rules of the social and political game. So, for example, a French proposal to ban Muslim girls from wearing veils in public schools was greeted with large demonstrations and threats of worse to come. “But once France’s resolve became clear, the marches fizzled out” and the vast majority of those affected complied with the new rules.
For Caldwell, this resolve has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy. France’s president has insisted that democracy is strong, not weak, so long as its citizens make it so. He insists that true integration of immigrants must be made available, and also mandatory. In the face of bullying, he exudes “toughness,” insisting that “[t]he response to riots is not spending more money and putting it on the back of the taxpayer. The response to riots is to arrest rioters.” This is designed not to crush or exclude but to bring out the best in everyone: “When they see you’re not afraid, they respect you more,” and become better citizens as a result. “Sarko” also champions what Americans call affirmative action in education and job-seeking. He seems to offer immigrants a grand bargain: you will be brought into the Republic, but on certain essential matters, this must be on the Republic’s terms. In the process, France might well change but the Republic will not.
A robust stance of this kind might be capable not only of cautioning extremists and encouraging European Muslims to integrate successfully, but also of rallying Europe’s “silent majority,” to whom Sarkozy has made virtually explicit reference. Caldwell comments that many average Europeans have searched for “some sign of state action against the Islamization of institutions,” and have responded favorably to politicians willing to defend social order in responsible ways.
* * *
This cause for hope is predicated on what Caldwell considers vast cause for concern. But how justified is that concern, which he shares with a number of others? Caldwell’s argument that Europe’s Muslim communities are maturing a large-scale illiberal impulse is based on evidence that is less statistical than anecdotal, i.e., individual stories from over a half-dozen countries. That his data is not more systematic is largely the fault of Europe’s scholarly and journalistic institutions, which have largely steered clear of the trends and events that he says should preoccupy us. One need look no further than the speed with which France’s 2005 riots disappeared into the research memory hole. But whatever the cause, we are left unsure to what extent dis-assimilation, illiberalism, and extremism characterize Muslim Europe. The closest Caldwell comes to systematic measures are public opinion polls on disparate issues, often conducted on single-country bases. These reveal nasty or worrisome opinions held by sizable minorities and sometimes majorities of European Muslims. But in a world rife with cheap talk and posing, it remains unclear what relationship exists between survey responses and the kinds of authentic beliefs on which behavior is based.There is an even more important concern, though. Clearly, many European Muslims are being affected by a global surge in Islamic identity politics. As Caldwell puts it, even Muslims who may not practice their faith still believe in “Team Islam.” This era of Islamic fervor has its historical counterparts in other communities. But those very parallels offer some caution to those who would extrapolate from current events. In the other cases, periods of fervor faded in time. In the case of contemporary Islam, that fading might be only a decade or two away. If only we had confidence that Western Europe, in every sense of the term, could afford to wait it out.
BUY: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West
Tags: book, christopher caldwell, conservative, Europe, european, Immigration, Islam, neocon, political, political science, politics, revolution
BUY: The Age of Reagan
The Age of Reagan: by Steven Hayward
If you’re seeking an honest, no fluff take on the Reagan era, this book may be what you are looking for.
BUY: The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989
The rise in popularity of Reaganomics along with the perception, falsely perhaps, that Reagan was largely cheered as the hero of his day has caused a peak in interest in what Ronald Reagan was truly about. Steven Hayward seems to do a pretty good job presenting a realistic view of what the Reagan era truly was, how it was received by the public and the media, and how the policies of the administration were and how what affect they have left on the country.
Here is what John O’Sullivan said of the Claremont Institute:
On the penultimate page of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, the first volume of his magisterial political history, Steven Hayward drew this momentous but tentative conclusion:
In smashing the monopoly of liberalism in 1980, Reagan exposed the fractured and increasingly hollow character of what passes for liberalism in the late twentieth century, and prepared the ground of political debate on which American politics is still being conducted today. That is what makes the closing decades of the twentieth century the “Age of Reagan.” Like the post-New Deal era—the “Age of Roosevelt”—the Age of Reagan may prove equally durable.
This possibility looks more likely, though still uncertain, 21 years after Reagan left office than at almost any time during his presidency. One of the many merits of Hayward’s second volume, covering Reagan’s years in the White House, is that it reminds the reader firmly just how embattled and frustrated he seemed for much of the period. Simply to list some of the main episodes of those years—the attempted assassination and its aftermath, the resignation of Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, two mid-term electoral reverses, the retreat from Lebanon under fire, the nuclear freeze movement, the 1987 stock market crash, the Iran-Contra hearings, the Savings and Loan crisis, the “Borking” of Robert Bork—is to depict a presidency mired in difficulties and apparently heading for oblivion. All of these setbacks were magnified by an almost comically biased media. And though Reagan enjoyed successes from Grenada to Reykjavik, they seemed brief and atypical interludes in a general story of amiable confusion. About the most flattering impression at the time was of Reagan as Laocoön waging a magnificent but doomed struggle to free himself and America from the coils of Liberaldom at home and abroad.
We have to remind ourselves—or have Hayward remind us—of this contemporary impression because recent Reagan scholarship has presented a far more favorable view of the man and his presidency. Books by liberal historians such as John Patrick Diggins and Richard Reeves have conceded that Reagan was a formidable statesman with great historical achievements to his credit. Reagan himself contributed to this revisionism when his columns, broadcasts, and diaries, published over the past ten years, revealed him not as an “amiable dunce” but as a well-informed, serious man with a strong grasp of major political issues. Events in the real world—which sometimes conquer even the defense mechanisms of intellectuals—came to his aid as well. His economic policies were followed by America’s economic recovery, the modernization of U.S. capitalism, and a boom that lasted 26 years with only two brief and modest interruptions. His foreign policy led to the first U.S.-Soviet arms reduction agreement, victory in the Cold War, and the peaceful collapse of Communism.
If anything, Reagan’s new admirers compensate for their heresy on the central issues of Reaganomics and the Cold War by repeating the standard liberal critiques of his policies on homelessness, budget “cuts,” the environment, AIDS, labor unions, affirmative action, and almost everything else. Indeed, these critiques often have a curious taken-for-granted quality as if it is unnecessary to argue such things since everyone knows them to be true.
* * *
By contrast, Hayward, who is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, sets out to look in detail at almost all the important controversies of the Reagan era (the S&L crisis is a rare exception). In doing so, he examines critically not only what Reagan said and what his administration did but also how the Democrats responded and what the media reported. He discovers, unsurprisingly, that sometimes the Reagan Administration was either seriously mistaken (the Iran-Contra affair) or blunderingly inept (the Bob Jones University tax flap). More often than not, however, he finds that the administration was correct or at least reasonable, the media partisan, and the Democrats alarmist.The fabled “cuts” in Reagan’s landmark 1981-82 budget are a good example of all three. What the administration initially proposed (before congressional haggling added various pork-barrel items) involved no actual reductions in welfare spending at all. Almost all the supposed “cuts” were reductions in a previously planned rate of growth (i.e., budget hikes). As Hayward points out, “overall spending for all social programs in 1982 was still $53 billion higher than in 1980.” But this modest fiscal restraint was depicted by the media as the imposition of a brutal austerity.
“Hunger in America is back,” intoned Bill Moyers in a CBS special before Reagan’s “cuts” had even taken effect. Charles Kuralt similarly reported that food stamp cuts were “putting people into a 1981 version of the bread line.” (When they eventually came, the 4% “cuts”—$100 million out of $11.4 billion—tightened eligibility, but 22 million recipients remained on food stamps.) “The impact of the Reagan cuts on minority groups is likely to be severe,” ran a front-page Washington Post news report. Several urban Democrats predicted a long hot summer of riots as a result of the “cuts.” (The riots never occurred.) Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House and their de facto leader, said in a spontaneous television interview that the president “has no concern, no regard, no care for the little man in America.” Later, in a speech, he accused Reagan of being “a tightwad, a real Ebenezer Scrooge.”
In the course of his narrative Hayward subjects one after another of these anti-Reagan critiques to a well-researched, critical examination. Almost always they turn out to be either grossly exaggerated or outright untruths. (Perhaps it would be kinder to describe them as metropolitan myths or superstitions of the sophisticated.) This painstaking process sometimes slows down Hayward’s otherwise well-paced and highly readable account. But that is a price worth paying for a comprehensive analysis that will serve as a treasure trove for future historians.
It also helps answer another question. How did Reagan’s popularity withstand this avalanche of difficulties and bad publicity? His critics have argued over the years that the president’s amiability and communication skills persuaded the voters to overlook or forgive the “cruelty,” “harshness,” or “callousness” of his policies. But if his policies were none of those things, as Hayward establishes very clearly, maybe the explanation is that the voters realized that Reagan was closer to reality than his critics in the media and the opposition. This sympathy for the president on matters voters grasped, such as food stamps, would then bolster his credibility on more arcane questions, such as monetarism and missile defense.
* * *
When Hayward moves onto the larger picture of the Cold War, he tackles material on which established opinion is already favorable to Reagan—far more so than when the author began his gargantuan two-volume task. Yet he tells a gripping story vividly—especially the Geneva and Reykjavik summits—with balanced judgments and new material. And as in other recent accounts, Reagan emerges as a statesman significantly different from the portrait of him both admirers and critics have carried in their minds. The simplest description is to say that he saw all the great issues of politics, including peace and war, through a serious (Christian) moral perspective.Although SDI turned out to have all sorts of political advantages for America, the overriding appeal of missile defense for the president was the argument that it was more moral to defend the American people than to avenge them with a nuclear strike. This commitment, which was close to nuclear pacifism, won over Pope John Paul II when they met in 1982 in Rome. Meanwhile, the U.S. Catholic bishops defended the “stability” of Mutual Assured Destruction over and against this explicitly moral calculation, even though they had long been uneasy (at best) about MAD.
Reagan’s nuclear views reflected a subtle, prudent view of military power in general. He was more than happy to employ a show of force as a strategic tactic. He did so on entering office when he signed off on the proposal of U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman for a massive Anglo-American naval exercise in the North Atlantic to challenge Soviet domination in that region. On the other hand, he was very reluctant actually to use force—according to his secretary of state, George Shultz, he did so on only three occasions in eight years. When American medical students were threatened by a Marxist coup on the island of Grenada, he doubled the number of troops requested by the Joint Chiefs (whom he infuriated by falling asleep during their briefing) because he thought more lives would be saved on all sides if the U.S. had an overwhelming predominance. He pointed out, too, that if Jimmy Carter had doubled the number of troops and helicopters in his attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran, he might still have been giving the orders in 1983.
In short there was no discontinuity between the Reagan who denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and helped the Contras in Central America, and the Reagan who worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to sign arms reduction agreements. In each case the president was pursuing a tough-minded moral strategy to resist and defeat Communism without risking a nuclear war. And as it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.
* * *
Even so, Hayward ends his study on an elegiac, questioning note. Did Ronald Reagan create a Reagan era? Or did he merely slow the drift of America towards a somnolent statist future? These questions redirect our attention to American domestic politics. For, as the opening quote makes clear, a Reagan era would be one in which Reagan, like Roosevelt before him, set the terms of American political debate for the foreseeable future. But Reagan is accused, somewhat less by Hayward than by some disillusioned conservative reviewers, of failing in that task in various ways. How valid are such charges?Reagan certainly failed to turn the culture back to the simpler, more patriotic world of the 1930s that he idealized and even embodied. Gay rights, abortion rights, and other moral novelties continued their remorseless advance through the culture. But he had other things to do—winning the Cold War, reviving the American economy—that seemed more important at the time. Besides, the wholesale transformation of a culture is not something that a president is expected—at least by conservatives—to attempt. It is remarkable enough that he should have restored the standing of the presidency and the belief that America is governable.
Reagan equally failed to reverse welfare-state liberalism. Hayward posits that this is because persuading voters to give up benefits they already enjoy is beyond the power of political man—or at least harder than defeating Communism. Maybe so. But Reagan halted the advance of such liberalism. When he left office, he bequeathed to his successors a set of penalties and incentives that for two decades or so made any further flirtation with that liberalism costly and controversial.
Reagan did fail, however—and fail significantly—where Margaret Thatcher succeeded. He failed to convert the opposition party. For a while he seemed to have done so; President Bill Clinton balanced the budget, declared that the era of big government was over, embraced NATO and NAFTA expansion, backed a Republican plan for welfare reform, and sought safety in triangulation. But a series of factors—the Iraq war, George W. Bush’s domestic drift leftwards, the political possibilities of the internet, boredom with centrism—pushed the Democrats back towards their statist and wobbly foreign-policy attitudes of 20 years ago. And Barack Obama was elected president on policies that reflected these attitudes.
Obama has praised Reagan, as Hayward notes sympathetically, for changing the “trajectory” of American politics. But the current administration’s policies are a thorough reversal of that trajectory on the economy, taxes, the budget, health care, climate change, and much else. Hence we cannot be sure if the “Age of Reagan” will prove a durable era or merely a conservative interlude between the “ages” of Roosevelt and Obama.
What is clear is that if the Reagan era is to be durable, then President Obama must not succeed—either politically because he cannot pass his programs, or substantively because his programs pass but then produce some blend of higher inflation and lower growth, and are subsequently abandoned. Reaganomics succeeded politically in 1981, but its more lasting success was the long boom in the years after Reagan left office. What matters ultimately is not the popularity of a policy but the popularity (and soundness) of its results. Steven Hayward deserves our gratitude for establishing this vital but unfashionable truth over the full range of policy and the eight years of the Reagan presidency, even if a final judgment on the durability of the Reagan era remains tantalizingly open.
BUY: Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989
Tags: american history, book, conservative, election, GOP, history book, policy, political, politics, president, reaganomics, republican, Ronald Reagan
The list of books on which the Outpost54 recommends you avoid wasting time and money.
We Are Doomed: Recovering Conservative Pessimism
by John Derbyshire
If you have a disdain for the sugar-coated then you will have a taste for John Derbyshire. You may have read his column at the National Review Online, and if so, you are aware that Mr. Derbyshire is a realist ready with sarcastic grim commentary on the current state of today’s political arena.
His recent book, We Are Doomed: Recovering Conservative Pessimism, is no exception. Here is what the Claremont Institute had to say:
Derb, as his friends and fans on National Review Online know him, might seem to be the Dr. House of the conservative movement—acerbic, abrasive, sarcastic, but usually right; but a better comparison is to Albert Jay Nock. Seldom has doom and gloom been expressed with so much style and laugh-out-loud prose. In fact, Derb appears in places to offer a more plainspoken version of Nock’s famous essay on the “remnant”: “We pessimists, you see, are not only wiser than the smiley-face crowd; we are better people” (original emphasis). For all of his acerbic grumpiness, one can imagine Derb going down on the Titanic with a relentless stream of mordant wit about the whole thing. We Are Doomed is simply a great read, and will have an oddly cheering effect on some readers.
Conservatives of all types will find much to agree with, and much to be troubled by, in Derb’s tour of the horizon. Most will be in emphatic agreement with his critique of the diversity mongers and money-grubbing educrats. “Education,” he writes, “is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist logrolling,” for which there is little or no chance of serious reform. More problematic is his chapter on culture and human nature, where he dilates on recent findings on genetic and biological determinism that undermine a central tenet of conservatism, that culture shapes human character. He may well be right or partly right about this, and he is certainly right that “culturism” (as he calls it) is the premise for leftist social engineering. He recognizes that the implications of his speculations in this area would require “a new conservatism.”
BUY We Are Doomed: Recovering Conservative Pessimism
Derb also thinks the U.S. is fated to follow the example of Europe by becoming even more secular: “America’s religious exceptionalism is doomed, and American conservatism with it.” He is against “the damn fool Iraq war” (though he initially supported it as a punitive raid, akin to gunboat diplomacy), along with the “conservative utopianism” that thinks we can implant democracy in the Arab world. It is the foreign policy cousin, he argues, of “compassionate conservatism” at home. He refreshingly omits the usual animadversions against the dreaded neocons, but wishes the George W. Bush who spoke against “nation-building” in the 2000 campaign had stuck to this position.In advocating that conservatives embrace “the audacity of hopelessness,” Derbyshire does not offer political prescriptions or strategies for the conservative movement. To the contrary, he says near the end, “I fully expect to pass the rest of my life as an American without ever seeing any major conservative legislation passed by Congress, or any major executive action drawn from conservative principles, or any Supreme Court ruling that will do more than slow the advance of state power by a percentage point or two.” In his last chapter he attempts to conform to convention by offering some hope, though this might be subtle parody on his part (note the juxtaposition of Samuel Beckett’s stage play Happy Days with the television sitcom Happy Days). His “hope” is pretty forlorn and antipolitical: through pessimism “we can still transmit something of value to the future, while seeking for private contentment in the present while the earth-pile rises.”
Here one arrives at the odd, unintended convergence between Tanenhaus and Derbyshire. Tanenhaus thinks the conservative movement would be better off if it ceased to think of itself as the self-conscious political movement it has been since the 1950s. Implicitly Derbyshire’s privatization of conservatism would have us do the same thing. While the prospects for conservative “revanchism” may still seem daunting in the Age of Obama, it is nonetheless surprising that Derbyshire never raises the obvious question: without the conservative movement of the past 50 years, how much worse would things be? The revival of conservatism, drawing upon the richness of American exceptionalism, probably explains most of the political variance between the United States and Europe in the postwar era—explains, in particular, why America has refused to make peace with the modern welfare state, why we remain a military superpower, and why Americans remain a religious people. With Obama faltering and a resurgence of conservative energy evident, even Derb might want to don his armor, draw his sword, and enter the fray once more.
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BUY: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
Tags: american history, book, conservative, Derbyshire, Dr. House, education, election, John Derbyshire, political, political science, politics, president, republican, tea party, theory
America: The Last Best Hope Volumes I & II Box Set
Author: Dr. William J Bennett
Seldom does a history text embrace both emotional intensity and rigid authenticity. The reader of this priceless two volume set by former adviser to President Ronald Reagan will be aware that he is in possession of just such a tome a mere paragraph or two into the first page.
It is a wonder that Dr. Bennett was able to write this book while maintaining all of the other prestigious posts that he does (national circuit speaker, major talk show host, political analyst for several major cable news networks, and fellow at several conservative think-tanks). I highly recommend that you listen to his radio show if you have never done so. You will be refreshed at the enormous intellectual content delivered in a sedate, non-vitriolic manner from Dr. Bennett and his gang.
GET IT NOW: America: The Last Best Hope Volumes I & II Box Set
Now to the book. It is a narrative, starting roughly with Christopher Columbus and working through the struggle of early settlers to the breaking from England up to the modern era, Dr Bennett tells the story of an America that was founded and is maintained by those who were “great people who wisely choose how to save themselves and others, how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation in the history of the world.”
Bennett has a skill for telling historical events in a detailed and accurate way that is entertaining and engaging. The reader feels as if they are reading Tolkien or Lewis, not a history text. Yet, in so doing, Bennett never gives way to the temptation of “creative license” and does not seem to embellish stories. Rather, in a sort of pithy and elegant way, he takes the reader, in a grandfatherly manner upon his knee, and tells them of how America came to be.
The importance of this book can not be overstated. In an age when our very foundation is being attacked, and when the principles and values upon which the United States was birthed are being surgically removed, every parent would do well to read this book, and then pass it to their children to do the same.
Here is the review by Claremont Books
BUY: America The Last Best Hope
Tags: 1492, 1776, american history, bill bennett, christopher columbus, colonies, conservative, education, founding fathers, george washington, history book, patriot, politics, settlers, tea party
Outpost54 Founder
Welcome to Outpost54 Books. The idea here is to provide a platform for readers to comment, and generally discuss the plethora of books that are coming onto the market in the political genre. So many books, so little time to read them.
The books we will discuss, for the most part, will involve the following topics:
- History: mostly American history as it pertains to today’s political arena. At times a good global history book comes out, especially one that deals with commerce, trade, economics, and war and peace.
- Political theory: contemporary and traditional political theory is what we hope to discuss and what we hope to grow in our knowledge and understanding.
- Economics: how are current economic trends and conditions shaping policy and our lives, what can we do to adapt, and what can we learn from the past.
- Military Strategy: Any books written past and current by top military strategists are worthy of THE LIST.
- Presidential: We will filter the tons of books written about our leaders and direct you to the one’s worth your hard earned dollars.
- Forecasting: Books that are attempting to forecast the future political landscape will be reviewed as well.
This site is not a GURU site. The success of Outpost54 thus far has been it’s steady reliance on it’s participants. Your comments on any books we recommend and post are welcome, needed, and appreciated.
Thank you!
Bill Newman
Founder – Outpost54
