Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It, by Stephen Baskerville, explains the rapid ascendency of the left shortly before the Biden administration came to power, including the collapse of the conservative opposition.
The leftist junta then implemented policies more radical than any previously known in America. Among these:
- an engineered viral epidemic
- mandatory and sometimes lethal “vaccines” purporting to protect against the virus
- violent street demonstrations and riots following the death of George Floyd, led by Black Lives Matter and antifa
- removal of border controls
- extreme economic stimulation and resulting inflation
- censorship imposed by social media companies on their own customers, under pressure from the federal government
- politicization of the FBI, CIA, and other law-enforcement and security agencies
- mass arrests and serious civil liberties violations
Who Lost America? does not dwell on these now well-known events themselves; nor is it a polemical screed against the left. What distinguishes it from other books is by offering a clear, logical explanation for why the left outmaneuvered the right and took power. Baskerville, Professor of Politics at Collegium Intermarium university in Warsaw, argues that key factors include innovations in leftist ideology that conservatives have failed to understand and that continue to impede them from effective response. He also emphasizes that right-wing political operatives often imitate the methods of the left, adopt its assumptions and jargon, avoid engaging in confrontations, and even collude with the left to advance its agenda, sometimes unwittingly. The rightist political establishment has also long neglected persistent abuses of government power and resulting problems suffered by ordinary Americans, Baskerville further argues.
Baskerville examines and rejects crude psychological explanations (“mass formation psychosis”) and avoids “conspiracy theories” (even those he acknowledges to be true) as unconstructive and defeatist. He also dismisses some of the stock preoccupations of the professional right as well as the left, which he regards as subterfuges and “optical illusions.”
Instead, he emphasizes dysfunctional practices and policies that are seldom questioned by left or right, even though they could readily be rectified. Yet because they have been allowed to fester unaddressed, they are now exerting a decisive impact on our politics and civilization, often in unintended and unperceived ways. Specific examples include:
- the displacement of citizens by professional political operatives and activists;
- similar displacement of churches, in essential roles, by law firms and pressure groups;
- intrusive government control over the private lives of millions of non-criminal people by the welfare machinery;
- the abandonment of justice as the sole legitimate purpose of the judiciary, allowing legal proceedings and legal punishments against legally innocent people;
- the abolition of marriage as a legally enforceable contract;
- the persistent immiseration of the African-American community;
- commandeering the foreign policy machinery, military, and security services to serve agendas of domestic social engineering.
In the Conclusion, the author offers feasible responses that ordinary citizens can adopt. These are not wish lists dreamed up by some commentators, with no hope of being implemented, but practical, effective responses that some ordinary citizens are already undertaking spontaneously.
As always, Baskerville takes readers “outside the box” and beyond their “comfort zone” and forces us to rethink assumptions about today’s global crisis as a prelude to constructive action.
About the Author
Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His previous books include The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017) and Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (1993, 2018). His work is available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.
A book launch will be hosted by the Collegium Intermarium university in Warsaw in July.
You can purchase the book here.
