https://www.frontpagemag.com/domestic-enemies/
That there’s always more history to learn is one of the many lessons of Daniel Greenfield’s truly magnificent new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight against the Left. In six riveting, eye-opening chapters, Greenfield guides us through untold or little-told stories of leftist perfidy beginning in the days prior to the ratification of the Constitution and concluding in the last years of the Civil War. It is a genuinely remarkable work, which even for many people who consider themselves relatively well-informed students of history is full of one revelation after another – all of which serve to underscore that the far-left phenomena that today seem to portend nothing short of apocalypse (from BLM riots to outrageous election irregularities to the breathtaking efforts by New York officials to destroy Donald Trump’s financial empire) are in fact nothing new.
The late writer Howard Zinn, in his appallingly successful People’s History of the United States (1980), pushed his far-left agenda on naive young readers by, at every turn (and here I adapt from Johnny Mercer’s immortal lyric), fanatically accentuating the negative aspects of American capitalism and liberal democracy and utterly eliminating the positive. Greenfield is the anti-Zinn: whereas Zinn besmirched American liberty at every turn, Greenfield tells the plain truth about far-left challenges to that liberty that have either been whitewashed in most history textbooks, given very short shrift by them, or scrubbed from their pages entirely. The result is a superbly illuminating book that has the drive and urgency of a great political pamphlet as well as the density and detail of a distinguished three-volume historical opus.
