Posted on 06/06/2024 2:32:00 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
My friend Daniel Greenfield, the outstanding contributor over at FrontPage Magazine, is no Pollyanna. If you’re a religious reader of Greenfield’s work, as I am, you’ll know he’s one of the most brutally honest and savage critics of the Left that we’re blessed to have, and in that brutal honesty, he’s credibly accused of presenting current circumstances as dire.
To which Greenfield has a defense: Current circumstances are dire.
Interestingly enough, though, Greenfield’s excellent new book Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left contains a quite optimistic look at the future of America. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 115: The Left’s War on the American Republic Is Older Than You Think)
Greenfield makes the point that the kooks, crooks, and villains who make up the modern Left aren’t very new at all. They’re merely new iterations of an irritating faction in American politics that has been around from the very beginning.
We’ve always had socialists, communists, urban machine pols, traitors, and thugs. The ones our Founding Fathers contended with might actually have been worse than what we’ve got now.
It seems hard to imagine, especially given our current miseries, but Domestic Enemies makes a terrific case for just that contention.
Greenfield doesn’t belabor things too much in giving a blow-by-blow presentation of all of the terrible leftist movements America has faced. He focuses his analysis on the period between the calling of the constitutional convention in 1787 and the Civil War, and particularly the 1864 election. We’re presented with the idea that American politics was dominated by aristocratic white men in that timeframe and that the arguments animating our political process had to do with the commercial disputes of the ruling classes.
Not so, says Greenfield.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Yes, the leftists who refer to us as a democracy.
bkmk
bookmark
Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually learned a thing or two from history. The repetition of stupidity is a bummer.
bump
Great review. I put this title on my list of books to buy for birthday and holiday gifts, only to find out I had already put it on the list two books previous from some other excellent review.
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