Sometimes a book’s cover gives the reader a particularly clear preview of its contents. The cover of JT Young’s book Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed the Socialist Left has portraits of George Washington and Karl Marx gazing outward. Will we follow the philosophy of George Washington (individual liberty under a government limited to protecting our rights) or that of Karl Marx (forced communal living under a government of unlimited power)?
Given the horrific record of Marxist nations, you wouldn’t think there could be any doubt about that. Today, however, the followers of Marx are surprisingly numerous, well-funded, and strategically positioned throughout the government to impose their will on the rest of us. Equally alarming, they have managed to besmirch George Washington as a “white supremacist” deserving only of scorn.
How could this have come about? Young, who served as Congressional staffer and later an aide at the Department of Treasury, explains how. He gives readers many lessons in American history and civics along the way.
Young writes, “Seemingly, every significant arena in American society is now a battleground. Even the casual observer sees this and many have encountered it first-hand. Examples are pervasive, but to list a few: the leftists’ radical climate agenda favors ideology over energy. Their Social Justice Initiative claims to combat America’s implicit racism but does so with its own explicit racism. In schools, they pursue indoctrination over education.” Those (and many others) are not instances of marginally changing the nation’s policies, but are part of a campaign to fundamentally change our structure.
Just to give a couple of current examples, should unelected bureaucrats have the power to tell us whether we can have natural gas stoves or to dictate that schools, businesses and churches must close because of a proclaimed emergency? Anyone who answers in the affirmative wants a radically different country than the one George Washington helped found.
Young distinguishes between the “traditional Left” and the “socialist Left.” The former has been around since the nineteenth century. For example, there were organizations of farmers and industrial workers who were not happy with their lot in life and thought that they could get more through collective action. They did not, however, want to overthrow the American economic system in favor of a Marxist system of complete state ownership. As Young observes, Americans were free to try communism and in a few instances, they did. A socialist visionary established New Harmony in Indiana, where there was no private property and everyone worked for the good of all. It failed within a few years, foundering on the lack of incentives for hard work and innovation.
The socialists ran candidates espousing their ideals, but they garnered only small percentages of the vote in election after election. Few Americans were interested in their statist, anti-American ideology.
But the radical Left has always known how to take advantage of a crisis. The first big crisis that opened the door to it was the Great Depression. Young points out the Depression, contrary to popular opinion, was caused by governmental blunders and not by any failure of the capitalist system. Poor decisions by the Federal Reserve System set the stage for the stock market crash in 1929; that’s just one of his many corrections for readers who have only heard the official, leftist version of our history. But once the Depression settled in, government policies intended to revive the economy simply made things worse.
As the people became increasingly desperate, they looked to government for salvation and FDR’s New Deal was skillfully sold as exactly that. The New Deal fundamentally changed the relationship between the people and the government, encouraging them to look to it for their needs. That was an important part of the socialist Left’s program — undermining the basic American value of self-reliance.
Still, radical leftism held little appeal for most Americans. The radicals needed much more help to push forward their agenda. In 1962, Young notes, the Students for a Democratic Society issued a manifesto calling for revolutionary change in America. They got an unexpected break just three years later with President Lyndon Johnson’s multi-pronged “Great Society” — his idea of solving all social problems through vastly expanded federal power and spending. Johnson himself was not of the socialist Left, but his policies gave the radicals something they had never before had, namely access to the US Treasury. Numerous “Great Society” programs doled out money to activist organizations such as the Legal Services Corporation, which used the money to organize their client bases to help lobby for bigger budgets and more authority.
The Great Society also created vast numbers of new beneficiaries of government, especially in the realm of health care.
Here, however, Young misses one of the most disastrous aspects of the Great Society — federal student aid. Federal student aid (grants and easy loans) enabled far more Americans to go to college than ever before and the results of that have been almost entirely negative: academic standards have fallen, costs have risen precipitously, and, most importantly, great numbers of Americans have been subjected to the kind of anti-American propaganda that many professors force feed them.
The reason why radical leftist notions have so much traction today is that college students hear them over and over. Many courses are nothing but the opinions of the professors, almost invariably spouting the lines that America is “irredeemably racist” and the scourge of the planet. Rarely do students hear any defense of our traditions and they are intolerant of arguments that conflict with the beliefs that have been inculcated in them. The socialist Left would have far fewer advocates (and also much less money for its causes) if it didn’t dominate our educational institutions.
What can we do to fend off this unprecedented assault? Young argues that the American people need to see the truth about what the government is doing, something that the Left always tries to hide. In that, he has anticipated one of the most hopeful consequences of the 2024 election – the Department of Government Efficiency. With Elon Musk at the helm, there’s reason to think that the vast, mostly unconstitutional, and often blatantly ideological spending by the government will be subjected to public scrutiny.
Young correctly asserts that the socialist Left’s malign influence would not exist without deception. Its ideas for transforming the United States into a rigidly controlled, collectivist society are pathetically weak. To save the country from them, we need to pull the plug on government funding and show the people how well our traditions work. JT Young’s book is a much needed eye opener.
