Product Description

From Communes to the Clintons

Why does Hillary Clinton crusade for government-provided health care for every American, for the redistribution of wealth, and for child rearing to become a collective obligation? Why does Al Gore say that it’s okay to “over-represent” the dangers of global warming in order to sell Americans on his draconian solutions? Why does Michael Moore call religion a device to manipulate “gullible” Americans?

Where did these radical ideas come from? And how did they enter the mainstream discourse?

In this groundbreaking and compelling new book, Daniel J. Flynn uncovers the surprising origins of today’s Left. The first work of its kind, A Conservative History of the American Left tells the story of this remarkably resilient extreme movement–one that came to America’s shores with the earliest settlers.

Flynn reveals a history that leftists themselves ignore, whitewash, or obscure. Partly the Left’s amnesia is convenient: Who wouldn’t want to forget an ugly history that includes eugenics, racism, violence, and sheer quackery? Partly it is self-aggrandizing: Bold schemes sound much more innovative when you refuse to acknowledge that they have been tried–and have failed–many times before. And partly it is unavoidable: The Left is so preoccupied with its triumphal future that it doesn’t pause to learn from its past mistakes. So it goes that would-be revolutionaries have repeatedly failed to recognize the one troubling obstacle to their grandiose visions: reality.

In unfolding this history, Flynn presents a page-turning narrative filled with colorful, fascinating characters–progressives and populists, radicals and reformers, socialists and SDSers, and leftists of every other stripe. There is the rags-to-riches Welsh industrialist who brought his utopian vision to America–one in which private property, religion, and marriage represented “the most monstrous evils”–and gained audiences with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison. There is the wife-swapping Bible thumper who nominated Jesus Christ for president. There is the playboy adventurer whose worshipful accounts of Soviet Russia lured many American liberals to Communism. There is the daughter of privilege turned violent antiwar activist who lost her life to a bomb she had intended to use against American soldiers. There are fanatics and free spirits, perverts and puritans, entrepreneurs and altruists, and many more beyond.

A Conservative History of the American Left is a gripping chronicle of the radical visionaries who have relentlessly pursued their lofty ambitions to remake society. Ultimately, Flynn shows the destructiveness that comes from this undying pursuit of dreams that are utterly unattainable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219943 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-29
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

From Booklist
Intent upon shaping the future, American leftists have so neglected their own past that they need a conservative to recover it. So argues Flynn in justifying a decidedly unflattering investigation into progressive origins. Though those origins owe much to pre-Marxist European radicals, such as Owen and Fourier, Flynn limns a lineage of authentically American leftists, from Channing to Hoffman. In both imported and homegrown versions, however, the American Left consistently attacks three foundations of the nation’s culture: private property, the traditional family, and otherworldly religion. As these animosities ramify, they yield curiosities such as racist utopians in nineteenth-century New Harmony and bomb-making pacifists in 1960s cells. Yet the same core hostilities keep resurfacing, even in the blame-America-first position of some post-9/11 activists. From Flynn’s perspective, it is the hardening of these antipathies into political dogmas that has marginalized emancipatory leftists, who once advocated “participatory democracy,” while emboldening coercive leftists, who advance their agenda through unelected judges. Irreverent and unpredictable, Flynn’s polemical scholarship will enrage many, bore none. --Bryce Christensen

Review
“A tour de force. A Conservative History of the American Left is a compelling read, supported by an enormous amount of research. Even those on the Left will learn something about their movement by reading this book, although they are unlikely to enjoy reading Flynn’s many revelations and poignant insights.”
—Peter Schweizer, bestselling author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do)

“Witty, insightful, and informed, Dan Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left is the best introduction I know to this destructive and unavoidable social phenomenon.”
—David Horowitz, bestselling author of The Professors, editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine


From the Hardcover edition.

Review
“A tour de force. A Conservative History of the American Left is a compelling read, supported by an enormous amount of research. Even those on the Left will learn something about their movement by reading this book, although they are unlikely to enjoy reading Flynn’s many revelations and poignant insights.”
—Peter Schweizer, bestselling author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do)

“Witty, insightful, and informed, Dan Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left is the best introduction I know to this destructive and unavoidable social phenomenon.”
—David Horowitz, bestselling author of The Professors, editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine

Customer Reviews

Don't Judge it by its Title
Many people might expect a book with the title of "A Conservative History of the American Left" to be a Coulter style polemic. This book is closer to what you should expect from Tom Sowell or Paul Hollander. Flynn traces the history of leftist idealism/utopianism all the way back to Plymouth Rock. The unrealizable visions that Flynn explores have come in many forms and guises. There are also many aspects of this history that modern leftists do not want to hear about. It turns out the Margaret Sanger, Robert Owen, and John Dewey are not quite as admirable as some like to think.
A Conservative History of the American Left is interesting as a piece of intellectual history. Critics from the left will surely find fault with at least some elements of Flynn's research. Its style is polemical at times. The contents of this book are not entirely unheard of either (I have heard of Pilgrim socialism before). Yet this book proves to be as illuminating as it is provocative. Well done!

Brilliantly done
I picked this book up a few days ago and was completely unsure what to expect. On the one hand, it had received mostly favorable reviews from relatively reasonable sources and was even being used as inspiration for an essay contest by YAF, meaning that it could not be completely barren. However, on the other hand, the title came off as dangerously polemical, which made me wonder whether the book would merely become a massive exercise in straw-manning along much the same lines as early liberal "histories" of the conservative movement. So it was with great anticipation tempered by a dose of skepticism that I opened the book.

And I literally could not stop reading. This book is brilliantly written - scrupulously fair, extraordinarily perceptive and well-researched. In fact, the very first person I would recommend this book to would be Leftists - so long as they are the honest, self-critical sort who are willing to take a deep probing of their flaws.

Whatever its title might lead you to believe, the book is not purely an exercise in conservative condescension to the Left (though the author does write with a wry, sarcastic tone which often comes off as condescending). Rather, Flynn spends much of his time simply telling the story of the Left, with a minimum of snide commentary (there are exceptions, such as his drippingly disdainful explanation of the ideas of Charles Fourier). This decision to write the book as a relatively disinterested storyteller was brilliant both aesthetically and polemically - the story itself is damning enough without snide comments to support it. Flynn depicts the Left's pastiche of failed experiments, delusional utopians and violent agitators in luminous, vivid colors, but though his brush strokes paint a harsh picture, it is conspicuously not the fault of the painter, for many of the hues he mixes into the picture make his subjects appear not as purely delusional lunatics, but as deeply flawed human beings. One finds oneself relating to some of the most infamous Left-wing bogeymen like Tom Hayden, Emma Goldman and John Reed even as one cringes at the vague, unrealistic and dangerous nature of some of their ideas. This is not to say that Flynn lavishes sympathy on everyone - his description of Huey Newton oozes with moral outrage, revulsion and contempt - but he only blasts a sparse few people, and tries to allow his readers to make up their own mind about the motives of his subjects. As such, the feeling one is left with upon finishing the book is not so much "what a boatload of nutcases" but "there, but for the grace of God, go I." However, this feeling is soon overwhelmed by a deep feeling of intellectual satisfaction as one ponders the truly impressive nature of Flynn's scholarship.

Amazing information presented with scrupulous fairness
With wit and insight Flynn traces the utopians who have longed to change society. Some were merely silly, some were mad, and some evil.

Take the "strange men who founded" (p 47) the Harvard commune. One was a vegetarian who would eat apples one year, crackers the next. There was also a celibate who heard voices, a man once jailed for not bathing, and, of course, a nudist. What fun it must have been at dinner time.

While some idealists were naifs, some were knew just what they were doing. Take Kinsey, whose "impact knew no bounds" (p 253) as a social scientist pushing for freer sexuality. He "shared his wife with co-workers" (p 254} and insisted that children, even babies, enjoyed sex. His source for this claim was pedophiles. I am not making this up.

Then there was Margaret Sanger, a racist who pushed eugenics, a fact never mentioned in Planned Parenthood brochures. Or John Reed (whose life inspired the movie "Reds") who never met a revolutionary he didn't love, but who had a stone heart for the women he used and the masses killed by communists.

By the 1960's the Left "had grown frustrated over the working class's refusal to adhere to the roles Marx" (p 267) wanted. The 60's nevertheless soon swarmed leftist Panthers, Weathermen, hippies, LSD, and agitation over the Vietnam war. Betty Friedan, a red diaper baby, announced that the home was a concentration camp, and the feminist movement was born.

In the end, Flynn finds "this is a book more about dreams than about reality...Setbacks cause enthusiasts to repackage but never to reassess" (p. 371). Leftists continue to seek human and worldwide perfection. And, frequently, the rest of us have to clean up the messes left behind.