Silent revolution

Over the past fifty years, a silent revolution has allowed the radical left to seize power to an extent unthinkable only a decade ago. Stranger still, no one has noticed. Throughout the twentieth century, leftists worked tirelessly toward their goal of a proletarian revolution. But they continually fell short. American workers rejected socialism in the 1920s and declined to join the international communist movement in the 1930s. The New Left flowered briefly in the 1960s but petered out with the end of the Vietnam War. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, radical Marxism seemed to have been defeated and discredited for good. Not so fast, says the political scientist Barry Rubin in this sharply pointed history of the modern American left. Far from disappearing, the radical left has undergone an ideological revolution and has rebranded itself as liberalism. Rubin traces the roots of this new ideology to the ideas of domestic radicals like Saul Alinsky, cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, and Third World revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon. This new brand of leftism constitutes a Third Left that now dominates the liberal movement in the United States. The Third Left's main ideological innovation is the abandonment of the working class as a revolutionary vehicle. Instead it targets the education system, and it has now trained several generations of Americans to think in leftist terms of fairness and social justice.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.