The Servile Mind - How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Is Barack Obama the savior of liberalism-or the last liberal president? Charles R. Kesler's spirited analysis of Obama's political thought shows that he represents either a new birth of liberalism-or its demise.

Who is Barack Obama? Though many of his own supporters wonder if he really believes in anything, Charles R. Kesler argues that these disappointed liberals don't appreciate the scope of the president's ambition or the long-term stakes for which he is playing.

Conservatives also misunderstand Obama, according to this leading conservative scholar, educator, and journalist. They dismiss him as a socialist, hopelessly out of touch with the American mainstream. The fringe Right dwells on Obama's foreign upbringing, his missing birth certificate, Bill Ayers's supposed authorship of his books. What mainstream and fringe have in common is a stubborn underestimation of the man and the political movement he embodies.

Reflecting a sophisticated mix of philosophy, psychology, and history, and complemented by a scathing wit, I Am the Change tries to understand Obama as he understands himself, based largely on his own writings, speeches, and interviews. Kesler, the rare conservative who takes Obama seriously as a political thinker, views him as a gifted and highly intelligent progressive who is attempting to become the greatest president in the history of modern liberalism. Intent on reinvigorating the liberal faith, Obama nonetheless fails to understand its fatal contradictions-a shortsightedness that may prove to be liberalism's undoing.

Will Obama save liberalism and become its fourth great incarnation, following Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson? Or will he be derailed by his very successes? These are the questions at the heart of Kesler's thoughtful and illuminating book.

Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism--the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one of France's leading writers and public intellectuals, argues that obsessive guilt has obscured important realities. The West has no monopoly on evil, and has destroyed monsters as well as created them--leading in the abolition of slavery, renouncing colonialism, building peaceful and prosperous communities, and establishing rules and institutions that are models for the world. The West should be proud--and ready to defend itself and its values. In this, Europeans should learn from Americans, who still have sufficient self-esteem to act decisively in a world of chaos and violence. Lamenting the vice of anti-Americanism that grips so many European intellectuals, Bruckner urges a renewed transatlantic alliance, and advises Americans not to let recent foreign-policy misadventures sap their own confidence. This is a searing, provocative, and psychologically penetrating account of the crude thought and bad politics that arise from excessive bad conscience.

The genuine prosperity of the preceding two decades slowly morphed into a false sense of wealth, brought about by excessive dependence on credit by both the public and private sector. When the credit bubble burst, the economy collapsed. In short, policy makers dismissed sound classical economics and instead relied on the false promise of Keynesianism, the theory that the government itself can generate prosperity through easy credit and heavy government spending.

An eye-opening critique of the identity-based revolution that has transformed American campuses and its effect on politics and society today.

The 1960s and ’70s were a time of dramatic upheaval in American universities as a new generation of scholar-activists rejected traditional humanism in favor of a radical ideology that denied esthetic merit and objective truth. In The Victims’ Revolution, critic and scholar Bruce Bawer provides the first true history of this radical movement and a sweeping assessment of its intellectual and cultural fruits.

Once, Bawer argues, the purpose of higher education had been to introduce students to the legacy of Western civilization—“the best that has been thought and said.” The new generation of radical educators sought instead to unmask the West as the perpetrator of global injustice. Age-old values of goodness, truth, and beauty were disparaged as mere weapons in an ongoing struggle of the powerful against the powerless. Shifting the focus of the humanities to the purported victims of Western colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, the new politicized approach to the humanities gave rise to a series of identity-based programs, including Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. As a result, the serious and objective study of human civilization and culture was replaced by “theoretical” approaches emphasizing group identity, victimhood, and lockstep “progressive” politics.

What have the advocates of this new anti-Western ideology accomplished?

Twenty-five years ago, Allan Bloom warned against the corruption of the humanities in The Closing of the American Mind. Bawer’s book presents compelling evidence that Bloom and other conservative critics were right to be alarmed. The Victims’ Revolution describes how the new identity-based disciplines came into being, examines their major proponents and texts, and trenchantly critiques their underlying premises. Bawer concludes that the influence of these programs has impoverished our thought, confused our politics, and filled the minds of their impressionable students with politically correct mush. Bawer’s book is must-reading for all those concerned not only about the declining quality of American higher education, but also about the fate of our society at large.

Millions of people around the world were shocked and horrified when a madman named Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb in downtown Oslo and then attacked a political summer camp on the island of Utoya, gunning down defenseless teenagers while calling out Gotcha! as though he were playing a video game. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, before the killers identity was known, some people leaped to the conclusion that this was yet another act of Islamic terrorism. When it turned out that the killer was a native Norwegian-the author of a rambling manifesto in which he described himself as a modern Knight Templar defending the values of Christian civilization-the left wing cultural elite in Europe and the US jumped to delegitimize critics of Islam by falsely and cynically linking them to Breivik.

One of those critics was American writer Bruce Bawer, author of numerous books about the threat of Islamic radicalism and one of those whose works were cited in Breiviks manifesto. Bawer has lived in Oslo for many years and has written extensively on the challenges of immigration and the negative effects of radical Islam on liberal societies. He is also a vocal critic of the left wing cultural elite that seeks to minimize this threat and promotes instead a vision of a harmonious multicultural society based on tolerance and mutual respect. Unfortunately, such tolerance does not extend to critics of Islam or multiculturalism, who are routinely labeled nativists and fascists by members of the left wing elite.

The left typically denies or downplays the religious motives of Islamic terrorists while insisting that right wing rhetoric creates a climate of hate which necessarily leads to violence. Thus the multicultural left in Europe and the US strove to paint Breivik as a pro-Israel Christian terrorist whose insane actions were encouraged if not outright motivated by conservative authors who warn against the impending Islamization of Europe. Those who had criticized Islam, however legitimately concerned they might be with the denial of basic human rights and individual liberties within Muslim communities, were deemed officially anathema. They were Islamophobes-racists, bigots, extremists. They were the danger. They were the threat. They had fertilized the soil in which the mass murderer had grown. This campaign of vilification was waged not just in the European press but on American blogs and in the pages of the New York Times.

In The New Quislings, Bruce Bawer explores the world-wide response to Breiviks rampage, from the Norwegian cultural elite to Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times Roger Cohen. He provides a fascinating portrait of the left-wing cultural elite in Norway-revealed to be the birthplace of political correctness-and shows how they have become apologists for radical Islam. Bawer further argues that they are the heirs of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist who administered Norway under the heel of the Nazi regime. And he explains how those who oppose open debate and seek to control the conversation about Islam pose the greatest threat to liberal society.

Set just before the onset of the First World War, The Thirty-Nine Steps introduces one of literature’s most memorable detectives, Richard Hannay, an expatriate Scot who has just returned to London from South Africa. Four days after hearing of an assassination plot and plans to steal Britain’s military strategies, Hannay’s informant is found dead in his apartment. Forced to flee from both the murderers and the police, Hannay must use his wits to stay ahead of his pursuers and warn the government before it is too late.

One of the most popular adventure stories ever written, The Thirty-Nine Steps is regarded as the starting point for espionage fiction and established John Buchan as the original thriller writer. The Thirty-Nine Steps, the first book in the Richard Hannay series, inspired many others novelists and filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock who directed the first of four film adaptations of the novel.

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In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most-respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who through their brave perseverance helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today.