The American Mein Kampf

Michael Moriarty on Edmund Wilson:

Most Americans haven't read To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson for the same reason that most Germans don't pick up Hitler's Mein Kampf. To the Finland Station is indeed an odious piece of work, in which a "civilized" man salutes the invading barbarians.
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As I prepare to enter the Presidential race in 2008, it helps to simplify, find the common denominators in all the opposition candidates, particularly those primary volunteers of the Democratic Party, and know with some certainty where they will all ultimately be coming from.

William Clinton called To the Finland Station a "marvelous book," and did so while he took the same train Lenin did when he reentered Czarist Russia on the way to St. Petersburg. How could such an obvious and self-declared admirer of the Soviet founding fathers be so fast-tracked to the White House?

Clinton would make the Third Way happen (see my previous editorial on The Third Way To Metaphysical Treason). That is Clinton's title for what the Republican Party seems to have tacitly agreed to. If the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, George H.W. Bush, could almost hand the White House over to Clinton in 1992, the Company of Langley, Va., must have surely been prepared for an entirely new bipartisan agenda. When did that happen?

Under Richard Nixon.

Kissinger's realpolitik amounted to no more than convincing the conservatives that worldwide Socialism was inevitable, the only "realistic" path for the U.S. to take. The previous President, Lyndon Johnson, had instituted the Great Society, a program that made Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal look anemic by comparison. Kissinger was eager to tell Moscow and Beijing that Washington would run the New World Socialist Order. Why did Nixon's first term look like Johnson's second term, including the escalation of the war into Cambodia? Both U.S. political parties had agreed to succumb to Socialism as long as their Cold War enemies knew who would run it.

The children of America knew instinctively that America's founding fathers did not intend for their country to be the bully on the block. Thus the left proved to the right that the human heart will buy a charitable idea, even if the charity is forced at the point of a gun, an Internal Revenue Service summons or a lien on everyone's house and back forty.