• Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, Broadside Books, 331 pages, $25.99.
RALEIGH — Historian and political scientist Barry Rubin, who passed away in February, titled his last book Silent Revolution, a perceptive and powerful work that would have been more accurately billed as Silent Counterrevolution.
The United States began with a successful revolution, but now, Rubin explains, we are experiencing a “break from all American history” and “a different system from the one through which America achieved success and prosperity.” The altered approach “was one of an unprecedented degree of statism, an imperial presidency that went far beyond Richard Nixon’s dreams: record high levels of government regulation, taxation, and debt.” All that, plus indoctrination, political correctness, and the alteration of reality. How had all that come about?
Rubin ties it to the “Third Left,” the heir to both the Old Left of the 1920s-’50s and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The Third Left took over liberalism, portrayed its only opponent as reactionary right-wing conservatism, and claimed that their radicalism represents all that is good in America and a correction to all that is evil. The new radicalism also claims a monopoly on truth and a right to transform America fundamentally, which President Obama claims as his mandate.
The Third Left goal was “to convince Americans the exact opposite of what their experience proved: that the country had fundamentally failed and the old leftist solutions were the answer.” For Rubin, the timing is significant.
At the very moment in human history when it became obvious that the far left’s ideas had failed and that statist, big-government, ever-higher-regulation policies did not work, it became possible for the first time ever to convince Americans that these things were precisely what the country needed. And at the very time in human history when Western civilization and liberal capitalism were so obviously the most successful in history — recognized as such in the Third World and most of all in formerly Communist China — a camouflaged radical movement convinced many of those benefiting from the system that their own societies were in fact evil and failed.
It became possible to convince Americans their society had failed because the Third Left “put its emphasis on infiltrating the means of idea and opinion production.” In journalism, reporters “routinely used politically charged language that would have gotten them fired in earlier times,” comparing the Tea Party to Nazi Brownshirts for example, and the mass media were out to “protect the image of anyone on the left side.”
The Third Left took to education for the possibilities of indoctrination and enjoyed great success by excluding materials celebrating America and hiding the failures of Communism, which “produced far more waste and unhappiness and far less wealth than the American system, not to mention totalitarian oppression.”
For the Third Left, wealth was not created by individual enterprise and workers, but instead stolen from poor foreigners and oppressed nonwhites. The Third Left declares America evil, “and the people are broken up into warring groups,” a “country of castes” in which the reward of individual merit is “overthrown in favor of special privileges.”
The Third Left shunned the workers and the factories, but — as Rubin shows — they found reliable allies in government employee unions. Most taxes and regulations directly benefit government workers, therefore shrinking government, boosting efficiency, cutting taxes, and maintaining a powerful private sector is all “against their interests.”
As Rubin notes:
The economy would decline, constantly adding to unemployment payments, food stamps, and other government programs, which in turn gave the Third Left more reasons to blame capitalism and the greedy rich for not having met society’s needs: to demand even higher taxes; to raise taxes, and to increase government spending.
Barack Obama, Rubin writes, “came to symbolize the silent revolution,” but readers will find no conspiracy theories. Obama is “just another product of the ideology and indoctrination that grown-up 1960s radicals had systematically spread to his generation and its successors.” By radicals he means people like Bill Ayers, Van Jones, and Bernardine Dohrn, who said that young Americans should “use their strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of empire.”
In Silent Revolution, the president emerges as the Third Left’s self-hypnotized Manchurian candidate, shrink-wrapped in statist superstition like his “progressive” political mentors, hostile to America like his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright, and certainly not a liberal. If Obama was a liberal, asks Rubin, “why did he repeatedly denounce the greatest accomplishments of liberals and call for a completely different approach?”
For Obama, “A free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” As Rubin notes, “But it had always thrived under fewer rules than Obama wanted, while it had plummeted with the level of rules and definition of fair play Obama had imposed during his first term.”
And, of course, he won a second term, a huge victory for the Third Left, which does not “expose and correct its own failures.” The result “may be a very long-term and even permanent change of the United States into something else, a nation far less affluent and far less free.”
Says Rubin, “The idea that tens of millions of Americans could be, in effect, turned into anti-Americans seemed insane. But it happened, didn’t it?” Yes, it did happen, and by any standard that is a counterrevolution. Readers will be left wondering with the author: “Will there be a U-turn?”
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.