HOWARD ZINN’S AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

If folks wonder why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States -- a one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains a plethora of distortions and outright lies.  In 2012, the director of the American Textbook Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the “best-selling survey of American history.”  By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies.  

Mary Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn, does us the service of exposing  the mendacious,  non-scholarly character of this work that was praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor,  Matt Damon.  In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will knock your socks off!”  making an even greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year.  Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.”  The well-known liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”  Grabar herself notes that after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together his People’s History -- a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.

Grabar provides scores of examples of Zinn’s modus operandi that ignores, distorts, or simply lies about evidence to construct a Manichean portrait of good versus evil as those categories are conceived by a Marxist activist.  Zinn’s caricature of Columbus sets the stage for his presentation of American history as a series of Holocausts.  In one case Zinn quotes Columbus’ diary entries out of context to portray the explorer as a rapacious gold-seeker who wouldn’t be averse to enslaving the island’s primitive inhabitants.  To accomplish this goal Zinn ignores Columbus’ positive comments about “freedom” for the “Arawak” tribe and splices together separate entries that make the explorer appear a nascent slave trader on first viewing the island’s inhabitants.  In fact, the damning comments about the natives being “good servants” were made days later and concerned the perspective of a warring tribe intent on subjugating their more docile neighbors.  The other side of Zinn’s narrative involves the beatification and Marxification of the Americas’ native population -- a portrait at odds with any objective history of the New World which was filled with wars at least as ubiquitous and violent (including the cannibalism that Zinn omits) as those in “capitalist” Europe!   

To top off the lies about Columbus, Grabar shows that a good deal of Zinn’s “scholarship” is plagiarized from a 1976 work by fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth.  Grabar shows how page after page in Zinn’s history was lifted almost verbatim from Koning’s book.  Indeed, “The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered passages from Columbus: His Enterprise.”  The secondary kicker is that Koning wasn’t even an historian, much less a Columbus scholar.  In fact, Koning’s “slim volume does not cite any sources.”  Grabar also reveals additional instances of Zinn’s plagiarism -- one of which was discovered by a leftist Professor who didn’t publicize the truth lest it harm their common ideological objectives.  So much for professional standards that were applied even to a well-known historian like  PBS’s favorite scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who “resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a ‘leave’ from PBS NewsHour” when parts of her work were found to be plagiarized.

Chapter two of Grabar’s book reviews the life of Zinn as a dedicated Communist activist whose Marxist beliefs and activities spoke louder than any card he may or may not have carried.  Chapter three shows how Native Americans are used as props for Zinn’s ongoing Marxist cartoon, with Europeans and Americans forming the necessary oppressive class.  As for his account of the Iroquois Indians, it was again largely plagiarized from another patently biased historian, Gary Nash.  One critic said the descriptions of this well-known American tribe resembled “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians. . . .”   In Zinn’s telling, any butchery and slavery on the side of oppressed groups (even the Aztecs) is ignored, distorted, or excused.  Thus, Zinn’s “history” conforms perfectly to Professor Fred Siegel’s observation about the “New Historians” for whom “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”  

Concerning the second act of that tragedy, Zinn somehow manages to blame capitalism for American slavery, though the institution has been around for all of recorded history and still exists in some very non-capitalist African states.  He also ignores the fact that only in America, where slavery was said to be the cruelest, were slaves, despite the evils of the institution, able to grow their population through natural increase, something not possible in regions where slaves died or were killed so frequently that only a constant influx of new victims maintained their numbers.

Grabar clearly demonstrates that Zinn takes the orthodox Communist line when discussing any topic: The Founding Fathers were more interested in their investments than the welfare of oppressed groups.  Lincoln was more a capitalist tool than a President committed to ending slavery -- or a friend to his adviser and later Republican political official, Frederick Douglass.  Even World War II was fought to maintain the capitalist system, as was, of course, the Vietnam War, where, according to Zinn, the My Lai massacre was “typical.”  Also in the 60s, radical and violent groups like the Black Panthers are given greater attention and more credit for (always inadequate) civil rights progress than traditional groups like the NAACP -- even though the latter organization clearly accomplished more than the former and was supported by blacks (despite Zinn’s insinuations) far more than their violent counterparts.                    

Earlier in the book and also in closing Grabar makes a telling point about the duplicity of modern historians by comparing their vigorous denunciation of David Irving’s Holocaust-minimizing work with the plenary indulgences given to Zinn’s unbalanced, unreliable, often-plagiarized volume.  Why, she asks, should Zinn’s false American Holocaust history not be judged by the same standards that make Irving’s account of Hitler’s crimes totally unacceptable.  The obvious answer is that most historians, even those who think Zinn’s book is more propaganda than history, are still sympathetic to the ideology that permeates Zinn’s distorted view of the U.S. -- a sympathy illustrated by their spirited defense of the book whenever official attempts arise to remove it from state-related classrooms. Grabar provides sufficient evidence to make the case that Zinn’s history is every bit as contemptible as Irving’s and should be viewed with equal revulsion.  That Zinn in 2004 signed a statement supporting an investigation into a possible 9/11 Bush Administration conspiracy says all one really needs to know about Zinn’s animus toward America.  That professional historians, clueless high school teachers, and even Google searches (no surprise) present  Zinn’s history as reliable is a big reason many young Americans no longer feel pride in a nation that’s been presented to them through the jaundiced eyes of a Communist who cares not a whit for professional historical standards -- or the truth. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

Only a few decades ago California twice elected Ronald Reagan governor and twice voted for the Gipper as President.  It later chose a series of Republican governors, ending with its former Senator Pete Wilson (1991-1998).  Twenty years later the state has no functioning Republican Party and all statewide offices are securely held by Democrats in the mold of San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.  What California looks like today is what Democrats want for the whole country.  That Gilded State dystopia is described in detail in the first chapter of Michael Anton’s book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.  That portrait features super-wealthy coastal elites eager to impose their environmental ideology and social justice agenda on a vanishing middle class as well as on Valley farmers whose irrigation waters and livelihood dry up for the sake of a supposedly endangered fish.  This Democrat lock on political power is based on an ever-growing multitude of legal and illegal immigrants whose voting power and reliance on government assistance turned a relatively red state deep blue. 

Add to this overview crushing home prices, the highest state income tax rate, crumbling infrastructure, traffic nightmares, deteriorating schools, a burgeoning homeless population, and a protected class of illegal aliens with more freedom to violate the law than conservatives have to express opinions about males who identify as the opposite sex and share bathroom facilities with biological females.  This incomplete portrait reveals what’s in store for the rest of the country if current trends continue, trends made possible by the addition of, at a minimum, fifty-nine million immigrants since Ted Kennedy’s 1965 “reform” bill whose every promise to the American people was, as Anton notes, a complete lie.  Anton also observes (in chapter 5, “Immigration”) that fifty-nine million doesn’t include the offspring of those prolific immigrants or the twenty million plus illegal immigrants now in the country.  All totaled, these numbers represent an unprecedented inflow of foreigners  whose presence in the country has lowered working class wages, increased home prices, drained  public coffers, taxed public services, crowded cities, “fundamentally transformed” California, and is quickly transmogrifying Colorado and even Virginia.

Most AT readers are familiar with the execrable state of affairs in California (well summarized by Victor Davis Hanson) but most will find something new to consider when Anton focuses attention on the ultimate objectives of America’s super-wealthy ruling class (chapters 3 and 4), a group consisting of tech, finance, business, and agriculture oligarchs who provide the money that creates and motivates political puppets eager to create their own fiefdoms via influence-peddling and revolving government-business doors.  (Why has Congress, including the GOP, been loath to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s corruption?  Answer:  “because they all do the same thing -- or hope to once they leave office.”)  Anton’s analysis of these super-rich and somewhat hereditary puppeteers focuses more on economics than sheer ideology, and on political power as the means to secure their positions of wealth and status.

 Anton asserts that the primary goal of these elites is “to transform the United States into a deracinated economic-administrative zone with one size-fits-all ‘rules’ whose surface impartiality masks an unbending bias toward capital over wages, management over labor, words over actions, ideas over things, the new over the old, cosmopolitanism over the familiar, foreigners over the native-born. ”  Put more simply, ruling elites pursue a globalist free market that redounds to the benefit of high finance and big business (especially technology) at the expense of American workers, American culture, and the American Constitution.  A “high-low” coalition of the super wealthy plus folks dependent on government is the nationwide ruling class playbook as it was in California.    

Anton doesn’t discount the role of ideology among the ruling class but views it more as a means than an end in itself -- a vehicle employed to pacify true believers (the “Wokerati”) and to secure the power that guarantees their fabulous wealth will continue indefinitely.  Indeed, these elites must employ a juggling act that balances grievance-based identity politics with the need to pay off their various constituencies.  Killing the golden goose of globalist capitalism would surely produce a break-up of their coalition that includes many “Freeloaders” as well as aggrieved minorities unwilling to give up I-phones and hefty government assistance programs just to vilify “the (white, male, heterosexual, Christian) man.”  The vindictive “Avenger” group in this coalition, led by academics like Ta-Nehisi Coates, seeks nothing short of, in the words of one critic, “a program of infinite penance for whites.” Meanwhile a soulmate of Coates, Noel Ignatiev, goes even further by giving his Harvard Magazine article this title: “Abolish the White Race.” While the largely white ruling class elites are content to use this racist hatred for political objectives that now include reparations, they hardly want to see their mega-fortunes turned into dust.  

Whether a global capitalist system can succeed in buying off these competing constituencies given a democratic-in-name-only America is unlikely, thus Anton’s prolonged discussion in chapters 6 and 7 of future possibilities which extend from Blue and Red Caesars to outright war to various secession scenarios.  Anton would have been wise, in my view, to sharply curtail these speculations since the author himself notes Yogi Berra’s prognosticative warning:  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  What is perfectly clear, however, is how that globalist system has harmed American workers and how our ruling elites have all but destroyed the country’s traditional political institutions thanks to the ubiquitous rule of activist judges (“kritarchy”) who regularly nullify democratic decisions like the 60 to 40 percent  California vote in 1994 to deny illegal aliens non-emergency government assistance.

With respect to culture, I give Anton major kudos for discussing how the ruling class has pacified and distracted  Americans via mindless and morally vacuous entertainments, drugs, and especially “porn” -- all products that have dulled the cognitive abilities and moral fiber of Americans thanks to their incessant propagation via television, film, music, and the Internet!   Needless to say, the ruling class’s media “Megaphones” eagerly push these tawdry products to keep themselves modestly rich and American consumers “demoralized” -- indifferent to the hollowing out of their country’s working class and Constitution. 

In this hollowed out America justice is anything but Constitutionally equal.  One example among  several  Anton provides is the FBI’s pre-dawn, SWAT-squad raid of the elderly Roger Stone’s house that was filmed “coincidentally” by CNN -- all in response to a non-violent “process crime.”  Compare this wildly disproportionate use of force with the failure to even prosecute a ruling class functionary, Andrew McCabe, who lied to Congress about a coup designed to undermine a legally elected President.  Thanks to a complicit media dedicated to the proposition that most Americans are racist dimwits, this blatant injustice is hidden from the wider public.

Anton’s final chapter provides a political platform that calls for President Trump’s re-election and disavows any Republican Party not committed to protecting American workers, America’s traditional culture, and the American Constitution.  The GOP of the two Bushes and many “conservative” think tanks that push globalist “free trade” policies and give tacit support for open borders and unchecked  immigration must either follow Trump’s pro-American lead or die. 

While Anton would have done well to make his points in two-thirds the space, he nevertheless scores numerous bullseyes that make his tendency to “over-explain” forgivable.  Among these telling hits is the author’s quotation of an English author, Anthony Daniels, who observed that political correctness is “communist propaganda writ small.”  The purpose of both is to humiliate people by forcing them to repeat obvious lies and thereby “lose once and for all their sense of probity.”  An example I would offer is the now-PC claim that men can have babies and menstruate.  Daniels says, “To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.”  He adds, “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”  Control is an essential component of the ruling class’s agenda, and one that’s surely at stake in next month’s election. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

AMERICA: LAND OF THE DOCILE SHEEPLE

I’m retired and don’t eat out a lot or attend crowded events, so the effect of this virus lockdown on me personally has been minimal -- excepting a sizable hit to my IRA portfolio and the closure of local golf courses.  But as the weeks have worn on, the incessant drumbeat of commercials, public service announcements, and local news hairdos declaring that “we are all in this together” and imploring everyone to “stay inside” have become insufferable.   Often these directives are conjoined with salutes to the “heroes” in masks who are credited with saving our secluded backsides from a dreaded plague. (Yes, health professionals almost exclusively in the New York City area have done heroic work, but hospitals around the country have been laying off employees and suffering huge financial losses due to a shortage of patients.)  Another flood of commercials piggyback on the panic with assurances that “take out” is available during these “difficult times” and that your friendly auto dealer is prepared to postpone car payments should you now be unemployed.   A wistful hope about getting back to normal in some distant future accompanies a few ads devoted to slavish obedience to unseen authority.

A few signs of actual courage, however, have begun to emerge.  A salon owner in the North Dallas suburb of Frisco opened her establishment and tore up the citation she’d been issued for defying a government pronouncement that classified her work as “non-essential.”  Even more impressive is the New York City tailor’s commitment to open up in the virus “epicenter” -- a metropolitan area that accounts for about half of the (inflated) Wuhan deaths in the entire country.  By doing so he defied the imperial arrogance of Gov. Andrew Cuomo who snarkishly told beleaguered protesters to “get an essential job” if they wanted to work.  Protestors in Michigan finally began to see the light when it became clear that it’s not about your health when a governor tells you that you can go to Home Depot to buy a sponge but not to buy seeds for your garden!  

It isn’t exactly a portrait of “the home of the brave” that we’ve witnessed over the last month.  Instead, a docile population (about 70% in one poll) seem content to do whatever Dr. Fauci tells them to do, ignoring the fact that even as late as February 29 the long-time NIH epidemiological bureaucrat assured Americans that it was safe to go to the mall, the movies, and even the gym!  That pronouncement followed his comment on January 21, “This is not a major threat for the people in the United States.”  Nor have the cascade of predictive errors given most Americans pause when it comes to trusting the white-robed authorities who are now ceded more credibility than was recently accorded holy scripture.  

For those willing to penetrate the blizzard of media obscurantism, there are many scientists and even a whole European country whose approach to this epidemic differ radically from that of the shutdown-obsessed Fauci.  One of many examples is Dr. Knut Wittkowski who for 20 years was head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University -- hardly a “country doctor” as the New York Times described a physician on the other side of its anti-hydroxychloroquine jihad.  Here’s what Wittkowski said about the epidemic:  “With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity.   About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected.”  That was also the approach taken in much-vilified Sweden, which undertook precautionary measures far short of shutting down the economy and shutting up much of the population in their homes.  Wonder of wonders, statistics actually show Sweden doing better than most European countries in terms of deaths, though Fauci fanatics will insist one only compare it with its less densely populated neighbor, Norway. 

What is clear in any comparison, however, is that the Swedish approach disproves conclusively the panic-producing numbers emanating from the Imperial College of London study that predicted up to 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 500,000 U.K. deaths absent radical measures -- numbers endorsed by Fauci and consequently repeated by the President.  But nothing like that apocalypse occurred in non-lockdown Sweden which seems on its way to “herd immunity.”  Swedish epidemiologists, of course, have explained their approach to the few uncomprehending journalists who dare to engage them, but obviously these voices, along with many other likeminded health experts in the U.S. have not been heard by Americans whose eyes and ears are glued to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and the panic-loving MSM whose delight over a Trump-defeating economic catastrophe is impossible to conceal! 

So why has the country that used to tout itself “the land of the free and the home of the brave” so quickly become “the land of the docile and the home of the shuttered”?  I proffer two related reasons.  First, Americans possess an inordinate and false belief in “science,” incorrectly assuming that it is next to infallible and that all scientists pretty much agree.  “Follow the science” has been a mantra in the U.S. for a worldwide experiment that’s never been previously undertaken.   And if an experiment is the first of its kind, it cannot be settled science.

  

Moreover, anyone with intelligence and a degree of honesty can see, as noted above, how wrong the scientists anointed as our Corona pontiffs have been thus far.  Secondly, the propaganda power of media, both political and commercial, has reinforced to an incredible degree the panic-laded message of the public health bureaucrats in charge, thus making the slightest deviance from the promulgated orthodoxy a blasphemous heresy.  Mindless mask-wearing conformity and panic emerges based on burgeoning COVID case numbers that to a non-addled mind prove the virus is nowhere near as lethal as previously advertised and that herd immunity may soon be attainable.

 It has taken far too long to break through these almost impenetrable cognitive and emotional barriers and to challenge stay-at-home and wear-a-mask-when-walking-your-dog dictates that go well beyond wartime mandates or anything “science” can vouchsafe.   I, like Dr. Wittkowski, have been chagrined beyond measure at Americans’ willingness to comply with these more-than-dubious requirements, and I concur with his ominous warning:  “I think people in the United States and maybe other countries as well are more docile than they should be . . . if people don’t stand up [for] their rights, their rights will be forgotten.”

 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

Medicare for None -- Sally Pipes: False Premise, False Promise

“Medicare for All,” were it subjected to truth in labeling criteria, would more accurately be named “Medicare for None.”  This is a point made early in Sally Pipes’ succinct but detailed analysis of the socialized medicine programs offered by Bernie Sanders and other Democrat POTUS candidates.  Her book, False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All provides a chilling portrait of the much-touted socialized health systems in Canada and the U.K. -- programs plagued by doctor and hospital shortages, long waiting times, rationed treatment,  substandard care, and, on occasions, appalling bureaucratic callousness. 

Pipes begins her analysis, however, with a perceptive distinction between traditionally accepted rights and the assertion that health care is a right.  The former rights, she notes, only oblige people not to interfere with, for example, a person’s free speech or religious practice.  Non-interference is required as long as the exercise of those rights doesn’t restrict the rights of others, as it would if one yelled “fire” in a crowded theater.  These traditional rights are labeled “negative” because they “require others [including the government] to step aside and allow people to act independently.”

On the other hand, in the case of health care this “positive right” not only “gives us something,” it also “requires someone else to give it to us.”  And as Pipes illustrates in spades, defining “the criteria for positive rights . . . is tricky” -- a process that supposedly values equal medical care for all above, for example, the freedom of parents to pursue treatment for a sick child outside a nation’s socialized framework, thereby making mincemeat of the most prized of all American rights, life and liberty.  In short, residents of Canada and the U.K. forfeit a tremendous amount of freedom concerning the availability and quality of health care in return for a system designed primarily to offer an equal measure of care to everyone -- an arrangement Pipes concludes “is a catastrophe for the people forced to live under it.”  Thus, a “right” to health care is transformed into the obligation to accept and contribute to a system that often provides mediocre and sometimes appalling care.  

When analyzing specific “Medicare for All” proposals, Pipes notes that the program’s popularity disappears when folks discover it would totally do away with the private insurance held by 253 million Americans (mostly through employers) and would be far from free!  Sanders’ proposal adds at least 32 trillion to the federal budget over ten years and likely up to 60 trillion, since it “would prompt unlimited demand from patients.”  The latter figure represents a doubling of projected federal spending over the decade.  Add to that cost the inevitable hospital closures and doctor shortages tied to stringent government reimbursement rates as well as the dislocations caused by outlawing private insurance and you have the makings of a perfect societal storm.  But it would be a storm caused not by the quality of medical care (with which a large majority of Americans are satisfied) but rather by the cost of insurance.  Far from reducing insurance costs, Obamacare saw a doubling of premiums in the individual market between 2013 and 2017.  Meanwhile, employer-based family premiums continued to rise to over $20,000 a year in 2018.

The bulk of Pipes’ book describes the reality of socialized medicine in the U.K. and Canada, both statistically and via a number of gut-wrenching anecdotes.  Statistically, Pipes shows that the presumed monetary savings of socialized programs are largely illusory since significant costs are hidden in taxes and take no account of lost wages and productivity due to demonstrably inferior health outcomes.  Moreover, the typical assertion that the U.S. trails the U.K. and Canada in overall health rankings is also debunked by showing that those rankings don’t focus on specific health outcomes (e.g. cancer survival rates) but rather give inordinate weight to socialist programs and even fail to account for the different standards countries have for calculating “infant” mortality.  Additionally, those socialist-biased health comparisons don’t take into consideration non-health related factors (such as traffic accidents and crime) that significantly affect life expectancy averages.  When one compares like to like, U.S. life expectancy and infant mortality rates are comparable to or better than other advanced nations and, significantly, specific health outcomes for treatment are consistently better than their socialized counterparts.  

Pipes’ book would be persuasive but not emotionally compelling without its numerous vignettes that put a human face on an often less than human bureaucratic monstrosity.  Among others there is the tragic story of a single mother of two without a car in southeast Wales who called ahead to inform an emergency clinic that she would be a bit late bringing in her severely asthmatic five-year-old child since she had to make arrangements for an infant’s care and catch a bus.  Her 18-minute tardiness resulted in the doctor’s refusal to honor the appointment.   Instead, it was rescheduled for the next day.  That night the child had another asthmatic attack and died in the hospital.  Anyone reading Pipes’ book knows this tragedy is the direct result of doctor shortages that make a typical visit to a general practitioner in the U.K. last a grand total of nine minutes.

Then there is the case of young Charlie Gard, born August 4, 2016, with a rare genetic disorder that’s typically fatal.  His parents, however, wished to try an experimental treatment in the U.S. that wasn’t available in the U.K. and raised over a million pounds to give it a try.  The doctors caring for Charlie Gard, however, petitioned the government to remove him from life support, and it is the court, not doctors and parents, that has the last say in such matters.  Despite pleas from the Vatican and even assurance from President Trump that the U.S. would be “delighted” to help Charlie, “Charlie died in a hospice on July 18, 2017, after the court denied his mother’s request to bring her son home for his final hours.”  Another couple was arrested for kidnapping when they took their child to Spain in 2014 for a cancer treatment not approved in the U.K.  This story, fortunately, had a happy ending in Prague following a legal battle over proton therapy, a treatment available in the U.S. since 2001.  

Ironically, socialist medicine doesn’t mean the same care for wealthy and well connected individuals, as Canadian singer Micheal Bublé moved to California where his son was treated for liver cancer in 2016 at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.  Even more egregiously, in 2010 Newfoundland’s premier traveled to Mount Sinai Hospital in Florida for minimally invasive heart surgery that he could have received in his own country.

Pipes ends with a series of proposals for making American health care more affordable, ideas that focus on Health Savings Accounts, tort reform, individually tailored insurance policies, and a government program to take care of the approximately two million folks who would not qualify for private insurance -- a small subset for which it makes no sense to socialize the entire health care system.  Overall, Pipes’ book is predicated on the hope that Americans won’t give up their access to quality medical care if they know that the “free” care they are promised will cost almost as much as the 17% the U.S. now devotes to health care and will result in vastly increased waiting times, fewer treatment alternatives, massive dislocations, and restricted or no access to expensive drugs -- all without the default option employed by thousands of Canadians, treatment in the United States. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

Contrary to previous belief, wolves aren’t solitary creatures that naturally roam in random packs but are rather, like most animals, familial beasts whose behaviors assume pathological characteristics when those domestic bonds are broken.  That observation, reiterated with reference to other species, is the biological starting point for Mary Eberstadt’s insightful exploration of the social and political consequences of the recent and monumental disruptions in American family structure that she terms “the Great Scattering” in her book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.

Eberstadt’s focus is on the way divorce, absent fathers, shrinking family size, and the sexual revolution of the 60s has produced an environment that radically undermines traditional answers to the question “Who am I?” -- a question typically addressed by reference to a child’s father, mother, siblings, and sex.  In addition, since basic social skills are obtained vis-à-vis parental and familial examples, absent fathers and non-existent siblings make learning how to interact civilly with the opposite sex (or to respect one’s own) extremely difficult.

The rise in “identity politics,” therefore, is linked by Eberstadt to the social and especially familial disruptions that make answering the “Who am I?” question highly problematic.  The negative consequences of the sexual revolution (primarily contraception technology plus the destigmatization of non-marital sex, abortion, single-parent homes, and, to some extent, pornography) are provided abundantly by the author.  They include the clearly detrimental effects of fatherless homes (“a literature as well-known as it is stoutly ignored”) and various studies that document a large increase in self-harm and loneliness, including morose statistics on elderly folks (4,000 a week in population-dwindling Japan) who die alone without relatives and are only discovered by neighbors due to the odor coming from their residences.  The author links these and other sociological data to a desperate cri de coeur that amounts to a primal scream: “Who am I?”

As surrogates for the basic familial answers to that question, ethnic, erotic, racial, and sexual identities have been asserted with a vengeance, especially against those seen as oppressors.  Eberstadt notes that the “first collective articulation of identity politics comes from a community [black women] where familial identity was becoming increasingly riven” and constituted “a harbinger of what would come next for everyone else.”  In the previous year, 1976, “the out-of-wedlock birth rate for black Americans had just ‘tipped’ over the 50 percent mark.”

The “infantilized expression and vernacular” of identity politics also points to a regressive “mine, mine!” toddler mentality.  Young adults screaming at speakers they imagine threaten their sexual, racial, or ethnic identities (e.g. Christina Sommers and Charles Murray) or even at friendly faculty members offering criticism of Yale’s detailed “cultural appropriation” guidelines for Halloween costumes is typical behavior -- tantrums that go hand in hand with “safe spaces” on campus, “those tiny ersatz treehouses stuffed with candy, coloring books, and Care Bears.”  Such childish exhibitions point to a primitive psychological deficit that corresponds with studies about identity-formation in children of divorce or of those having no father at all.  

Eberstadt notes, furthermore, that after the sexual revolution, women were expected to be more like men and were praised for achieving sexual liberation (no strings sex), physical prowess comparable to men, or corporate CEO status.  Those women who assumed traditional maternal roles were correspondingly disparaged.  Men, on the other hand, received a steady dose of blame for “toxic masculinity” while those without fathers in the home had additional reasons to reject their biological heritage.  Lost in this reshuffling were familial models, via parents and siblings, to teach girls how to understand men and boys how to treat the other sex.  But were women, who now had the sole legal voice on abortion, naturally constructed to approach sex as men might?  And were men deprived of a father or an opposite sex sibling likely to approach females with the same respect and reticence as previous generations of men did whose families were large, intact, and often schooled to view women as, in some sense, sisters in a religious community?  And what about the impact of the sexually saturated culture that offers graphic, often violent, pornography with the click of a mouse?   

Eberstadt observes that the #MeToo movement exposed what perceptive observers already knew, that the dissolution of the family has led to profound ignorance not only about the opposite sex but also about one’s own sexual nature.  Even men who “identity” as women (or vice versa) are presumed to be the gender of their choice and treated as victims entitled to whatever athletic competition or locker room they choose.  Meanwhile, protestors against this biological conflation are relegated to the status of bigots.  The identity movement has gone so far that the feminist icon Martina Navratilova who protested against transgender competitors was all but excommunicated by its political mob -- a state of affairs that provides a stark example of the revolution consuming its own “in a spiral of scapegoating and social destruction that no one seems to know how to stop.”

Eberstadt concludes as follows: “Identity politics is not so much politics as a primal scream.  It’s the result of the Great Scattering -- our species’ unprecedented collective retreat from our very selves.”  Though the author’s analysis of the primacy of nature and the family is instructive, her persistent attempt to separate that nature from politics, at least for purposes of discussion, is destined to fail.  One of the three responses to her work included in Part Two of her book illustrates this point.  Though politics isn’t the only reason for “the Great Scattering,” the left side of the political spectrum clearly facilitated and encouraged it with gusto.  Thus, Columbia Humanities Professor Mark Lilla’s rejoinder to Eberstadt's book is overwhelmingly political and ignores completely the role of nature in family fragmentation and the divisiveness of identity politics.  Instead, he blames everything bad on “Reagan individualism” and capitalism -- a predictable response from a partisan for whom deterministic Hegelian ideas about History (with a capital H) are embraced with ardor and for whom the importance for most conservatives of unifying cultural institutions (family, community organizations, and religion) is completely ignored. 

That said, Eberstadt’s very compact work is well worth reading for the significant insights it provides into the relationship between family dissolution, the devastation wrought by the sexual revolution, and the puzzlingly infantile extremes to which any reasonable version of identity politics has been taken.

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle