I got really sick the other day looking around Barnes and Noble, trying to find a good historical biography for a juvenile. Did you know there is an entire HOWARD ZINN set of books marketed to KIDS?
Made me very angry—the leftwingnuts are working overtime to ruin the way the next generation thinks. Many of the baby boomers are brain dead, too.
Of course, I guess it has always been the case that only about 1/3 of the population makes the changes we need.
I don't know. There were not many discending opinions, as far as I know, when FDR summarily executed German subversives caught during WW II; the country was pretty much unanimous about the foreign enemies.
Until Clinton times, it was a basic, unchallenged assumption that foreign policy in nonpartisan. JFK was no less anti-Communist than Reagan. Like any family should, Dems and Repubs disagreed within, on domestics matters, but presented the unified front to the outside world.
Our problems today stem from the fact that, indeed, a great majority of the people is ignorant about the great achievements of its own country --- capitalism which made even the poor more prosperous, and democracy that was expanded to included some of the people to whom it was previously denied. Because this majority is confused, a vigorour minority is making further inroads at dismantling hte very foundation of this coutnry. This "1/3" phenomenon to which you refer is quite recent.
P.S. Have you spoken to the manager of B & N? It's not just Zinn's biography: they routinely "hide" the conservative books that even make to the NY Times best seller list. I expressed protest in those cases in the past. By now, however, I have stopped patronizing that chain (and Borders).