July 8, 2004
HE'S RIGHT ON THE FACTS ISN'T HE?:
An Ugly Anti-American (Anders G. Lewis, July 8, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)
Among the A-list of self-declared enemies of the American state, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are the gold standard. But the historian Gabriel Kolko, though less popular than either, has been almost as influential. [...]The starting point for Kolko’s work is the preposterous idea that America is a totalitarian nation, where the rich rule and the poor obey. The “ruling class,” according to Kolko “defines the essential preconditions and functions of the larger American social order, with its security and continuity as an institution being the political order’s central goal in the post-Civil War historical experience.” The ruling class dominates both the Republican and Democratic parties, which have no significant differences between them that Kolko is able to detect. Obviously, this theoretical framework lacks any originality and is merely a crib of Marx’s discredited attack on “bourgeois democracy,” in which the state is just “the executive committee of the ruling class.” Republicans and Democrats, Kolko explains (as though this is in fact an explanation) are “inalterably wedded to the desirability of capitalism as a general economic framework.” (And why not if one compares capitalism to the totalitarian states that Kolko appears to endorse?) In Kolko’s presentation reform movements like Progressivism and New Deal liberalism for example amount to nothing more than efforts to promote “efficiency” in preserving America’s totalitarian system. Stalinist apparatchiks would not disagree.
America’s unjust political order produces vast riches for a few and poverty and inequality for the majority, while ensuring that the ruling class controls foreign policy. The ruling class, Kolko summarizes, is “the final arbiter and beneficiary of the existing structure of American society and politics at home and of United States power in the world.”
From this untenable ideological premise, Kolko concludes that the Cold War was not about Soviet expansionism but an American attempt to promote free trade and corporate profits.
How are those two things different? Either our vision or theirs was going to expand--our idea was right; theirs was wrong. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2004 9:11 PM
And they all have tenure.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at July 9, 2004 1:18 AMHe's a Canadian, and I thought he was dead.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 9, 2004 2:51 AMWhere do all of these Jewish intellectuals
learn their anti-Americanism???
the formerly Christian Ivies
Posted by: oj at July 9, 2004 10:01 AMThe way things seem to work these days, at least in academia---and it seems to have spread far and wide---is that those who win, lose; and those who lose, win. And this has become the very essence of virtue, of goodness and of right,
(It is, of course, not a concept foreign to students of the New Testament or acolytes of Bob Dylan. Though all metaphorical proportion does seem to have fallen by the wayside.)
With this in mind, one can surely understand why Marxism is far superior to capitalism, Islam to the West, and practically everything and everyone to America and Americans.
(And needless to say, Israel must be goaded and attacked until she disappears from view.)
Posted by: Barry Meislin at July 9, 2004 11:22 AMJH: We keep telling them to lay off now that we've consolidated our control of both parties, but you know how stubborn those people are.
Posted by: David Cohen at July 9, 2004 2:42 PMDoesn't the mere fact that these professors are not only free to protest about the totalitarian nature of the American government, but are able to thrive as academics and authors at our most prestigous universities disprove what they are trying to prove?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 9, 2004 11:40 PM