NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

NextGen Marxism is one of the most informative and relevant books I have read in years. It addresses issues that lie at the heart of political and cultural divisions now evident in America. As the authors write, “the social upheaval we are experiencing in the United States today is the result of a zero-sum view of the world…in which the open exchange of ideas is replaced by a rigid orthodoxy…in which people are reduced to their skin color or sexual orientation.” As the authors explain, the prioritizing of race and gender is not an end in itself but the means of fomenting conflict with the goal of securing power. This strategy is a familiar technique of Marxist politics stretching back through Black Lives Matter, radical environmentalism, the radicalism of the 1960s, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Lenin, and to Marx himself. What the authors refer to as “NextGen Marxism” can be understood as a direct descendant of a long line of Marxist theory and practice. 

The object of NextGen Marxism, as always with Marxism, is to instill a sense of grievance in a particular population and to foment a crisis within society at large with the intention of securing an opening for leftist “solutions.” In this way, the left is following the familiar playbook of those in the past who have applied the same procedure: identify a real or supposed grievance, fuel confrontation and anger, and then “ride into power through elections, promising stability and utopian change,” but delivering only repression and permanent control. It is no accident that the left has endlessly repeated the mantra of “chaos” and, more recently, the lack of “affordability”: these are versions of the conventional leftist rhetoric of social disorder and lack of equity deployed in the service of obtaining power. 

All such grievances should be understood as “fronts in a larger war” with the intention of “seeking to dismantle capitalism and the political order.” Cultural Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci recognized, after the failure of leftists to seize power by force in Germany and other Western European countries during the 1920s and 1930s, that capitalism could be undermined by a determined assault on institutions and culture, including the political order, the church, the family, and the rule of law. What one sees today in America and in other countries is precisely this sort of Gramscian dismantling of the established order in an effort to make way for totalitarian Marxist rule. 

Clearly, the Founders of our nation understood the crucial role of these institutions and cultural traditions in terms of preserving benevolent order and freedom, or, more precisely, as what Ellis Sandoz has described as “an antimodernist recovery and rearticulation of Western and English constitutionalism.” It was perhaps inevitable that the long war of Marxism against capitalism would come to center on the United States, a nation with a strong and longstanding constitutional system in the service of precisely those institutions that Marxism seeks to destroy. 

The concept of “warfare” is not too strong a term to apply to this conflict. As with every major feature of NextGen Marxism, the conception of opposed forces with no room for compromise is deeply rooted in Marxist theory and practice. Marx himself portrayed capitalism as entirely evil and in need of elimination, not reform. Indeed, any tendency toward reform is invariably greeted with derision by leftists and associated with those, like classical liberals, who would defend established institutions and who themselves need to be “canceled.” That tendency of radicals to turn on liberal reformers has been on display in American politics for many decades, but it is more pronounced now than at any time in the past. The problem is that this oppositional mentality takes the form not just of healthy debate but of physical violence, as one has seen in this country and throughout a long history of genocidal campaigns in Marxist countries from the Soviet Union to communist China, North Korea, Cambodia, and many other countries, but genocide and unrestrained violence against political foes are the logical result of a bifurcated vision of the world. 

It is not just political opposition but the entire culture of the past that Marxists wish to destroy. One of the finest sections of NextGen Marxism is its discussion of the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and his influence on followers, especially in the United States. “The object of Gramsci’s lifework,” the authors write, “was to transfer hegemony from the capitalist, the parliamentary democrat, and the faithful to the worker,” and not just “the worker” but to activists who sought total state control of the economy and of the private lives of workers themselves. In the pursuit of this utter transformation of existence, Gramsci sought to play the long game of infiltrating educational institutions, the media, corporations, and government, and gradually turning them against capitalism and religion. 

It is not difficult to see Gramsci’s legacy in the millions of American Marxists who have exploited similar tactics of gaining a foothold in power, often on false pretenses such as environmental justice, racial equality, women’s rights, and most recently “opportunity,” only to revert to their hard-left ambitions of state control (with, of course, themselves as central agents of that control). It is disturbing to realize just how far these ambitions go, for they include not only political control but complete censorship, elimination of religious freedom, corruption of the franchise, confiscation of private property, and an end to the rule of law. Given the opportunity, there is little doubt that today’s radicals would establish permanent rule and total stranglehold over the lives of every person. 

Among ideological descendants of Gramsci, the authors single out the adherents of Critical Race Theory (CRT), American Marxists who, particularly following the inflammatory murder of George Floyd, gained influence from racial divisions that they themselves exacerbated at every turn. Yet, as David Horowitz put it, “the issue is never the issue” (quoted on p. 98). It is not racial justice, gender equality, environmental progress, or other forms of social justice that Marxists seek to achieve: it is totalitarian control with race, gender, class, or environment as the pretext for achieving it. 

In American politics, the authors focus on Herbert Marcuse, Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Eric Mann, Abbie Hoffman, Isadore Rubin, Angela Davis, C. Wright Mills, Harmony Goldberg, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project. One might also include the useful idiots in the media, such as Bill Moyers, who at every turn abetted the rise of Marxism in America. During the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society played a pivotal role, and many of its members and adherents continued to influence later radicals who would feature in the emergence of the current generation of Marxists. NextGen Marxism includes a detailed history of the destructive activities of SDS, including dozens of bombings and murders, and an informative account of the intricate web of its associations and influences that continue to this day, such as the close relationship of activist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. 

In addition, the assault on the established order must include undermining the traditional family and conventional ideas of gender, and once again the theorizing of such a transformation can be traced back to Marx and his socialist predecessors, even to Rousseau and Plato, and it holds a prominent place in the thinking of Lenin, Lukács, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, to name a few. This line of thinking has evolved to yield an influential body of thought in the United States, culminating in Critical Race Theory, which itself has grown into what is known today as “woke” thinking, a “benign term for what it truly entails, which is obliteration of anyone who dares to dissent from the new intellectual orthodoxy.” Once again, violence and censorship are accepted as the means of gaining power. 

In regard to education, Gonzalez and Gorka make it clear that Marxists have largely gained control of administration and teaching and that education is being employed as a means of undermining the family. Certainly, in many school districts, the rights of parents to be informed and have a say in their children’s education are ignored, as for instance in teaching and counseling regarding gender identity, often with children who are too young to comprehend what is being imposed on them. Many of the practices now common in public schools—including, in some cases, support for adolescent transgender surgery—run counter to traditional ideas of gender and to traditional morality, but when parents object, they are met with the same censorship and canceling that typifies Marxism in all areas. 

The scope of NextGen Marxism is too broad even to be suggested in a short review. Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day. Their knowledge of this history is impressive, as is their perceptiveness in unraveling the countless connections between Marxists of the past and their present-day followers. The importance of what they have to say cannot be overestimated. NextGen Marxism is a book that should be read by everyone who is concerned about the direction of our constitutional democracy and our traditional culture of capitalism and religious faith. It could well serve as a textbook in upper-level classes on American politics and culture. It is a book that takes aim at the heart of the ideological struggles taking place in America today, and that clarifies and connects many strands of Marxist thinking. 

As Gonzalez and Gorka write in their conclusion, what we face today is a reemergence of Marxism, the legacy of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, that shares “a constructivist view of the world that denies nature, and is at war with reality.” The constructed reality that Marxists wish to establish in place of past traditions and beliefs is truly frightening, and all persons of good will need to unite in opposition to it.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

At the beginning of The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel J. Mahoney points to the harmful nature of ideology and its damaging effects in present-day society. “Every decent American,” he writes, “must reject the quintessentially ideological move of locating evil exclusively in suspect groups who are said to be guilty for who they are and not what they have done.” This, he states, is “the heart of the matter and the core theme of this book,” a theme that the author develops in both historical and contemporary examples and that he examines in the context of philosophy, religion, literature, and art over a period stretching from classical times to the present. 

Needless to say, Mahoney has taken on an ambitious task: a sweeping examination of the nature, history, and consequences of the ideology that permeates almost all of modern existence, particularly in an America in which race, class, and gender have become the default mental settings for much public discourse. What the author seeks is an outright rejection of the reliance on ideology and a return to traditional conceptions of the human condition. As he understands it, one lives today under the yoke of a dishonest condition that represses civilized thought and behavior and that has warped and inverted our understanding of such basic concepts as the nature of liberty, the importance of religious faith, and the inherent differences between men and women. The woke thinking that has evolved over the past forty years represents a descent into thuggery and intimidation, not an advance in civilization. In opposition to wokeism, we must return to traditional moral and religious concepts, including the bedrock notion that man was created by God in his own image. 

Much of what Mahoney writes will be familiar to conservatives and moderates, if not to true-believers on the left who have long ago dismissed such ideas as faith and liberty as mere abstractions or “superstructure.” The author’s thinking is grounded in an enduring body of Judeo-Christian thought and in the ideals of the American revolution, and his prescription for liberation from the Ideological Lie is equally traditional: we must reject the mistaken belief that Western civilization is responsible for all the world’s ills, the idea that men and women are identical in all of their predispositions and abilities, the falsehood that authority must always be challenged and found wanting, and the lie that existence is purposeless or perhaps even maleficent. From the destructive anarchy of the French Revolution and the unrestrained violence of fascism and communism to the mental straitjacket of contemporary DEI and wokeism and their silencing or “canceling” of opposing opinions, ideological thinking has resulted in the virtual enslavement of man. Even in America, with its long history of personal freedoms and democratic ideals, we are nearing the precipice of a state of totalitarianism that would involve a monopoly on thought by progressives and permanent one-party rule. 

Mahoney has much to say about the “pseudoscientific” nature of Marxism that underlies so much of this cultural and political decline, and, as often in this book, his analysis is both incisive and uncompromising. As for many who have read Marx with unbiased eyes and have come away skeptical, Mahoney finds Marx’s rejection of natural law and all forms of idealism to be a crude and unsophisticated sort of “materialism that has no place for authentic moral judgment or for salutary self-restraint.” Marxism, of course, is at the heart of the Ideological Lie that has spread throughout our schools, media, government, and intellectual life, and, as Mahoney sees it, Marxism is little more than a blind adolescent cry for the sort of radical perfection that does not and can not exist in actual human societies. In every case where it has been tried, Marxism has produced immense suffering as tyrants seize control in the name of social justice, only to enslave the masses for the benefit of a small vanguard of revolutionaries. It goes without saying that such politics is anti-democratic, atheistic, and antithetical to human freedom.  

Certainly, we live in a time influenced by what Roger Scruton called “the culture of antagonism” and what, from a different perspective, René Girard with great insight referred to as “anti-Christian Christianity.” This cultural alienation is driven by a willful opposition to all that is good and decent, and that can only view the world through the lens of perverse hostility toward all that would suggest that man was indeed created in the image of God and that life is positive and meaningful. Kindness, idealism, aspiration, loyalty, and goodness play no role in the antagonist culture because that culture is inherently nihilistic and hurtful. All of the values that were at play in America’s founding and, more broadly, in the development of Judeo-Christian civilization over the past two millennia have been targeted and rejected by the Left. This rejection of our moral birthright amounts to “ideological Manichæism, the temptation of ideologues and revolutionaries everywhere to localize evil and see its embodiment in suspect groups” such as white males, heterosexuals, Christians, and the middle class. What has arisen in America is in fact nothing less than a totalitarian mindset bent on violence against and cancellation of those seemingly tainted groups and their replacement by other “virtuous” groups of ethnic minorities, homosexuals, transgenders, socialists, and atheists. 

One of the virtues of Mahoney’s book is that, by locating so many discrete elements of modern experience in historical context, he generates a compelling vision of the origins and consequences of our current woke and antagonist culture. With good reason, the author insists that we must be guided by “the lessons of experience,” yet it appears, as with the rise of a frightful new wave of antisemitism, that a large proportion of our citizenry has not learned those lessons and may not even be aware of the existence of past abuses. If Mahoney is right and contemporary thinking is increasingly governed by ideology, the consequences will be no more favorable than in the past. We have already witnessed our own version of fascist brown-shirts disrupting speeches by moderates and conservatives, responding to the police with violence, and occupying entire sections of our cities. It is frightening to consider what the next step in this anarchic process may be, but it is unlikely that it will be peaceful or democratic.

The author offers a profound analysis of this cultural decline based on a lifetime of careful reflection and reading. His accounts of such thinkers and events as the French Revolution, Soviet communism, DEI and wokeism, Robespierre, Tocqueville, Marx, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Polanyi, Scruton, Christopher Rufo, and Thomas Sowell are highly perceptive and informed, and his ability to readily locate contemporary events within this rich historical context is impressive. Mahoney also documents the manner in which humane and altruistic elements of existence, and even those of self-responsibility and legitimate aspiration, have been rejected by such theorists as Michel Foucault and the countless number of imitators and lesser minds that comprise the woke, DEI, and race and gender movements. The pure love of parents and grandparents, the devotion of spouses and friends, the kindness and self-sacrifice of teachers and mentors, and the idealistic faith in Christian teachings of love have been rendered suspect and undermined by the corrosive cynicism of leftist thinking. What we are seeing, as Mahoney puts it, is a “tumultuous revolt against decency, restraint, and humanizing authority,” a revolt that seeks to “transform” society, but to what end?

The pathway back from the precipice is a counterrevolutionary rejection of the Ideological Lie in all its forms. Those who oppose the progressive transformation of society must learn to unabashedly resist leftist ideology and to courageously assert what they know to be true. This resistance does not rely on extremism or intimidation: it is inherently moderate because it celebrates the fact that everything we know about human nature and natural law has already been known and that our choice is simply between a return to familiar inherited values or a further plunge into ever more radical progressive innovations of thought.  

In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel J. Mahoney constructs a very strong case for the necessity of resistance to progressive change and to the woke thinking that accompanies it. As he writes in the conclusion, “The road forward is steep, but the resources for civilizational renewal are still available to all those who seek them.” In the course of this book, Mahoney clarifies exactly what these “resources” are, and his stark and unyielding depiction of the consequences of failure makes it clear that progressivism must be understood as a stage toward totalitarianism and that it must be opposed by way of reasoned argument. What Mahoney refers to as the Ideological Lie is everywhere apparent in our culture, and the task of reversing it is daunting but all the more necessary. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie constitutes a kind of guidebook to intellectual resistance, and as such, it is a highly useful and important work.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

Sparta’s Third Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 413-404 B.C. 

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

In Sparta’s Third Attic War, Paul H. Rahe continues his multi-volume history of fifth-century Sparta and cements his place as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, specialists in the field. Rahe’s scholarship is formidable and, at times, may seem daunting to readers accustomed to a less conscientious approach. Rahe devotes some six hundred pages to the final decades of the Peloponnesian War, the same number of pages that Thucydides devoted to the entire war. Every element of the third Attic war is covered in detail; even seemingly insignificant events are explored and, at times, shown to have had a crucial impact on the outcome. Combined with his five previous volumes focusing on Sparta’s role in the Peloponnesian war, Sparta’s Third Attic War must be viewed as a major contribution to the literature.

In addition to his six-volume history of the Attic wars, Rahe is also author of the Republics Ancient and Modern series and of numerous other books on topics stretching from ancient Greece to American politics and history. Throughout much of what he has written there lies a coherent warning for democracies: the world is full of antagonists, many of them tyrannical, and those who prize democracy need to be informed and remain on guard. The accidents and policy failures that befell Athens over a period of nearly thirty years are thoroughly discussed in Rahe’s account and the author does not hesitate to assign blame where it is deserved. By the end of Sparta’s Third Attic War, the culmination of Professor Rahe’s long period of research into the subject, one’s understanding of the fragility of civilization and the brutality of war is suitably increased. 

Rahe’s interest in antagonists to democracy has stretched over at least sixty years, a period that coincides with the aftermath of World War II, the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, the fall of communism, the rise of Islamic jihad, and the Reagan and Trump presidencies. One cannot fail to see the influence of these contemporary events on Rahe’s research into the ancient Greek world, and indeed the parallels are many. Just as in the fifth century B.C., democracies today are under pressure from militaristic dictatorships. As in the Peloponnesian War, alliances have frequently shifted, and support for war on both sides has waxed and waned. As in the past, devastating mistakes have been made placing democracies at risk, and apathetic populations have undermined their resolve. 

Above all, Sparta’s Third Attic War relies, as it should, on Thucydides’s account of the Attic wars. The History of the Peloponnesian War is, of course, the most detailed and reliable contemporary account of events covered in Rahe’s book, and, as one would expect, Rahe quotes from it extensively and relies on it at a great many points. At times, Rahe appears to be writing a commentary on Thucydides, as well he might, given the power and immediacy of the Greek historian’s account of events, though not without frequent reliance on Xenophon and other historians. 

At one point Rahe notes that Thucydides’s history is far more than an account of events: “It is also an extended philosophical meditation on war and on peace as such.” Much the same could be said for Rahe’s scholarship, which is far more than a narrow tracing of events: Sparta’s Third Attic War and its predecessors are philosophical meditations on such weighty issues as the rise and fall of civilizations and the fundamental motives of major players within these civilizations. It would seem that this scholarship is driven by a ceaseless curiosity and a fascination with the forces that lead to political change, and, as Rahe stresses at the beginning, it is domestic conditions that propel change: “in contemplating foreign affairs and in thinking about diplomacy, intelligence, military strength, and that strength’s economic foundations, one must always acknowledge the primacy of domestic policy.” Certainly, it was domestic weakness, some of it rooted in disastrous policy decisions but some beyond the control of human actors, that led to the gradual weakening of Athens’s defenses and its ultimate fall to the Spartan alliance.

Time and again, Rahe seeks to ground his observations in what he knows to be true and enduring about human nature. Thus his understanding of the failing morale of the Athenians is based on the unchanging truth that government is founded for and must secure “the protection of life and livelihood” lest its population grow restive. Athens’s failure to defend its farming population—indeed, its willingness to sacrifice the interests of that population entirely to its enemies—led to bitterness and demoralization among the large landowners who grew unwilling to defend democracy in Athens. There are countless other examples of greed and vainglory, all of them contributing to the city’s weakness vis-à-vis the Spartans. Of course, the Spartans themselves were hardly immune from the foibles of human nature, and their indecisiveness and self-interested refusal to act in a decisive manner and as a collective power caused the war to continue well beyond what might have been. Among the worst failings on both sides was the tendency during long periods of peace to neglect military defenses that ought to have been maintained, but this failing, too, can be traced to a universal tendency of human nature: the sort of complacency that infects all human affairs and makes it impossible for all but the most gifted leaders to rouse the public to action.

Among the many refreshing aspects of Rahe’s history is the author’s stubborn refusal to inject modern ideology into the account of the past, a past that by modern standards might well be judged racist, sexist, class-bound, and the like. It is a fool’s errand to attempt to twist past attitudes, whether those of some 2,500 years ago or merely a century or two in the case of America, to the latest fashion in academic ideology. Rahe is gifted in his determination to write of the past on its own terms, and in doing so he delves more deeply into that past than any number of others who have been distracted by their obsessions with ideology. Rahe’s histories carry us into the true nature of human beings, not the fancied accounts of modern liberal theorists. The ancient world was unstable, corrupt, and often brutal, but so too has been our own, as anyone who looks unflinchingly at events of the past one hundred years. The rise of modern fascism and communism brought about unprecedented levels of violent death, torture, starvation, and oppression in comparison with which ancient wars were conducted on a lesser scale. Those today who find that woke injustices deserve our highest degree of attention have either not read and considered the past or have chosen to ignore it.

Fortunately, we have historians such as Paul A. Rahe who treat past events with the seriousness they deserve and who treat them on their own terms, not by the counterfeit standards of critical theory and other academic fashions. In Sparta’s Third Attic War Rahe has arrived at the climax of ancient Greek history, and he does justice to this pivotal time with his painstaking consideration of nearly all that is known of that era. Presumably the last of Rahe’s books on the Attic wars, Sparta’s Third Attic War is a deserving culmination to this historian’s long and faithful devotion to the truth of this history. Sparta’s Third Attic War is a remarkable book in several respects, not least among them in the author’s ability to reconstruct a world not so much different from our own but one known to us largely through fragmentary and often unreliable evidence. Rahe’s latest book is a worthy contribution to scholarship and to our understanding of our own relationship to these extraordinary events of the ancient Greek world. Beyond that, it is an intriguing contemplation of civilizational decline and of the consequences of defeat on the one side and short-lived victory on the other. In sum, Sparta’s Third Attic War is the product of a lifetime of dedication to the highest standards of scholarship, and it deserves to be celebrated as one of the finest books on the subject.

In the end, the Spartan victory in 404 B.C. was short-lived. Difficult relations with Persia, which had underwritten Sparta in the war, unrest among Athens’s former allies in the Aegean, and other issues soon arose that would undermine Sparta’s dominant position. “In any case,” Rahe writes, “no one supposed that perpetual peace was in the offing and that history had come to an end. Such delusions are peculiar to the age in which we now live.” This is an apt summation, and again a reflection of the author’s depth of learning and wise understanding of the history of war, ancient and modern.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism 

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

In American Leviathan, Ned Ryun offers a cogent overview of the origins, development, and present condition of the administrative or “deep” state in America. He also provides a brief proposal for reining in the authoritarianism that he sees as threatening the country and gives a vision for returning to constitutional democracy. By the end of American Leviathan, the reader will gain a clear understanding of the dangers of bureaucratic governance and the nation’s slippery slope toward authoritarian rule. According to the author, only a dramatic elimination of administrative departments and agencies can restore the constitutional balance of powers that our Founders intended.

Ryun begins by describing the “leviathan” that has overtaken our democracy. It is crucial to understand that the administrative state is not merely a costly and wasteful but essentially innocuous excess of bureaucracy: it is, rather, an “unelected, detached, powerful bureaucracy” that now controls most of our nation’s legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and as such it represents “nothing less than a regime change against and over the Constitution of 1787.” According to Ryun, we now live in a nation in which our representatives in Washington do not so much enact the people’s will as merely exist to fund ever-expanding agencies at the expense of massive deficits. The true power resides in the administrative state, not Congress or the Executive. 

Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and continuing under Wilson, FDR, and Johnson, the administrative state’s funding has expanded from less than one billion dollars in 1910 to well over six trillion in 2023, or over 6,000 times that of the past. Particularly in times of crisis, including two world wars, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and, recently, the housing crisis of 2008 and the COVID epidemic of 2020, the electorate has been willing to cede power to an educated elite. Although such elites promise to address the crisis, they in fact establish themselves as a self-perpetuating and uncontrolled center of governance operating against the interests of the public. This unelected elite claims an unprecedented level of funding and, with it, control over the lives of citizens. As Ryun writes, “no one has any rights except those given to him by the state when considered beneficial for the advancement of the state and society.” In reality, it is not even “state and society” that the state bureaucracies wish to advance but their own wealth, power, and influence. As Ryun makes clear with reference to theorists such as Herbert Croly, it is not just that the American government arrived at this impasse by accident: an all-powerful, unelected deep state was the conscious intent of the Progressive movement all along, and to a great extent the unelected elites have succeeded in gaining control.

As he traces the unchecked power of government agencies, Ryun discusses the importance of the Chevron doctrine (recently reserved by the Supreme Court) in justifying and spurring the expansion of the administrative state. By deferring decision-making to agencies, the Chevron Doctrine transferred legislative power to unelected elites whose policies cannot be challenged through a democratic process. It was just this sort of power that the Founders worked so hard to prevent by creating three separate branches of government, each able to rein in the potential overreach of the others. Now, however, it is clear that there exists an extraordinary amount of overreach, not by any of the three branches but by departments and agencies operating essentially without oversight. It is vital to see just how dangerous this overreach actually is, for “until the administrative state, the deep state, the surveillance state (mostly the same) are forcefully confronted and dismantled, everything else is pointless.” 

Ryun is passionate about the dangerous growth of authoritarianism in America—as he should be. Under an administrative state with the power to extract ever greater funding, to regulate at will, and to exert power via law-fare and deployment of armed agents, America appears to be evolving toward the enslaved condition of previous authoritarian states, including twentieth-century fascism and communism. The administrative state has swept aside constitutional protections of privacy, private property, and free speech—basic rights that Americans have treasured and passed down for generations. With targeted IRS audits, unreasonable marginal tax rates, and manipulation of social media, Progressives have displayed little regard for such rights. “Like every other adherent of statism,” Ryun writes, “from communism to fascism, Progressive Statists were very much for either controlling or redistributing wealth and property, all in the supposed aim of creating a more just society, which is very conveniently shaped to benefit the ruling elite.”

In a chapter aptly entitled “When Threatened, the State Strikes Back,” Ryun details how the deep state exerts force, particularly against anyone, including a president or presidential candidate, who intends to restrict its power. As the bureaucracy gains control of legislative, executive, and judicial functions, what arises is “consolidated power and eventually government thuggery.” Certainly, we have seen evidence of such thuggery over the past several years, and it does not require a great deal of imagination to envision what might follow: lawsuits, audits, and even re-education for those who oppose the deep state. The most egregious example so far was the 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, although that action will almost certainly be viewed as moderate if the administrative state is allowed to expand without opposition. As Ryun puts it, “It’s becoming more and more apparent that the DOJ and FBI are nothing less than the administrative state’s Praetorian Guard, the ruling class’s personal bodyguards, intelligence gatherers, and intimidators.”

It should be obvious that American Leviathan is highly relevant to the current political climate, what with President Trump’s promises to restrain spending and the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency intent on slashing the annual deficit. Indeed, even before Trump’s re-election, Ryun included a list of specific ideas that read like a DOGE prospectus for controlling the administrative state, though, with his assumption of a “feckless” Congress, Ryun’s proposals center on what might be accomplished by the executive branch under a conservative president. Ryun would begin with “mass firings” via Reduction in Force provisions exercised within agencies. There are currently some two million federal employees, 800,000 deemed non-essential. In addition to firings, the president could employ voluntary early incentives and reassignment “to a remote location,” which would result in further reductions.

In addition, Ryun suggests that a president who wishes to curtail the power of the administrative state might use the Office of Personnel Management to set limits on pay and benefits and to convert “Career Reserved” senior executive service positions to general positions. One might also limit the power of the Office of Management and Budget by eliminating the president’s annual budget, which, Ryun feels, serves little purpose in any case. Numerous other actions would be required to bring the administrative state to heel, including reforming the National Security Council, reinstating Civil Service Exams, and exerting force by way of Schedule F, which allows the firing of lower-level bureaucrats. In addition, the FBI must be drastically reformed; the Consumer Financial Protection Agency closed down; and the Department of Education and HUD shuttered. And this, of course, is only the beginning.

Ned Ryun has taken on an ambitious topic, and in most respects, he has made a strong case for greatly reducing the size and power of the deep state. For most persons outside Washington, it seems obvious that there is a great deal of waste and abuse within the federal government and that the government needs to be downsized and reformed. Ryun would, of course, go much further: he suggests eliminating many agencies and significantly reducing staff at others. In American Leviathan, he makes a credible case for just such actions. 

Regardless of the extent to which one shares the author’s concerns, American Leviathan is a thoughtful and well-informed account of the rise of the administrative state and its current power, providing a road map for eliminating its influence. Ryun has written a forceful and highly relevant study of the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, one which most readers will, I suspect, find quite worthwhile.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

American Refugees is a worthwhile and highly readable account of an important social trend: the “exodus” of large numbers of people from blue to red states. Its author, Roger L. Simon, is a well-informed and articulate writer who relies on a combination of personal experience and anecdotal evidence in an effort to trace the motivations and backgrounds of a certain segment of these refugees, those of a middle-class background who have relocated from blue states to Tennessee, or more specifically to the Nashville area. In doing so, Simon manages to paint a vivid picture of a class of persons who are deeply disillusioned with the blue states and indeed with America in general and who appear to be seeking the “promised land” in what is, to them, an unfamiliar corner of the American South.

I am sympathetic to Simon’s perspective, but I must emphasize that his approach in American Refugees is far from scholarly. Nowhere do we learn even the most elementary facts regarding the migration: how many have immigrated to the red states and when, which states have lost the greatest number of residents, and why the migrants are moving (the Dust Bowl migration which Simon cites as analogous in some ways was largely one of economic migrants; is the Red State migration economic, political, ideological, or something else?). Also, there is no systematic attempt to survey the opinions of the refugees or even to consult such information where it is available.

Likewise, perhaps because of the author’s reliance on personal experience, American Refugees contains some rather glaring errors. Former governor Philip Bredesen was and still is a Democrat, not a Republican; there is no evidence for the assertion that residents of California and New York exhibit “a considerably higher degree of push” than residents of the red states; one does not have to consume shrimp and grits on a regular basis to be a “southerner” (my wife and I have lived in the South for sixty-five years and never eaten shrimp and grits; neither have many of our friends).

Still, American Refugees is an intelligent, at times passionate narrative of one of the more important tendencies of our times. It displays a good deal of knowledge of regional politics, focusing in particular on central Tennessee, where Simon had lived for four years at the time of writing American Refugees. Indeed, one is tempted to say that Simon knows too much: too many lists of Nashville restaurants and bars; too many names of little-known political figures; too many stories of petty political intrigue. These facts may be important in determining who serves on local councils or who gets elected to the Tennessee legislature, or even, in one case, to Congress, but they do not hint at the more profound differences between red and blue states, including the church-going mentality and moral seriousness that serve as the foundation of southern regional identity.

To my way of thinking, it seems a bit presumptuous to speak with authority about the nature of southern culture while only having lived in the region for a few years. For that reason, perhaps, a number of clichés enter the author’s depiction, including the wealthy songwriter with “a personal gun locker in his house approaching the size of a two-car garage, holding enough weapons…to arm the defense force of a smaller African country. To call this songwriter merely a supporter of the Second Amendment would be an understatement of serious proportions.” Most white southerners do support the right to bear arms, but citing this example seems egregious. Another cliché is the idea that a “slower-moving culture” exists in the South: there was nothing “slow moving” about the mind of William Faulkner or of Flannery O’Connor, nor, I would think, is decision-making particularly slow moving at the headquarters of Coca-Cola in Atlanta or ExxonMobil in Houston. Manners can be deceptive, and it is the responsibility of the cultural critic to look beneath the surface to the true nature of things.

If the cast of its elected leaders is any indication, much of Tennessee still abides by a traditional conservatism which is respectful of the past and suspicious of change, but Roger Simon would seem to have something very different in mind. Instead of a moral conservatism grounded in a set of inherited beliefs, Simon focuses on what must be described as an ideological conservatism reacting to a series of quite contemporary issues such as woke teaching in the schools, DEI policies in corporations and government, increased government spending, urban sprawl, transgender bathroom policies, and the like. Simon himself acknowledges something of this sort when he states that he is “not attempting to write one of those traditional political or social books” but rather, in effect, an account of a newer form of conservatism that actually conflicts with traditionalism in many respects. Thus, there are frequent mentions of times when Simon and his wife, newly arrived from California and originally, in his case, from New York, appear to be uncomfortable in the presence of lifelong southern conservatives. “The refugees,” writes Simon, “found the traditional party system, on the state and county levels, to be somewhere between useless and incompetent, consumed by minor-league matters of self-interest.” Should Simon have been so surprised? Tennessee is a conservative state, but even southern conservatism cannot eliminate the foibles of human nature. 

Another aspect of ideological conservatism is its unbending, extreme quality, especially when it comes to an eschatological sense of the “dire straits” that America finds itself in. There is certainly some truth to the charge that progressives are guilty of “suppressing the thoughts and beliefs of others” and even the thought that submission to this control leads “to a new form of totalitarianism,” but the doomsday scenario of ideological conservatives does not, to me anyway, ring true. True enough, America is facing political division and fiscal stress, but I doubt that “virtually every national indicator [is] trending downward” or that Washington is filled with “federal authorities of questionable integrity and even of evil intent.” The suggestion that now, at this moment, we are facing challenges of unprecedented proportions should raise suspicion. It has always been doomsday in America, from Valley Forge to Gettysburg to World War II to the Cuban missile crisis, but America has survived just fine even with what many of the author’s friends view as the excessively moderate tenor of Tennessee politics—with the suggestion that former Governor Bill Haslam was a RINO and that Senator Marsha Blackburn may lean a bit too far left as well. Just how far right do Simon’s political refugees wish to go?

Certainly, American Refugees is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. It is not a broad account of regional migration but largely the account of the initial experience of one “refugee” from California to Nashville. It rarely ranges outside the metro-Nashville area and thus has little to say about what might be regarded as the quintessential conservative life of small-town and rural Tennessee. 

A crucial question within Simon’s book is whether the blue to red state migration will have a transformative effect on American society in general. Indeed, the regional migration may add a number of congressional seats to red states and subtract a few from blue states. Increasingly, corporate headquarters are relocating to safer and more livable cities in the South, and with this relocation comes economic power. And southern universities such as Duke and Vanderbilt are gaining ground on the Ivy League in terms of prestige. Still, with the notable exception of Donald Trump, the cultural and political tendency of American politics has been, regrettably, toward progressive and socialistic policies. 

Between 2011 and 2023, six million Americans migrated from blue to red states (a figure not cited in Simon’s book), but not all of those individuals are conservatives and few, I suspect, are what one would call “traditional” conservatives. The migration experience that Simon documents is a significant cultural phenomenon (though swamped in numbers and impact by foreign immigration, estimated for the same period at around 13.5 million but possibly much higher), but it is an open question as to what effect this migration will have at the national level. 

In the meantime, we have in American Refugees a quite worthwhile and entertaining discussion of the experience of one refugee’s relocation from the most liberal of states to one of the most conservative, though conservative in ways that the author did not entirely anticipate. Simon’s book is well-written and readable, and it should be of interest to many readers concerned with the increasing shift in population from the blue to the red states.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to O’Connor to Haruf (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

In an age of political correctness and guarded speech, Anthony Esolen’s writing strikes one as wonderfully keen, timely, and true. As one reads Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, one is carried along by the marvelous originality and courage of an author who is shining a bright light on our age of declining standards of learning, labor, and social relations. In the end, what Anthony Esolen describes, in a manner that reminds one at times of Chesterton, Orwell, and Naipaul, is the loss of immediacy and thus the loss of humanity in our affairs. As the author makes clear, we now face a choice between further enslavement or the restoration of purposeful life as it existed in the past. 

Out of the Ashes provides remarkable insights into the current state of American culture and compelling suggestions on how to revitalize it. In order to fight the straight-jacket of “diversity, equity, and inequality,” one must begin by examining the use of our language, which has been corrupted by political cant. The tendency to revert at all times to concepts of race, class, and gender has robbed us of the ability to speak in a meaningful way about actualities such as work, family, experience of nature, and other “human things.” The foundation for rebuilding America is the recovery of meaningful speech and writing. 

The recovery of language is especially important in restoring education. At one point Esolen pictures education as it was a century ago in a small, one-room schoolhouse in Nova Scotia. Much of what was good about that education—the focus on useful topics such as mathematics, geography, biology and grammar—has now been supplanted by courses on sexual education and ethnicity accompanied by a lowering of standards in subjects that count. One can hardly be said to be a high school graduate unless one possesses at least a basic set of skills and knowledge, yet, according to a 2016 study by the British Council, only 30% of British high school and university graduates had been taught Shakespeare. The numbers for American students are presumably lower. 

Stepping back into that bygone era of the one-room schoolhouse, we would be astounded by the differences, not least of all in moral sensibility. “We are witnessing here not a different way of doing something that is still done now,” Esolen writes. “We might as well be walking into another world entirely.” It is not merely so in terms of politicized topics that now dominate the curriculum; it is also those rewarding forms of study that are now crowded out or explicitly excluded including literary classics (actually reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, and the major modern authors), history (with an emphasis on names and dates), foreign languages (including Latin and Greek), gender specific sports (with plenty of contact sports for males), and direct experience of nature. 

These curricular problems are only compounded at the university level, but these are so familiar that I need not delve heavily into them. There are, of course, exceptions, and Esolen lists them, most of them small colleges including, among others, Hillsdale, Saint Vincent, Grove City, Bryan, and Houston Baptist, that “tend to concentrate on the liberal arts, in a way that would now be called ‘classical.’” At these colleges there are dedicated faculty members working to reverse the corrupt teaching that prevails in much of American education. 

Out of the Ashes offers some striking insights into the damage caused by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its aftermath. Once again, Esolen asserts that we now occupy a different world entirely than that of our ancestors and that it is necessary to repudiate the recent past entirely. This includes not just the increased sexual freedom but much of what is called “women’s liberation” as well and, more recently, the tendency to view differences in gender as “socially constructed.” At this point the author offers an extremely useful discussion of the natural basis of traditional gender roles and of the part that they play in the spiritual health and stability of society. Esolen points out that in all cultures over thousands of years of recorded history, men and women have chosen separate roles and engaged in different forms of expression. It is difficult to argue that these distinctions were socially constructed and not the result of fundamentally different natures. 

Esolen finds that though both manhood and womanhood are the product of natural differences, both must be nurtured and that manhood is most at risk. Those institutions that once nurtured boys into men, such as gender-segregated schools, scouting, the YMCA (now rebranded as “The Y”), and the media (with the manly Roy Rogers and feminine Dale Evans replaced by the sexually ambiguous puppets of Sesame Street), are now so altered by ideology, and by the courts, that the development of manhood is often painfully uncertain. The idea that forcefulness is a quality to be associated with males has become suspect to the point that male celebrities now routinely strive to avoid the impression of strength. The reality, Esolen believes, is that with some exceptions “[m]en are bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and more tolerant of violence than women are,” and the suppression of this and other gender differences has proved harmful to both men and women. 

Traditional gender distinctions are especially important in terms of the parts men and women play in the family. Even in the case where a male chooses to be a “stay-at-home dad,” this is no substitute for a nurturing mother. Worse yet, according to the author, soulless daycare centers, where children are in the charge of strangers from an early age, cannot provide the nurture of loving parents. A woman who chooses to spend her days sitting in an office cubicle may be foregoing her true vocation, that of a loving mom in which she may express the “female virtues” (Esolen’s term) of gentleness, empathy, and domesticity. In cases where one must choose between advancement at work or domestic responsibilities, Esolen finds that one must put the family first.

Beneath the progressive assault on traditional gender lies a hatred of the nuclear family, and this because the family is the most important institution standing in the way of the state’s power over the individual. “The state grows by the family’s failure,” Esolen writes, “and the state has an interest in persuading people that the family can do nothing on its own.” In reality, the family, along with the church and schools properly understood, are crucial pillars of civilization. One need only examine the extent of crime and delinquency among fatherless young men to realize the extent of the damage. 

Along with faith and family, Esolen believes that a return to skilled labor would help restore our culture. At one point the author describes a lovely reed organ, the sort once routinely found in churches and even in private homes. These beautiful instruments required great skill in their production, not least of all in the painstaking cabinetry work. Why are these instruments no longer commonly found in churches and homes? There is of course the cost and the fact that learning to play such an instrument requires time and effort, but in the end it is a matter of priorities. A great deal of time and money is spent on smartphones, subscription entertainment, and other forms of electronics, none of which can be said to be very beautiful and much of which is ghastly in its content. “Maybe we draw near to the mark,” Esolen writes, “if we simply confess that we do not have beautiful things because we do not want them enough.”

Underlying the decline of skilled labor is a great change in priorities. The reed organ company that Esolen cites ceased operations in 1936 after some fifty years in business. What has taken its place are the makers of digital electronic keyboards, mass produced with plastic cabinets and keys at very affordable prices and marketed, in many cases, for children. What is lost is not just the beauty of the instrument but an appreciation and enjoyment of  traditional styles of music as well. Once again, Esolen displays a talent for expressing exactly where we are as a culture: 

We are stuck on the expressway from O’Hare Airport because the alternative, sitting still in our room, is too appalling. We lose the human things and replace them with inhuman things—anything at all, rather than nothing.

Russell Kirk would have called what is lost the “permanent things,” and he and Esolen would have found much upon which to agree.

Tlhis brings one to the crux of Esolen’s argument in Out of the Ashes. The decline he has diagnosed is not merely a shift in cultural tastes or even a change in values; it is a near total loss of what it means to be human. What we are losing is freedom in its many aspects: freedom of thought and feeling, freedom to worship and pray, freedom to educate our children as we wish, freedom to engage in personal contact with others, freedom to work with our hands and minds as we see fit. In its place there has arisen a vast bureaucracy of government, education, media, and law which regulates and prosecutes as it sees fit. Within this authoritarian culture, there is no more chance of true freedom in everyday life than there was in the life of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We now feel that we are constantly under observation and subject to criticism should we differ from what is expected.

One should not forget that ultimately Esolen’s book is about recovering our lost humanity, and the author would be remiss not to offer a path to remediation. The “solution,” as Esolen sees it, is nothing less than a complete rejection of the secular and authoritarian culture in which we now live. To recover is, in effect, to return: to return to the human scale of the past, to local governance, to church and family as priorities, to direct human relations, and to meaningful work. In Out of the Ashes, those who pursue this recovery are said to be “pilgrims” on the road to a great restoration. Esolen and others of similar views are calling for a fifth Great Awakening in which nearly all of our governing laws, electronic culture, and sexual freedom would be replaced by spiritual reflection, contact at the human level, and self-governance. 

Esolen ends Out of the Ashes with an inspiring vision of what a reawakened society would look like. This future, which the author believes must happen “because the truth will out,” is an enticing land of religious faith, sanity, health, real things and nature, devoted marriages, wisdom, productive labor, and untroubled childhood. Although this world “will strike the newly awakened as wonders from another world altogether,” it will be entirely familiar to any student of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, or Conrad. It involves a return to a civilized order that prevailed for many centuries and in many lands and from which, at least to anyone who agrees with Esolen, the last fifty years must seem a diseased aberration. 

Like the many classical and medieval/renaissance authors whom Esolen has studied and the many he has translated, Esolen himself is a highly gifted and creative individual. But more than this, like the many who came before, Esolen is one who is unafraid and who speaks the truth of human experience. Every reader who shares my concerns about the increasing radicalization and abstraction of Western civilization should find Anthony Esolen’s Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture a rewarding volume. Esolen’s analysis of our condition is unflinching, and his prescription for renewal is ambitious, but as the author writes in his introductory chapter, “[w]hen your only choices are repentance or oblivion, you repent.” Out of the Ashes is a bold and insightful investigation of these alternatives.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

The Novel: Who Needs It?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

There are few books of literary criticism in recent years that are clearly written, free of jargon, and not weighted down by one sort or another of ideological bias. Joseph Epstein’s The Novel: Who Needs It? is one of these few, a book that is well informed, reasonable, and beautifully expressed. Not just that: by the end, Epstein goes a long way toward convincing the reader that the novel still plays an important part in civilizing the mind, or ought to. And by “the novel,” the author intends novels of the better sort: the classic works of “the great Russian novelists and short story writers…the Victorians Dickens, Eliot, Trollope; the Americans Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Wharton, Cather,” and a handful of moderns and contemporaries including Faulkner, Roth, Naipaul, Waugh, Forster, I. J. Singer, Wright, and Narayan. In earlier pages, Epstein made it clear that he would have included Austen, Conrad, and Proust in this “personal canon” as well. 

Regardless of his personal likes, the importance of The Novel: Who Needs It? lies in its defense of an element of our civilization that today is severely neglected and whose loss would involve the consequent decline of a crucial human faculty: the ability to project into the minds and emotions of others and to develop a broad understanding of the often contradictory facets of human nature and a deep sense of moral understanding. Taken together, these virtues derived from the reading of serious fiction contribute to genuine empathy and humane feeling. Partly due to the expansive nature of the novel—in the Penguin Classics edition, War and Peace weighs in at 2.76 pounds and covers 1440 pages—fiction is the only genre of literature that uncovers the everyday thoughts and feelings of ordinary human beings and that traces the development and moral consequences of those inclinations. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is a supreme example but so too would be Jane Austen’s Emma and V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. 

Not only is the novel a highly important form of literature, it stands out as a civilizing agent in contrast to other forms of contemporary media, from news commentary to internet posting to popular music. Unlike the wasteland of raw expression to be found on smartphones, tablets, and computers that can be streamed on larger screens, the novel affords a quiet, private, leisurely forum of expression driven by humane concern and gifted observation without the partisan ideological intent of most of what is published today, including much of what appears as “fiction.” Unfortunately, in the contemporary marketplace for ideas, thesis-driven writing has all but taken over, and Epstein’s discussion of this threat to the future of the novel is quite compelling. Since even those who lead us in society now obtain their understanding of others through brief, simplistic, partisan media commentary, there is little hope for wise and thoughtful direction. 

It is unlikely that The Brothers Karamazov, Clarissa, Remembrance of Things Past or even lesser works of serious fiction have much of a role in education today. The reading of serious fiction has been driven from the curriculum not just by the usual culprits of race, class, and gender but by a general dumbing down of education. What percentage of students, even at the college level, could tackle Henry James, Joseph Conrad, or William Faulkner? And it is not just among students that these more demanding writers are neglected: society as a whole has clearly adopted an intellectually vacuous, impatient, thoughtless, and passive sort of reading (or viewing) that is immensely less rewarding and less humanizing than the reading of novels. What has been called “Sanctimony Literature,” its characters and plot determined by childish notions of political correctness or wokism, now dominates the genre. As Epstein puts it, “[t]he spirit of the [true] novel entails questioning, complexity, irony, dubiety about much that others consider home truths.” What is at stake is the development of a sense of humane understanding, and the decline of this form of understanding surely has much to do with the mounting divisiveness and partisanship in our society today.

Obviously, Epstein is addressing serious matters, but he does so with a light touch that makes The Novel: Who Needs It? a readable and entertaining book. The author brings a lifetime of learning to the task, and every page is thoughtful and informative. For example, Epstein begins his discussion of “those novelists known for their style,” in particular Joyce, Nabokov, and Updike, with the admission that he admires their work “without being particularly nuts about them.” Surely, there are many readers who would concur. 

What Epstein returns to again and again is the fact that serious fiction plays a crucial role in civilizing the reader by way of expanding one’s sense of human experience. Human nature itself, in all its complexity, is the subject of the best novels, and few other forms of reading or viewing can offer the same depth of feeling and thought. I must, however, disagree with Epstein regarding the superiority of the novel over history, biography, philosophy, and other genres, the best of which, I believe, also contribute to a finer sense of human understanding. The novel is a vehicle for expressing and experiencing the wonder of human existence, but that sense of wonder can be encountered in other genres of writing and forms of expression. Indeed, the uniqueness of fiction is also its limitation: the reading of fiction makes possible a rare admission into the minds and spirits of others, but it cannot achieve the rapture of listening to the finest music, nor the stimulation of philosophy in its pursuit of truth, nor the sense of spatial perfection in the best visual art. The novel is one vehicle for probing human experience, but other aspects of that experience can be expressed in a number of visual and musical forms.

Despite this caveat, I find The Novel: Who Needs It? the most engaging and rewarding work of literary criticism that I have read in many years. Clearly, the author is correct in stressing that novel reading is in decline (Penguin’s War and Peace, which Epstein considers the greatest of all novels if not the greatest book ever written, currently ranks number 7,181 among books sold on Amazon), but what exactly has been lost with this decline? Though it is difficult to define and certainly impossible to quantify, a substantial shift is taking place, and it involves a serious loss of imagination on the part of those who restrict their reading to “factual” material on the internet or to second-rate fiction or popular biographies. Today’s citizens are not just “reading differently,” as Epstein claims, they are losing qualities of empathy, tolerance, and reserve that are the product of patient reflection and profound inquisitiveness, both of them central virtues of novel reading. As Epstein puts it, “[o]ne doesn’t read on the Internet quite the same way one does on the printed page of a book or magazine or newspaper,” and the difference is as great as that between “knowledge and wisdom.”

In contrast to “the age of distraction” in which we live, the novel, Epstein concludes, “seeks to discover deeper truths, the truth of the imagination, the truth of human nature, the truth of the heart.” This more profound understanding of human nature may well be all that protects us from rushing into a catastrophic war, sinking further and further into disastrous levels of government and private debt, or turning a blind eye to political violence. One who has read Proust, Tolstoy, or Austen with care will have attained greater awareness of the value of life and of the virtues of restraint and moral perception. Armed with an attentive reading of serious fiction along with an appreciation of the finest music, art, history, and philosophy, an educated populace may serve as a bastion against authoritarianism and social anarchy. As Epstein puts it, “the novel is an instrument of discovery, [and] what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all mysteries, human nature.” He reaffirms our faith in this truth and inspires a return to the study of the best and wisest that has been written.

The Novel: Who Needs It? is a book that will reward almost any reader with a clearer understanding of the cultural crisis that we face, what with the explosion of electronic media, the partisanship of news commentary, and the atrophy of educational standards, including the inability of many students to tackle serious fiction. Returning to the question posed in the title of his book of “who needs the novel,” Epstein asserts at the end that “we all do, including even people who wouldn’t think of reading novels.” With its perceptive discussion of the role that serious fiction ought to play in civilized society, The Novel: Who Needs It? makes a strong case for this assertion. The culmination of a lifetime of reflection and study, Epstein has written a rewarding and readable book that will be of interest to many readers. 

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to O’Connor to Haruf (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

Identity politics is one of the defining issues of our time. In American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell addresses this issue, and he offers a coherent theory to explain what he views as the mounting decline of Western civilization. Yuval Levin’s opinion that American Awakening amounts to “a key to the times we are living in” may be not far from the truth because identity politics is now a pervasive ideology, finding its way into nearly every school, workplace, and civic institution. Joshua Mitchell’s analysis of identity politics is cogent, illuminating, and, in its way, courageous. His central thesis is that there exists a “deeply deformed relationship between identity politics and Protestant Christianity,” but, unlike traditional Christianity, identity politics finds its scapegoat not in the divine figure of Christ but in mortal groups such as white heterosexual males. The rise of identity politics, which Mitchell views as the expression of a spiritual quest, however misguided, should give pause to the idea that the West has simply become more materialistic and self-oriented: with identity politics, many who have turned away from Christianity have adopted a pseudo-religion that is more impassioned and extreme than anything to be found in Christian churches.

At the heart of Mitchell’s analysis is the paradigm of victim and scapegoat, an oppositional pattern that pervades every feature of identity politics and that has spread throughout our society, even into domains such as natural science and mathematics. What one finds in every domain is a mania for focusing only on victimization and scapegoating, even in the most unlikely places such as the nuclear family and the appreciation of nature. As Mitchell explains, “Absent the once-and-for-all-time Divine scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world, every domain of human life becomes a battleground for establishing wherein stain and purity lie.” 

As Mitchell sees it, there is only one path back from the “debilitating pathology” of identity politics. It is for a community of thoughtful individuals to build, or rebuild, a society of honest “face-to-face” relationships and a “politics of competence,” and thereby restore a society in which individuals are judged on virtue, merit, and conduct rather than affiliation with one or more distinct identity groups. In this view, the rehabilitation of society depends on the actions of well-intentioned individuals to oppose identity politics in the public space, yet one wonders why these defenders of competence have not made their presence known already. The answer is that there exists enormous social pressure to support preferences based on identity, and anyone opposing them is immediately shunned and ostracized. Is there any reason to believe that this situation will improve rather than deteriorate further? 

Mitchell may be too sanguine at times, but his writing is profound, and it addresses matters of central concern. The author probes deeply into the pseudo-religious origins of identity politics, and he demonstrates convincingly how widely this new ideology has spread across American society and Western society in general. An important point in Mitchell’s argument is that identity politics exists only in those societies that were once Christian but where Christian belief has lapsed, thus demonstrating that identity politics is in fact an ersatz form of religious scapegoating. Also important is the insight that, unlike Christianity, in which believers achieve forgiveness of sin through the intercession of the scapegoat figure, in identity politics the grievances of self-proclaimed victims can never be resolved. The model of Civil Rights protest has been hijacked and applied to a seemingly endless series of complaints, all of which obtain relief at the expense of some other group, only in time to be scapegoated by some other complainant. It goes without saying that the endgame of identity politics is an authoritarian society in which each identity group competes for recognition and relief, and in which the social cohesion that Tocqueville once highlighted as a crucial element of American democracy is replaced by distrust, isolation, and competition. This prospect is indeed a brave new world, as Mitchell makes explicit in several references to the Aldous Huxley novel “in which in order for citizens to be protected from suffering and death, they must renounce their political liberties altogether and bow without opposition to a world-controlling elite.” What is all the more disturbing is that the damage of identity politics shows no sign of running its course: every month there are more outrageous demands for equity and more assaults on well-meaning and blameless segments of the population. 

American Awakening is truly impressive in all that it does, but it is also highly abstract, and it requires readers to follow the author through a labyrinth of demanding mental gymnastics. One of these is Mitchell’s repeated use of the schema of “meal” and “supplement” to discuss everything from abortion rights to social media to GPS driver systems. For all of these and much more, Mitchell concludes that there exists a “meal” and a “supplement,” as for example in his argument for limited government: “The government can supplement, but it cannot substitute for, the meal that is stewardship,” a sentiment of which few in Washington appear to be aware. Having adopted this schema, the author applies it even in somewhat unlikely situations. It does, however, have its limits and indeed, carried to an extreme, the “fixed law that declares that supplements cannot be turned into substitutes” has the effect of undermining absolute moral distinctions, which the author labels “justice” but that, in his view, require the supplement of “mercy” to avoid a hardening of social relations. The trope of meal and supplement is effective, as far as it goes, but clearly it cannot be meant to suggest that illegal drugs such as fentanyl may be viewed as appropriate supplements to a healthy lifestyle or that the current wave of organized theft can be regarded as a supplement to ordinary shopping. Nor, I believe, should extramarital sex be regarded as an admissible supplement to marriage, as at one point American Awakening appears to suggest. In reality, in terms of the most important aspects of our lives, we were meant to live with inflexible rules and limits, and the idea of a fixed law where supplements are acceptable as long as they do not become substitutes seems doubtful.  

One caveat: I found it disappointing that in a book devoted to American awakening, there is no mention of the United States Constitution or of the many questions beginning to be addressed by the Supreme Court as to the constitutionality of identity politics in schools and workplaces. One would hope that the Court in future decisions would continue to combat identity politics. A discussion of “Students for Fair Admissions” and other cases would have added to Mitchell’s critique of identity politics. 

Mitchell’s diagnosis of the harmful effects of identity politics is compelling and his discussion of its origins in lapsed Christian faith is illuminating. His solution to the problem, the happy future to be achieved when “liberal competence” displaces the nasty identity politics of the present, is less convincing. That day, I fear, will never come and may never have existed, or else it will be replaced by something even nastier. The reality of human history is that for eons one people has murdered, suppressed, and enslaved another, to be in turn murdered, suppressed, and enslaved by yet another, a pattern of violence and distrust aptly recorded in Homer’s Iliad and in most of the literature of war that succeeded it. America was the exception, founded as it was by a clear-eyed middle class suspicious of tyranny and the growth of government power, but we are long past the day of enumerated powers and limited government. With the rise of identity politics, we have entered the phase of tyranny of which many great minds of the past warned us, but it seems a bit late for a collegial “politics of competence” to restrain the zealots on the left. 

Even now, when identity politics is causing such harm, over half of Americans believe that continuance of affirmative action is necessary, according to a 2023 NBC poll. It seems that the forces of repression and societal division, driven as they are by underlying self-interest and lust for power, are likely to double down, transforming accusation and scapegoating into something more ominous. A politics of competence may not serve as much protection against this threat. 

Altogether, I found American Awakening to be a highly insightful and thought-provoking book. This volume is obviously the product of a long period of study and research focused on the harmful effects of identity politics. Its assertion that identity politics is a misguided form of Christian belief involving a scapegoat and victim is quite convincing and should be useful to all who study the issue. Also of note is Mitchell’s speculation as to what will happen once the current scapegoats, white heterosexual males, have been completely marginalized: at that point, identity groups will compete to scapegoat another group, perhaps white females or black males. At many points Mitchell’s analysis is profound and reaches far beyond most social commentary now available. American Awakening offers a useful framework for understanding the damage that the pathology of identity politics is doing to our nation, and it suggests a means of reversing the illness. 

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to O’Connor to Haruf (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University 

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

Paper Belt on Fire addresses a topic of great interest and obvious relevance, and its stated intention, to transform society by providing bright students with an alternative to formal education, is ambitious and perhaps laudable. There is much value in this wide-ranging book, and it is likely that it will spark healthy discussion concerning the condition of higher education and other core institutions. Many would agree with Michael Gibson’s assertion that innovation has slowed in the United States since about 1970, but his claim that the purported failure of university education is largely responsible for this decline is difficult to accept or to prove. 

Certainly there is increasing skepticism regarding the value of an expensive college education that leaves students with student loan debt and, in many cases, little improvement in employment prospects. Perhaps for these reasons and others, including the recent pandemic, college enrollments have declined by some 10% during the past decade. From the point of view of Paper Belt on Fire these declining enrollments are a good thing since they have freed some four million young minds from the desultory and deadening influence of out-of-touch educators. If one follows the logic of Gibson’s argument, declining enrollments should already have spurred innovation, but there is no evidence to show that this is the case. From 2012 to 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP in the US rose 23%, less than historical averages. To what extent did a less-educated population of younger workers contribute to that decline? 

What are we to make of the fundamental claim that the author has “sparked a revolt against the university” by establishing a two-year scholarship program for exceptional teenagers willing to drop out of formal education and pursue entrepreneurial endeavors? This program, funded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, enrolls a small number of highly qualified individuals on the condition that they are willing to devote two years to exploring innovative ideas. The Thiel Fellowship program has garnered a good deal of attention, and anecdotal evidence points to its success, though Gibson provides little documentation. 

The more important impact of Gibson’s efforts may derive from the way in which they contribute to the national debate concerning the need for reform of higher education. That is a much larger issue than even Gibson’s wide-ranging book can cover, and no doubt it will continue for decades. And it is not just higher education that, according to Gibson, is in need of reform: the “erosion of America’s core institutions” is spread across “the media, Wall Street & the Fed, non-profits, the military, the universities, NASA, the administrative alphabet soup (CIA, FDA, CDC, and the rest), Congress, academic science, and more.” All except for Gibson and his small number of backers and protegees seem to be “less reliable and less trustworthy than they used to be.” 

Starting from the assumption that America is in decline, it is a small step to indict nearly every profession and institution. Yet one must ask whether America really is in decline and whether its professions and institutions actually are as corrupt and mediocre as the author claims. Certainly there is today great dissatisfaction with the direction America is heading in, but that dissatisfaction has existed many times in history, stretching back to the impassioned arguments of the Federalist Papers and well before. A great deal of work needs to be done to reform and repeal what is not working, but blanket condemnation of nearly our entire society may not be an effective starting point.  

It is quite a generalization to state that “I, for one, believe most of what public and private schools teach is worthless in preparing young people for the world.” What the author characterizes as “the university” actually constitutes some 5,300 educational institutions in the United States alone, each with its own distinctive governing board, faculty, mission statement, and identity. It is hard to imagine that all of these different colleges and universities function merely as a “paper belt” providing credentials required for entry into an equally pointless and deadening workplace. Nor is there much evidence that the Thiel program has inspired panic at Harvard or Yale, to say nothing of Ohio State. Like many assertions in Paper Belt on Fire, these claims are intriguing but impressionistic. One would like to believe that the obvious weaknesses of today’s university system, including a widespread insistence on woke activism on the part of faculty and students, could be reversed by a few idealistic crusaders, but the reality is that our national culture, including our institutions of higher education, is suffering from serious moral and intellectual challenges, and it will take more than a program funding drop-outs to heal it.   

Gibson believes that colleges fail to allow for the kind of creative problem-solving that once led Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk to achieve transformational discoveries in physics and medicine. On this point, as on so much else, Gibson is short on data and proof, which leads one to ask: is it simply the “deadening” experience of classroom education that Gibson objects to, or is it the condition of being “educated” in the conventional sense? Is Gibson merely objecting to the cookie-cutter process of university education—the “paper belt” that he believes he and like-minded others have set “on fire”—or is there something more fundamental? Does the author wish to go further than just recruiting a few dozen students to drop out and pursue their passions? Does he envision a society where everyone disdains work in the conventional sense and spends time speculating on breakthrough innovations? If so, one has to ask whether Gibson’s critique has relevance for the hundreds of millions of Americans who harbor more modest and conventional ambitions of obtaining a useful education, securing well-paid employment, raising a family, and preparing for retirement. Most would agree that our core institutions are far from perfect, but they have always been so. For most persons, the key is to work and thrive and to maintain their faith in the goodness of life within a society that presents obstacles and imposes burdens of a sort that has always existed.

One figure who shadows all that Gibson proposes is Steve Jobs, the college drop-out who founded Apple Computer and truly did revolutionize digital culture. However, one can make the case that Jobs, though not officially enrolled during most of his time at Reed College, gained the foundation for his sense of design and expression during his time there. Jobs left Portland after he had already absorbed what there was to learn at Reed, and perhaps the same was true of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, and of Larry Ellison at Illinois and Chicago. Will a scholarship for brilliant students conditional on severing their ties with college necessarily produce the same results?

At the heart of Gibson’s thinking is the idea that creativity has been lost due to the intellectual suppression of young people by educational institutions, but Gibson never actually defines what is meant by “creativity.” Does one become creative by virtue of dropping out, rejecting teachers, educating oneself, and applying a “fresh” mind to speculative theories and solutions? Or do discipline, learning, and application have much to do with creative outcomes? Perhaps Gibson’s conception of creativity is based on the familiar romantic image of the bohemian artist laboring away in his garret, separated and to a great extent antagonistic to convention and tradition. This conception recalls the theory of antagonist culture so meticulously explored by the late Roger Scruton, who, in his wonderful book Gentle Rejects, noted that “the fashionable society doctrines of our day” are all “founded, in the end, on anger or resentment.” Some resentment at least appears to underlie Paper Belt’s argument that, in regard to the qualities associated with entrepreneurial endeavors, universities “have no idea how to impart these virtues. They don’t even know they exist.” 

Gibson’s intent, by his own admission, is not just to subvert the “paper belt” of conventional learning but to transform society as a whole into a place of rapid innovation and great prosperity, a sort of utopia beyond anything that existed in the past. Yet one could argue that much of the prosperity that America now enjoys has been produced as a result of access to universal free public education and outstanding public and private universities, even at a time when education as a whole was more regimented and far less “student-friendly” than it is today. If anything, universities today, in my estimation, tend to be too much open to “creativity” and too little like those gray institutions of the past in which learning was imparted with ponderous seriousness by intellectually demanding faculty.

Romantic and nostalgic at the same time, Gibson’s perspective seems removed from the conventional life of the ordinary American, the sort who studies, works, saves for retirement, and enjoys a rewarding if not spectacular career in his chosen field. Indeed, that sort of bourgeois endeavor appears to be the particular target of Paper Belt on Fire. It is not the billions of ordinary people, living their ordinary lives, that matter so much as the gifted ones who need not earn their degrees or work their way up the ladder at work. As Scruton warns in Gentle Regrets, this is “an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us.” There is also an element of coastal elitism in Gibson’s book, as when he writes that discovering “an ace nineteen-year-old engineer in Tulsa bears a resemblance to scouting a linebacker who is playing in a Friday night football game way out in the sticks of West Texas.” Tulsa is now a thriving metropolis attracting taxation-migrants from California, and quite a few West Texas players are now highly-paid pros in the NFL. The residents of Tulsa or West Texas are just as intelligent as those of Manhattan or Palo Alto, and companies would do well to recruit them.

Gibson’s writing is thoughtful and vivid, but the author himself admits that it tends toward the speculative. Given that fact, it would be worth asking how well his investment ideas have done in the actual marketplace. Over the past year, as I write, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.65%. Four of Gibson’s “teams to watch,” chosen entirely at random (Tesla, Luminar, Veolia, and Joby Aviation) are down an average of 26.25% over the same period. Obviously, it is impossible to predict the future for these companies: they may soar during a growth environment, but actual returns are at least one way of evaluating the author’s line of thinking. Many of Gibson’s suggestions of companies to watch are private ventures and may have produced better returns, especially for early investors, but most are not investing in early-stage private companies. The point is that it is difficult to determine whether Gibson’s assertion that alternative entrepreneurial investments are more productive than the “paper belt” of JP Morgan, Merck, and Exxon-Mobil, which, by the way, have returned an average of more than 27% during the past year. 

One further point is that the author fails to consider what might be the cumulative effect on productivity and living standards of large numbers of college drop-outs, each of them expecting professional employment but without the level of training afforded by a university education. Some drop-outs might excel even without a college education, but most, I suspect, would simply be less prepared, less productive, and less disciplined than otherwise. Despite what the author says about the dulling effect of higher education, for most bright students college is a useful experience that leaves them better educated, more articulate, more organized, and in possession of better social skills. For a few highly motivated teenagers, the opportunity to skip college and proceed directly into entrepreneurial pursuits might be rewarded with success, but these few by themselves are hardly enough to ignite an era of innovation and transform society in the manner that the author envisions. For most students, I fear, the chance to get paid for dropping out would not constitute an improvement, either mentally, socially, or morally. 

Paper Belt on Fire is undoubtedly correct in its assertion that the educational system stands in need of reform. The nebulous, politically correct, and costly education that many students endure in pursuit of a degree could be made more effective by restoring an open-minded pursuit of truth rather than ideological indoctrination, and certainly the role of general requirements needs to be re-examined as well. Increasingly, a long and seemingly irrelevant college education, along with all else that young people endure early in their careers, must seem like a paper belt. Michael Gibson does well to question and probe, but his radical approach of setting the paper belt alight and encouraging the brightest young people to dismiss higher education altogether leaves much to be desired. A great deal could be done to improve higher education, but it will not be done by encouraging large numbers of students to drop out.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated! 

The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free is a profoundly thoughtful and knowledgeable book highly relevant to the condition of America today. It reflects the extraordinary commitment of an author who cares deeply about the direction in which America is heading and who provides useful suggestions for altering that course. In this sense The Plot to Change America is among the most impressive books I have read in many years.

Gonzalez begins by reviewing the history of progressive thinking with its origins in Continental philosophy and, in particular, in the work of Karl Marx. He studies the pathway to America of authoritarian ideas from German and French writers, especially those who immigrated to the United States around the time of the second World War, and the role of Antonio Gramsci, who “essentially provided the field manual for taking over countries.” 

From his perch at several American universities, Herbert Marcuse was particularly influential on students such as Angela Davis. What Marcuse taught, however, was not reform of a flawed system but wholesale rejection of order and tradition and unbridled censorship of and assaults upon less radical individuals. In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” (the title reveals a great deal), Marcuse urged “shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right” (quoted in Gonzalez). Contemporary leftists have gone much further, arguing for fines and imprisonment for “climate deniers,” opponents of affirmative action, and those whose religious values prohibit recognition of gay marriage. All in all, identity politics relies on an authoritarian philosophical base that involves “a rejection of the body of thought that gave us our present understanding of individual freedom, natural rights, equality, and democracy.”

Soon leftists such as Marcuse were able to enlist the efforts of sympathetic liberals in government, media, education, corporations, and nonprofits, particularly the Ford Foundation during and after the years it was headed by McGeorge Bundy. Ironically, liberals like Bundy soon found themselves the object of vicious attack, so much so that now anything less than enthusiastic support for woke causes is taken as proof of bad faith. As Gonzalez states, “[a] particularly dangerous component of identity politics is the coercive diversity to which we must all pay lip service today. This is decidedly not the inclusive melting-pot idea that Americans come from many different lands but are united in a common cause.” Presumably, from his post as head of a well-funded nonprofit, Bundy acted in good faith in an effort to “lift” various ethnic groups from poverty, but the end result has twisted the concept of disadvantage to that of victimization requiring reparations and preference, or what Gonzalez calls the “recognition and restitution canard.”

A crucial element of the plot that Gonzalez exposes is the division of Americans into discrete groups based on race, national origin, gender, sexual preference, class, and other features. Before the 1960s there was little sense among immigrants and other groups that they were anything more, or less, than “Americans,” and the ambition of most immigrants was to assimilate and thereby open doors to full participation in American life. It was radical activists like Saul Alinsky who plotted to divide Americans by pressing for the labeling of groups such as Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American and by “raising the consciousness” of women, homosexuals, and blacks. Along with Marxist academics, including many from the Frankfurt School who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, activists infiltrated powerful nonprofits and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, where for the first time identity labels other than “white” and “black” were included in the decennial reports. These labels were then used as the basis for government programs to address “inequity” among various groups, a lucrative reward for minority status that then spurred further creation of so-called disadvantaged groups. 

As a result, the traditional idea of a common American civilization and of loyalty and obligation to that civilization has been weakened to the point that wide swaths of our population now voice antagonism toward our nation’s values and history. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our public schools, in which the teaching of CRT and of curricula such as the 1619 Project seem intent on replacing reverence for our nation’s founding principles with an intensely divisive and critical ideology that leaves no room for common values or patriotic belief. Those behind woke teaching appear intent on destroying every facet of our traditional identity and replacing it with centralized authoritarian government. To accomplish this, it is necessary to undermine the faith and pride that Americans traditionally connected with their nation’s history and values, and to instill identification with a host of competing identities, a condition that would lead inevitably to virtual warfare among identity groups and the breakdown of social order. Into this vacuum would then step a classic Marxist vanguard of the proletariat.

Ironically, the intent of the New Left is the direct opposite of the Civil Rights Movement. The idea that each gains identity through inclusion within a discrete ethnic or other grouping is exactly the sort of separatism that civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s fought so hard to end. The growing practice of awarding preferences based on minority status also violates the central tenet of the race-neutral society that Martin Luther King, Jr. so strongly supported, as when he declared his hope that his children would someday “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King’s dream, as he said, was “deeply rooted in the American dream,” but now the left is determined to destroy both King’s dream of racial unity and the American dream that underlies it. 

The Plot to Change America is an ambitious work which traces not just the history but the current parameters of the left’s influence across all of our institutions. Gonzalez’s treatment of the mounting division in our country is thorough and well-informed, so much so that the attempt to reverse it may seem like a daunting task. To begin, it is necessary to recognize just how pervasive and determined the left has become: nearly every public school has come under the sway of Critical Race Theory to one extent or another; half of the electorate votes for politicians who wish to increase the role of government and to implement programs that encourage the balkanization of American life; corporations and the media kowtow to radical influencers who intend to transform our understanding of race, class, and gender and, in effect, to criminalize those who resist woke thinking. On all of these fronts, there is a diminishment of our freedom, especially with the vast powers of the federal and state governments now enlisted in the cause of promoting “equity,” that is, the forced redistribution of assets and privileges so as to equalize outcomes, an effort that necessarily diminishes the opportunities of some while it penalizes others. As Gonzalez points out, the race-based preferences of these redistributionist programs eerily echo the “separate but equal” rationale of Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision upholding segregation. 

Gonzalez provides the essential information and analysis needed to comprehend what is taking place and to resist what is truly a “plot to change America.” The single goal of this plot, whether manifested in ethnic and gay studies, radical feminism, or Marxist teaching, is to bring about a communist dictatorship within the United States. There is no task more important at this time than to identify and resist the left’s influence and to replace it with the teaching of Western civilization and American civic traditions. The only way to accomplish this defense of liberty is to become better informed about the nature of Marxist thinking and tactics and to deploy this knowledge in opposition to the left’s influence. The Plot to Change America is an invaluable tool in this most important endeavor: nothing less than the future of America as the world’s center of democratic capitalism is at stake.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Support the University Bookman

The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!