A Conservative History of the American Left

By Daniel J. Flynn

I've had Daniel J. Flynn's blog in my conservative blogs listing for quite some time, and today, I found out he has just published a new book, "A Conservative History of the American Left."

Here's an excerpt from an interview he did with FrontPage Magazine.

The Left counts on Americans to forget history. When Americans don't, they whitewash their mistakes and crimes through attempts, usually successful, to rewrite history. I view it as my job to conserve the history the Left obscures. One needn't go back hundreds of years for successful rewrites of history by the Left. Let's get an example from our lifetime. In the late 1970s, Mother Jones and The Nation fawned over Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution in Iran . "What kind of state might result if Khomeini or his followers take power?," Mother Jones asked in 1979. The magazine answered by citing "democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government." The prediction couldn't have turned out more wrong. One can see from such examples, and there are many of them in "A Conservative History of the American Left," why radicals run from their own history.

Throwing history down the memory hole enables the Left to detach itself from past failures, appear forever fresh and new, and perpetuate an ideology that by virtue of natural selection should have perished long ago. The Left's amnesia is convenient, but it is also part of its makeup. Who has time to look back when there's a glorious future to be made?

The transition from the Old Left to the New Left is a perfect example of old wine in new bottles. Initially, with a pox-upon-both-your-houses Cold War sensibility, the New Left, through documents such as the Port Huron Statement, seemed to be blazing a separate trail from the Old Left. But by the end of the 1960s, the New Left--with its worship of foreign tyrants, factionalism, and Marxoid jargon insider language--merely re-enacted dramas that the Old Left had performed decades earlier. With the American Left, everything new is old again.

[...] The most enduring and dangerous delusion on the Left, and perhaps in all history, is a secularized religious idea--that it can be, as the Lord's prayer states, "on earth as it is in heaven." Only men narcissistic enough to see themselves as gods could dream of such nonsense. Soviets, Nazis, and jihadists all killed large numbers of people because they thought that they were ushering in the millennium, perfecting man, or instituting Allah's Kingdom in the temporal world. This is idealism run amuck. Americans witnessed such millennial delusions inspiring carnage thirty years ago, when one of San Francisco's most prominent left-wing activists, Peoples Temple "comrade leader" Jim Jones, embarked upon "revolutionary suicide"--Huey Newton's phrase--in which more than 900 people were killed or took their own lives. "Nobody's going to come out of the sky!," Jones had earlier told his flock. "There's no heaven up there! We'll have to have heaven down here!" Like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Jonestown never attained the glorious ends but instead suffered under the vile means.

I would never even begin to compare Barack Obama to any of these deluded idealists, but it's worth noting Obama's heaven-on-earth delusion to demonstrate how little the Left has learned from its most horrific errors. "We're going to keep on praising together," Obama preached from the pulpit of a megachurch in Greenville, South Carolina last fall. "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on earth." I'm confident that people who truly believe they can create heaven on earth will harm people who impede their designs.

Read the full interview here. Buy the book "A Conservative History of the American Left" from Amazon. See also Flynn Files, Intellectual Morons and Why the Left Hates America.